Catton did an interesting essay reflecting of Malthus. http://desip.igc.org/malthus/Catton.html
I’m sure you must have seen Joe Tainter’s book, yes?

I also find it is bit questionable to simply assume that “every other animal” was subject to “demographic expansion”. Species have, generally, the rate of reproduction that permits them to increase to the limit of their food supply, but other vectors tend to keep their numbers below this point. In humans the main predators since the late Pleistocene have always been microbial and parasitic infections. These account for most of the mortality in the younger age groups, as well as in the extremely old. These are very effective in almost every known species. Other factors, like occasional droughts etc, and even extreme changes in climate due to volcanic eruptions and ice ages, also played a role in cutting back on human numbers time and again.

@JunJay
I would hesitate to assume that very much about humans is “hard-wired” except the drive to learn and accommodate oneself to ones culture of birth, and.or, to the culture in which one finds oneself dependent at any point in one’s later life. The sex and the “in-love” drive, the drive to eat and drink, are a given, of course.

I have a lot of trouble buying the idea that humans whose limited technologies were in stasis for thousands of years at a time weren’t subject to demographic expansion like every other animal.

The other argument made by people who think that warfare is a modern/historical invention is that they acknowledge interpersonal violence as universal but make a categorical distinction with warfare. The categorical distinction might be meaningful in “civilized” cultures but I think it has little meaning outside of elaborate, civilized social structures.

If you do a similar graph of the frequency of murder and lesser interpersonal violence, the graph would not be q the same, since even among mobile foragers who have strong social controls over interpersonal aggression, murders do happen, fight do happen. Since states and empires tend to take corporal punishment and the enforcement of social controls upon themselves, it is not surprising that ordinary citizens of states, especially powerful prosperous states, have been relatively safe from violence, and that is one of the things that has been a particular gain made in the high energy/high prosperity period marked by the industrial period, and particularly by the age of oil. But it applies especially to a particular segment of the population, the expanding middle class.

Pinker does not really distinguish between internal criminal violence, domestic violence, and murder vs warfare as a cause of death in the data he draws on from Keeley. Keeley could not do it, because of the nature of much of the data made it ambiguous. Was a person from a mesolithic burial marked by signs of brutal violence because of warfare or was he a murder victim?

Humans have always had the capacity for lethal violence. I am not by any means suggesting that our forager ancestors were a bunch of peace-nic pacifists. The foragers I lived with in the Kalahari had tempers and got into arguments and even fights. There was even a murder done among them forty years before I arrived in the field, which people still discussed in vivid detail (it apparently involved the termination of dangerous psychopath by his own kinsmen).

But the threat of anger and of more extreme and possibly violent action served a purpose – it was the point that no one wanted matters to reach. Fighting was considered to represent a failure of rational people speaking in good faith, which was a very shameful thing. All kinds of good future options for gifting, reciprocal access to territory, and potential marriage negotiations, were “thrown away” by displays of temper, so therefore displays of temper were considered very foolish and childish and cruelly mocked.

I agree with Razib. I should not have stated it so baldly as to leave it open to the logical counter thrust. Perhaps I ought to have said simply that Man is a thinking beast, and both “nasty” and “nice” are minted within the realm of cultural strategy, not human nature alone.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker:

We’ve all asked, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era yet. Evidence of a bloody history has always been around us: the genocides in the Old Testament and crucifixions in the New; the gory mutilations in Shakespeare and Grimm; the British monarchs who beheaded their relatives and the American founders who dueled with their rivals. Now the decline in these brutal practices can be quantified. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then were suddenly abolished. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the numbers they did a few decades ago. Rape, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse — all substantially down. How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? Pinker argues that the key to explaining the decline of violence is to understand the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away. Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence. Pinker will force you to rethink your deepest beliefs about progress, modernity, and human nature. This gripping book is sure to be among the most debated of the century so far.

this is a compelling observation.

fair enough. i’ll put that in my “stack” and see what you come up with.

Man is not a nasty beast.

i think this is as true as the assertion that man is a nasty beast. give me such a reductive maxim, and i’ll call it an illusion. re: the birth-spacing argument. i’ve heard it before. if so, than man seems to be a somewhat sui generis beast, when it comes to group living organisms and intra-specific competition. not impossible, but my prior remains skeptical. but i’ll look at the lit. horgan talks about at some point and make a ‘final decision’