Samuel Bowles’ opinion piece titled Warriors, Levelers and the Role of Conflict in Human Social Evolution (2012) discusses the role of conflict in human history. His outlook is that intra-group conflict catalyzed major societal developments. The developments that Bowles focuses on are “democracy, the rule of law, and a propensity to help others and to abhor injustice” (p. 876). The formation of democracy, Bowles contends, was dependent on the culmination of a single national entity that conquered via force. The rule of law was, and is currently, influenced by social class struggles. The article also argues for the existence of a willingness to cooperate on a biological level. Specifically, it suggests that “our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost
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The main reason that war is considered to be nonessential with respect to societal growth is that “the logic of competition among differing institutions and social norms does not guarantee such benign results anymore than natural selection maximizes the fitness of a species…” (p. 878). In other words, societal growth arising from group conflict can only be understood when it relates to affairs within a group. This is due to the fact that there is a large variance of behavior and culture between groups, as opposed to within groups. Bowles concludes that this variance is significant enough to discount war as necessary or sufficient for the “evolution of altruism” (p. 878).
Taking all facets of the article into account, it is important to remember that it is written from the author’s point of view. It is a “Perspective” piece that even features the writer’s own research. As a result, there are claims and conclusions that are not as reliable as …show more content…
Smith and Szathmary’s research proposed that biological progress transpires in the absence of competition. Bowles then extrapolates that this proposal can be linked to hunter-gatherer groups, albeit with a caveat. Whereas the cellular organisms can control the “lower-level entities making them up” and thus ensure “competitive effectiveness”, ancestral groups could not control individuals and thus must have collaborated for prosperity (p. 878). The problem with this line of thought is that there are significant distinctions between organisms of a cellular magnitude and groups of hunter-gatherers. It is difficult to envision how the behavior of the simplest life forms can compare to that of humans, which were already said to be unique in the
The main reason that war is considered to be nonessential with respect to societal growth is that “the logic of competition among differing institutions and social norms does not guarantee such benign results anymore than natural selection maximizes the fitness of a species…” (p. 878). In other words, societal growth arising from group conflict can only be understood when it relates to affairs within a group. This is due to the fact that there is a large variance of behavior and culture between groups, as opposed to within groups. Bowles concludes that this variance is significant enough to discount war as necessary or sufficient for the “evolution of altruism” (p. 878).
Taking all facets of the article into account, it is important to remember that it is written from the author’s point of view. It is a “Perspective” piece that even features the writer’s own research. As a result, there are claims and conclusions that are not as reliable as …show more content…
Smith and Szathmary’s research proposed that biological progress transpires in the absence of competition. Bowles then extrapolates that this proposal can be linked to hunter-gatherer groups, albeit with a caveat. Whereas the cellular organisms can control the “lower-level entities making them up” and thus ensure “competitive effectiveness”, ancestral groups could not control individuals and thus must have collaborated for prosperity (p. 878). The problem with this line of thought is that there are significant distinctions between organisms of a cellular magnitude and groups of hunter-gatherers. It is difficult to envision how the behavior of the simplest life forms can compare to that of humans, which were already said to be unique in the