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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

The willingness of societies to sanitize the realities of war is easily understood in evolutionary terms: genes that build brains that are willing to suspend disbelief and engage in violence reproduce better than genes that build brains that are not willing to do so because the former can use a credible threat of violence to exploit the latter as resources. The sad fact of the matter is that the answer to Rodney King's famous rhetorical question is that no, we can't all just get along, because we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show, not Jesus. (Which is, ironically, a big part of the reason that belief in Jesus is so persistent and pervasive.)

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We can definitely go along most of the time. Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition with modern (conventional) weapons, and the complexity needed to run a prosperous society. Starting a war to grab riches (as it was in ancient times) usually does not work, and definitely does not work on larger scale.

The only relatively reasonable case for starting a war today is a war for independence, for liberation from someone else's strangling control. It does not always lead to prosperity as a result though; look at Eritrea, for instance.

> Bigger wars become more and more of a losing proposition

You've missed the point. Yes, a war is generally a losing proposition nowadays. But a credible threat of war often is not.

Even more to the point, wars were often winning propositions in our ancestral environment, and so we are more likely to be descended from people who were willing to wage them in the past. That is a very difficult legacy to overcome.

> we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show, not Jesus.

natural selection/Darwinism isn’t any sort of genius. from one angle, you outsmart it every time you use a condom. from another angle, if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior — one which popped into being suddenly, after millions of years without — how certain can we really be about the outcomes this mechanism will produce into the future?

> you outsmart it every time you use a condom

Not really. All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms.

> if Darwinism leads to such an apparently contradictory behavior

What contradictory behavior are you referring to? The ability to suspend disbelief is useful to survival in all kinds of situations, especially in our ancestral environment. Where is the contradiction?

> All you're doing is moving the needle a tiny bit so that in the next generation there will be fewer people inclined to use condoms.

so you claim, yet condoms have been around for generations now and my perception is that their use has only increased over generations. am i mistaken in this?

> What contradictory behavior are you referring to?

i said "apparently contradictory": on first look it appears to be contradictory, whether it objectively is or not. better would have been for me to use "unexpected", best would have been "unpredictable": because evolution produces so many random effects along the way.

> we can't all just get along, because we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and at the end of the day it is Darwin who runs the show

Darwinism suggests here that solving for limited resources will someday be required for an organism to be successful. it doesn't care how that's solved for: how can you be so confident that the emerging solution won't be coupled with "all [of this organism] just getting along?" for example, an unending arms race over physical superiority may be disastrous against resource use, and a more successful strategy might be some level of cooperation that avoids that arms race. if today's humans are a Darwinian product consider that they differ from parts of the past both along increased large-scale cooperation (e.g. cities) and less individual-against-individual violence (e.g. violent crime). that already looks a lot more like us "just getting along" than many stages of the past.

how long will this be stable? where lies the next local optima? can anyone really know?

> so you claim, yet condoms have been around for generations now and my perception is that their use has only increased over generations. am i mistaken in this?

Condoms only go back a few hundred years, and that happens to coincide with a period of time where evolutionary pressure on humans was generally low because of the economic prosperity brought about by the industrial revolution. So all kinds of alleles have been able to survive in the last few hundred years that would have had a much harder time before.

Condoms are hard to analyze because they offer not only birth control but also protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Their effects are also temporary, so someone who uses a condom can still reproduce.

> Darwinism suggests here that solving for limited resources will someday be required for an organism to be successful.

You have to remember that evolution advances the reproductive fitness of genes, not organisms. This is most dramatically illustrated by hive insects where the vast majority of the individuals are sterile. Humans are ridiculously complicated compared to any other life form. But one of the things that is observed across all human societies across all human history is the segregation of human populations into in-groups and out-groups. This can take different forms: tribalism, castes, social classes, nation-states... but human populations that embraced all other humans as part of "us" are nearly unheard of. I don't know of any examples. And it's pretty easy to understand why: any such group would be easily conquered when it came into contact with a more militarily aggressive group, and so genes for aggression will tend to dominate genes for getting along with everyone.

You are correct that "solving for limited resources" will eventually be required, but that can just as easily take the form of killing off a lot of people as it can wisely planning for the future. Evolution doesn't care about our sensibilities. Evolution doesn't actually "care" about anything, except in the sense that water "cares" about flowing downhill. Genes build brains that care about things, but the genes themselves don't care.

It's easier to just eat your competition's babies. That's the adaptation that evolved when scientists ran the limited-resources experiment with insects.

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