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I disagree cb.....the earth without humans isn't a violent place....natures "violence" in no way compares to the deceit, manipulation, torment and greed (among others) that we humans perpetrate on one another.
Animals kill for survival....we kill because we want to control how others live and behave...it has nothing to do with our own survival...it's just about controlling others to do as they're told...even when what they're told is wrong, even when these others live thousands of miles away.
Actually, the tendency for violence by Homo sapiens has been greatly reduced in modern societies. The fatality rate among hunter-gatherer tribes (such as still exist in places like New Guinea and the Amazon) due to homicide typically runs in the double digits per 100 - exponentially higher than you'll find in any country as a whole.
It's really not a matter of 'removing' such tendencies so much as minimizing them. Murder will always exist. Negligent homicide will always exist. No one expects laws and norms meant to prevent it to completely eliminate it. Rather, we always try to make it lower than whatever it is.
Really, it's just a matter of understanding that what was useful as a nomadic tribe of ~100 individuals doesn't work in a modern organized state. And there are countless examples of how we've changed our behavior to adjust accordingly. But ultimately, evolution is at work. Studies, for example, have shown that in the aforementioned hunter-gatherer societies, the number of mates and offspring a man has is proportionally to how many other men he has killed. To have killed numerous men from the tribe that lives beyond the next ridge is a status symbol that pays evolutionary dividends there. But here, in a modern state, it doesn't. To the contrary, it hurts ones ability to produce viable offspring. So whereas there is is a selected-for trait, here it is a selected-against trait. Thus, our far-lower homicide rates.
What is the source of violence? Does it count as violence if you're killing game to eat? Or is it only violence against other humans that we are counting?
It would seem that violence comes from needing (or wanting) something that you don't have. Whether or not you have the brains or money or influence to get it some other way perhaps determines whether you resort to violence to get it. If everyone had everything they desired, would there still be violence, just for fun and excitement? What if violence could be expressed completely in a virtual manner? These would seem to be true tests for whether violence in humans is inevitable.
H.G. Wells proposed that it had by 802,701 A.D. with the evolution of race of people called the Eloi in his 1895 classic novel "The Time Machine". Until H. George Wells arrived from the 19th century to help them defeat the Morlocks pacifism didn't work out very well for them. In fact, you could say that they were regular dinner guests of the Morlocks.
I wouldn't draw any conclusions from The Time Machine. If you read the original, the Eloi are built like & resemble our 10- or 11-year-olds, physically. (Ignore the movies, they portray much lusher women, who are Barbie-ized to a fare-thee-well.) Given that, it's not clear to me that the protagonist - the Traveler - could even bring himself to marry one of those pint-size waifs, nor that the genetics would have held true over the 800M+ years that the story spans. That's a long time, & sheer genetic drift might complicate any breeding. The most recent movie remake posits that the Morlocks & Eloi can interbreed - @ least, that's what I assume from their capture & attempted mental conditioning of the Traveler's Eloi girlfriend.
Wells - the author - himself hoped that some kind of Socialism would make humanity more civilized, but the verdict's not in that yet.
Seems like this is the only true way to evolve. We must lose our lower instinct to survive through violence, as a genus, but rather, to survive through brain power and good-will.
Well, it's two different things. One is to evolve, even if we - humanity - take a hand in guiding that evolution. @ the point that we're discussing removing the propensity toward violence from the human design, we've moved from guiding our evolution to controlling it directly. Such control may be possible in future - we've charted the human genome, but that's not the same thing as understanding how all the bits & coding work together, or which clusters of code act together to promote or suppress traits that we're interested in. That work is ongoing, & I haven't seen any estimates on how long it will take to work out all the details.
One of the issues is - how much is violence entwined in the human psyche? Is violence related to the will to power over others, our family, our friends, our communities? Does the capacity for violence underlay human creativity? Self-defense & defense of our family & neighbors is recognized as a natural right - so long as there's a reasonable correspondence of the defense to the attack. Before we remove violence as a possible response, we would need to make sure that violence is not used to attack us - something that no one, TMK, can guarantee.
& I'm not sure that the instinct to survive can be fairly characterized as a lower instinct. In biology & in populations generally, you have to exist in order to participate in life in the larger World. No one, for instance, questions the morality of the dinosaur (& proto-mammalian, & lots of other flora & fauna) die-off back when Chicxulub ended the Cretaceous.
There's also an esthetic argument there - narrative art (written, movies, painting) is typically about some kind of conflict - man against nature, man against man, man against society. If you succeed in suppressing violence altogether, you may also lose art - or @ least, the art that's produced after that extraction may not be recognizable to us as art.
The next issue is Who decides? Does all of humanity go under the knife @ once (& is that possible? or are we talking about modifying the next generation in utero, & having to wait a generation to see what the results are? & in that scenario, as long as there are unmodified humans around, there is always going to be the possibility of someone recruiting old-style humans for wetwork. (& given the biological engineering implicit in editing our genome, the medical advances implied will ensure that individual humans live for a long time. Unless, of course, the neo-children decide to hurry us offstage. But isn't that the point of the whole exercise - that such prodigies of genetic improvement shouldn't be capable of such a coldblooded act?)
I'm sure there are more possible twists & turns to consider. It's a good thing that we have a fair amount of time before we have to commit to pulling the trigger on this set of issues.
Violence and greed is a distortion of the survival instinct. However, without the survival instinct the human race would become extinct.
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Time wounds all heels?
