angry chimps 1 of 3

ANGRY CHIMPS

The future of warfare is simply a continuation of our primate  forebears ( and, yes, sorry to any religious fundamentalists but I am guided by evolutionary biology.  Not to say one is more correct than the other-science always serves its practitioners and they are never completely impartial-but my preferred theory and hence viewed prism is the latter rather than former ).  While you may argue against evolution from apes and dispute the Earth is older than six thousand years, history and anthropology and other studies do strongly argue for a furry feces flinger as whom we descend from.  Now, humans are very different from animals, in many ways.  We have opposable thumbs, allowing better use of tools.  We have no hair, allowing us to run any wounded animal into the ground from overheating.  Obviously you have to be in shape for that, such as the idea of the Apache all day runners.  Most of you attempting to run down a paraplegic would have a heart attack after a lifetime of automobile use.  We have amazing hand eye coordination allowing use of our first tool ( in all probability ) the rock to be precision delivered at prey and predator alike.  Very importantly, we discovered how to use fire.  Not just to keep predators away, and to structure nature more to our liking, as important as that is, but to cook our food.

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Cooking food doesn’t seem all that important, but only because we are like fish in water.  It seems obvious to us.  But cooking allowed us to escape the jungle where high energy foods were scarce and dispersed.  Outside of fruits, it is hard to get a lot of calories out of raw foods.  Eating meat raw, for instance, is pretty close to worthless as a much higher portion of the food is eliminated undigested, and that is AFTER the body burns far more energy attempting to do so.  Cooking, however, not only allows us to fully digest one of the most calorie and protein dense foods, it transfers the energy needed from the body to the fire.  Cooking allowed man to use far less calories digesting ( for instance, leaves such as apes consume ) and far more thinking ( a bigger brain consumes an amazingly high number of calories-with a payoff only if the brain is used as a superior tool ).

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While other animals have social skills and coordination, humans take it to a whole other level ( as with all of our unique abilities ).  We have culture, our premier mental tool in adapting to any climate on earth.  The fire we have allows us to eat far more than most other animals can, culture teaches us what can be food, AND how to process it with tools only humans can wield.  We can easily change individual and group behavior to survive.  Females easily space pregnancies by prolonged lactation, alternate sexual practices to eliminate conception ( while still promoting the pair bonding necessary to elongated rearing of offspring ), practicing infanticide,  changing the rules to hold off marriage and breeding, etc.  But there are two things we still hold in common with the chimpanzees.  First, we are incapable of outwitting Mother Nature, for all our tools and training and practice.  We cannot avoid overreaching our resource base.  Breeding is long term and natural disasters are short term.  And second, we are just as violent, territorial and aggressive as they are ( and for all our high tech wonder toys, we fight in a similar manner ).

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This series of articles focuses on our warlike behavior, the reasons for it and how that will play out in the future.  But we need a bit of background to that story.  So let’s focus on our resource base and our inability to conserve.  Like most animals, as hard as we attempt to balance our breeding with our food supply, we are unable to do so.  We have much more sophisticated tools to attempt this than animals do, and while they certainly help in muting the effects of hunger ( malnourishment being the unhappy but preferable outcome verses famine ), they cannot be the primary tool as their effectiveness is still marginal ( it takes nine months of gestation and at least thirteen years of rearing offspring, whereas locusts and freezes and hurricanes happen in hours.  You CAN’T balance supply and demand past a certain point with that variable ).  The far better tool for this is warfare.  More tomorrow.

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