Definition
Warfare, defined as lethal coalitional violence, is a human universal and may be partially explained as a result of evolved psychological mechanisms in males for increased sexual access to females.
Introduction
J. M. G. van der Dennen described how, at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (1993), Leda Cosmides posed the question “Why would anyone be so stupid as to initiate a war?” and then provided the answer: “To get women” (quoted in van der Dennen 1995, p. 327). Although this answer is often rejected out of hand by most social scientists, and modern scholars of war rarely consider sexual access as a motive for warfare, the notion that coalitional violence is waged by men to gain sexual access to women is far from new. Descriptions of success in war leading to increased sexual access to women are found in both ancient texts and...
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Savage, C.R., Palmer, C.T. (2016). Sexual Access as Benefit of Victory in War. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_965-1
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