Sex and War Quotes

“Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to he human capacity for cruelty.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity for cruelty.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Cruelty takes many forms, but all those forms depend on the human hability to dehumanize and de-individualize another person.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“We are, as a species, in the process of proving Malthus’s proposition that population will always outstrip resources.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“For billions of years, evolution has been driven by competition caused by the simple fact that, left unchecked, all living things can reproduce faster than their environment can sustain”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“…the male desire to control women’s sexual activity can be traced to efforts to ensure paternity. This impulse lurks behind even the most extreme or bizarre expressions of religious obsession, misogyny, and sexual repression.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Again and again, we see how cultures and religions frame women’s sexuality as both powerful and dangerous, and as something that must be kept under control.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“…human beings are condemned to live in two ethical and behavioral worlds at once -the morality of empathy for and reciprocity with ingroups, and cold-hearted team aggression aimed at outgroups.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“The more we appreciate from whence we came biologically, the better placed we will be to build up those cultural and environmental influences that help ameliorate the worst aspects of war.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“A few people -and a few chimpanzees- are just frankly antisocial. Presumably, such cases are the result of something going grievously wrong in a brain that has been built by a particular combination of genes and then submitted to a particular set of environmental pressures, so that it places almost everyone in an outgroup. When such individuals act alone, they are antisocial. But when they gain control over groups or even whole nations, they join the ranks of history’s greatest villains.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“The evolutionary logic of team aggression is to kill as many members of the outgroup as possible, at as minimum risk to yourself as possible.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“...killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“People who can see their neighbors with air-conditioning and cars, but who themselves live in shacks and often lack sewage disposal or a reliable water supply, have little to lose, and may find violence a rational option.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Belief in the supernatural is another powerful route to overcoming the very natural desire to stay alive.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“On the spectrum of team aggression, street gangs are one step nearer to a preliterate raiding party than to terrorists and therefore they are perceived as less threatening -they only destroy themselves. Some aspects of gang behavior do parallel chimpanzee raids, but in an urban jungle. -Gang warfare- is driven by the two basic emotions that also fuel chimpanzee and preliterate warfare -territory and revenge, or just being from another neighborhood. Merely belonging to another gang is enough reason to justify an attack, as also happens with the chimpanzees of Gombe. Unlike terrorists who attack a perceived outgroup for ideological reasons, in the case of Al Qaeda by mounting attacks halfway across the world, gangs fight their neighbors for what they perceive as territory and resources.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Respect and loyalty go together and gang members, like the formal military, hoplites, Yanomamo warriors, and chimpanzees on patrol, will risk and give their lives for one another.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“After World War II, Marxist archaeologists argued that Stone Age societies were economically self-sufficient and therefore incapable of warfare -that is until they excavated skeletons with flint arrows embedded in them.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“For millions of years our human, and before them, hominid ancestors lived in small bands of a few hundred persons wherein the women contributed most of the calories by gathering edible plants and men provided much of the protein through hunting. Most of our behavioral predispositions were evolved to adapt us to this type of life, and not to our very different, contemporary world of computers, cars and concrete.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“In short, controlling more resources means you are likely to have more progeny surviving to future generations: Team aggression is one way that both chimpanzees and humans have hit upon to reap that evolutionary reward.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World