Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (review)

Dr. Thayer's ambition is to introduce the use of evolutionary biology and social anthropology into the study of international relations. This work is therefore theoretical, focusing on demonstrating evolutionary theory's potential for substantiating a variety of hypotheses, John Mearsheimer's "offensive realism" for example. While offering an ambitious thesis, Thayer remains appropriately modest in his claims, emphasizing that his work can address only ultimate causes of human behavior, not the proximate causes of a specific actor's decisions. This constant effort to balance ambition and proportion is one of the book's strengths, even if the effort proves to be inadequate at times.

Thayer begins by offering a primer on evolutionary theory, followed by chapters on the potential of evolutionary theory to contribute to, in turn, realist theory and rational choice analysis, the evolutionary roots of intraspecies conflict, the origins of warfare among humans, and finally xenophobia and ethnic conflict. Thayer is thorough and straightforward in his arguments and purpose. His ambition is relentlessly positivistic, arguing for example that evolutionary theory contributes to placing the realist theory of international relations "on a scientific foundation for the first time" (p. 65). His chapter on warfare uses fieldwork in ethology to establish that warfare does exist in the animal kingdom (ants and chimpanzees) and to claim that the veteran's ambiguous legacy of participating in combat has evolutionary roots. Much of what Thayer offers is informative and can be read with profit, though undergraduates may find the reading heavy sledding. But there are some caveats to register on the book as a whole.

Perhaps most seriously, Thayer is apparently trying to do two things with the book: to develop a new approach to international relations theory and to participate in several complicated ethological debates. For example, he approvingly refers to theories developed by writers like Steven Pinker (to mention the most widely recognized name). Here one reads that Pinker and Noam Chomsky have "shown" that Locke's assumption that the human mind at birth is a "tabula rasa" is wrong (p. 60). This overstates the case, especially in regard to Pinker, implying that the position reflects a consensus in the academic community. While Thayer scrupulously addresses critics of his arguments, Stephen Jay Gould for example, here and elsewhere, the net effect is unsatisfying. The struggles among Pinker, Gould et al. are too specialized to be comprehensively addressed in such a short, wide-ranging book. Furthermore, Thayer's efforts to make measured claims can lead to confusing prose: "Recalling that biology is good probability, not destiny, we should expect that leaders of states and major decision makers will possess these traits and are not likely to suppress them" (p. 76 [emphasis added]).

The book's greatest potential for provocative reactions lies in the questions of individual volition and how the power to choose is exercised by individuals in certain cases. Given that Thayer does not assert that his theory can explain the specific decisions made by Slobodan Milosevic, for example, any practical application of Thayer's theory in the quotidian reality of diplomacy has to wait for another time. Dr. Thayer has written a thoughtful book that can challenge some of our comfortable assumptions. While some of the material he offers is not new, his effort to construct a theoretically coherent argument is well worth reading, carefully.