Additionally,. This is because a single male can reproduce with multiple females, whereas females can usually only reproduce and rear the offspring of one male at a time, with a long delay before becoming reproductively available again. However, the persistence of these three traits across domains and over time casts doubt on arguments like these, and strongly counts in favor of an evolutionary explanation instead. We recognize that many factors may affect the behavior of states, including bureaucracies, types of government, culture, international institutions, or the international system itself, but we also recognize, as traditional theories of international politics have from the time of Thucydides, that humans affect state behavior as well.Reference Levy202 Many factors come between an individual leader and the behavior of a state, but that does not mean leaders have no effect at all. With regard to phylogeny, most primates and all the great apes (the group to which humans belong) have strong social dominance hierarchies, and humans are no exceptiondominance hierarchies have been extensively documented among humans in a wide variety of settings and eras.Reference Wason96,Reference Mazur and Booth97,98 With regard to ecology, dominance hierarchies are a common form of social organization in the kind of ecological settings in which humans evolved (social groups with competing interests, variation in power, and finite resources). The impact of these biological factors on social and political behavior will vary depending on context. He was later a research fellow at the Brookings Institution (197980) and a research associate at Harvard University (198082). Scholars often argue over whether historically humans experienced a Hobbesian state of nature, butwhatever the outcome of that debateit is certainly a much closer approximation to the prehistoric environment in which human brains and behavior evolved.48,Reference Buss49,Reference Mirazn Lahr, Rivera, Power, Mounier, Copsey, Crivellaro, Edung, Maillo Fernandez, Kiarie, Lawrence, Leakey, Mbua, Miller, Muigai, Mukhongo, Van Baelen, Wood, Schwenninger, Grn, Achyuthan, Wilshaw and Foley50 This legacy heavily influences our decision-making and behavior today, evenperhaps especiallyin the anarchy of international politics. Cooperation and peace efforts often fail precisely because people have too rosy a view of human nature and thus fail to structure incentives effectively. That choice, I argue in this article, creates three problems for his theory. We do not, however, need to rely on mere analogies linking animal and human behavior. This strategy was clearly not an option for critical resources, such as food and water. Our point is therefore not that humans are naturally good or naturally bad at all times and in all circumstances, but rather that people have evolved mechanisms for egoism, dominance, and groupishness that are activated and amplified in certain settings. Variations of Realism Working from these core assumptions realists have developed three major explanatory frameworks: l Classical or Human Nature Realists (Hans Morgenthau) l Structural or Defensive (a. k. a. neo-realists) Realists (Kenneth Waltz) l Offensive Realists (John Mearsheimer) l 3 It contended that a powerful lobby skews U.S. foreign policy against the countrys national interests by securing unconditional support for Israel. Even optimists acknowledge that remarkable mechanisms and institutions are required to generate and sustain cooperation, and the identification and implementation of these conditions occupies many of our colleagues.180,Reference Milner181,182 183 The European Union, to give one flagship example, is often put forward as a vision of the future, demonstrating that democratic states are willing to subordinate self-interest for a greater good, and that war is becoming obsolete. Why would hunter-gatherer groups fight at all? Debate continues as to whether modern states actually do, or should, behave in this way, but we are struck by a different question. John Mearsheimers contribution to neorealism has also proved significant. Examples of offensive realism include John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability inEurope after the Cold War,"International Security, Vol. As we have stressed, the human traits of egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias are adaptations to the ecological conditions prevalent in human evolution. However, he criticized post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy for overestimating the countrys military power and its capacity to project that power at will. Historically, evidence has often supported this hypothesis.199,200,201 However, we take the position that, on average, state leaders personal interests have significant and genuine overlap with national security interests, not least of which is the survival and prosperity of the state for themselves and their progeny. Third, by acknowledging that the social and natural sciences are both necessary to understand human behavior, we advance consilience. Rather, as Mearsheimer points out, states do best if they expand only when the opportunity for gains presents itselfthey try to figure out when to raise and when to fold.163 Evolution has been doing this for a long time. Evolutionary theory and the causes of war,, John Strate emphasizes the importance of defense from attack by conspecifics, other humans; he argues that it caused the growth of human societies. Something inherent in our biological makeup motivates us to try to improve, or at least maintain, our standing against those with whom we compete for important positional resources.Reference Frank94 In the context of evolutionary theory, dominance usually means that particular individuals in a social group have priority of access to resources in competitive situations.Reference Milinski, Parker, Krebs and Davies95 A wide variety of animals exhibit a form of social organization called a dominance hierarchy, in which members of a social group each have a status rank descending from the alpha male down through all the other individuals to the lowliest subordinates. However, there is, of course, considerable variation in egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias. This parallels the primatologists argument that the efforts of chimpanzees to seek territorial expansion and as much power as possible represents an adaptive strategy to ensure survival and promote the success of future generations. The brain may be responding exactly as it was designed to do, given informational inputs from the environment. Despite realisms long history as a theory of international politics and its widespread use by scholars and policymakers such as E.H. Carr, George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Hans Morgenthau, the traditional realist argument rests on weak foundations. Clearly, when it comes to the many distinctive physiological and behavioral changes humans have undergone, ecology has been as or more important than phylogeny (hence, the field of evolutionary anthropology focuses on hunter-gatherer analogues, not nonhuman primate analogues). However, it is important to make clear that humans did not descend from either species. Our argument is that evolution produced a human brain and human behaviors that closely match these implicit behavioral patterns on which Mearsheimers theory of offensive realism depends: Egoism (self-help) captures why we want resources and resist their loss; Dominance (power maximization) explains why we want power to control resources for ourselves and our relatives and why we seek to defend them from or deny them to others; Ingroup/outgroup bias (fear of others) explains why we perceive other human groups as threats and rivals. Defensive realists argue that too much powerclassically, too much military powerdecreases a states security because other states will balance against it. Sexual selection has led to costly biological adaptations, such as fighting, the growth of heavy weapons (e.g., antlers), risky courtship displays, or adornments that signal genetic quality (e.g., gigantic tails). Survival of the disciplines: Is international relations fit for the new millennium? Table2. Indeed, there is a considerable literature on animal and human adaptations for cooperation.Reference Fehr and Fischbacher170,Reference Dugatkin171,172 However, while cooperation is frequent and widespread, this empirical observation does nothing to dent the evolutionary logic that cooperation helps the helperit evolved to occur only where it brings return benefits.Reference Trivers173,174 This is precisely why the cooperation literature has remained so heated. Whatever ones personal views on evolution, the time has come to explore the implications of evolutionary theory for mainstream theories of international relations.Reference Neumann51,Reference Johnson52. To an observant international relations scholar, the behavior of chimpanzees is remarkably like the behavior of states predicted by the theory of offensive realism. Mearsheimers other works included Conventional Deterrence (1983), Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (1988), Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics (2011), The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018), and scores of articles published in academic journals. While biological group selection in humans is possible in theory, there have not been any published empirical examples. Table4. Second, even if group selection does occur, it can only increase altruism within groups. What is the logic for risking life and limb in engaging in violent aggression against other groups? Wherever actors are left to compete with each other by relying on their own devices (whether in the human evolutionary past or today), we predict that actors within those systems will exhibit similar behavior, not least self-help behavior to maximize power. The international system is anarchic. Many criticisms of international relations theories focus on these unsubstantiated or contested assumptions about underlying human nature. Behavior intention models, for example, assume people have: a linear time orientation (the future has meaning), an internal locus of control, and the ability to think in probabilistic terms. Dominic Johnson is professor of international relations at the University of Oxford. States do not cooperate, except during temporary alliances, but constantly seek to diminish their competitors power and to enhance their own. In fact, however, anarchy has been a constant feature of the entire multimillion year history of the human lineage (and indeed the 3.5 billionyear history of the evolution of all life on Earth before that). Hamilton used genetic models to show that, while individual organisms are egoistic, they should be less so in their behavior toward genetic relatives, especially in parent-offspring and sibling relationships.Reference Hamilton87,Reference Hamilton88 This decrease in egoism is because close relatives share many of the same genesone-half for siblings and parents, one-quarter for aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and one-eighth for cousins. Updates? In this section, we have presented standard biological arguments that egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup bias are deeply rooted behavioral adaptations common among mammals in general and primate species in particular. Much of Thayers scholarship centers onlife-sciences insights into political-behavioral topics, including the origins of war and ethnic conflict and the dynamics of suicide terrorism. Between groups, group selection would do the opposite, maintaining or even exacerbating conflict.187 Because the premise is that selection operates at the level of groups, altruistic traits can only spread if altruism helps spread the genes responsible for it at the expense of other genes, and that must occur via intergroup competition or conflict. The ubiquity and strength of the ingroup/outgroup bias across history and across human cultures suggest it is an ingrained aspect of human nature, and evolutionary theory explains why such a mechanism would evolve.Reference Alexander125,Reference Hammond and Axelrod126,Reference Choi and Bowles127 First, considerable evidence from both archeological and ethnographic research on preindustrial societies points to intensive intergroup conflict in our past.128,129,130,131,132,133 As we noted earlier, around 15 percent of male populations in indigenous small-scale societies died in warfare (and, in some such societies, war-related mortality rates were considerably higher).134,135 War also remains a significant influence on the social organization and physical distribution of these societies even when they are not actually at war. And, even then, these arrangements often fail to work. The group can accept organization with some centralization of power (dominance hierarchies), or it can engage in perpetual conflict (scramble competition), which incurs costs in terms of time, energy, and injuries, as well as depriving the group of many benefits of a communal existence, such as more efficient resource harvesting.119 Among social mammals, and primates in particular, dominance hierarchies have emerged as the primary form of social organization. Offensive realists and other theorists of international relations may see more or less of each. Egoism, dominance, and ingroup/outgroup distinctions have previously been attributed to variables such as culture, economics, or religion.148,149 For example, Karl Marx and his followers identified egoism as a result of capitalism and called for its suppression and the triumph of class consciousness. Behavior varies considerably, just as standard offensive realism predicts for states, and countervailing forces would sometimes mitigate power-maximization strategiesalthough the very need for and difficulties of those countervailing forces help to demonstrate the fact that offensive realist behavior remains an underlying problem. Mearsheimer notably advocated the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Europe, arguing that their presence there was irrational, as no state currently threatened to dominate the continent. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. The particular socio-ecological setting in which humans evolved meant that egoism, dominance, and groupishness were important behavioral adaptations, irrespective of the traits found in related species. As Chinggis Khan is purported to have said: The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes.159 Although not usually expressed in such stark terms, the pleasure of competition and victory has been widely recognized as a feature of human nature from classical times to the present day, and success in competitive interactions and the domination of others are known to increase testosterone and dopamine responses in menthe so-called victory effect.160 Such dominance behavior is, we suggest, exaggerated among leaders because they are generally ambitious and competitive, and usually male. Humans evolved in a state of nature where competition for resources and dangers from other humans and the environment were great. Each season at Evermore Park brings new adventures, fit for all ages. Mearsheimer and Walt in particular make cases for "restraint" and "offshore balancing," meaning a reservation of the use of force to the most serious threats to US power, coupled with a policy to prevent China's assumption of regional hegemony in Asia (Mearsheimer and Walt 2016). . We are positively biased toward our own groups and negatively biased toward other groups. Our evolutionary approach predicts the same behavior as offensive realism but derives from a different ultimate cause. Many models of consumer behavior include fundamental assumptions which are rarely questioned. Rather, chimpanzees appear to have evolved an innate aggression toward other groups, a tendency that causes them to attack neighboring males when the opportunity arises, and leads to greater Darwinian reproductive success over time. The role of war in the evolution of political systems and the functional priority of defense,, For an excellent review of the logic for, and evidence of, adaptations for war, see, Inclusive fitness has recently been the subject of a heated debate in the biological literature; see M. A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, The evolution of eusociality,, There is copious evidence from historical and contemporary times that such nepotism is a significant influence in politics. In short, offensive realism may really be describing the nature of the human species more than the nature of the international system. We realize international cooperation is prevalent, but that does not mean such cooperation is easy to obtain. For example, among wolves, lions, and chimpanzees, when members of rival groups are found alone, they are extremely vulnerable and risk being killed.140,141,142 We discussed intergroup killing in chimpanzees earlier, but the pattern is notable among social carnivores, too: Studies of undisturbed wolf populations in Alaska have found that 39 to 65 percent of adult deaths were due to intergroup killing.Reference Mech, Adams, Meier, Burch and Dale143, Of course, the ability to assess threats is much more complex in humans than it is in other animals, and human intelligence gives us a greater repertoire of behavior.

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