I'm certain there's evidence to the contrary, at least in terms of humans' propensity to turn to violence, but I love this quotation by J. Bronowski from the BBC series "The Ascent of Man" (1972):
"Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history and instead to speculate about the roots of war [as though it has its cause] in some animal instinct--as if, like the tiger, we had to kill to live or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft."
What part of war is a primal instinct?
"Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history and instead to speculate about the roots of war [as though it has its cause] in some animal instinct--as if, like the tiger, we had to kill to live or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft."
What part of war is a primal instinct?
