UMaine Anthropologist Publishes Research on Warfare Paradox
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — Some leading scientists who have studied warfare through the ages have long suggested that humans — the males of the species, at least — have little choice when it comes to slaughtering one another in great numbers. Such warlike behavior, the scholars contend, is hardwired into the human brain.
We are, in other words, born to kill our own, an evolutionary trait that sets us apart from nearly all other species on the planet.
Paul “Jim” Roscoe, a University of Maine professor of anthropology and cooperating professor of Quaternary and climate studies, subscribes instead to an equally long-held theory that suggests just the opposite: humans actually have an innate aversion to killing. However, Roscoe believes that this natural aversion can be disabled when warfare is thought to be advantageous to a clan, a tribe or a nation.
“It certainly raises big questions, though,” Roscoe says of his theory. “If we do have an aversion to killing, how is it that we manage to kill pretty efficiently? And since we are a species that kills, how could that aversion have evolved and persisted through time?”
Roscoe thinks he may have found the answer to this seeming paradox while conducting an exhaustive study of warfare among tribes in New Guinea, where he lived for a year and a half in the early 1980s and has revisited three times since.
“I argue that the uniquely developed intelligence of humans is the faculty that resolves those questions,” says Roscoe, whose article on the subject appears in the September issue of American Anthropologist, considered the country