The fact that there is still a certain percentage of individuals in the human population capable of committing violence, up to and including murder, easily and without any internal resistance, may lead some to think that this is quite normal and natural. Since such people exist, and humanity has existed for a long time, could violence simply be an evolutionary adaptation that for some reason proved necessary for the human population?
To answer this question, we turn to the works of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who first discovered the presence of innate inhibitors of intraspecific aggression in many animal species. He also described the conditions under which these inhibitors arise. The most important of these are the presence of strong innate weaponry and the inability to avoid violence through flight. According to Lorenz’s observations, ravens possess a strong inhibitor against striking their conspecifics in the eyes with their sharp beaks. Such inhibitors are often observed in wolves as well—when one of them assumes a submissive posture or demonstrates vulnerable parts of the body, such as the throat or belly, it leads to the cessation of aggressive actions by the conspecific. At the same time, collared doves, whose beaks are not as sharp as those of ravens, although they usually do not kill each other in natural conditions, are capable of doing so during a conflict if they are deprived of the possibility of escape by being locked in a cage.
Speaking of humans, Lorenz did not believe that they possessed aggression inhibitors, as they lack strong innate weaponry. Furthermore, humans were not prepared for the emergence of artificial weapons, as scientific and technical progress acquired rapid momentum that biological evolution simply could not keep up with. In view of this, Lorenz expressed concerns about the possible destruction of humanity:
“The day will come when two hostile camps will find themselves face to face, facing the danger of mutual destruction. A day may come when all of humanity is split into two such camps. How will we behave in this case—like doves or like wolves? The fate of humanity will depend on how people answer this question. We must be vigilant!”
Of course, as other researchers later found, humans do possess a mechanism similar to the one Lorenz wrote about. Its emergence can be explained by gene-culture coevolution, where factors of culture and society influence selection in the human population even over short periods of time. And it is worth remembering that primitive artificial weaponry in the form of clubs, spears, and stones appeared in early hominids presumably as far back as 5 million years ago.
However, to a certain extent Lorenz was right, and in the course of biological evolution, intraspecific violence was not completely eradicated from the human population. It is also obvious that humans could not evolutionarily adapt to modern remote weaponry, such as artillery or the atomic bomb. Of course, based on the model of the violence inhibition mechanism in humans, conditioned reflexes should be developed during its operation, preventing any urges to initiate violence. But military evidence shows that while 98% of soldiers experience strong resistance to committing murder during direct contact, in the case of remote weaponry, which allows one not to observe or even know about the potential victims, such resistance weakens.
Based on all this, it can be boldly asserted that violence cannot be called an evolutionary adaptation for humans. Any adaptation must benefit the species by increasing its chances of survival, which cannot be said of violence. It is quite the opposite—due to rapid scientific and technical progress, humans have not had time to fully adapt to new environmental conditions, to the fact that they are the most armed species on the planet. This, in turn, based on the evolutionary model, should imply the existence of extremely strong and pronounced inhibitors of intraspecific aggression.
