If war is not ingrained in human nature, that may help provide a basis for arguing against war as an option, he says. His research is an attempt to settle an age-old academic debate over whether humans are hardwired to fight wars or if war is a human invention. It’s a topic he’s been studying since the Vietnam War, a period in history that sparked his interest. Why We Fight,” Ferguson reached back thousands of years to look at the historical roots of warfare to shed light on whether humans have always made war or if armed conflict has only emerged as changing social conditions provided the motivation and organization to collectively kill. In his study, “War May Not Be in Our Nature After All. “But it is the overall circumstances that we live in that creates the impulse to go or not go to war.” “There is definitely controversy in the field when it comes to this question,” says Ferguson, who studies human nature, war and peace. People might fight and sometimes kill for personal reasons, but homicide, he argues, is not war. In a paper published in Scientific American, Ferguson argues that war may not be in our nature at all. There is no scientific proof that we have an inherent propensity to take up arms and collectively kill. Brian Ferguson, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark.

Is it in our nature to go to war? Should we just accept the fact that humans have this innate tendency and are hardwired to kill members of other groups?

Warlike human grouos