![]() This was probably enough to make men more likely to go to war from the outset. So, if both outcomes are equally plausible, why is warfare in fact almost exclusively male? Our study also suggests that male competition over mates and resources – an aspect of what biologists call sexual selection – might have caused men to evolve to be generally more aggressive than women. Whether male-only war or female-only war evolved in our model depended only on the initial question of which sex was more likely to go to war to start with. This evolutionary pressure means that, if there was then even a small reason why men might be more likely to fight, over many generations the incentives for men to join in would grow until warfare became an almost exclusively male practice.īut as our hypothetical model worked on the basis that men and women were identical, for every potential evolutionary trajectory that led to exclusively male warfare, there would be another that led to exclusively female warfare. For example, if lots of men are already fighting, then the risks to an individual man would be lower and the potential rewards higher, but the there would be much less incentive for a woman to take part. Instead, our model showed that what was important was how many members of a person’s sex were already taking part in warfare at any given point, and how that affected sexual competition for mates with other people of the same sex. To our surprise, we found that exclusively male warfare could still evolve in this case. We designed a model that looked at men and women as two identical groups, and didn’t take account of the sexes’ different characteristics when working out the probability of an individual joining in a war. Modelling the evolution of warfareīefore investigating each of the proposed explanations in detail, we decided we should better understand the simplest case where there are no sex differences. Our model looks at the consequences of going to war on a person’s fitness, and for the fitness of their genetic relatives, to work out the probability that a person will join in the fighting. ![]() We set out to answer this question, developing a mathematical model of the evolution of male and female participation in warfare, building on some of our previous work in this area. But they fall short on explaining why the fighting is almost always done by men. Granted, these hypotheses all suggest plausible reasons why more men than women participate in wars. ![]() This supposedly means that women are less genetically related to their social group than men, and so are less keen to risk their lives for their communities. Others still have argued the answer can be found in the fact that females in groups of ancestral great apes and humans were more likely to migrate. This isn’t true for women because they can only produce a limited number of offspring and so there’s little or no evolutionary advantage to obtaining more partners. ![]() Others have suggested that this pattern occurs because the costs of warfare are lower for men, as the risks of dying or being injured are offset by the opportunity to obtain more sexual partners in case of victory. Some researchers have proposed that since men are on average stronger, taller, and faster than women, they are simply more effective in winning battles. Instead, this state of affairs might have more to do with chance. But our new study, published in Proceedings B, finds that none of these differences fully explain why women have almost never gone to war, and nor are they needed to do so. Previous hypotheses have suggested that this is the result of fundamental biological differences between the sexes. Why then, are half of a community’s potential warriors (the women) usually absent from the battlefield? From a numbers perspective, bigger armies obviously have greater chances of success in battles. Frontline fighting in warfare is primarily and often almost exclusively a male activity. One pattern characterises every war that’s ever been fought.
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