Evolution and the Human-Animal Drive to Conflict: A Psychobiological Perspective

Evolution and the Human-Animal Drive to Conflict examines how fundamental, universal animal drives, such as  dominance/prevalence, survival, kinship, and "profit" (greed, advantage,  whether of material or social nature), provide the basis for the evolutionary trap that promotes the unstable, conflictive, dominant-prone individual and group human behaviours. 

Examining  this behavioural tension, this book argues that while these innate  features set up behaviours that lean towards aggression influenced by  social inequalities, the means implemented to defuse them resort to  emotional and intellectual strategies that sponsor fanaticism and often  reproduce the very same behaviours they intend to defuse. In addressing  these concerns, the book argues that we should enhance our resources to  promote solidarity, accept cultural differences, deter expansionist and  uncontrolled profit drives, and achieve collective access towards  knowledge and progress in living conditions. This entails promoting the  redistribution of resources and creative labour access and avoiding  policies that generate a fragmented world with collective and individual  development disparities that invite and encourage dominance behaviours.  This resource redistribution asserts that it is necessary to  reformulate the global set of human priorities towards increased access  to better living conditions, cognitive enhancement, a more amiable  interaction with the ecosystem and non-aggressive cultural differences,  promote universal access to knowledge, and enhance creativity and  cultural convivence. These behavioural changes entail partial  derangement of our ancestral animal drives camouflaged under different  cultural profiles until the species succeeds in replacing the dominance  of basic animal drives with prosocial, collective ones. Though it  entails a formidable task of confronting financial, military, and  religious powers and cultural inertias – human history is also a  challenging, continuous experience in these domains – for the sake of  our own self-identity and self-evaluation, we should reject any  suggestion of not continuing embracing slowly constructing collective  utopias channelled towards improving individual and collective freedom  and creativeness.

This book will interest academics  and students in social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, the  neurosciences, palaeoanthropology, philosophy, and anthropology.