Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

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Overview
Editorial Reviews
What People Are Saying
Product Details
Meet the Author
Table of Contents

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Overview

Human beings have been battling one another since time immemorial. But why war and terrorism? Why are men almost always the killers, and why are war and sex so inextricably linked? Why do we kill members of our own species intentionally, when few other animals do so?

Sex and War traces the cultural and biological evolution of warfare from its prehuman origins through to our own times. In the spirit of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Potts and Hayden pull together insights from history, archaeology, psychology and biology to produce a clarifying new understanding of human history and current events.

Combining exhaustive research and rich personal experience, Sex and War shows that war, terrorism, slavery, and the subjugation of women have common roots deep in our biological history. Evolution is not destiny, however, and the authors, with the crucial contributions of Martha Campbell, show how relatively simple strategies can help the biology of peace win out over the biology of war. In doing so, they lay out a rational roadmap to make war less likely in the future, and less brutal when it does occur.

What People Are Saying

Jane Goodall

Potts and Hayden make an important contribution as they explore our evolutionary origins and make suggestions as to how human society might reduce warfare in the future. (Jane Goodall, primatologist and environmental activist)

Randy Olson

In this impressively comprehensive treatment, Potts and Hayden step as far back as possible from the human race to assess the root causes of social upheaval. (Randy Olson, author and director, Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus)

Sean B. Carroll

Will transform your outlook on war, peace, and what needs to be done to secure a safer world. (Sean B. Carroll, author, Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Making of the Fittest)

Editorial Reviews

Melvin Konner

…with journalist Thomas Hayden, [Potts] offers a lively and highly readable account of the evolution of war and terrorism.
—The Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781933771571
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Publication date: 12/1/2008
Pages: 457
Sales rank: 856,797
Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Malcolm Potts, MB, BChir, PhD, FRCOG, is the Bixby Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Cambridge University and trained as an obstetrician and research biologist, his profession has taken him all over the world. Potts led a medical team into Bangladesh immediately after the War of Liberation in 1972, and he has worked in many other war-torn places including Vietnam and Cambodia,
Afghanistan, Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Liberia, and Angola. His most recent books are Queen Victoria’s Gene and Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality.

Thomas Hayden is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about science, medicine and culture. Formerly a staff writer at Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, his articles and reviews have appeared in more than twenty publications, including National Geographic, Nature,
and The Washington Post. He is coauthor of On Call in Hell: A Doctor’s Iraq War Story, a 2007 national bestseller. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and fellow writer, Erika Check Hayden.

1. Sex and Violence 1
2. The War of Nature 17
3. The Missing Link 39
4. We Band of Brothers 63
5. Terrorists 99
6. Women and War 119
7. Raids into Battles 147
8. War and the State 175
9. War and Technology 213
10. War and the Law 241
11. Evil 265
12. The Future of War 283
13. Women and Peace 303
14. Stone Age Behaviors in the Twenty-First Century 333
15. C ivilization at Its Best 365
To the Reader 385
References 389
Index 411
About the Authors 457

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gradyharp

Posted April 3, 2009

more from this reviewer

Fascinating, Informative and Intelligently Written

SEX AND WAR: HOW BIOLOGY EXPLAINS WARFARE AND TERRORISM AND OFFERS A PATH TO A SAFER WORLD is a long title that may put some readers off as a sensationalist treatise. But excellent authors physician/women's reproductive rights activist Malcolm Potts and award winning scientist Tom Hayden have managed to create a book that not only informs but also entertains. This is a book that reads like a fine novel - only the writing is all based on research and peppered with photographic images that heighten the controversies it contains.

Though the book is hefty at over 450 pages, the chapters are plotted with a keen eye on maintaining the momentum of the message: war is innately a virile reaction, a male behavior, and the only hope to ending the cycle of constant war and terrorism is to introduce the nurturing effect of the feminine psyche. Change is a must and the manner in which the authors explore their thesis is rich in thought and touching in the manner in which it is written. They are brave enough to write controversially: 'In an increasingly dangerous world we need to analyze future scenarios as objectively as possible, using the best evidence. But we are becoming more religious, not less so. In democracies, religious fundamentalists are influencing policy and in the Muslim world fundamentalists are filling shortfalls in education. Fundamentalist teachings, whether Christian, Muslim, or any other religion, end up restricting and controlling women, which in turn makes wars and terrorism more likely. The twenty-first century is seeing a clash of cultures, but that clash is not between Islam and Christendom. Rather, it is between fundamentalism and reason. Reason's child, science, may entice us with new ways of killing one another, but it also teaches us to rein in our most aggressive tendencies.'

There is much to learn from the vantage of both Potts and Hayden, and gaining their insights is as entertaining as reading a truly fine novel! Grady Harp

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Olathe

Posted December 4, 2008

Thorough

Great read!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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