Why did President John F. Kennedy choose a strategy of confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis even though his secretary of defense stated that the presence of missiles in Cuba made no difference? Why did large numbers of Iraqi troops surrender during the Gulf War even though they had been ordered to fight and were capable of doing so? Why did Hitler declare war on the United States knowing full well the power of that country? War and Human Nature argues that new findings about the way humans are shaped by their inherited biology may help provide answers to such questions. This seminal work by former Defense Department official Stephen Peter Rosen contends that human evolutionary history has affected the way we process the information we use to make decisions. The result is that human choices and calculations may be very different from those predicted by standard models of rational behavior. This notion is particularly true in the area of war and peace, Rosen contends. Human emotional arousal affects how people learn the lessons of history. For example, stress and distress influence people's views of the future, and testosterone levels play a role in human social conflict. This thought-provoking and timely work explores the mind that has emerged from the biological sciences over the last generation. In doing so, it helps shed new light on many persistent puzzles in the study of war.

"The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.

What are the causes of war? Wars are generally begun by a revisionist state seeking to take territory. The psychological root of revisionism is the yearning for glory, honor and power. Human nature is the primary cause of war, but political regimes can temper or intensify these passions. This book examines the effects of six types of regime on foreign policy: monarchy, republic and sultanistic, charismatic, and military and totalitarian dictatorship. Dictatorships encourage and unleash human ambition, and are thus the governments most likely to begin ill-considered wars. Classical realism, modified to incorporate the impact of regimes and beliefs, provides a more convincing explanation of war than neo-realism.

This 2001 book shows the intersection of chemical warfare and pest control in the twentieth century.

Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? And what of war today: is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? This book sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the riddle of war throughout human history.

SUMMARY: This book is If you’ve ever wondered about human behavior, wonder no more. In The Laws of Human Nature, Greene takes a look at 18 laws that reveal who we are and why we do the things we do. Humans are complex beings, but Greene uses these laws to strip human nature down to its bare bones. Every law that he presents is supported by a real-life historical account, with an insightful twist to drive the point home. As you read the book, don’t be surprised if you get the feeling that everyone you know, including yourself, is described in the book! DISCLAIMER: This is an UNOFFICIAL summary and not the original book. It is designed to record all the key points of the original book.

How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murder After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man’s evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials and in-depth interviews, Erika Lorraine Milam reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity’s problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, Milam shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee-human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, Creatures of Cain argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.