HOBOKEN, MARCH 1, 2025.  The idea that war is innate--part of human nature, in our genes--is deeply rooted in our culture, and it has been touted by scientists like Edward O. Wilson, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Richard Wrangham. For decades, anthropologist Brian Ferguson has meticulously dismantled the war-is-innate claim, showing that it is based on flimsy science. In his new book Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill?, Ferguson picks apart alleged evolutionary links between chimpanzee and human violence. Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says: “In this superb, important book, [Ferguson] demolishes… the supposed inevitability of chimpanzee proto-warfare, and our link to a supposed chimpanzee-like past." Ferguson has been a crucial source for my own writings on war, including my 2012 book The End of War. Below I ask him a few questions. – John Horgan

Horgan: Why did you become an anthropologist?  And why the focus on war?

Ferguson: At Columbia College I chose an anthropology major after I rejected all the others, though I knew hardly a thing about it.  From my Intro courses with Morton Fried, I came to see it as an effort to answer the grandest questions about humankind.  So I went on to Columbia Graduate school.  Once I learned you did not have to focus on a geographic area but could pick a topic, I chose two: poverty and war.  I worked on poverty and social class in my Puerto Rico field work (2011a–dates refer to publications available at rbrianferguson.com ).  Degree in hand I learned nobody wanted a course or book like that.  I’d already focused on war, through anti-war activism, and fellow students published an edited volume (1984a). War was then a tiny field in anthropology, so I was able to read almost everything, and was then able to keep up more or less as broader interest grew.

Horgan: Do you consider yourself an activist as well as a scholar?

Ferguson: I was 17 in 1968, and after a few tumultuous years, I set on a more staid course.  I choose to research topics of social importance–but then the evidence takes over.   I believe in science, and that the truth shall set you free.  I try to keep political opinions out of writings and teaching, but I hope my conclusions upset some widespread political foundations.  If someone wants to argue about it, they should be prepared with clear theory and evidence.

Horgan: Are you a pacifist?  Why or why not? 

Ferguson: No.  I never gave it much thought.  I think some things must be fought for, starting with resistance to conquest.  But evaluation of the justifications for war becomes very complicated in practice, and I sometimes struggle with mixed opinions, not that anyone cares (luckily).  Yet war itself is the enemy of humanity.  The killing and destruction should never fade from primary emphasis.

Horgan: Why does research into the roots of war matter?

Ferguson: Does it?  I hope so. Most of my work is not on war’s origins, but about the complex specifics of Why War?-- generally and particularly, holistically (everything involved) and cross-culturally (applicable everywhere) (2023; 2008a; 1999).  But any important sociocultural connections explaining war get scarce hearing with all the innatist theories floating about.

You’ve no doubt heard it said, “war is just human nature.”  And that is true, in that people can and often do make war.  But do we “naturally” lean into it, prefer it over other paths?  Is that innate tendency why war is so common?  No.  Yet how deflate this nebulous notion?  How show it wrong in a scientific way?  Over decades, my strategy has been to thoroughly evaluate the three pillars of support, which are routinely cited as providing evidence that war is humanly innate, through our Darwinian struggle to survive.

One pillar is the supposedly incessant war supposedly observed among tribal peoples.  Neo-Darwinian perspective has it that they are not over resources, valuables, or power, but are expressions of a struggle over reproductive success and genes.  The Yanomami were the go-to example.  But with a detailed contextual look at all fighting, all reproductive claims evaporate.  Their fighting is shown responding to historical material developments associated with Western contact (2015).  That perspective works across colonial situations. (1992b)

Projecting the innatist perspective backward though our ancestry is the claim that evidence shows group killing throughout the archaeological record.  20 years ago scholars and pundits claimed that upwards of 15% of our collective ancestors died violently (2013e).  This is an essential claim: evidence of human nature having its way, but also and critically identifying war as an evolutionary selection mechanism for other gender traits.  To test this I combed through earliest global archaeology records, showing that collective violence was rather a latecomer, generally increasing after preconditions of density, sedentism, hierarchy, complexity, elite trade, and later external state encroachment (2018; 2013d ).  Not our natural condition, (though in some places beginning before agriculture or states).

Horgan: Why did you write Chimpanzees, War, and History?

Ferguson: The third pillar for our deadly tendencies is chimpanzee studies.  (Evolutionary psychology once was a fourth, but that seems to being fading away on its own.  2012a).

Since the 1980s, accepted primatological truth has been that adult male chimpanzees seek out opportunities to kill males of other group, theoretically their reproductive competitors.  This warlike behavioral inclination illuminates human war by suggesting a shared evolutionary heritage.  Chimpanzees, War, and History examines every reported case of deadly violence, showing that intergroup killings are rare by observational years, and sequential war-like killing occurred only twice over nearly 500 years of field observations.  Deadly attacks are almost equally directed at potential reproductive allies as at theoretical adversaries.  Rather than evolved tendencies, an historical, contextual approach demonstrates intense violence responds to specific forms of human disruption, including provisioning, habitat loss, human diseases and deliberate killing, population crashes, captive releases, playback experiments, and climate change.  War is not in chimpanzees’ genes either.

Human impact is not the whole story.  Sex, status and power also loom large.  I propose a category of “display killing” by adult males–commonly of within-group infants and contradicting reproductive interests.  This happens under combinations of a disrupted status hierarchy–sometimes but not necessarily connected to human disturbance–and particularly belligerent individuals.  And more encompassing, sex, status and power are fundamental dimensions of the well-known behavioral contrast of chimpanzees (“from Mars”) and bonobos (“from Venus”).  Chimpanzees kill conspecifics, bonobos do not.

Chimpanzees, War, and History (CWH) devotes three chapters to bonobos, synthesizing all relevant wild and captive observations, demonstrating within and between species behavioral differences, similarities, overlap and variations, and the existing theories about all that.  Consistent with some current theory, I model their comparative socially evolved social organizations.  Differing social organizations promote or constrain inter-male and cross-gender bonding and violence.  CWH goes further, combining that perspective with new understandings in the theory of biological evolution, which leave behind the 1970s selfish genes approaches.

Plasticity-led selection, evolutionary developmental biology, epigenetics, niche selection, and social inheritance combine in Extended Evolutionary Theory.  Those are each described, and then specifically applied to chimpanzees and bonobos.  This shows that no evolved differences in predispositions toward violence are needed to explain observed behavioral or neurobiological differences of bonobos and chimpanzees.

Lastly, I wrote CWH to present in full my own anthropological theory of war, from why war exists, through cultural patterning of war practice, to specific wars--everywhere, anytime.   But theoretical presentation this time is informed by contrast with chimpanzees and bonobos, showing that what they do–without the full dimensions of human culture–do not qualify as “war.”

Horgan: According to surveys I’ve carried out for decades, most people think war will never end, it’s a permanent part of the human condition.  Is this pessimism justified?  Will we ever see a world without war of even the threat of war between nations?

Ferguson: As for predicting the future of war and peace, I tried that during the Cold War (1988b; 1989d) with mixed results.  But I am confident saying now that we are not doomed to war because of our nature, and we can fight that misleading delusion.  Humans construct their worlds and can construct them differently.  Today, who could make a prediction about war 10 years from now, much less a hundred or thousand.  A general peace is attainable, some day.

Horgan: What are war’s chief causes? 

Ferguson: Depending on your questions and frame of reference, war has many causes.  To distill one key finding, though, my work highlights the role of leaders.  War or even the threat of it frequently enhances the power of a strong leader.  Exaggerating external threats increases internal solidarity and power, although creating an internal threat works too (2003).  The political self-interests of leaders are never stated but are obvious in all today’s wars.  But in addressing big questions of “why war,” those get left out.  They are fundamental causes, apparent even in the “simplest” war (see my Yanomami Warfare: A Political History).

Horgan: How can we make the world less warlike?  

Ferguson: Over the long run, by making clear the real causes of war, generally and specifically.  In a sentence, war results from a society’s social, cultural, and historical configuration, as played on by leaders who seek to gain from war.  Look there, not at genes.  And as my colleague Doug Fry does, highlight to others the overwhelming role of cooperation in our evolutionary heritage.  Try to spread an alternative vision of brighter possibilities, refuting the idea that war is inevitable.

Horgan: Trump said in his victory speech, “I’m going to stop wars.”  Could he be an antiwar President?

Ferguson: I am happy about his aversion to global counterinsurgency that beguiled some predecessors (2011e, 2013c), though his proposal of ethnic cleansing in Gaza would be just as protracted.  It is always easier to get in than get out.  Within my theory’s expectations, Trump will seek opportunities to use military action, to rally his base by flaunting our war fighting prowess. Outside dangers give cover for increasing internal power, suppressing opponents and restricting media or education.  Threatening to use tactical nukes could be part of that.

But there is one possibility that is more hopeful. Arms analyst William Hartung points out that at a Davos news conference, “Trump said the following in response to a question about U.S. relations with China: ‘Tremendous amounts of money are spent on nuclear, and the destructive capacity is something we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it.’  Trump went on to say, ‘I want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.’ suggesting that there be talks on the issue involving the U.S., Russian and China” (https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-nuclear/ ).

Of course there are many reasons not to take this seriously.  But Trump is transactional.  He will keep the tactical nukes, but what does the global infrastructure of strategic nuclear war do for Trump? All those delivery systems, bases, laboratories, personnel, maintenance costs developed since the 1950s came from an international system very different from today, yet today it seems fixed forever.   Maybe Trump could lead the world out of this enormous, pernicious infrastructure.  What would it cost him?  Nothing obvious.  What could he hope to gain?  The Nobel Peace Prize.

Horgan: What’s your utopia?

Ferguson: No idea, but I’d probably move.

Further Reading:

For links to Ferguson’s articles and books, see his website.

McSweeney’s Press just released a new edition of The End of War.

Here are my recent columns on war:

The Statistics of Lovers’ Quarrels

Frans de Waal (RIP) and the Origins of War

Jimmy Carter’s Thoughts on the End of War

Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War

Is Killing Children Ever Justified?

Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!

You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s

Confessions of a Woke, Antiwar, Hockey-Playing Demonic Male