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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GPS Info who wrote (205403)	10/8/2006 4:49:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

Interesting question: <What’s your guess about how much DNA diversified during times of war versus the same interval of peace, going back the last 1,500 years? > People die from all sorts of things. The four horses of the apocalypse have taken a LOT of people over the millennia. So, since there are four horses, I guess quarter of blokes died from fighting, or injuries sustained which left them in too much trouble to do well. Wars are always necessarily brief. It takes 20 years to grow a young man and a day or two to kill him in a tribal territorial conflict. I suppose wars have gone in something like 20 year cycles. After the war, the winners would celebrate with mating rights and maybe conduct some infanticide too. I don't see why they'd leave young males to grow up and be annoying. Very young might be okay as they'd just turn into soldiers for the new bosses. After 20 years, there's a new crop of young males ready to do some territorial acquisition. So, it's time for some more wars. Neighouring tribes would be ready about the same time. It was a breeding race. A never-ending championship contest. The idea of war wasn't to diversify DNA but to concentrate it. The good DNA went on to propagate and to further victories. The dud DNA was eaten. The peace-time sexual selection process was also concentrating the good DNA, leaving the dud on the mating rituals scrap heap during those 1500 years. During war, there was very rapid concentration of DNA, with swarms of males being killed at once. During peacetime, the process was relentless but less rapid. Overall, I guess the sexual selection process was more important than the conquest or defeat process. It's all a bit academic, because we have what we have and the past is no guide to the future. Especially in a globalized cyberspace era when the red in tooth and claw era is irrelevant [almost and vast nuclear bomb arsenals notwithstanding and huge capacity for mass killing by conventional weapons too - hopefully, though one has to question why bother having all that if it's so irrelevant to today]. Mqurice