Hat tip to Dr. Barnett’s blog for pointing me to Stephen Pinker’s great essay, A History of Violence.

Pinker is one our great public intellectuals, able to constructively synthesize vast swaths of research into cogent summaries. I agree with a sociobiologist friend of mine who likes to say that anyone claiming to be well-educated should read The Blank Slate.

In this essay, Pinker examines the wealth of historical data that indicates that violence per capita has been steadily decreasing in human society. He cites Lawrence Keeley’s archeological research that indicates the prevalence of violence in tribal soceities. Pinker also references Stephen LeBlanc’s work which has explored why Western anthropologists have overlooked so much of pre-industrial violence. More recent data moves out of the realm of archeology, anthropology and sociobiology into the realm of political science. The common political science data sets for tracking warfare over the past century all indicate that a steep drop-off in state-based warfare. An interesting research question would be to try to quantify the losses to non-state warfare (because I can already hear the 4GW crowd pointing out that I just said “state-based warfare”), though based on Keeley and LeBlanc’s work I don’t believe that current or near-term rises in non-state violence come anywhere close to the levels found in tribal societies.

Pinker brings up the role of modernity as a “civilizing process” as a possible explanation for this drop in violence. A possible supporting mechanism for this change on an evolutionary time scale might have been selection for juvenile characteristics. A few years ago I studied some very interesting sociobiological theories of how selection pressures can lead to “domesticated” traits. Examples include bonobos relative to chimps and domesticated dogs relative to wolves. Domesticated traits have, historically, been mistaken by scientists as simply the junvenile characteristics of another species. Bonobos, for example, were long assumed to simply be junvenile chips and it was not until they were tracked over long periods of time that primatetologists recgonized them as a distinct species.

The argument goes that such “domesticated” species are less aggressive, more sexually active, and more open to cooperation than their non domesticated counterparts. Experiments involving selective breeding of wolves for these traits found that within a very few generations the fully mature wolves began to look more like juveniles (with larger heads in proportion to their bodies, slighter figures and less prominant teeth) and act more like juveniles. The argument concludes by comparing Homo Sapiens to Neanderthals, we can see a similar transformation taking place.

All of this means that while the mechanisms of violence remain within each of us (as Dave Grossman has explored at length in his indispensible On Killing), we’ve been doing something right. So even though, as Neal Stephenson likes to say, our genetic heritage provides us the ability to be Stupendous Badasses when situations demand, this does not condemn us to a life of violence.