THE BOOK OF WAR: The Evolutionary Biology of Racism, Religious Hatred, Nationalism, Terrorism, and Genocide

Has the world gone crazy? The intractable MAGA-WOKE divide. The re-election of Donald Trump. The brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Hamas-Israel catastrophe. Iranian nuclear ambitions. Saber rattling China.Today, more than ever we need to understand why we so often join together in groups to go to war.The amount of effort and resources humans put into killing one another is utterly mind-boggling. A careful reading of our history shows that—after obtaining sustenance, mating, and rearing offspring—we invest most of our life energy in murderous, coalitional aggression. Up until now, there has been no sufficient explanation for this fact: Human behavior appears to have been designed (shaped by natural selection) to include what is apparently the most maladaptive behavior imaginable.Furthermore, the beliefs and reasoning that guide such horrific behavior have all the characteristics of psychotic delusions. So, how could it be that history demonstrates that our devotion to murdering one another based on utter nonsense has evolved and become part of the core of the human psyche?Dr. Kriegman, a psychologist and evolutionary biologist is co-author (w Malcolm Slavin) of The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process, an acclaimed "brilliantly argued book. The treatment of the biology is expert" (Robert Trivers) and it is considered "essential reading for anyone interested in the psychodynamics of the mind" (Irv DeVore, Chair, Dept. of Anthropology, Harvard University). Using cutting-edge, modern evolutionary biology, Dr. Kriegman presents the first complete answer to the conundrum of human inhumanity. The Book of War explains how we were designed by millions of years of natural selection to join together in groups that use ethnocentric racism, religious, and quasi-religious belief systems to guide organized, intergroup violence.During the evolution of our species, such tribal madness and mass murder of outsiders can be shown to have been highly adaptive. As our species evolved, a tendency to denigrate and murder the subhuman “others” was reinforced when the winners (most often the perpetrators) survived, prospered, and increased their lineage, while the losers were typically enslaved, decimated, and/or exterminated. The Book of War explains how the tendency to engage in murderous warfare based on our shared, tribal identities co-evolved alongside the burgeoning, symbol using, human brain.Modern humans have been around for 300,000 years or so. Yet it is only with the relatively recent advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution that, for the first time, humanity has had what can be called a "scientific theory of creation." And it is just during the past 50 years that this powerful explanatory theory has been turned toward the study of human behavior. Today, the elaboration of the breakthrough explanations of evolutionary biology has provided a foundation for understanding much of why people believe and act as they do.Yet, it is over just the past thirty years that many evolutionists have been turning to focus specifically on the violence that has been endemic in human history. Why are we so violent? Why do we spend so much of our life energy and resources on murdering one another? Why do we so readily form and hold the insane beliefs about US and THEM that facilitate such horrors? It is only in the last one ten-thousandth of our history that humanity has had a valid understanding of our delusional tendency to engage in tribal violence. We were designed (by natural selection) to be tribal supremacists who believe that we should replace them.In addition to understanding the evolutionary history of warfare, The Book of War examines the psychology that motivates murderous intergroup conflict. This new understanding presents us with a real foundation for solving this horrific problem. Read more