Definition
The causes of war remain a strangely obscure subject. While people have a good idea of the aims that may motivate states to go to war, an attempt at a strict definition of them is widely regarded as futile. This entry seeks to show how the various causes of violence and war all come together and are explained within an integrated human motivational complex, shaped by evolution and natural selection.
Introduction
The age-old philosophical and psychological inquiry into the nature of the basic human system of motivation is fundamental to the question of why people fight. Numerous lists of basic needs and desires have been put together over the centuries. The most recent ones show little if any marked progress over the older, such as Hobbes’s insightful propositions in Leviathan, chapter 6. Such lists have always had something arbitrary and often trivial about them. They lacked a...
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Gat, A. (2016). Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of War. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_930-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_930-1
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