Is War a Product of Evolution, Or Just a Flaw of Man?

Humans have been historically eager to kill each other. Throughout history, we've thought up all sorts of nutty reasons to slaughter our fellow man that had nothing to do with immediate survival of the fittest. We tend to chalk all these wars up to cultural differences fed by a species-wide need to be ideologically right (and impose that right-ness on others), along with a knack for weapons discovery culminating in a technology boom that's constantly supplying bigger and better ways to off each other. Add governments to the mix, and you've got a big steaming pile of questionably necessary interspecies violence. So it's a little—but not a lot—surprising that the growing scientific consensus is that war not only dates back to the origins of humankind, but has also played "an integral role" in or species' evolution. According to this theory, which emerged during a recent conference at the University of ...