Keith,
That would be one theory, that 'warfare' (and perhaps xenophobia) arose
early on, and is built in at a very low level in the human psyche, but isn't
the evidence on the other side? That what happened after hunter gatherer
bands was settlement, markets and eventually agriculture? All these are hard
to imagine emerging at all in the face of pre-existing warring bands.
Current affairs show that the first casualty of warring bands is settled
agriculture and the market economy. We know that warring bands have emerged,
and have characterised whole periods of history in different parts of the
world, but surely at a much later stage in development, at a point after
class and leadership, settled territories and essentially political power
structures had already emerged over which to fight. Perhaps I am an
optimist, but my view is that society is characterised by its propensity to
collaborate rather than to fight.
Alan Penn
> snip (interesting discussion)
>
> I have never worked in social simulation, but was familiar with system
> dynamics from the early 1970s and with agents since the first Artificial
> Life conference in 1986. I don't have a bias toward one or the other;
> both
> are attempting to model reality and to the extent they succeed, the
> results
> of each approach should be similar within error bounds.
>
> Something you might consider is modeling agents as the result of a deeper
> layer of agents, namely genes. This is the evolutionary psychology
> approach which states that all human psychological traits are either the
> direct result of selection or a side effect of some trait that was
> directly
> selected. (Keeping inclusive fitness in mind.)
>
> My experiences with a cult ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson )
> eventually led me to writing a paper on how wars happen through the
> intermediary step of xenophobic meme amplification.
>
> Not considering perturbations, rising population in hunter gather bands
> eventually made the future game and berry prospects look grim. That
> activated evolved brain mechanisms to turn up the gain on circulating
> xenophobic memes. Those xenophobic memes eventually synched up the
> warriors for a do or die attack on neighbors.
>
> Win or lose, there were fewer mouths to feed. In the worse case, all the
> males of one band were killed and the band's young women became booty. So
> the genes for these traits went on even when the band was wiped out.
>
> Anyway, I think simulations based on humans viewed as having a long stone
> age evolution would be a really interesting approach.
>
> Keith Henson
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