Warfare in Homo sapiens: An Anthropological Reassessment of Its Origins
and Their Implications for International Double Standards
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65074/t5az4p82Keywords:
Parochial Altruism, Coalitional Morality, Evolutionary Anthropology, Warfare, International Double Standards, Multilevel Selection, International LawAbstract
Received: 2026 / 08 / 18
Revision: 2026 / 09 / 03
Accepted: 2026 / 09 / 06
Published: 2026 / 09 / 30
Evolutionary anthropology poses an explicit challenge to human-centrism, casting doubt on the extent to which we have truly distanced ourselves from our animal origins, and on whether we have genuinely moved beyond the logic of "the struggle for survival" toward a universal ethics grounded in partnership, justice, and altruism. This study departs from the concept of "parochial altruism," understood as the co-evolution of in-group love and out-group hostility, and examines how this pairing produced, across our evolutionary history, a parochial moral system that prohibits violence within the group while permitting it without — and how this dynamic constitutes one of the root causes of warfare.
The study draws on five graduated explanatory hypotheses, moving from the most fundamental biological drives to the ethical ceiling: resource competition, sexual selection and parental investment, parochial altruism, the behavioral immune system, and finally coalitional morality and multilevel selection.
The study proceeds along two parallel tracks: the first applies evolutionary frameworks to explain warfare, while the second examines the bias embedded in contemporary international law through the lens of the in-group/out-group distinction. In the second track, the study employs a comparative analysis of the Ukrainian and Palestinian cases as evidence that the double standards observable in the application of international law follow the logic of geographic and historical alignment rather than the logic of law itself.
The study concludes that morality, in its evolutionary origins, is not universal but parochial — that it perpetuates war rather than constraining it, and that humanity confronts the ravages of war with the very same moral system that produced them. It further concludes that the logic of the in-group and the out-group has never left human civilization; it has merely assumed the guise of international law and humanitarian norms. The difference between the logic of the tribe and the logic of the contemporary international order is one of scale, not of substance.
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