- Joined
- Feb 12, 2013
Even tribal tier wars need either a logistical train or soldiers self sufficient enough to supply/feed/treat themselves. This would make groups entirely/largely consisting of relatively dumb and violent people at a tactical and strategic disadvantage to those who were not relatively dumb and violent.Soldier class. Who else is going to go to war?
Wars are not just well muscled chads teleporting to a battleground and punching eachother with rocks before instahealing and teleporting away. Even third world prison wars need a fucktunne of planning, preparation, and busywork to be sustainable in the short term, let alone medium or long term.
And given how ubiquitous tribal war was in prehistory, this would have then spread this "inherently dumb and violent" gene to everyone, including those migrating out of africa to europe/asia/australasia/the americas had it been any advantage.
The answer is that the extreme lack of expression is not extremely prevalent because it -is- a disadvantage in stable times, but the level of MAOA gene activations that's considered "normal" among subsaharans is lower than that of any other race. Increased activation was highly selected for in Europe and Asia, not so much in Subsaharan Africa, where the dominant Bantu-speaking population achieved its prominence through warfare and subjugation in the historically recent past. This is a circumstance where having 5% (or higher in some areas) of your population with high aggression is a huge boon over your neighbors.
The base-line level of MAOA gene activation in "jogger-americans" is, when seen at a similar level in whites, correlated with higher crime rates in those whites than the rest of the white population with a higher level of expression. So obviously there is a difference in behavior that this expression elicits even though it isn't as damaging as the 5% who have the extremely maladjusted version of that gene expression.
And I shouldn't have to tell you how large a group 5% represents when the population is in the tens of millions.
In which case this is a circumstance that has been shared in europe, asia, and the americas for the exact same half million or so years of human existence until debatably the past few centuries, unless I have been misled about the long and glorious history of warfare. Thus this hypothetical "mindless warrior" gene would be ubiquitous if it had any tangible advantageous effect over generations, even if only the most minor statistical trend given how long a span of history we are talking about here.
Remember that agrarian civilisation is only about five thousand years old and homo
If this trait is a major advantage and is widely dispersed in modern populations, then it would have to something relatively recent in geneological history to not have spread out with different migration waves
If this trait is a minor advantage and is widely dispersed in modern populations then it would have had to have existed for a longass time to become so widespread despite only offering statistical advantages over thousands of years, in which case it would have followed the different migration groups to europe and asia
In either case if we are going by the studies then its probably fair to say that 5% of a population having a possible genetic predisposition to be on average somewhat more irritable and impulsive when subject to negative environmental stimuli in childhood, which is what pretty much all the studies I have glanced at in the abstract suggest, is not a majorly advantageous trait to have in any society, let alone something to be actively selected for in a subset of an ethnic group over a relatively extremely short period of time.
Also on a historical note, given it took the bantu a thousand years to finish their colonisation of that chunk of southern africa, I somewhat doubt they were any more ultra-aggressive uber conquerers than any other wave of human migration/conquest.