ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Why war is a man's game.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sex Biases in Patterns of Parental Investment.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- The evolution of negotiation strategies diversifies parental cooperation.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Identifying Opponent's Neuroticism Based on Behavior in Wargame.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Kin selection as a modulator of human handedness: sex-specific, parental and parent-of-origin effects.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Wartime forced sex as a male mating strategy.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2023Article
- Culture and group-functional punishment behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- The evolution of altruism through war is highly sensitive to population structure and to civilian and fighter mortality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- The demography of human warfare can drive sex differences in altruism.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- The Impacts of Conservation and Militarization on Indigenous Peoples : A Southern African San Perspective.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interest in the evolutionary origins and drivers of warfare in ancient and contemporary small-scale human societies has greatly increased in the last decade, and has been particularly spurred by exciting archaeological discoveries that suggest our ancestors led more violent lives than previously documented. However, the striking observation that warfare is an almost-exclusively male activity remains unexplained. Three general hypotheses have been proposed, concerning greater male effectiveness in warfare, lower male costs, and patrilocality. But while each of these factors might explain why warfare is more common in men, they do not convincingly explain why women almost never participate. Here, we develop a mathematical model to formally assess these hypotheses. Surprisingly, we find that exclusively male warfare may evolve even in the absence of any such sex differences, though sex biases in these parameters can make this evolutionary outcome more likely. The qualitative observation that participation in warfare is almost exclusive to one sex is ultimately explained by the fundamentally sex-specific nature of Darwinian competition-in fitness terms, men compete with men and women with women. These results reveal a potentially key role for ancestral conditions in shaping our species' patterns of sexual division of labour and violence-related adaptations and behavioural disorders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.