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The book Guns, germs and steel retorts that fit the majority of human history (I.e the last hundred thousand years or so) most human encounters with other human

The book Guns, germs and steel retorts that fit the majority of human history (I.e the last hundred thousand years or so) most human encounters with other humans who were not family resulted in death for one party or another. Still the case in some isolated areas. Only the growth of societies really changed that default inclination, out of necessity.

copperx 11y ago
That seems awfully murderous. Not even animals of the same race face that fate.
- chaostheory 11y ago
  That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War That's just one example and it isn't exclusive to primates.
nosuchthing 11y ago
Absence of community, scarcity of resources, and a life of fear might have a significant influence on aggressive behavior in those circumstances.
maaku 11y ago
There's a book called "on killing" that you should read.
- barry-cotter 11y ago
  The book is based on research that was flat made up by S.L.A. Marshall. There is no evidence he ever collected the data he used to spread that myth. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman Quote From Wikipedia The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception,[1] the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldiers' firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.[2] Below quote from http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha... Emphasis not in original This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Marshall is not the only source of data in the book.

copperx 11y ago

That seems awfully murderous. Not even animals of the same race face that fate.

chaostheory 11y ago
That's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War That's just one example and it isn't exclusive to primates.

nosuchthing 11y ago

Absence of community, scarcity of resources, and a life of fear might have a significant influence on aggressive behavior in those circumstances.

maaku 11y ago

There's a book called "on killing" that you should read.

barry-cotter 11y ago
The book is based on research that was flat made up by S.L.A. Marshall. There is no evidence he ever collected the data he used to spread that myth. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman Quote From Wikipedia The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception,[1] the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldiers' firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.[2] Below quote from http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha... Emphasis not in original This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
- maaku 11y ago
  Marshall is not the only source of data in the book.