The Social and Biological Underpinnings of Warfare
Jakob Griffith
War and Society
5-6-2022
The nature and origin of warfare has puzzled thinkers for millennia. Warfare has existed
at least as long as history has been recorded, and still exists today, as it is taking place across the
world. For this entire span of time, people have commented upon and puzzled about the reasons
why war keeps happening. Humanity may end war one day, and it may not. Regardless, if the
mitigation of war is to be achieved to any extent, it is important to search for the origins of
warfare and attempt to understand why it happens in the first place. Many schools of thought on
the subject have come about over the course of the centuries, but they broadly tend to fit into one
of two categories: social war or biological war. That is, war exists due to social factors or due to
biological factors. Some schools of thought blur the line, examining both biological elements and
cultural elements to the emergence and continuance of war. It is likely within this grey area that
the answer can be found. While evolutionary biological factors contributed to the emergence of
war, it is primarily the social factors that contribute to the progression and continuation of the
practice of warfare, and have maintained its seemingly intrinsic quality throughout human
history.
A particular area in which the discussion of the nature of war has remained prominent is Europe
and the “West.” Serious scholarly discussion of the nature of war in the West can be primarily
traced back to the Enlightenment, and has evolved significantly in the few hundred years since
then. The Enlightenment, an era of reason and growing emphasis on the rationality of humanity,
was an era in which western thinkers tended to view war as “irrational” rather than an intrinsic
part of life, and that it was “bound to dissipate with modernity.”1 This was by no means a
universal belief of the Enlightenment, however. The two major schools of thought on the nature
Lindy Heinecken, “The Military, War and Society: The Need for Critical Sociological
Engagement,” Scientia Militaria - South African Journal of Military Studies 43, no. 1 (2015),
https://doi.org/10.5787/43-1-1107, 3.
1
of humanity that came out of the Enlightenment era originated with specific men: Thomas
Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes held that nature was a “state of war,” and that
society has tempered man’s violent nature with civility and culture.2 Rousseau and others like
him, particularly Montesquieu, were more optimistic on the nature of humanity, holding that men
in a complete state of nature are in a “golden age,” and that war necessarily arise from states and
politics rather than from human nature.3 These very different viewpoints can be seen as extreme
ends of the spectrum, with Hobbes firmly on the side of a biological or nature side of warfare,
and Rousseau and Montesquieu firmly on the side of warfare arising purely from social factors.
Over time, these schools of thought adapted and grew into a variety of beliefs on the nature of
war, most of them still tending to stick to either a mostly biological or mostly social angle. Over
time, however, as the literature grew, more serious scientific research was able to create more
advanced schools of thought on the subject that incorporated biological and anthropological
viewpoints that would reinforce the argument one way or the other, with biology often backing
the evolutionary explanations and anthropology often backing the sociocultural explanations for
war.
With a basic overview of the concepts of social and biological war in western thought of the
way, it is important to chart more thoroughly the definition of and the emergence of warfare as a
concept. What is war? A variety of definitions have been conceived, but a simple one that works
for the purposes of this discussion comes from I.J.N Thorpe’s article “Anthropology,
Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” who defines war simply as “organized aggression
Doyne Dawson, “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories,” History and
Theory 35, no. 1 (1996): p. 1, https://doi.org/10.2307/2505515, 3.
3
Dawson, “The Origins of War,” 5-6
2
between autonomous political units.”4 Based on this working definition, warfare has been around
for a long time. Indeed, evidence of human-to-human violence on a larger-than-personal scale
exists in anthropological records predating historical records, including a major find in Sudan of
about 12,000 years ago that indicates violence on a scale larger than personal violence but
smaller than anything that could be considered warfare.5 Another striking example is the
definitive appearance of the bow and arrow, along with wounds from projectiles in human
skeletons, in the North Atlantic as far back as 8500BC, which shows very early definitive
elements of warfare as far back as the record goes.6 With this evidence, it becomes clear that
humans engaged in warfare practically as soon as they were able to. In essence, the moment that
humanity had the organizational capacity for a minor form of warfare, a minor form of warfare
emerged. These patterns of early conflict are difficult to determine a cause for. Resources,
territory, and even personal slights are all suggested, but anything definitive about the cause is
virtually impossible to state. However, it can be said with reasonable certainty that war has
existed as long as humans have had the capacity to make war. With time, as society grew in
complexity, war still stuck around, and indeed it also grew in complexity.
Since war has existed since the earliest point in which it could exist, the biological and
evolutionary arguments for war may seem convincing, but they also present significant
problems. Indeed, many important observations have been made in the argument for a biological
basis of warfare. Aggression, for example, is well-documented as a part of animal nature,
including humans, which has spawned an entire arena of the debate on biology as a part of
I. J. Thorpe, “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” World Archaeology 35,
no. 1 (2003): pp. 145-165, https://doi.org/10.1080/0043824032000079198, 146.
5
Thorpe, “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” 152-153.
6
Thorpe, “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” 155.
4
warfare centered around “social Darwinism.”7 Aggressive behavior is relatively common in
humans, with structures in the brain and male sex hormones significantly affecting violent
behavior.8 Aggression stands as a central pillar in the argument that war is biological, but this is
problematic because cooperation, a trait also central to human development, is more important to
warfare than aggression. This can be exemplified by the statement “we can work together and
come to share a set of beliefs and loyalties. On the other, in doing so, we may transfer the
aggression from within the group to outside it – and in the process perhaps solidify the ties that
bind us to our immediate neighbors.”9 In other words, the institutional power to engage in
warfare requires a level of cooperation that could not exist in the Hobbesian or social Darwinist
world of hyper aggression, and this cooperation itself enables the capacity for warring with other
groups who are also cooperative enough to form a war-making apparatus. Thus, it becomes
necessary to consider that war may not entirely arise from evolutionary or biological factors.
Conversely, it is important not to only focus on the sociocultural side of the argument. As
demonstrated with the early warfare examples, warfare emerged as soon as humans had the
organizational capacity for it. Furthermore, warfare is nearly universal among human cultures, a
social reality accepted by seemingly all schools of western thought surrounding the origins of
war.10 With this in mind, it is difficult to claim that war is completely social, because violent
conflict between groups of humans predates agriculture or any other sign of large-scale
civilization.
Dawson, “The Origin of War,” 9-11.
Miguel Angel Centeno and Elaine Enriquez, War & Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017), 13.
9
Centeno and Enriquez, War & Society, 20.
10
Dawson, ”The Origins of War,” 6-17.
7
8
With all of this in mind, it perhaps becomes clearer that the answer lies in compromise between
the biological and sociocultural explanations. From this angle, it becomes necessary to examine
the merits of the arguments on both sides, and consider that there may be a place for both to
coexist. Firstly, from the evolutionary side, the importance of aggression in humans has already
been established, but perhaps more important for warfare is the centrality of cooperation and
coordination in humans, a factor embraced by the “peace biologists” who used Darwinian
explanations for human nature and war in a very different way than “social Darwinists.”11
Humans have a biological capacity for cooperation and coordination, something that gives a
powerful evolutionary advantage, but which may also exacerbate group dynamics that lead to
conflict, thus potentially providing an explanation on the biological basis of warfare that in no
way comes close to the level of biological determinism espoused by some thinkers over the
years, and certainly leaves room for social factors to play a role as well. Social factors, in fact,
must play a role in the existence and development of warfare. After all, if cooperation is inherent
to the capacity for war-making, then it would be remiss not to mention that human polities over
time, especially the modern nation-state, have the greatest capacity for coordination between
individuals than any prehistorical human apparatus or non-human apparatus for communication.
Modern nation-states serve as a critical component of the argument of a social side of war, but
they also reinforce the importance of coordination and cooperation to the capacity of warmaking. First, as a sociocultural factor of war, modern nation-states demonstrate the social
capacity to maintain power over massive swathes of territory and ideological unity among vast
populations, fueling an era of unprecedented wars that are both unique to the modern world in
their ideological underpinnings and the zenith of thousands of years of sociocultural
11
Dawson, ”Origins of War,” 11.
development.12 This also, however, shows the evolutionary importance of cooperation, as
modern nation-states are unprecedented in their capacity to demonstrate large populations of
people engaging in a form of cooperation that results in the bureaucratic apparatus of the nationstate itself. With this in mind, it becomes clear that biological underpinnings play a role in the
formation of social structures that make warfare possible, but it is those social structures that
ultimately engage in, maintain, and reinforce the capacity for polities to engage in war.
Warfare as a product of human nature and warfare as a product of social development,
while appearing like two different schools of thought, must be considered together in the
formation and maintenance of warfare in humanity. While evolutionary biological factors are
important to consider, they ultimately cannot generate war in a vacuum, and social factors
creating war likewise do not spring from nothing. Ultimately, this leads to the compromise that
biological factors must contribute to the emergence of warfare, but social structures are the
agents that make warfare possible and maintain its central place in human affairs. Whether
warfare is inescapable or not, it is important to recognize the origins and development of war
from prehistory to the modern day when attempting to find an answer to such a question.
12
Sinisa Malesevic, The Sociology of War & Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010). 118-145.
Bibliography
Centeno, Miguel Angel, and Elaine Enriquez. War & Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017.
Dawson, Doyne. “The Origins of War: Biological and Anthropological Theories.” History and
Theory 35, no. 1 (1996): 1. https://doi.org/10.2307/2505515.
Heinecken, Lindy. “The Military, War and Society: The Need for Critical Sociological
Engagement.” Scientia Militaria - South African Journal of Military Studies 43, no. 1
(2015). https://doi.org/10.5787/43-1-1107.
Malešević Siniša. The Sociology of War and Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010.
Thorpe, I. J. “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare.” World Archaeology 35,
no. 1 (2003): 145–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/0043824032000079198.