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Azar Gat's argument represents a major advance toward realism in neo-Darwinian theory on war. Consistently reasonable, plausible, with substantial evidence (on some points), his basic argument is that a wide range of reasons for war are all part of an integrated motivational complex, evolved to deal with problems of survival and reproduction in our species past. Some, clashes of material (somatic) or reproductive interests, are "root causes" of conflict. Others are secondary or derived, "second floor" elaborations necessary for coping with more basic competition, including an impulse toward revenge, sensitivity to status, fear of sorcery, quest for power, even predilection toward sadism. His point is that cultural anthropologists have been mistaken in trying to identify one versus another as explaining war, because they all are involved, non-reductionistically, stamped into our species' mind by their complementary contributions to our evolutionary success.
In approaching war, he avoids the more dubious evolutionary constructs, such as "instincts to kill" (Ghiglieri 1999: 178), "Darwinian algorithms" for collective aggression (Tooby and Cosmides 1988), and unconscious tracking of reproductive advantages of violence (Chagnon 1979; 1987). I do not know how he categorizes his approach, but in emphasizing material self- interest and behavioral plasticity, along with directed efforts to maximize inclusive fitness, it appears to me as a development of evolutionary ecology. Evolutionary ecology has a great deal of overlap with ecological approaches that do not include reproductive interests. So Gat's view (Part II: 79) of reasons for war on the Pacific Northwest Coast is much like my (Ferguson 1984a) pre-contact model, though he brings in evidence of women capture which, as he notes (I: 28), 1 ignore. And there are major correspondences with the Divale and Harris (1976) model regarding female scarcity and fighting over women, although without the population-regulation element. The primary difference between evolutionary ecology and "regular" ecology is the former posits that human behavior is evolutionarily designed to maximize reproductive success along with material well-being.
I have several major disagreements with Gat. First, throughout his arguments runs the assumption that humans practiced war throughout the huntergatherer past. I believe that assumption is unsustainable. The question of the antiquity of war has been raised but clouded by Keeley (1996), whose rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is as old...