The Nature of War Theory

Abstract

Today s advances in evolutionary biology are unifying competing theories of natural selection and serve as a timely call for a similar unification of competing theories of war. This paper explores the relationship between war and natural selection by first examining war s biological origins, and then placing them within a multidisciplinary framework called the Nature of War Theory. This theory, as its name implies, reconciles natural selection and war to reveal a shared overarching and paradoxical duality, displaying that war is characterized by the simultaneous violent interplay of evolutionary individual-level and group-level adaptations, manifested by individualist and altruistic wars, respectively, and highlighted by trends and insights recognizable to both students of war and evolutionary biology.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 10, 2011
Accession Number
ADA552999

Entities

People

  • Paul B. Olsen

Organizations

  • United States Army War College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Animal Behavior
  • Animals
  • Asymmetric Warfare
  • Education
  • Genetics
  • Geography
  • Human Behavior
  • Military Operations
  • New York
  • Social Media
  • Social Sciences
  • Students
  • Terrorism
  • Terrorists
  • United States Military Academy
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Theoretical Analysis.