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Is War Inevitable? Essay

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Is War Inevitable?
The modern human mind has sought to present findings and evidence that would lead to some form of an indication or conclusion regarding the inevitability of war through the multifarious fields of science and technology; anthropology; political science; economics; psychology (both humanist and evolutionary); and cultural studies. The general perception for most people – gauged through academic surveys and Social Networking websites – is that the innate biological tuning, socio-cultural infrastructure, geo-political systems, economic scarcity, and the massive amounts of arsenal possessed by mankind will never allow humans to transcend the atrocities of brutality, violence and aggressive bloodshed. Unfortunately, …show more content…

Anthropological and ethnic studies have shown that, long before the emergence of modern nation-states, human beings waged war in the tribal setting, basing these conclusions on archeological findings. Furthermore, observance of the behavior of our closest evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees, has encouraged the perception that just the way chimpanzee troops tend to wage war on other chimpanzees – sometimes even beating them to death – similarly, we too are biologically programmed and naturally hardwired for aggression. In “Are Humans Hardwired to Behave Aggressively?” Margie Wylie says that a new and upcoming field of genealogy suggests that the Y-Chromosome in human beings causes us to be, at least in part, “hardwired for aggression and troublesome behavior”. The question is posed to any logical mind: can we allow ourselves to conveniently use this as an excuse for war and crime? No. We can not. Yale’s “Human Relations Area Files” (Ember), a database of around 360 cultures around the world from the past and present, shows that nearly nine-tenths of these cultures have engaged in warfare. However, the frequency, intensity, and time spans of these wars varies vastly from one culture to the next. "There is variation in the frequency of warfare when you look around the world at any given time," says Melvin Ember. "That suggests to me that we are not dealing with genes or a biological propensity."
Even if we do consider the biological propensity and

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