Blogs / Reality Base

What’s worse, the genocide in Darfur or the horrors of North Korean prison camps? While the question may seem a bit like comparing global warming and the financial crisis, it can be useful to evaluate and compare all the awful things humans are doing to each other around the globe.

And in order to create an effective comparison, you need a set of objective data that can be analyzed to evaluate wars and even give direction for intervention and deterrence. While throwing around numbers like “45,000 Iraqi civilians killed” can be useful for nabbing attention, it typically does little for inspiring solutions.

With this idea in mind, Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks of King’s College in London and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College in Egham, UK, have created a “Dirty War Index” that quantifies all of the various atrocities we commit—such as rape, civilian murder, or torture—and labels them as a proportion of the total number of incidents reported. For example, the DWI of civilian casualties would be “the number of civilian deaths divided by the overall number of mortalities in the conflict, both civilian and combatant, multiplied by 100.”

While turning carnage, beatings, and other horrors into data might sound callous, it can have major benefits as far as finding solutions in war-torn areas, says University of Toronto biostatistics professor Nathan Taback:

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In the wake of near-daily scandals involving billions of dollars, it can be easy to lose sight of the rampant unrest in the rest of the world—including Sri Lanka, the small Asian nation that has been fighting a lengthy civil war. The conflict is between the government and a group of insurgents known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and while the violence has been ongoing and tragic, the fascinating aspect is how both sides are using technology to spin their actions, gain public support, and put down the other side.

Brian Calvert at World Politics Review, who is doing an investigative series on the country’s unique technological warfare, reports that releasing YouTube videos depicting things like suicide bombers has become standard practice for both parties. The government even has a headquarters for its information campaign, called the Media Center for National Security, which was established in 2006 to “disseminate accurate defense-related news within short as possible time, to both local and international media, and then at the same time to counter the LTTE propaganda.”

The insurgents, meanwhile, have formed their own technological strategy, described as follows:

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Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association voted (at last) to ban its members from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers, including the notorious Guantanamo Bay. This marked a major shift from its previous stance, which permitted work with interrogation (some of which is known in certain circles as “torture”) despite the fact that both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have banned any affiliation with the practice for years.

So what’s different about psychologists, that it took them this long to decide that participation in torture wasn’t something the field should strive for? Stanley Fish at the New York Times blog “Think Again” offers the following explanation:

One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists.

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Most people peruse blogs at the office, meaning that if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you weren’t a victim of Bloody November, in which around 500,000 jobs were systematically purged from the U.S. workforce—many of them from the tech sector. But one industry that’s been hiring in droves, reports the Boston Globe, is defense contractors, particularly those focused on the latest in war technology.

The cluster of defense companies based in New England is expected to weather the downturn reasonably well, because of their tech focus:

[R]ather than building entire jets, ships, tanks, or ground installations, many of the region’s defense firms develop the electronics, combat, and communications systems they use…

Area contractors, for instance, work on electronic eavesdropping, signal processing for radar systems, and equipment used to integrate intelligence from different sources, technologies critical to helping the US military and allies battle terrorists in multiple countries.

Not that we’re suggesting qualified applicant shouldn’t jump at a well- (or any-) paying gig, but it’s worth asking: Is this really the place we want to be re-channeling our tech talent?

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Humans have been historically eager to kill each other. Throughout history, we’ve thought up all sorts of nutty reasons to slaughter our fellow man that had nothing to do with immediate survival of the fittest. We tend to chalk all these wars up to cultural differences fed by a species-wide need to be ideologically right (and impose that right-ness on others), along with a knack for weapons discovery culminating in a technology boom that’s constantly supplying bigger and better ways to off each other. Add governments to the mix, and you’ve got a big steaming pile of questionably necessary interspecies violence.

So it’s a little—but not a lot—surprising that the growing scientific consensus is that war not only dates back to the origins of humankind, but has also played “an integral role” in or species’ evolution. According to this theory, which emerged during a recent conference at the University of Oregon, the war “instinct” was present in our common ancestor with chimps, and has been a “significant selection pressure on the human species,” as evolutionary psychologist Mark Van Vugt put it.

His and his colleagues’ reasoning goes something like this: Evidence exists to show that war and humans have been friends since the beginning (fossils of early humans show wounds consistent with combat injuries). As such, we would have evolved “psychological adaptations to a warlike lifestyle.” To this end, researchers have presented “the strongest evidence yet that males—whose larger and more muscular bodies make them better suited for fighting—have evolved a tendency towards aggression outside the group but cooperation within it.”

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While Russian warships head to Abkhazia and arguments begin over who started it all, the conflict in Georgia has “paralyzed” scientific research in the country, according to Nature News. The director of the Georgia National Science Foundation said that 72 research projects, or 30 percent of all the foundation’s current work, have been halted because of the conflict.

In an example of terrible timing, the invasion hit smack in the middle of a new ramp-up in the country’s science-funding system, following a resurgence of young and skilled Georgian scientists. The GNSF had planned to double its national science budget next year, from $8 million to $16 million—which spells a lot of research and travel grants. But given the huge costs of post-war reconstruction (not to mention the hit Georgia’s economy will take from its loss of foreign investors), that money is now likely headed for recovery efforts.

Since we’re heaping on the bad news:

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