THE fact that chimpanzees wage land-grabbing battles (see “Chimpanzees kill to win new territory”) will be used by those who are cynical about human nature as evidence that warfare is inevitable. If our close relatives form coalitions to kill their rivals, such behaviour must be embedded in our DNA, they will argue.
But these battles are really no more than skirmishes: they have little in common with human warfare. The idea that war is hard-wired is also weakened by the fact that different human cultures have different propensities for war. For example, people in modern societies are less likely to…
