Evolution and the Human-Animal Drive to Conflict examines how fundamental, universal animal drives, such as dominance/prevalence, survival, kinship, and "profit" (greed, advantage, whether of material or social nature), provide the basis for the evolutionary trap that promotes the unstable, conflictive, dominant-prone individual and group human behaviours.
Examining this behavioural tension, this book argues that while these innate features set up behaviours that lean towards aggression influenced by social inequalities, the means implemented to defuse them resort to emotional and intellectual strategies that sponsor fanaticism and often reproduce the very same behaviours they intend to defuse. In addressing these concerns, the book argues that we should enhance our resources to promote solidarity, accept cultural differences, deter expansionist and uncontrolled profit drives, and achieve collective access towards knowledge and progress in living conditions. This entails promoting the redistribution of resources and creative labour access and avoiding policies that generate a fragmented world with collective and individual development disparities that invite and encourage dominance behaviours. This resource redistribution asserts that it is necessary to reformulate the global set of human priorities towards increased access to better living conditions, cognitive enhancement, a more amiable interaction with the ecosystem and non-aggressive cultural differences, promote universal access to knowledge, and enhance creativity and cultural convivence. These behavioural changes entail partial derangement of our ancestral animal drives camouflaged under different cultural profiles until the species succeeds in replacing the dominance of basic animal drives with prosocial, collective ones. Though it entails a formidable task of confronting financial, military, and religious powers and cultural inertias – human history is also a challenging, continuous experience in these domains – for the sake of our own self-identity and self-evaluation, we should reject any suggestion of not continuing embracing slowly constructing collective utopias channelled towards improving individual and collective freedom and creativeness.
This book will interest academics and students in social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences, palaeoanthropology, philosophy, and anthropology.
Author(s): Jorge A. Colombo
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 254
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
Foreword
1 Species and Cultural Evolution
A Brief Account of Our Distant and Complex Evolutive Origin
Brain and Cognitive Development
Material Evolution
Socialisation Implies Taming of Natural Drives and Abiding by Imposed Rules of Convivence under Differing Sociopolitical Structures
Social Status as Privilege and Dominance
2 Evolution, Biological Inertias, Violence, and the Evolutionary Trap
Competition for Survival
Response to Threat
Violence
3 Gene-Culture Interactions
Social and Environmental Conditions Influence Gene Expression
Social Inequalities
Social Behavioural Network and Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
Biological Impact of Social Hierarchies
4 Organism-Environment as an Integrated Dynamic System
A Stroboscopic View of Our Species’ Evolution
Cooperation and Social Stratification
Environmental Influence on Brain Development and Behavioural Profiles
5 Social Dominance and Inequalities
The Education Gap Eventually Transformed into Dominance
Internet Access
Poverty Rates
Wealth Distribution
Health Impact
Political (Dominance) Goals in Leading National Budget Expenditures
Human Trafficking, Slavery, and Child Labour
6 Neurobiological and Cultural Tectonic Plate Friction
The Build-Up of Tectonic Plate Friction
Survival and Aggression on Neurobiological Grounds
Aggression: An Ancient Animal Drive Transformed into a Human Warmonger Profile. An Evolutive Perspective
Social Impact on Brain Development
7 Socio-cultural Behavioural Conditioners. The Evolutionary Trap
The Concept of Collective and Individual Profit as a Primaeval Behavioural Drive in the Natural Kingdom
Eusociality
Neurobiology and Brain-Behavioural Development
The Construction of the Evolutionary Trap
8 The State of the World
On Corporate Political Involvement (Post-Democracy?)
Planetary Boundaries
Forest Resources and Environmental Degradation
Access to Drinking Water
Poverty Rates as an Epidemiological Event
Threats to Biodiversity
Energy Source Conundrum: Clean Energy, Mineral Exploitation, and Marine Pollution
Marine Pollution
Fisheries and Marine Life Devastation
Corruption
Comparative Investment in Research and Development (R&D)
9 Dominance and the Human Development of the Evolutionary Trap
Warmongers and Arms Production. Military Spending. Wars and Uprisings in Human History
Nuclear Weapons
10 Waste Management and Quality of Life
Waste Production
11 Wealth Inequalities and Social Dominance
12 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Embedded in Our Human History
Empowerment of Hierarchies and Dominance Reveal Hidden Ancestral Drives that Derived into Purposeful Cruel Behaviours of Nature and Practices Unknown in the Animal Kingdom
Dominance, a Behaviour Based on Physical and Virtual Domains. Did Human Behaviour Cease from Predatory Activity?
Human Slavery
Institutional and Citizen’s Rights Outcomes of Social Construction Profiles
13 Homo Sapiens: A Janus-Faced Species or Two Coexisting Varieties?
Escape from the Evolutionary Trap?
Appendix
List of Wars (by Era)
Civil Unrest on the Rise
References
Index
