经济学人下载:战争的起源 古老的战士?

Science and technology
科学技术

The origins of war
战争的起源

Old soldiers?
古老的战士？

The latest research suggests humans are not warriors in their genes, after all
最新研究发现人类骨子里有的不是杀伐

EDWARD WILSON, the inventor of the field of sociobiology, once wrote that war is embedded in our very nature.
艾德华·威尔森是生物社会学领域的创始人。他曾经写道战争深植于我们的骨子里。

This is a belief commonly held not just by sociobiologists but also by anthropologists and other students of human behaviour.
这种观点不仅生物社会学家普遍认同，人类学家以及一些研究人类行为的学者也认同。

They base it not only on the propensity of modern man to go to war with his neighbours but also on observations of the way those who still live a pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer life behave.
认同的基础有两点：现代的人们有与邻为敌的倾性；对那些仍然生活在农业社会以前的采集狩猎者的观察结果。

Add this to field studies of the sometimes violent behaviour of mankind's closest living relative, the chimpanzee, and the idea that making war is somehow in humanity's genes has seemed quite plausible.
除此之外，还可以到野外观察一下与人类亲缘关系最为相近的黑猩猩，可以知道黑猩猩有时也有暴力行为。由此，威尔森的观点似乎相当有说服力。

It has even been advanced as an explanation for the extreme levels of self- sacrificial altruism people sometimes display.
其实，这种观点早已有人提出过，用来解释自称牺牲的利他主义者有时表现出来的那种极端行为。

But a paper in this week's Science, by Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg of Abo Akademi University, in Finland, questions all this.
本周，芬兰埃博学术大学的道格拉斯·弗莱和帕特里克·索德伯格在《科学》杂志上发表了论文，提出了疑问。

Dr Fry and Mr Soderberg have reviewed what is known about modern hunter-gatherers.
他们负责对被称为现代狩猎采集者的研究做出评论。

They suggest that although such people are far from peaceful they are also far from warlike.
他们说，虽然这些人远不是和平之士，但他们也远不是好战之人。

Most who die violent deaths in their societies do so at the hands of fellow tribesmen, not foreigners.
在他们的社会中，多数死于同族人暴力的人，而不是外来者暴力的人，也会施展暴力。

Murderers, this research suggests, humans may often be.
论文称，人类可能经常会成为杀人者。

But they are not the died-in-the-wool warriors of anthropological legend.
但是，又不是人类学传奇上的那种马革裹尸的武士。

Dr Fry and Mr Soderberg came to this conclusion by scrutinising 21 hunter- gatherer societies from all over the world.
他们两人对全世界21个猎狩社会进行了仔细观察，得出了此项结论。

They looked at ethnographic studies of these groups, published over the past 100 years or so.
他们浏览了这些族群的种族志研究结果。

Inter alia, these studies recorded homicides and their circumstances.
这些研究发表于大约100年以前，特别纪录了杀人行为以及原委。

The two researchers classified such deaths into interpersonal events, interfamilial feuds, group-sanctioned executions and intergroup events.
他们把死因分为人际关系矛盾，家庭不和，族群判决的死刑，族群间矛盾。

Only the latter could be described as war.
只有后两者称为战争。

One of the 21 groups was extremely warlike.
21个族群中有一个极度好战。

More than half of recorded killings perpetrated by the Tiwi, an Australian people, were acts of war—and nearly half of all homicides from all causes in all 21 groups involved the Tiwi.
这个族群就是澳大利亚的提维人。研究中纪录了他们的杀戮行为，其中多半数的都属战争行为。21个族群所有的杀戮原委中近半数的涉及提维族。

This group was such an outlier that Dr Fry and Mr Soderberg did their analysis twice: once with and once without the Tiwi.
这个族群极度异常，两人进行了两次分析：一次涉及提维族，另一次没有。

Nomad's land
游牧民族的土地

Excluding the Tiwi, deaths in war were only 15% of the total.
排除提维族，战争致死的人数是全部的15%；

Including them, the figure was 34%.
否则是34%。

But even that is still a minority.
但仍然不够充分，

These numbers do not suggest hunter-gatherers are going out looking for trouble with their neighbours.
不能说明问题─猎狩者跑出去找麻烦。

This finding seems different from that arrived at in 2009 by Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico.
这项发现与新墨西哥圣菲研究所的塞缪尔·鲍尔斯2009年的研究结果不同。

Dr Bowles looked at eight modern hunter-gatherer groups, including the Tiwi, and at archaeological evidence concerning 15 ancient ones.
鲍尔斯研究了8个现代猎狩族群和15个古代猎狩族群的考古证据，得出了结论：

He concluded that death in warfare is so common in hunter-gatherer societies that it was an important evolutionary pressure on early Homo sapiens, and might easily account for the emergence of self-sacrificial altruism.
猎狩社会中发生的战争死亡现象非常普遍，变成了早期人类进化的压力。这就轻松地说明自我牺牲的利他主义的出现。

Dr Bowles's analysis did not, however, separate the Tiwi from the rest, so was influenced by this outlier.
然而，鲍尔斯的分析并没有把提维族与其它族分离开来，因此受到了这种异常现象的影响。

Treating outliers with caution is reasonable.
认真对待这种异常现象是合乎情理的。

An analysis of modern warfare that looked at the 1940s would come to a different conclusion from one that looked at the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s.
有一项分析着眼于1940年代的现代战事，得出的结论与着眼于1950年代，1960年代，1970年代，1980年代以及1990年代的不同。

Nor could the archaeological studies clearly indicate which violent deaths were caused by war.
而且考古学研究也不能说明哪一项暴力致死的原因是战争。

As Dr Bowles himself says, one cannot always distinguish between deaths due to intergroup violence and that occurring within groups.
正如鲍尔斯本人所说，总是分不清哪些死亡是族群间暴力所致，哪些是同族群暴力所致。

Dr Bowles was not the first to conclude that war was common during human evolution.
战争是人类进化当中的普遍现象，得出此结论鲍尔斯并不是第一人。

Early in the 20th century, studies of the Yanomami, who live in the Amazon rainforest, suggested as much.
20世纪早期，对生活在亚马逊雨林的诺马米人的研究已经进行了大量论证。

But that idea was overthrown when, decades later, a researcher called Brian Ferguson re-examined all documented cases of Yanomami warfare.
但是，几十年后又被布莱恩·弗格森推翻。

These, he found, were overwhelmingly in areas penetrated by settlers rather than in places where the Yanomami dwelt undisturbed.
他重新研究了诺马米人所有的战事文献。他发现，这些战事都发生在有人迹的地方，而不是诺马米人安居的地方。

Something similar happened to chimpanzee researchers.
那些研究黑猩猩的学者们也进行了方式相似的研究。

The first big field study of these animals was done by Jane Goodall.
珍·古德进行了首次大型野外研究。

Her chimps, which live in Tanzania, are often aggressive, sometimes engage in cannibalism, and even steal and kill others' infants. And they do engage in something that looks like warfare.
她研究的黑猩猩生活在坦桑尼亚，好斗性强，有时会残食同类，偷盗甚至杀死猩猩婴儿，跟战争相似。

When a large group of chimps split, for instance, vicious intertribal conflict followed.
一大群猩猩内讧时，就会产生恶性冲突。

All this suggests an evolutionary origin for some of the darker aspects of human nature.
这些都表明了人性中那些较黑暗面的进化起源。

A second study, though, conducted in Congo-Brazzaville by David Morgan and Crickette Sanz of Washington University, in St Louis, came to contrary conclusions.
华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校的大卫·摩根和克瑞斯克特-桑兹在刚果共和国进行了又一项研究，得出了相反的结论：

It found chimps to be peaceful creatures.
此处的黑猩猩是安静的动物。

For a while, that confused primatologists.
这又使灵长类学家迷惑不解。

The difference between the two populations turns out to be density.
两处猩群的生活差别越来越大。

The Tanzanian chimps are crowded together as deforestation around their reserve reduces the amount of habitat available.
在坦桑尼亚，黑猩猩所生活的自然保护区周边地区进行了大量的森林采伐，减少了栖息之地的数量，只能团抱度日。

Those in Congo do not, at least yet, suffer in this way.
刚果的则没有。

Chimps, then, do offer a useful lesson on the origin of warfare—just not the one that was originally believed.
非洲黑猩猩确实能让人了解到冲突的起源─并不是先前的那样。

Groups of chimpanzees, like groups of people, will fight each other if need be, but will otherwise leave each other alone.
群居的黑猩猩跟群居的人类一样，矛盾激化时也会打架，再不了就是谁也不理谁。

Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine.
跟人类的猎狩祖先相比，现代化、工业化之下的人是否更加好战，还是不太好战，已经不得而知。

The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless.
机枪的杀伤力比弓箭要更大，但这种比较是无意义的。

One thing that is true, though, is that murder rates have fallen over the centuries, as policing has spread and the routine carrying of weapons has diminished.
有一点是肯定的，近几个世纪来，警力扩大了，带枪的惯例减少了，谋杀率下降了。

Modern society may not have done anything about war. But peace is a lot more peaceful.
现代社会可能没有改变战争，但社会秩序要更稳定了。