Alpha Dominance

What makes us kill?  Exhibiting Conspecific Violence, which is when members of the same species do harm to one another, is not exclusively a human trait.  The obvious motive is competition for resources, but most mammalian species accomplish this without doing serious harm to one another.  A combination of bluffing displays and stylized competition such as rams butting heads is usually as far as it goes.  What makes humans kill one another?

The costs of waging war are clear, so like most universal human activities there has to be a genetic component to it.  Natural life is highly efficient; squandering resources on behaviors that are energetically expensive and or potentially lethal is not done lightly.  The theory goes that an evolutionary handicap, such as the Peacock’s tail or a lion’s mane winnow out the weaker members of the gene-pool.  Any male not fit enough to bear the added burden of the handicap clearly and visibly has inferior genes that the female can use to screen him out as a suitor.  The universal presence of such a “wasteful” trait signifies a substantial genetic reward to the victors of the contest.  Biological imperatives can always be reduced to having one of two motives, survive, and survive long enough to reproduce and help your offspring survive to reproductive age.  Genetic competition always boils down to these fundamental objectives.  The only way to win the evolutionary contest of life is to disproportionately represent your offspring in subsequent generations.

This is not to say that humans, given our self-awareness, cannot sometimes overcome our basic drives.  Likewise, don’t mistake me for saying I condone violence beyond the realms of self defense, individual or national, but understand that our deepest subconscious motives are stronger and drive more of our behavior than most would like to recognize.  Trying to consciously override one’s innate drives is fighting a rising tide.  Mother Nature is a cold Mistress.

Nonetheless, the crux of this question lies in genetic competition; specifically male genomic competition, likely one reason for the propensity of boys and men of all ages for competition, aggressive behavior and fighting.  Thanks to the work of researchers such as Bryan Sykes we can track the relationships between groups of people and trace both a maternal and paternal lineage for an individual back to a common female ancestor.  This is done using pieces of so called “junk DNA” which are segments of genes that do not encode any critical information; they are more like placeholders, providing irrelevant spacing between critical genes.  These like all DNA are copied when the cell divides, but because they don’t encode anything important, the proteins that regulate the transcription and find and correct errors in the duplication process don’t monitor them closely and as a result their rate of mutation is much higher than in actual genes.  These rates are known, and the number of divergent mutations between two individuals gives a rough measure of the amount of time they have been evolving separately.  Like carbon-dating, we can impute from this the approximate time when they shared a common ancestor.

On the maternal side, the DNA used to determine the matriarchal ancestry is not nuclear DNA, the part in the nucleus of the cell, but is instead the DNA found in the organelle called the mitochondria.  You may recall this from school as the “Powerhouse” of the cell, metabolizing food to produce energy.  These are passed unchanged from Mother to Child as the sperm contributes only its nuclear genome to the offspring.  Because they are unchanged through the generations they are an excellent reference for maternal relation.

For men, there is a single piece of DNA that passes on to their sons unrecombined, the Y-chromosome.  Since women do not bear this chromosome however, the male contribution to his daughter is silent throughout the generations.  The Y-chromosome also has sections of junk DNA, and these for the same reason also mutate at a more frequent rate.

For a better understanding of tracking the maternal and paternal lines, read: The Seven Daughters of Eve and Adam’s Curse each by Mr. Sykes.  Both are fascinating reads and well written for the lay-person.

What is found with regard to warfare is that it is historically men killing men on a hand to hand basis, limiting incidental deaths of women and children.  Surviving men have greater access to women, and less competition from other men’s Y-chromosomes as explained in the excerpt below from Mr. Sykes’ book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts:

The genetic legacy of wholesale military slaughter will be found, one imagines, mainly among men.  The effect will be to reduce the diversity among Y-chromosomes.  Population numbers can recover quickly if the women are spared, with men taking advantage of the surplus of women to bear their multiple children.  But with a smaller number of fathers, the Y-chromosomes that are passed down to future generations will not be as varied as if there were equal numbers of men and women.

As one might imagine the more thorough the extermination of the opposing males, the greater the potential genetic benefits that might accrue to the aggressors.  This can be such a successful strategy that it can have profound effects on the composition of the Y-chromosomal landscape of an area, vastly benefiting the genes of the aggressors.  This is termed the “Genghis Khan Effect” due to the following finding, as described by Sykes:

A few years ago, researchers from Oxford found a Y-chromosome that was very widespread throughout Asia, more or less within the geographical limits of the Mongol Empire.  Finding a particular Y-chromosome with a specific fingerprint across such a wide area is highly unusual.  Y-chromosomes are generally much more localized.  The explanation, which I think is a correct one, is that this is the Y-chromosome of the first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century.  Not only is the Y-chromosome fingerprint geographically dispersed, it is also very common.  In Mongolia for example, 8 per cent of men have inherited the Genghis chromosome.  If you compute the number of men who carry this Y-chromosome throughout Asia, and occasionally on other continents, then it comes to a staggering 16 million.  Even a cursory glance at Genghis Khan’s methods in warfare is enough to understand the genetic mechanism.  On conquering an enemy’s territory he would kill all the men, then systematically inseminate all the good-looking women – he left his commanders strict instructions on that point.  When he died, the custom of patrilineal inheritance ensured that his empire was distributed among his sons, and their sons.  Thus his Y-chromosome increased with each generation of male descendants, who inherited not only a portion of his wealth, but also, presumably, his attitude to women.

Here, clearly, we can see the case for war, as well as for rape.  All soft PC rhetoric aside, inside each man lies a subconscious drive to outcompete or do harm to other men in competition for increased access to females.  Though societal expectations and our conditioning have suppressed the traditional methods in favor of using proxies such as accumulation of money and power to increase one’s reproductive fitness, these are merely societal overlays through which we act out these ancient battles, not evolution away from our former biological imperatives.  We can see this in the ease with which people degenerate into violence and rape when a society is torn asunder such as occurred in the Balkans.  It is arrogant to think that we would fare any better here if suddenly power, fuel and food became unavailable.

Despite the gynocratic myth being spun by feminist teachings and the PC movement, we are MEN and were born to be.  No amount of contra-sexual education will in any way reduce our desire to compete by any means necessary to increase our access to females.  At its heart, all normative human behavior comes down to this.  We men will choose an arena conducive to our strengths to compete in, be it intellectual, entrepreneurial, artistic or athletic; however in all cases the goal is to differentiate ourselves from the herd, to stand out as Alpha to the growing flock of betas.  Without cultivating excellence in some arena, you will not be appealing to women and if you are able to attract them at all, they will have less to offer than the women for whom we compete.  This is the Alpha Man’s mane, if you will our own energetic handicap indicative of reproductive fitness.  If you desire sex with women who exhibit reproductive fitness in their gender’s way, through apparent youth and beauty, you must find your way to shine brighter than the chumps around you.

Find your aptitudes and exploit them.