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Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
CarlNorthcore writes "Brian Hayes published this paper in the Computing Science chapter of Jan-Feb's American Scientist. It provides a fascinating and [sadly] relevant statistical exploration of our world's deadly conflicts. Look out for the excellent "Web of Wars" diagram."
Just look at all the pain and suffering that quarrel has caused.
Michael Loves Me!
That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I ought to move to Colombia, since they never have any wars *cough*
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
how appropriate that the banner ad was for Nerf weapons when I viewed this story...
lysergically yours
the "web of wars" diagram just so happens to look like a drawing done by my 5 year old nephew.
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
"Civil wars are omitted"
Good. I hate to sit around and watch two windbags duke it our with big words. I like my wars like I like my movies: with lots of action and cool explosions.
------
Today's Top Deals
Geez. Now that I think about it, there have been a lot more deadly conflicts than they taught us at school. It's a real eye-opener. I wish I had this when I needed it. On another tangent -- isn't this what the web is for? The "Information Superhighway"? It's nice that I'm actually learning useful history online, rather than in some stuffy classroom.
Live or die trying.
You vs. the "Can you Hear me Now?" guy.
tcd004
I thought this was about Crossbows. Of course it is about 3 minutes after this was posted and lready the site is slashdotted.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Here is a less obtuse and more practical summation of an 80s book that somehow got short shrift. How To Stop A War is more usable then that article.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
think of the deadly conflict that is happening in this guy's server room right now. slashdotted in 1 minute.
I wonder where pinky and the brain fit into the Web Of Wars
(muhahaha)
Linux Won, BSD has died
Both Vi and Emacs lost, nano won
Gnome died KDE won
- Science
: Statistics of Deadly SquirrelsJust the image, not the surrounding page..... http://www.sellingmysoul.com/web.jpg Hope someone else grabbed the rest of the site before it died....
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
I didn't like the fact that the thing has no indication of time. What about the fact that the US has been around for little over 200 years while other countries (especially the European ones with lots of lines) have been around for much more than that. Maybe they should limit this thing by time or something.
Someone should put that diagram into that gnucleus network modelling program so you can focus on certain countries. That image is so cluttered you can barely see anything.
http://www.askthevoid.com
...worth looking at is the Correlates of War Project:
http://www.umich.edu/~cowproj/
zeruch
I don't know about you, but I'm moving to whatever country ends in "co", "ec", "kr", "ve", or "ph". At least I know they have Internet access there.
Shit. /.'ed in under 10min. I swear that some people just wanna see their server collapse on purpose...
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
I second that!
Their superior intellect will be no match for our puny nerf weapons.
Repeat so there is 625 + 25 + 1
And keep repeating until slashdot has been DoSED
Although this diagram looks nice, it doesn't present a clear view of what is happening now. It consists of all conflicts between countries from Richardson's statistics (1820 - 1950), with refinements from Wilkinson.
Consider the graph (when it eventually comes up). All the red-lines represent Category 7, which is only the two world wars (the most recent of which was 50+ years ago). Category 6 is for deaths of from 500,000 to 2,000,000.
It would be nice to have information regarding something in more recent history, such as the last 10 - 20 years.
Anyone have the 411 here??
Shame that image isn't available in a higher resolution. This could be a good use for flash even - mouse-over the country to see the links, instead of the current mess.
I think the US should have a much bigger spot in the picture because we're much better than everyone else and have kicked so much more ass! Also, this is a good tool to show which companies aren't pulling their own weight in wars! Not to point fingers at anyone *cough*Ecuador*cough* but there are some major slackers in that map!
Actually, the pretty picture does appear to suggest that my overall theory that Evolution is best caused by continual Conflict is essentially correct.
Now, if only I can convince everyone that the separation of State, Justice, and Religion is the only way to run a nation then we'll all be in a relatively happier place...
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Venezuela just had a partially U.S.-backed coup there in the last month. While American allies are letting little girls die in burning schools because they don't wear proper headdress, Bush has decided people should know about Pres. Chavez undermining the institutions of democracy. Chavez himself thinks it won't be long before the U.S. discovers 'evidence' of Bin Laden taking haven there.
Besides, programmers only earn about $300 USD a month there.
CH == Confederation Helvetica == Switzerland isn't even on the map...
completely one sided wars, like Iraq v US (round 1)
wouldn't that be a high magnitude for Iraq and a low magnitude for the US?
and yes I do know that this study did not include that war... were there any completely one sided wars involved in the time frame studied?
Could 25 people repost this 5 times each?
I want to see Slashdot get slashdotted with crap!
One comment at the end of the article caught my attention:
This points out a comparison problem within the original research - it does not take into account the population increases over time. For example, somewhere in the mid-1600s, London had a population of 600,000 people, while it currently has a population near 7,000,000. That is the difference between a magnitude-5.7 and a magnitude-6.8 event, using the given scale.
Would factoring in the population growth curve enhance or reduce the apparent randomness of the data?
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
ISO 3166 Country Codes
Could 5 people repost this post 5 times each so there will be 25 + 1 Copies of this post.
Repeat so there is 625 + 25 + 1
And keep repeating until slashdot has been DoSED
625 people to repost this post 625 times each!
This is THE battle analysis tool. Trevor Dupuy was the master of prediction. Note the $93,000 price tag.
Remember, this is a tool for the operational level. The article is discussing macrosocietal conflict.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Computing Science
January-February, 2002
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
Brian Hayes
Note: This document is available in other formats.
Look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically, it hardly matters. War deaths amount to something like 1 percent of all deaths; in many places, more die by suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.
But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions--pity and love as well as fear and hatred--and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. When war comes, it muscles aside the calmer aspects of life; no one is unmoved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to stop the fighting, feelings run high. ("Antiwar militant" is no oxymoron.)
The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one's own culture and ideology is also a challenge--not to mention the bounds of one's time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the present purpose.
One defense against such distortions is the statistical method of gathering data about many wars from many sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. It's a dumb, brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promising. A pioneer of this quantitative study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorologist whose ambitious but premature foray into numerical weather forecasting I described in this space a year ago. Now seems a good time to consider the other half of Richardson's lifework, on the mathematics of armed conflict.
Wars and Peaces
Richardson was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in the north of England. He studied physics with J. J. Thomson at Cambridge, where he developed expertise in the numerical solution of differential equations. Such approximate methods are a major mathematical industry today, but at that time they were not a popular subject or a shrewd career choice. After a series of short-term appointments--well off the tenure track--Richardson found a professional home in weather research, making notable contributions to the theory of atmospheric turbulence. Then, in 1916, he resigned his post to serve in France as a driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Between tours of duty at the front, he did most of the calculations for his trial weather forecast. (The forecast was not a success, but the basic idea was sound, and all modern weather prediction relies on similar methods.)
After the war, Richardson gradually shifted his attention from meteorology to questions of war and international relations. He found some of the same mathematical tools still useful. In particular, he modeled arms races with differential equations. The death spiral of escalation--where one country's arsenal provokes another to increase its own armament, whereupon the first nation responds by adding still more weapons--has a ready representation in a pair of linked differential equations. Richardson showed that an arms race can be stabilized only if the "fatigue and expense" of preparing for war are greater than the perceived threats from enemies. This result is hardly profound or surprising, and yet Richardson's analysis nonetheless attracted much comment (mainly skeptical), because the equations offered the prospect of a quantitative measure of war risks. If Richardson's equations could be trusted, then observers would merely need to track expenditures on armaments to produce a war forecast analogous to a weather forecast.
Mathematical models of arms races have been further refined since Richardson's era, and they had a place in policy deliberations during the "mutually assured destruction" phase of the Cold War. But Richardson's own investigations turned in a somewhat different direction. A focus on armaments presupposes that the accumulation of weaponry is a major cause of war, or at least has a strong correlation with it. Other theories of the origin of war would emphasize different factors--the economic status of nations, say, or differences of culture and language, or the effectiveness of diplomacy and mediation. There is no shortage of such theories; the problem is choosing among them. Richardson argued that theories of war could and should be evaluated on a scientific basis, by testing them against data on actual wars. So he set out to collect such data.
Richardson was not the first to follow this path. Several lists of wars were drawn up in the early years of the 20th century, and two more war catalogues were compiled in the 1930s and 40s by the Russian-born sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin and by Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago. Richardson began his own collection in about 1940 and continued work on it until his death in 1953. His was not the largest data set, but it was the best suited to statistical analysis.
Figure 1
Richardson published some of his writings on war in journal articles and pamphlets, but his ideas became widely known only after two posthumous volumes appeared in 1960. The work on arms races is collected in Arms and Insecurity; the statistical studies are in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. In addition, a two-volume Collected Papers was published in 1993. Most of what follows in this article comes from Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. I have also leaned heavily on a 1980 study by David Wilkinson of the University of California, Los Angeles, which presents Richardson's data in a rationalized and more readable format.
"Thinginess Fails"
The catalogue of conflicts in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels covers the period from about 1820 until 1950. Richardson's aim was to count all deaths during this interval caused by a deliberate act of another person. Thus he includes individual murders and other lesser episodes of violence in addition to warfare, but he excludes accidents and negligence and natural disasters. He also decided not to count deaths from famine and disease associated with war, on the grounds that multiple causes are too hard to disentangle. (Did World War I "cause" the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919?)
The decision to lump together murder and war was meant to be provocative. To those who hold that "murder is an abominable selfish crime, but war is a heroic and patriotic adventure," Richardson replies: "One can find cases of homicide which one large group of people condemned as murder, while another large group condoned or praised them as legitimate war. Such things went on in Ireland in 1921 and are going on now in Palestine." (It's depressing that his examples, 50 years later, remain so apt.) But if Richardson dismissed moral distinctions between various kinds of killing, he acknowledged methodological difficulties. Wars are the province of historians, whereas murders belong to criminologists; statistics from the two groups are hard to reconcile. And the range of deadly quarrels lying between murder and war is even more problematic. Riots, raids and insurrections have been too small and too frequent to attract the notice of historians, but they are too political for criminologists.
For larger wars, Richardson compiled his list by reading histories, starting with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and going on to more diverse and specialized sources. Murder data came from national crime reports. To fill in the gap between wars and murders he tried interpolating and extrapolating and other means of estimating, but he acknowledged that his results in this area were weak and incomplete. He mixed together civil and international wars in a single list, arguing that the distinction is often unclear.
An interesting lesson of Richardson's exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that swept through whole nations just a century ago. Of course some aspects of military history are always contentious; you can't expect all historians to agree on who started a war, or who won it. But it turns out that even more basic facts--Who were the combatants? When did the fighting begin and end? How many died?--can be remarkably hard to pin down. Lots of wars merge and split, or have no clear beginning or end. As Richardson remarks, "Thinginess fails."
In organizing his data, Richardson borrowed a crucial idea from astronomy: He classified wars and other quarrels according to their magnitude, the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terror campaign that kills 100 has a magnitude of 2, and a war with a million casualties is a magnitude-6 conflict. A murder with a single victim is magnitude 0 (since 100=1). The logarithmic scale was chosen in large part to cope with shortcomings of available data; although casualty totals are seldom known precisely, it is usually possible to estimate the logarithm within ±0.5. (A war of magnitude 6±0.5 could have anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) But the use of logarithmic magnitudes has a psychological benefit as well: One can survey the entire spectrum of human violence on a single scale.
Random Violence
Richardson's war list (as refined by Wilkinson) includes 315 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or greater (or in other words with at least about 300 deaths). It's no surprise that the two World Wars of the 20th century are at the top of this list; they are the only magnitude-7 conflicts in human history. What is surprising is the extent to which the World Wars dominate the overall death toll. Together they account for some 36 million deaths, which is about 60 percent of all the quarrel deaths in the 130-year period. The next largest category is at the other end of the spectrum: The magnitude-0 events (quarrels in which one to three people died) were responsible for 9.7 million deaths. Thus the remainder of the 315 recorded wars, along with all the thousands of quarrels of intermediate size, produced less than a fourth of all the deaths.
Figure 2 Figure 3
The list of magnitude-6 wars also yields surprises, although of a different kind. Richardson identified seven of these conflicts, the smallest causing half a million deaths and the largest about 2 million. Clearly these are major upheavals in world history; you might think that every educated person could name most of them. Try it before you read on. The seven megadeath conflicts listed by Richardson are, in chronological order, and using the names he adopted: the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the North American Civil War (1861-1865), the Great War in La Plata (1865-1870), the sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution (1918-1920), the first Chinese-Communist War (1927-1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the communal riots in the Indian Peninsula (1946-1948).
Looking at the list of 315 wars as a time series, Richardson asked what patterns or regularities could be discerned. Is war becoming more frequent, or less? Is the typical magnitude increasing? Are there any periodicities in the record, or other tendencies for the events to form clusters?
A null hypothesis useful in addressing these questions suggests that wars are independent, random events, and on any given day there is always the same probability that war will break out. This hypothesis implies that the average number of new wars per year ought to obey a Poisson distribution, which describes how events tend to arrange themselves when each occurrence of an event is unlikely but there are many opportunities for an event to occur. The Poisson distribution is the law suitable for tabulating radioactive decays, cancer clusters, tornado touchdowns, Web-server hits and, in a famous early example, deaths of cavalrymen by horse kicks. As applied to the statistics of deadly quarrels, the Poisson law says that if p is the probability of a war starting in the course of a year, then the probability of seeing n wars begin in any one year is e-ppn/n!. Plugging some numbers into the formula shows that when p is small, years with no onsets of war are the most likely, followed by years in which a single war begins; as n grows, the likelihood of seeing a year with n wars declines steeply.
Figure 3 compares the Poisson distribution with Richardson's data for a group of magnitude- 4 wars. The match is very close. Richardson performed a similar analysis of the dates on which wars ended--the "outbreaks of peace"--with the same result. He checked the wars on Quincy Wright's list in the same way and again found good agreement. Thus the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents.
Richardson also examined his data set for evidence of long-term trends in the incidence of war. Although certain patterns catch the eye when the data are plotted chronologically, Richardson concluded that the trends are not clear enough to rule out random fluctuations. "The collection as a whole does not indicate any trend towards more, nor towards fewer, fatal quarrels." He did find some slight hint of "contagion": The presence of an ongoing war may to some extent increase the probability of a new war starting.
Figure 4
Love Thy Neighbor
If the temporal dimension fails to explain much about war, what about spatial relations? Are neighboring countries less likely than average to wind up fighting one another, or more likely? Either hypothesis seems defensible. Close neighbors often have interests in common and so might be expected to become allies rather than enemies. On the other hand, neighbors could also be rivals contending for a share of the same resources--or maybe the people next door are just plain annoying. The existence of civil wars argues that living together is no guarantee of amity. (And at the low end of the magnitude scale, people often murder their own kin.)
Richardson's approach to these questions had a topological flavor. Instead of measuring the distance between countries, he merely asked whether or not they share a boundary. Then, in later studies, he refined this notion by trying to measure the length of the common boundary--which led to a fascinating digression. Working with maps at various scales, Richardson paced off the lengths of boundaries and coastlines with dividers, and realized that the result depends on the setting of the dividers, or in other words on the unit of measurement. A coastline that measures 100 steps of 10 millimeters each will not necessarily measure 1,000 steps of 1 millimeter each; it is likely to be more, because the smaller units more closely follow the zigzag path of the coast. This result appeared in a somewhat out-of-the-way publication; when Benoit Mandelbrot came across it by chance, Richardson's observation became one of the ideas that inspired Mandelbrot's theory of fractals.
During the period covered by Richardson's study there were about 60 stable nations and empires (the empires being counted for this purpose as single entities). The mean number of neighbors for these states was about six (and Richardson offered an elegant geometric argument, based on Euler's relation among the vertices, edges and faces of a polyhedron, that the number must be approximately six, for any plausible arrangement of nations). Hence if warring nations were to choose their foes entirely at random, there would be about a 10 percent chance that any pair of belligerents would turn out to be neighbors. The actual proportion of warring neighbors is far higher. Of 94 international wars with just two participants, Richardson found only 12 cases in which the two combatants had no shared boundary, suggesting that war is mostly a neighborhood affair.
But extending this conclusion to larger and wider wars proved difficult, mainly because the "great powers" are effectively everyone's neighbor. Richardson was best able to fit the data with a rather complex model assigning different probabilities to conflicts between two great powers, between a great power and a smaller state, and between two lesser nations. But rigging up a model with three parameters for such a small data set is not very satisfying. Furthermore, Richardson concluded that "chaos" was still the predominant factor in explaining the world's larger wars: The same element of randomness seen in the time-series analysis is at work here, though "restricted by geography and modified by infectiousness."
What about other causative factors--social, economic, cultural? While compiling his war list, Richardson noted the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing. Richardson's own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but his hope that a common language would reduce the chance of conflict failed to find support in the data. Economic indicators were equally unhelpful: The statistics ratify neither the idea that war is mainly a struggle between the rich and the poor nor the view that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war.
Figure 5
The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion. In the Richardson data set, nations that differ in religion are more likely to fight than those that share the same religion. Moreover, some sects seem generally to be more bellicose (Christian nations participated in a disproportionate number of conflicts). But these effects are not large.
Mere Anarchy Loosed upon the World
The residuum of all these noncauses of war is mere randomness--the notion that warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. In this respect, Richardson's data suggest that wars are like hurricanes or earthquakes: We can't know in advance when or where a specific event will strike, but we do know how many to expect in the long run. We can compute the number of victims; we just can't say who they'll be.
This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence. Richardson himself was disappointed that his studies pointed to no obvious remedy. Perhaps he was expecting too much. A retired physicist reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace. But with larger and more detailed data sets, and more powerful statistical machinery, some useful lessons might emerge.
There is now a whole community of people working to gather war data, many of whom trace their intellectual heritage back to Richardson and Quincy Wright. The largest such undertaking is the Correlates of War project, begun in the 1960s by J. David Singer of the University of Michigan. The COW catalogues, like Richardson's, begin in the post-Napoleonic period, but they have been brought up close to the present day and now list thousands of militarized disputes. Offshoots and continuations of the project are being maintained by Russell J. Leng of Middlebury College and by Stuart A. Bremer of Pennsylvania State University.
Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology has begun another data collection. His catalogue extends down to magnitude 1.5 (about 30 deaths) and covers a much longer span of time, back as far as A.D. 1400. The catalogue is approaching completion for 5 of 12 global regions and includes more than 3,000 conflicts. The most intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s.
Figure 6
Even if Richardson's limited data were all we had to go on, one clear policy imperative emerges: At all costs avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may seem to the participants, it is the great global conflagrations that threaten us most. As noted above, the two magnitude-7 wars of the 20th century were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our power to have a magnitude-8 or -9 war. In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is demographically irrelevant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all.
Bibliography
Ashford, Oliver M. 1985. Prophet--or Professor?: The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, Boston: Adam Hilger.
Brecke, Peter. 1999. Violent conflicts 1400 A.D. to
the present in different regions of the world. http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter/PSS99_paper.html
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio A. 1990. The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars 1945-1988. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1961. The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., Vol. VI, pp. 140-187.
Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1993. Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson. Edited by Oliver M. Ashford, et al. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Stephen A. 1957. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): A personal biography. Journal of Conflict Resolution 1:300-304.
Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. 1972. The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution. New York: American Book Company.
Wilkinson, David. 1980. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War, with a Commentary on War Since 1942. Second edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Copyright 2001 Brian Hayes
Kind thoughts do not change the world
War and violence is unfortunately a part of human life. Over the centuries various groups of people have tried to create peaceful utopian societies and they have failed. The problem is human nature. Our motivations are very self-centered, without regard or consideration for the other person or country. We want our fair share and a little bit more. That is the way we humans are.
Note: This document is available in other formats.
Look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another
species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically,
it hardly matters. War deaths amount to something like 1 percent of all deaths; in many places, more die by
suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be
gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.
But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could
not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the
stronger emotions-pity and love as well as fear and hatred-and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is
out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. When war comes, it muscles aside the calmer aspects
of life; no one is unmoved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to
stop the fighting, feelings run high. (?Antiwar militant? is no oxymoron.)
The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or
scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible.
Stepping outside the bounds of one?s own culture and ideology is also a challenge-not to mention the bounds of
one?s time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for
lessons convenient to the present purpose.
One defense against such distortions is the statistical method of gathering data about many wars from many
sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. It?s a dumb,
brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promising. A pioneer of this quantitative
study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorologist whose ambitious but premature foray into
numerical weather forecasting I described in this space a year ago. Now seems a good time to consider the
other half of Richardson?s lifework, on the mathematics of armed conflict.
Wars and Peaces
Richardson was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in the north of England. He studied physics with J.
J. Thomson at Cambridge, where he developed expertise in the numerical solution of differential equations.
Such approximate methods are a major mathematical industry today, but at that time they were not a popular
subject or a shrewd career choice. After a series of short-term appointments-well off the tenure
track-Richardson found a professional home in weather research, making notable contributions to the theory of
atmospheric turbulence. Then, in 1916, he resigned his post to serve in France as a driver with the Friends?
Ambulance Unit. Between tours of duty at the front, he did most of the calculations for his trial weather
forecast. (The forecast was not a success, but the basic idea was sound, and all modern weather prediction
relies on similar methods.)
After the war, Richardson gradually shifted his attention from meteorology to questions of war and international
relations. He found some of the same mathematical tools still useful. In particular, he modeled arms races with
differential equations. The death spiral of escalation-where one country?s arsenal provokes another to increase
its own armament, whereupon the first nation responds by adding still more weapons-has a ready
representation in a pair of linked differential equations. Richardson showed that an arms race can be stabilized
only if the ?fatigue and expense? of preparing for war are greater than the perceived threats from enemies. This
result is hardly profound or surprising, and yet Richardson?s analysis nonetheless attracted much comment
(mainly skeptical), because the equations offered the prospect of a quantitative measure of war risks. If
Richardson?s equations could be trusted, then observers would merely need to track expenditures on
armaments to produce a war forecast analogous to a weather forecast.
Mathematical models of arms races have been further refined since Richardson?s era, and they had a place in
policy deliberations during the ?mutually assured destruction? phase of the Cold War. But Richardson?s own
investigations turned in a somewhat different direction. A focus on armaments presupposes that the
accumulation of weaponry is a major cause of war, or at least has a strong correlation with it. Other theories of
the origin of war would emphasize different factors-the economic status of nations, say, or differences of culture
and language, or the effectiveness of diplomacy and mediation. There is no shortage of such theories; the
problem is choosing among them. Richardson argued that theories of war could and should be evaluated on a
scientific basis, by testing them against data on actual wars. So he set out to collect such data.
Richardson was not the first to follow this path. Several lists of wars were drawn up in the early years of the
20th century, and two more war catalogues were compiled in the 1930s and 40s by the Russian-born sociologist
Pitirim A. Sorokin and by Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago. Richardson began his own collection in
about 1940 and continued work on it until his death in 1953. His was not the largest data set, but it was the best
suited to statistical analysis.
Richardson published some of his writings on war in journal articles and pamphlets, but his ideas became widely
known only after two posthumous volumes appeared in 1960. The work on arms races is collected in Arms and
Insecurity; the statistical studies are in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. In addition, a two-volume Collected
Papers was published in 1993. Most of what follows in this article comes from Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. I
have also leaned heavily on a 1980 study by David Wilkinson of the University of California, Los Angeles, which
presents Richardson?s data in a rationalized and more readable format.
?Thinginess Fails?
The catalogue of conflicts in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels covers the period from about 1820 until 1950.
Richardson?s aim was to count all deaths during this interval caused by a deliberate act of another person. Thus
he includes individual murders and other lesser episodes of violence in addition to warfare, but he excludes
accidents and negligence and natural disasters. He also decided not to count deaths from famine and disease
associated with war, on the grounds that multiple causes are too hard to disentangle. (Did World War I ?cause?
the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919?)
The decision to lump together murder and war was meant to be provocative. To those who hold that ?murder is
an abominable selfish crime, but war is a heroic and patriotic adventure,? Richardson replies: ?One can find
cases of homicide which one large group of people condemned as murder, while another large group condoned
or praised them as legitimate war. Such things went on in Ireland in 1921 and are going on now in Palestine.?
(It?s depressing that his examples, 50 years later, remain so apt.) But if Richardson dismissed moral distinctions
between various kinds of killing, he acknowledged methodological difficulties. Wars are the province of
historians, whereas murders belong to criminologists; statistics from the two groups are hard to reconcile. And
the range of deadly quarrels lying between murder and war is even more problematic. Riots, raids and
insurrections have been too small and too frequent to attract the notice of historians, but they are too political for
criminologists.
For larger wars, Richardson compiled his list by reading histories, starting with the Encyclopaedia Britannica
and going on to more diverse and specialized sources. Murder data came from national crime reports. To fill in
the gap between wars and murders he tried interpolating and extrapolating and other means of estimating, but
he acknowledged that his results in this area were weak and incomplete. He mixed together civil and
international wars in a single list, arguing that the distinction is often unclear.
An interesting lesson of Richardson?s exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable
quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible
neutrinos than to count wars that swept through whole nations just a century ago. Of course some aspects of
military history are always contentious; you can?t expect all historians to agree on who started a war, or who
won it. But it turns out that even more basic facts-Who were the combatants? When did the fighting begin and
end? How many died?-can be remarkably hard to pin down. Lots of wars merge and split, or have no clear
beginning or end. As Richardson remarks, ?Thinginess fails.?
In organizing his data, Richardson borrowed a crucial idea from astronomy: He classified wars and other
quarrels according to their magnitude, the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terror
campaign that kills 100 has a magnitude of 2, and a war with a million casualties is a magnitude-6 conflict. A
murder with a single victim is magnitude 0 (since 100=1). The logarithmic scale was chosen in large part to
cope with shortcomings of available data; although casualty totals are seldom known precisely, it is usually
possible to estimate the logarithm within ±0.5. (A war of magnitude 6±0.5 could have anywhere from 316,228 to
3,162,278 deaths.) But the use of logarithmic magnitudes has a psychological benefit as well: One can survey
the entire spectrum of human violence on a single scale.
Random Violence
Richardson?s war list (as refined by Wilkinson) includes 315 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or greater (or in other
words with at least about 300 deaths). It?s no surprise that the two World Wars of the 20th century are at the
top of this list; they are the only magnitude-7 conflicts in human history. What is surprising is the extent to which
the World Wars dominate the overall death toll. Together they account for some 36 million deaths, which is
about 60 percent of all the quarrel deaths in the 130-year period. The next largest category is at the other end of
the spectrum: The magnitude-0 events (quarrels in which one to three people died) were responsible for 9.7
million deaths. Thus the remainder of the 315 recorded wars, along with all the thousands of quarrels of
intermediate size, produced less than a fourth of all the deaths.
The list of magnitude-6 wars also yields surprises, although of a different kind. Richardson identified seven of
these conflicts, the smallest causing half a million deaths and the largest about 2 million. Clearly these are major
upheavals in world history; you might think that every educated person could name most of them. Try it before
you read on. The seven megadeath conflicts listed by Richardson are, in chronological order, and using the
names he adopted: the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the North American Civil War (1861-1865), the Great
War in La Plata (1865-1870), the sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution (1918-1920), the first Chinese-Communist
War (1927-1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the communal riots in the Indian Peninsula
(1946-1948).
Looking at the list of 315 wars as a time series, Richardson asked what patterns or regularities could be
discerned. Is war becoming more frequent, or less? Is the typical magnitude increasing? Are there any
periodicities in the record, or other tendencies for the events to form clusters?
A null hypothesis useful in addressing these questions suggests that wars are independent, random events, and
on any given day there is always the same probability that war will break out. This hypothesis implies that the
average number of new wars per year ought to obey a Poisson distribution, which describes how events tend to
arrange themselves when each occurrence of an event is unlikely but there are many opportunities for an event
to occur. The Poisson distribution is the law suitable for tabulating radioactive decays, cancer clusters, tornado
touchdowns, Web-server hits and, in a famous early example, deaths of cavalrymen by horse kicks. As applied
to the statistics of deadly quarrels, the Poisson law says that if p is the probability of a war starting in the course
of a year, then the probability of seeing n wars begin in any one year is e-ppn/n!. Plugging some numbers into the
formula shows that when p is small, years with no onsets of war are the most likely, followed by years in which
a single war begins; as n grows, the likelihood of seeing a year with n wars declines steeply.
Figure 3 compares the Poisson distribution with Richardson?s data for a group of magnitude- 4 wars. The match
is very close. Richardson performed a similar analysis of the dates on which wars ended-the ?outbreaks of
peace?-with the same result. He checked the wars on Quincy Wright?s list in the same way and again found
good agreement. Thus the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly
distributed accidents.
Richardson also examined his data set for evidence of long-term trends in the incidence of war. Although
certain patterns catch the eye when the data are plotted chronologically, Richardson concluded that the trends
are not clear enough to rule out random fluctuations. ?The collection as a whole does not indicate any trend
towards more, nor towards fewer, fatal quarrels.? He did find some slight hint of ?contagion?: The presence of
an ongoing war may to some extent increase the probability of a new war starting.
Love Thy Neighbor
If the temporal dimension fails to explain much about war, what about spatial relations? Are neighboring
countries less likely than average to wind up fighting one another, or more likely? Either hypothesis seems
defensible. Close neighbors often have interests in common and so might be expected to become allies rather
than enemies. On the other hand, neighbors could also be rivals contending for a share of the same resources-or
maybe the people next door are just plain annoying. The existence of civil wars argues that living together is no
guarantee of amity. (And at the low end of the magnitude scale, people often murder their own kin.)
Richardson?s approach to these questions had a topological flavor. Instead of measuring the distance between
countries, he merely asked whether or not they share a boundary. Then, in later studies, he refined this notion
by trying to measure the length of the common boundary-which led to a fascinating digression. Working with
maps at various scales, Richardson paced off the lengths of boundaries and coastlines with dividers, and
realized that the result depends on the setting of the dividers, or in other words on the unit of measurement. A
coastline that measures 100 steps of 10 millimeters each will not necessarily measure 1,000 steps of 1
millimeter each; it is likely to be more, because the smaller units more closely follow the zigzag path of the
coast. This result appeared in a somewhat out-of-the-way publication; when Benoit Mandelbrot came across it
by chance, Richardson?s observation became one of the ideas that inspired Mandelbrot?s theory of fractals.
During the period covered by Richardson?s study there were about 60 stable nations and empires (the empires
being counted for this purpose as single entities). The mean number of neighbors for these states was about six
(and Richardson offered an elegant geometric argument, based on Euler?s relation among the vertices, edges
and faces of a polyhedron, that the number must be approximately six, for any plausible arrangement of
nations). Hence if warring nations were to choose their foes entirely at random, there would be about a 10
percent chance that any pair of belligerents would turn out to be neighbors. The actual proportion of warring
neighbors is far higher. Of 94 international wars with just two participants, Richardson found only 12 cases in
which the two combatants had no shared boundary, suggesting that war is mostly a neighborhood affair.
But extending this conclusion to larger and wider wars proved difficult, mainly because the ?great powers? are
effectively everyone?s neighbor. Richardson was best able to fit the data with a rather complex model assigning
different probabilities to conflicts between two great powers, between a great power and a smaller state, and
between two lesser nations. But rigging up a model with three parameters for such a small data set is not very
satisfying. Furthermore, Richardson concluded that ?chaos? was still the predominant factor in explaining the
world?s larger wars: The same element of randomness seen in the time-series analysis is at work here, though
?restricted by geography and modified by infectiousness.?
What about other causative factors-social, economic, cultural? While compiling his war list, Richardson noted
the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for
correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing.
Richardson?s own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a
preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but his hope
that a common language would reduce the chance of conflict failed to find support in the data. Economic
indicators were equally unhelpful: The statistics ratify neither the idea that war is mainly a struggle between the
rich and the poor nor the view that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war.
The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion. In the Richardson data
set, nations that differ in religion are more likely to fight than those that share the same religion. Moreover, some
sects seem generally to be more bellicose (Christian nations participated in a disproportionate number of
conflicts). But these effects are not large.
Mere Anarchy Loosed upon the World
The residuum of all these noncauses of war is mere randomness-the notion that warring nations bang against
one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. In this respect, Richardson?s
data suggest that wars are like hurricanes or earthquakes: We can?t know in advance when or where a
specific event will strike, but we do know how many to expect in the long run. We can compute the number of
victims; we just can?t say who they?ll be.
This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our
own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who?s to blame? But this is a
misreading of Richardson?s findings. Statistical ?laws? are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or
of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the
crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy
of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence
of violence. Richardson himself was disappointed that his studies pointed to no obvious remedy. Perhaps he was
expecting too much. A retired physicist reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica can do just so much toward
securing world peace. But with larger and more detailed data sets, and more powerful statistical machinery,
some useful lessons might emerge.
There is now a whole community of people working to gather war data, many of whom trace their intellectual
heritage back to Richardson and Quincy Wright. The largest such undertaking is the Correlates of War project,
begun in the 1960s by J. David Singer of the University of Michigan. The COW catalogues, like Richardson?s,
begin in the post-Napoleonic period, but they have been brought up close to the present day and now list
thousands of militarized disputes. Offshoots and continuations of the project are being maintained by Russell J.
Leng of Middlebury College and by Stuart A. Bremer of Pennsylvania State University.
Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology has begun another data collection. His catalogue extends
down to magnitude 1.5 (about 30 deaths) and covers a much longer span of time, back as far as A.D. 1400. The
catalogue is approaching completion for 5 of 12 global regions and includes more than 3,000 conflicts. The most
intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s.
Even if Richardson?s limited data were all we had to go on, one clear policy imperative emerges: At all costs
avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may seem to the participants, it is the
great global conflagrations that threaten us most. As noted above, the two magnitude-7 wars of the 20th
century were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our
power to have a magnitude-8 or -9 war. In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is
demographically irrelevant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all.
Bibliography
Ashford, Oliver M. 1985. Prophet-or Professor?: The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, Boston:
Adam Hilger.
Brecke, Peter. 1999. Violent conflicts 1400 A.D. to
the present in different regions of the world. http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter/PSS99_paper.html
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio A. 1990. The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets
on Crises and Wars 1945-1988. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau.
Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War.
Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1961. The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Yearbook
of the Society for General Systems Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., Vol. VI, pp. 140-187.
Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1993. Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson. Edited by Oliver M. Ashford, et al.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Stephen A. 1957. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): A personal biography. Journal of Conflict
Resolution 1:300-304.
Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. 1972. The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York:
John Wiley.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War, and
Revolution. New York: American Book Company.
Wilkinson, David. 1980. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War, with a Commentary on War Since 1942. Second edition. Chicago, Ill.:
University of Chicago Press.
Computing Science
January-February, 2002
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
Brian Hayes
Note: This document is available in other formats.
Look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically, it hardly matters. War deaths amount to something like 1 percent of all deaths; in many places, more die by suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.
But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions--pity and love as well as fear and hatred--and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. When war comes, it muscles aside the calmer aspects of life; no one is unmoved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to stop the fighting, feelings run high. ("Antiwar militant" is no oxymoron.)
The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one's own culture and ideology is also a challenge--not to mention the bounds of one's time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the present purpose.
One defense against such distortions is the statistical method of gathering data about many wars from many sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. It's a dumb, brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promising. A pioneer of this quantitative study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorologist whose ambitious but premature foray into numerical weather forecasting I described in this space a year ago. Now seems a good time to consider the other half of Richardson's lifework, on the mathematics of armed conflict.
Wars and Peaces
Richardson was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in the north of England. He studied physics with J. J. Thomson at Cambridge, where he developed expertise in the numerical solution of differential equations. Such approximate methods are a major mathematical industry today, but at that time they were not a popular subject or a shrewd career choice. After a series of short-term appointments--well off the tenure track--Richardson found a professional home in weather research, making notable contributions to the theory of atmospheric turbulence. Then, in 1916, he resigned his post to serve in France as a driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Between tours of duty at the front, he did most of the calculations for his trial weather forecast. (The forecast was not a success, but the basic idea was sound, and all modern weather prediction relies on similar methods.)
After the war, Richardson gradually shifted his attention from meteorology to questions of war and international relations. He found some of the same mathematical tools still useful. In particular, he modeled arms races with differential equations. The death spiral of escalation--where one country's arsenal provokes another to increase its own armament, whereupon the first nation responds by adding still more weapons--has a ready representation in a pair of linked differential equations. Richardson showed that an arms race can be stabilized only if the "fatigue and expense" of preparing for war are greater than the perceived threats from enemies. This result is hardly profound or surprising, and yet Richardson's analysis nonetheless attracted much comment (mainly skeptical), because the equations offered the prospect of a quantitative measure of war risks. If Richardson's equations could be trusted, then observers would merely need to track expenditures on armaments to produce a war forecast analogous to a weather forecast.
Mathematical models of arms races have been further refined since Richardson's era, and they had a place in policy deliberations during the "mutually assured destruction" phase of the Cold War. But Richardson's own investigations turned in a somewhat different direction. A focus on armaments presupposes that the accumulation of weaponry is a major cause of war, or at least has a strong correlation with it. Other theories of the origin of war would emphasize different factors--the economic status of nations, say, or differences of culture and language, or the effectiveness of diplomacy and mediation. There is no shortage of such theories; the problem is choosing among them. Richardson argued that theories of war could and should be evaluated on a scientific basis, by testing them against data on actual wars. So he set out to collect such data.
Richardson was not the first to follow this path. Several lists of wars were drawn up in the early years of the 20th century, and two more war catalogues were compiled in the 1930s and 40s by the Russian-born sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin and by Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago. Richardson began his own collection in about 1940 and continued work on it until his death in 1953. His was not the largest data set, but it was the best suited to statistical analysis.
Richardson published some of his writings on war in journal articles and pamphlets, but his ideas became widely known only after two posthumous volumes appeared in 1960. The work on arms races is collected in Arms and Insecurity; the statistical studies are in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. In addition, a two-volume Collected Papers was published in 1993. Most of what follows in this article comes from Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. I have also leaned heavily on a 1980 study by David Wilkinson of the University of California, Los Angeles, which presents Richardson's data in a rationalized and more readable format.
"Thinginess Fails"
The catalogue of conflicts in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels covers the period from about 1820 until 1950. Richardson's aim was to count all deaths during this interval caused by a deliberate act of another person. Thus he includes individual murders and other lesser episodes of violence in addition to warfare, but he excludes accidents and negligence and natural disasters. He also decided not to count deaths from famine and disease associated with war, on the grounds that multiple causes are too hard to disentangle. (Did World War I "cause" the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919?)
The decision to lump together murder and war was meant to be provocative. To those who hold that "murder is an abominable selfish crime, but war is a heroic and patriotic adventure," Richardson replies: "One can find cases of homicide which one large group of people condemned as murder, while another large group condoned or praised them as legitimate war. Such things went on in Ireland in 1921 and are going on now in Palestine." (It's depressing that his examples, 50 years later, remain so apt.) But if Richardson dismissed moral distinctions between various kinds of killing, he acknowledged methodological difficulties. Wars are the province of historians, whereas murders belong to criminologists; statistics from the two groups are hard to reconcile. And the range of deadly quarrels lying between murder and war is even more problematic. Riots, raids and insurrections have been too small and too frequent to attract the notice of historians, but they are too political for criminologists.
For larger wars, Richardson compiled his list by reading histories, starting with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and going on to more diverse and specialized sources. Murder data came from national crime reports. To fill in the gap between wars and murders he tried interpolating and extrapolating and other means of estimating, but he acknowledged that his results in this area were weak and incomplete. He mixed together civil and international wars in a single list, arguing that the distinction is often unclear.
An interesting lesson of Richardson's exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that swept through whole nations just a century ago. Of course some aspects of military history are always contentious; you can't expect all historians to agree on who started a war, or who won it. But it turns out that even more basic facts--Who were the combatants? When did the fighting begin and end? How many died?--can be remarkably hard to pin down. Lots of wars merge and split, or have no clear beginning or end. As Richardson remarks, "Thinginess fails."
In organizing his data, Richardson borrowed a crucial idea from astronomy: He classified wars and other quarrels according to their magnitude, the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terror campaign that kills 100 has a magnitude of 2, and a war with a million casualties is a magnitude-6 conflict. A murder with a single victim is magnitude 0 (since 100=1). The logarithmic scale was chosen in large part to cope with shortcomings of available data; although casualty totals are seldom known precisely, it is usually possible to estimate the logarithm within ±0.5. (A war of magnitude 6±0.5 could have anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) But the use of logarithmic magnitudes has a psychological benefit as well: One can survey the entire spectrum of human violence on a single scale.
Random Violence
Richardson's war list (as refined by Wilkinson) includes 315 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or greater (or in other words with at least about 300 deaths). It's no surprise that the two World Wars of the 20th century are at the top of this list; they are the only magnitude-7 conflicts in human history. What is surprising is the extent to which the World Wars dominate the overall death toll. Together they account for some 36 million deaths, which is about 60 percent of all the quarrel deaths in the 130-year period. The next largest category is at the other end of the spectrum: The magnitude-0 events (quarrels in which one to three people died) were responsible for 9.7 million deaths. Thus the remainder of the 315 recorded wars, along with all the thousands of quarrels of intermediate size, produced less than a fourth of all the deaths.
Love Thy Neighbor
If the temporal dimension fails to explain much about war, what about spatial relations? Are neighboring countries less likely than average to wind up fighting one another, or more likely? Either hypothesis seems defensible. Close neighbors often have interests in common and so might be expected to become allies rather than enemies. On the other hand, neighbors could also be rivals contending for a share of the same resources--or maybe the people next door are just plain annoying. The existence of civil wars argues that living together is no guarantee of amity. (And at the low end of the magnitude scale, people often murder their own kin.)
Richardson's approach to these questions had a topological flavor. Instead of measuring the distance between countries, he merely asked whether or not they share a boundary. Then, in later studies, he refined this notion by trying to measure the length of the common boundary--which led to a fascinating digression. Working with maps at various scales, Richardson paced off the lengths of boundaries and coastlines with dividers, and realized that the result depends on the setting of the dividers, or in other words on the unit of measurement. A coastline that measures 100 steps of 10 millimeters each will not necessarily measure 1,000 steps of 1 millimeter each; it is likely to be more, because the smaller units more closely follow the zigzag path of the coast. This result appeared in a somewhat out-of-the-way publication; when Benoit Mandelbrot came across it by chance, Richardson's observation became one of the ideas that inspired Mandelbrot's theory of fractals.
During the period covered by Richardson's study there were about 60 stable nations and empires (the empires being counted for this purpose as single entities). The mean number of neighbors for these states was about six (and Richardson offered an elegant geometric argument, based on Euler's relation among the vertices, edges and faces of a polyhedron, that the number must be approximately six, for any plausible arrangement of nations). Hence if warring nations were to choose their foes entirely at random, there would be about a 10 percent chance that any pair of belligerents would turn out to be neighbors. The actual proportion of warring neighbors is far higher. Of 94 international wars with just two participants, Richardson found only 12 cases in which the two combatants had no shared boundary, suggesting that war is mostly a neighborhood affair.
But extending this conclusion to larger and wider wars proved difficult, mainly because the "great powers" are effectively everyone's neighbor. Richardson was best able to fit the data with a rather complex model assigning different probabilities to conflicts between two great powers, between a great power and a smaller state, and between two lesser nations. But rigging up a model with three parameters for such a small data set is not very satisfying. Furthermore, Richardson concluded that "chaos" was still the predominant factor in explaining the world's larger wars: The same element of randomness seen in the time-series analysis is at work here, though "restricted by geography and modified by infectiousness."
What about other causative factors--social, economic, cultural? While compiling his war list, Richardson noted the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing. Richardson's own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but his hope that a common language would reduce the chance of conflict failed to find support in the data. Economic indicators were equally unhelpful: The statistics ratify neither the idea that war is mainly a struggle between the rich and the poor nor the view that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war.
figure 5
Figure 5
The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion. In the Richardson data set, nations that differ in religion are more likely to fight than those that share the same religion. Moreover, some sects seem generally to be more bellicose (Christian nations participated in a disproportionate number of conflicts). But these effects are not large.
Mere Anarchy Loosed upon the World
The residuum of all these noncauses of war is mere randomness--the notion that warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. In this respect, Richardson's data suggest that wars are like hurricanes or earthquakes: We can't know in advance when or where a specific event will strike, but we do know how many to expect in the long run. We can compute the number of victims; we just can't say who they'll be.
This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence. Richardson himself was disappointed that his studies pointed to no obvious remedy. Perhaps he was expecting too much. A retired physicist reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace. But with larger and more detailed data sets, and more powerful statistical machinery, some useful lessons might emerge.
There is now a whole community of people working to gather war data, many of whom trace their intellectual heritage back to Richardson and Quincy Wright. The largest such undertaking is the Correlates of War project, begun in the 1960s by J. David Singer of the University of Michigan. The COW catalogues, like Richardson's, begin in the post-Napoleonic period, but they have been brought up close to the present day and now list thousands of militarized disputes. Offshoots and continuations of the project are being maintained by Russell J. Leng of Middlebury College and by Stuart A. Bremer of Pennsylvania State University.
Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology has begun another data collection. His catalogue extends down to magnitude 1.5 (about 30 deaths) and covers a much longer span of time, back as far as A.D. 1400. The catalogue is approaching completion for 5 of 12 global regions and includes more than 3,000 conflicts. The most intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s.
figure 6
Figure 6
Even if Richardson's limited data were all we had to go on, one clear policy imperative emerges: At all costs avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may seem to the participants, it is the great global conflagrations that threaten us most. As noted above, the two magnitude-7 wars of the 20th century were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our power to have a magnitude-8 or -9 war. In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is demographically irrelevant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all.
Bibliography
Ashford, Oliver M. 1985. Prophet--or Professor?: The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, Boston: Adam Hilger.
Brecke, Peter. 1999. Violent conflicts 1400 A.D. to
the present in different regions of the world. http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter/PSS99_paper.html
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio A. 1990. The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars 1945-1988. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1961. The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., Vol. VI, pp. 140-187.
Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1993. Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson. Edited by Oliver M. Ashford, et al. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Stephen A. 1957. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): A personal biography. Journal of Conflict Resolution 1:300-304.
Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. 1972. The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution. New York: American Book Company.
Wilkinson, David. 1980. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War, with a Commentary on War Since 1942. Second edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
© 2001 Brian Hayes
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The amount of wars we have, and considering we are entering the nano age and still cant get along. Expect us to destroy ourselves for good in the next world war.
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Mirror of article and diagrams here
heh heh heh heh Could 5 people repost this post 5 times each so there will be 25 + 1 Copies of this post.
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Blame everything on America. It's the slashdot way.
Computing Science
January-February, 2002
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels
Brian Hayes
Look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically, it hardly matters. War deaths amount to something like 1 percent of all deaths; in many places, more die by suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.
But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions pity and love as well as fear and hatred and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. When war comes, it muscles aside the calmer aspects of life; no one is unmoved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to stop the fighting, feelings run high. (Antiwar militant is no oxymoron.)
The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one's own culture and ideology is also a challenge not to mention the bounds of one's time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the present purpose.
One defense against such distortions is the statistical method of gathering data about many wars from many sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. It's a dumb, brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promising. A pioneer of this quantitative study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorologist whose ambitious but premature foray into numerical weather forecasting I described in this space a year ago. Now seems a good time to consider the other half of Richardson's lifework, on the mathematics of armed conflict.
Wars and Peaces
Richardson was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in the north of England. He studied physics with J. J. Thomson at Cambridge, where he developed expertise in the numerical solution of differential equations. Such approximate methods are a major mathematical industry today, but at that time they were not a popular subject or a shrewd career choice. After a series of short-term appointments well off the tenure track Richardson found a professional home in weather research, making notable contributions to the theory of atmospheric turbulence. Then, in 1916, he resigned his post to serve in France as a driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Between tours of duty at the front, he did most of the calculations for his trial weather forecast. (The forecast was not a success, but the basic idea was sound, and all modern weather prediction relies on similar methods.)
After the war, Richardson gradually shifted his attention from meteorology to questions of war and international relations. He found some of the same mathematical tools still useful. In particular, he modeled arms races with differential equations. The death spiral of escalation where one country's arsenal provokes another to increase its own armament, whereupon the first nation responds by adding still more weapons has a ready representation in a pair of linked differential equations. Richardson showed that an arms race can be stabilized only if the fatigue and expense of preparing for war are greater than the perceived threats from enemies. This result is hardly profound or surprising, and yet Richardson's analysis nonetheless attracted much comment (mainly skeptical), because the equations offered the prospect of a quantitative measure of war risks. If Richardson's equations could be trusted, then observers would merely need to track expenditures on armaments to produce a war forecast analogous to a weather forecast.
Mathematical models of arms races have been further refined since Richardson's era, and they had a place in policy deliberations during the mutually assured destruction phase of the Cold War. But Richardson's own investigations turned in a somewhat different direction. A focus on armaments presupposes that the accumulation of weaponry is a major cause of war, or at least has a strong correlation with it. Other theories of the origin of war would emphasize different factors the economic status of nations, say, or differences of culture and language, or the effectiveness of diplomacy and mediation. There is no shortage of such theories; the problem is choosing among them. Richardson argued that theories of war could and should be evaluated on a scientific basis, by testing them against data on actual wars. So he set out to collect such data.
Richardson was not the first to follow this path. Several lists of wars were drawn up in the early years of the 20th century, and two more war catalogues were compiled in the 1930s and 40s by the Russian-born sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin and by Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago. Richardson began his own collection in about 1940 and continued work on it until his death in 1953. His was not the largest data set, but it was the best suited to statistical analysis.
(Fig 1)
Richardson published some of his writings on war in journal articles and pamphlets, but his ideas became widely known only after two posthumous volumes appeared in 1960. The work on arms races is collected in Arms and Insecurity; the statistical studies are in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. In addition, a two-volume Collected Papers was published in 1993. Most of what follows in this article comes from Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. I have also leaned heavily on a 1980 study by David Wilkinson of the University of California, Los Angeles, which presents Richardson's data in a rationalized and more readable format.
Thinginess Fails
The catalogue of conflicts in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels covers the period from about 1820 until 1950. Richardson's aim was to count all deaths during this interval caused by a deliberate act of another person. Thus he includes individual murders and other lesser episodes of violence in addition to warfare, but he excludes accidents and negligence and natural disasters. He also decided not to count deaths from famine and disease associated with war, on the grounds that multiple causes are too hard to disentangle. (Did World War I cause the influenza epidemic of 1918 1919?)
The decision to lump together murder and war was meant to be provocative. To those who hold that murder is an abominable selfish crime, but war is a heroic and patriotic adventure, Richardson replies: One can find cases of homicide which one large group of people condemned as murder, while another large group condoned or praised them as legitimate war. Such things went on in Ireland in 1921 and are going on now in Palestine. (It's depressing that his examples, 50 years later, remain so apt.) But if Richardson dismissed moral distinctions between various kinds of killing, he acknowledged methodological difficulties. Wars are the province of historians, whereas murders belong to criminologists; statistics from the two groups are hard to reconcile. And the range of deadly quarrels lying between murder and war is even more problematic. Riots, raids and insurrections have been too small and too frequent to attract the notice of historians, but they are too political for criminologists.
For larger wars, Richardson compiled his list by reading histories, starting with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and going on to more diverse and specialized sources. Murder data came from national crime reports. To fill in the gap between wars and murders he tried interpolating and extrapolating and other means of estimating, but he acknowledged that his results in this area were weak and incomplete. He mixed together civil and international wars in a single list, arguing that the distinction is often unclear.
An interesting lesson of Richardson's exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that swept through whole nations just a century ago. Of course some aspects of military history are always contentious; you can't expect all historians to agree on who started a war, or who won it. But it turns out that even more basic facts Who were the combatants? When did the fighting begin and end? How many died? can be remarkably hard to pin down. Lots of wars merge and split, or have no clear beginning or end. As Richardson remarks, Thinginess fails.
In organizing his data, Richardson borrowed a crucial idea from astronomy: He classified wars and other quarrels according to their magnitude, the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terror campaign that kills 100 has a magnitude of 2, and a war with a million casualties is a magnitude-6 conflict. A murder with a single victim is magnitude 0 (since 100=1). The logarithmic scale was chosen in large part to cope with shortcomings of available data; although casualty totals are seldom known precisely, it is usually possible to estimate the logarithm within +/-0.5. (A war of magnitude 6+/-0.5 could have anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) But the use of logarithmic magnitudes has a psychological benefit as well: One can survey the entire spectrum of human violence on a single scale.
Random Violence
Richardson's war list (as refined by Wilkinson) includes 315 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or greater (or in other words with at least about 300 deaths). It's no surprise that the two World Wars of the 20th century are at the top of this list; they are the only magnitude-7 conflicts in human history. What is surprising is the extent to which the World Wars dominate the overall death toll. Together they account for some 36 million deaths, which is about 60 percent of all the quarrel deaths in the 130-year period. The next largest category is at the other end of the spectrum: The magnitude-0 events (quarrels in which one to three people died) were responsible for 9.7 million deaths. Thus the remainder of the 315 recorded wars, along with all the thousands of quarrels of intermediate size, produced less than a fourth of all the deaths.
(Fig 2) (Fig 3)
The list of magnitude-6 wars also yields surprises, although of a different kind. Richardson identified seven of these conflicts, the smallest causing half a million deaths and the largest about 2 million. Clearly these are major upheavals in world history; you might think that every educated person could name most of them. Try it before you read on. The seven megadeath conflicts listed by Richardson are, in chronological order, and using the names he adopted: the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the North American Civil War (1861-1865), the Great War in La Plata (1865-1870), the sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution (1918-1920), the first Chinese-Communist War (1927-1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the communal riots in the Indian Peninsula (1946-1948).
Looking at the list of 315 wars as a time series, Richardson asked what patterns or regularities could be discerned. Is war becoming more frequent, or less? Is the typical magnitude increasing? Are there any periodicities in the record, or other tendencies for the events to form clusters?
A null hypothesis useful in addressing these questions suggests that wars are independent, random events, and on any given day there is always the same probability that war will break out. This hypothesis implies that the average number of new wars per year ought to obey a Poisson distribution, which describes how events tend to arrange themselves when each occurrence of an event is unlikely but there are many opportunities for an event to occur. The Poisson distribution is the law suitable for tabulating radioactive decays, cancer clusters, tornado touchdowns, Web-server hits and, in a famous early example, deaths of cavalrymen by horse kicks. As applied to the statistics of deadly quarrels, the Poisson law says that if p is the probability of a war starting in the course of a year, then the probability of seeing n wars begin in any one year is e^ppn/n!. Plugging some numbers into the formula shows that when p is small, years with no onsets of war are the most likely, followed by years in which a single war begins; as n grows, the likelihood of seeing a year with n wars declines steeply.
Figure 3 compares the Poisson distribution with Richardson's data for a group of magnitude- 4 wars. The match is very close. Richardson performed a similar analysis of the dates on which wars ended the outbreaks of peace with the same result. He checked the wars on Quincy Wright's list in the same way and again found good agreement. Thus the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents.
Richardson also examined his data set for evidence of long-term trends in the incidence of war. Although certain patterns catch the eye when the data are plotted chronologically, Richardson concluded that the trends are not clear enough to rule out random fluctuations. The collection as a whole does not indicate any trend towards more, nor towards fewer, fatal quarrels. He did find some slight hint of contagion: The presence of an ongoing war may to some extent increase the probability of a new war starting.
(Fig 4)
Love Thy Neighbor
If the temporal dimension fails to explain much about war, what about spatial relations? Are neighboring countries less likely than average to wind up fighting one another, or more likely? Either hypothesis seems defensible. Close neighbors often have interests in common and so might be expected to become allies rather than enemies. On the other hand, neighbors could also be rivals contending for a share of the same resources or maybe the people next door are just plain annoying. The existence of civil wars argues that living together is no guarantee of amity. (And at the low end of the magnitude scale, people often murder their own kin.)
Richardson's approach to these questions had a topological flavor. Instead of measuring the distance between countries, he merely asked whether or not they share a boundary. Then, in later studies, he refined this notion by trying to measure the length of the common boundary which led to a fascinating digression. Working with maps at various scales, Richardson paced off the lengths of boundaries and coastlines with dividers, and realized that the result depends on the setting of the dividers, or in other words on the unit of measurement. A coastline that measures 100 steps of 10 millimeters each will not necessarily measure 1,000 steps of 1 millimeter each; it is likely to be more, because the smaller units more closely follow the zigzag path of the coast. This result appeared in a somewhat out-of-the-way publication; when Benoit Mandelbrot came across it by chance, Richardson's observation became one of the ideas that inspired Mandelbrot's theory of fractals.
During the period covered by Richardson's study there were about 60 stable nations and empires (the empires being counted for this purpose as single entities). The mean number of neighbors for these states was about six (and Richardson offered an elegant geometric argument, based on Euler's relation among the vertices, edges and faces of a polyhedron, that the number must be approximately six, for any plausible arrangement of nations). Hence if warring nations were to choose their foes entirely at random, there would be about a 10 percent chance that any pair of belligerents would turn out to be neighbors. The actual proportion of warring neighbors is far higher. Of 94 international wars with just two participants, Richardson found only 12 cases in which the two combatants had no shared boundary, suggesting that war is mostly a neighborhood affair.
But extending this conclusion to larger and wider wars proved difficult, mainly because the great powers are effectively everyone's neighbor. Richardson was best able to fit the data with a rather complex model assigning different probabilities to conflicts between two great powers, between a great power and a smaller state, and between two lesser nations. But rigging up a model with three parameters for such a small data set is not very satisfying. Furthermore, Richardson concluded that chaos was still the predominant factor in explaining the world's larger wars: The same element of randomness seen in the time-series analysis is at work here, though restricted by geography and modified by infectiousness.
What about other causative factors social, economic, cultural? While compiling his war list, Richardson noted the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing. Richardson's own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but his hope that a common language would reduce the chance of conflict failed to find support in the data. Economic indicators were equally unhelpful: The statistics ratify neither the idea that war is mainly a struggle between the rich and the poor nor the view that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war.
(Fig 5)
The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion. In the Richardson data set, nations that differ in religion are more likely to fight than those that share the same religion. Moreover, some sects seem generally to be more bellicose (Christian nations participated in a disproportionate number of conflicts). But these effects are not large.
Mere Anarchy Loosed upon the World
The residuum of all these noncauses of war is mere randomness the notion that warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. In this respect, Richardson's data suggest that wars are like hurricanes or earthquakes: We can't know in advance when or where a specific event will strike, but we do know how many to expect in the long run. We can compute the number of victims; we just can't say who they'll be.
This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical laws are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence. Richardson himself was disappointed that his studies pointed to no obvious remedy. Perhaps he was expecting too much. A retired physicist reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace. But with larger and more detailed data sets, and more powerful statistical machinery, some useful lessons might emerge.
There is now a whole community of people working to gather war data, many of whom trace their intellectual heritage back to Richardson and Quincy Wright. The largest such undertaking is the Correlates of War project, begun in the 1960s by J. David Singer of the University of Michigan. The COW catalogues, like Richardson's, begin in the post-Napoleonic period, but they have been brought up close to the present day and now list thousands of militarized disputes. Offshoots and continuations of the project are being maintained by Russell J. Leng of Middlebury College and by Stuart A. Bremer of Pennsylvania State University.
Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology has begun another data collection. His catalogue extends down to magnitude 1.5 (about 30 deaths) and covers a much longer span of time, back as far as A.D. 1400. The catalogue is approaching completion for 5 of 12 global regions and includes more than 3,000 conflicts. The most intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s.
(Fig 6)
Even if Richardson's limited data were all we had to go on, one clear policy imperative emerges: At all costs avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may seem to the participants, it is the great global conflagrations that threaten us most. As noted above, the two magnitude-7 wars of the 20th century were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our power to have a magnitude-8 or -9 war. In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is demographically irrelevant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all.
Bibliography
Ashford, Oliver M. 1985. Prophet or Professor?: The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, Boston: Adam Hilger.
Brecke, Peter. 1999. Violent conflicts 1400 A.D. to
the present in different regions of the world. http://www.inta.gatech.edu/peter/PSS99_paper.html
Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio A. 1990. The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars 1945-1988. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press.
Richardson, Lewis F. 1961. The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., Vol. VI, pp. 140-187.
Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1993. Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson. Edited by Oliver M. Ashford, et al. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Stephen A. 1957. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): A personal biography. Journal of Conflict Resolution 1:300-304.
Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. 1972. The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution. New York: American Book Company.
Wilkinson, David. 1980. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War, with a Commentary on War Since 1942. Second edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
(c) 2001 Brian Hayes
Thats right, its a goal of many people to kill themselves, they dont know they are doing this, they think they are killing the enemy.
What humans just cant figure out is, we are all one, instead of us acting as a team we fight ourselves. This is why I dont think we will last for 50 more years, because the next big war wont involve nukes, its going to be a nano war, mixed with bio terrorism, a war you cant stop no matter what technology you have, and a war where both sides will die.
So whats the choice? The choice is to end all war, and all causes of war, such as hate, find ways to handle political disputes or just form a one world government for all I care, but war is something that should cease to exsist in the next 10-20 years, because if it still exsists at this time, it wont just be nuking one country, it will be spores spreading all over the world killing billions, or nano viruses killing the whole planet.
Technology is at the point now where war is just no longer practical. When will we evolve socially to the level we are at with technology? If theres no balance, we wont properly use our new technology and will destroy ourselves.
The End.
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fuck you...
bye now!
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434
What happened to the folks a number of years ago who had found a definite correlation betweent the percentage of adolescent males in a society and its likelyhood to go to war? Did that research pan out?
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
The reason we arent evolving, the anti war people are ignored and are considered stupid college kids, or hippies.
Look, while some of us MAY be evolved above the rest of the haters and war lovers, it doesnt change they fact that they decide the fate of humanity not us.
If they want to destroy us in wars, they can, if they want to pollute the air and enviornment they can.
You cant even get in their position in government because its like a fucking monarchy, the green party has been trying for years to get in and arent getting anywhere.
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http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:VltxrZa1rHMC: www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/Issues/Comsci02/Compsci2002- 01.html+Compsci2002-01.html&hl=en
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
on should stay the hellp out of Denmark...
Play Well
looking at that diagram, I said to myself, "wow, self. Denmark sure has been a violent country."
I guess it's that Viking influence.
"Where will I go when I die? I dunno, but I sure hope it isn't hell. I've been living in it all my life. "
Guess what? It's called internship so get used to it! Your "on the job training" will
be up soon....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
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Why does New Jersey have more toxic waste dumps and California have more lawyers? New Jersey had first choice.
Evolution. Human Nature was meant to EVOLVE.
I'm sick of every cave man, murderer, theif, and other bad person getting the term "Oh its just human nature"
No, its caveman nature. This is 2002, Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals.
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You poor americans! I can hear crying from all around the world for you.
There's a cool map of Nappy's march into Russia, which shows, visually, the losses suffered by the thickness of the line, among other things. Really beautifully rendered. Edward Tutfe (master of information design) is a big fan of it, understandably so.
c-hack.com |
From the diagram alone, it appears that, since they do not appear at all on the page, .com .net and .edu are some of the safest places to live.
can YOU imagine a beowulf cluster of "Could 5 people repost this post 5 times each so there will be 25 + 1 Copies of this post. Repeat so there is 625 + 25 + 1 And keep repeating until slashdot has been DoSED"??
Could 5 people repost this post 5 times each so there will be 25 + 1 Copies of this post.
Repeat so there is 625 + 25 + 1
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Lameness filter breaking code : 43403322
Too bad we can't just slashdot the combatants into immobility the way we just affected this guy's web server....
I dont want War, I'm not greedy, I dont have any of those problems, I dont steal, I dont exploit people, I dont murder, From what I know, based on the definition of Human Nature, I'm not human?
Uh no, I think its the other way around, Human Nature was meant to evolve, some Humans have the nature of CaveMen, other humans have a more evolved Human Nature.
I'll say that its human nature to love, but most humans dont.
So I guess thats just MY nature. I want a utopia where everyone loves everyone and shares,
Of course, the rest of the world does not seem to be ready for it, the problem is, our technology is ready for this, when you have nano technology, if you arent evolved enough to handle it, you'll use it to destroy yourself.
Its no diffrent than giving a monkey an atomic bomb and letting him play with it.
The problem with most people on this planet is they dont seek enlightenment, they dont TRY to improve theirselves,
I'm not christian, but i believe what jesus and other prophets were trying to teach us, is we should constantly improve ourselves, and search for enlightenment.
Most people are satisfied living like cavemen, doing stuff they shouldnt be doing and having no morals, they dont even give it any time to think that what they are doing is WRONG.
War isnt Human Nature, its Caveman nature, not every Human is a Caveman.
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It leaves out Microsoft's deadly quarrels with Netscape, Sun, Stac Electronics, the consumer, the USDOJ (surrender treaty being negotiated), etc.
How come the UN isn't prosecuting them for war crimes?
doesn't any country realise that the best way to win is to conquer australia first? you get five extra units and you only have to defend two territories.
Get over yourselves.
Human history is built upon the foundation of violence. It is our nature, bred and true. We kill what we do not understand or fear.
The representation is awful by the way. Some nations on this earth have been in existence for a very long time, including Turkey, China (and most of asia), England, Spain, etc. It does not account for scale of population over time, modern warfare, duration of war, and the full scale of recorded history.
I think if you go back to antiquity, accounting for population and scale of conflict/time and track the entire 'web' of war, you will discover that China, closely followed by the tie of Spain and England are the greatest killers of man and responsible for death on scales that rival the plagues of the dark ages themselves. In a close third would be Christianity, followed tightly by the Moslem faith.
The US has not killed nor engaged in the frequency of war that many of the other nations on earth have, nor have they started (directly) any of the wars they were involved in... indirectly an argument can be made that the US properity and/or penchant for interference in foreign politics and economics has inadvertantly caused several of the wars, but that is a side show.
Also, the lack of showing civil conflicts and politically motivated purges (massacres) really skews the numbers further! The Chinese intellectual purges of the 50's, Rowanda, Nazi death camps, Stalin's purges of the 30's, Cambodia, etc... I bet if you count up the corpses there that were not the result of direct conflict with another nation the pile reaches far higher than the one created by war...
Don't you people get it... until evolution gives mankind the power to fully supress this, or alternately evolution takes this urge away, we are killers... the worst kind because we kill our own and everything else indiscriminently. Worse still, our greatest innovations in science, politics, and morality have been stimulated or directly caused by conflicts.
Let us know when you make peace with bacteria and viruses trying to infect you. There are many abuses that do not involve war, but can only reliably be stopped by it, like genocide and tyranny...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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8787897978789
This is actually a very interesting detail, the 1700s amongst other things had "the small ice-age" where temperatures in europe were significantly lower than normal.
Considered together with the traditional wisdom of "hot tempers" in southern climates, (the middle east being the poster boy), this points to the obvious solution to world peace: Move everybody to Mars where the temperature is lower than on this war-ridden planet.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Colonization and the policy of corruption and biological warfare that the Europeans are so famous for during the 1600-1800 time frame... 100 million + indians enslaved and or killed off deliberately by biological warfare. Not too mention the african tendency to kill off an entire nation over an insult, or the intent of the chinese to freelance their men in Korea human wave style without declaring war (where would a non-declared war fit in this scheme anyway???).
that's all very well and good, but...
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stop me before i post again!
Brian Hayes' writing is excellent and very clear. How come a mathematician is responsible for one of the best-written articles /. has linked to in a long while!
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
Wars are no more random than Stock Prices. The premise of the book _A Random Walk Down Wall Street_ is that mathematical models are in the long run no better than random stock picking. That doesn't mean that stock prices are random accidents.
The causes are to manifold and complex to yield to any simple mathematical model. No surprise, because we're talking about human behavior.
By the way, the author of the paper makes your point:
"This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war.
What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence."
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Could 5 people repost this post 5 times each so there will be 25 + 1 Copies of this post.
Repeat so there is 625 + 25 + 1
And keep repeating until slashdot has been DoSED
Lameness filter breaking code : 5455433
damn! ouch! mama! w00t!
Humans arent bacteria.
You have ways of dealing with bacteria in the human body.
First you kill the bacteria.(war) Eventually that may cease to work, at this point your body develops immunity to the bacteria (it defends against it) the evolution occurs when the body finds ways to make that bacteria "GOOD" and useful to the human body. (this is the route we should take)
The Human Body even knows not to have war with something forever. It stresses the body (hurts the enviornment), it consumes resouces (money, time, effort), it kills many many cells (lives are lost)
The body has an evolution process, you are saying we shouldnt? we should be in perpetual war even when we have nano technology and biotechnology? The technologies which allow us to control nature?
I'm sorry but the rules HAVE changed. When technology reaches a certain point just like when the body is sick for a certain amount of time, it evolves, this is how we create vaccines!
Vaccines are the cure, you can have a Vaccine for aids, or you can keep taking AZT drug cocktails and wait until its time for you to die from aids.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Sure, we aren't the oldest COUNTRY in the world, but we *ARE* the oldest standing government in the world! Every other government in the world has been completely overhauled and/or been overthrown/changed systems at least once in the last couple hundred years. We, however, have been a democratic republic since 1776.
I guess that makes us the geezers of the world!
"I was telling the truth . . . from a certain point of view."
--Obiwan "the man" kenobi
id be a little pissed off, too.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
... Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals.
(1) Arrogance such as yours, assuming that you are human and others are not or that you are more highly evolved than others, contributes to war and violent behavior. Such arrogance and conceit contradict you claim of superiority. You share much with the murderers and thieves.
(2) Extreme pacifism is not necessarily biologically superior, it may or may not be a failed mutation. An ability to engage in violence may or may not be biologically superior. What is known is that mathematical models suggests cooperating with others until they betray you is a very successful strategy.
Besides, evolution doesn't apply to trolls.
Good day.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Are we more "civilized" today than 5000 years ago? I am not certain we are evolving morally. I would say we are not, or if we are evolving morally the rapid technological advances has given us power to destroy ourselves before we are ready. People today seem to think we are evolving in some biological moral way to something better. This is a philosophical (religious) belief that many today hold. I believe it is wishful thinking.
Note that the report on Kosovo was the basis of testimony used in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Streaming video of the testimony is here, see 13-14 March.
Be careful! A lot of people have used similar reasoning to justify violence and killing.
...and Civ2, Civ3?
I don't think that it's humans in general. If it was, we wouldn't be here, as we would have wiped ourselves out eons ago.
More it's our society. We encourage conformity, and discourage diveristy. This idea is not new, and certainly I did not orignate it, but I am doing my part to spread it.
Read it with an open mind. Pass it on if you find it insightful.
If killing someone is human nature, then I'm ashamed to call myself human. Better than human? Maybe not, but at least I'm trying.
This is the same argument vegetarians use, isn't it?
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
I liked this article a lot.
However it has one critical omission.Actual combat related death in wars are relatively few. With few exeptions, notably the truly appalling slaughter of combatants in the Iran-Iraq war and World War I,the real cost of wars is borne by civilians, usually poor people living in rural areas.
For example, much of the economic devastation in Africa, and America is directly caused by civil wars. These are often the extension of former super-power quarrels in Africa, and US corporate policies in South and Central America.
Note that these wars are often enthusiastically embraced by elements within the countries involved. I do not accept that all would be happiness and light if the USA were to sink beneath the waves, rather the opposite...
-- Anthony Staines
Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human?
I don't think "evolution" is the correct word here. It's a common myth that evolution has a goal--that "higher" life forms are always the most fit. Actually it all depends on the environment. Some successful creatures are simpler than their ancestors.
Of course our medical technology means that people who wouldn't have survived a couple of thousand years ago will lead long, healthy, reproductive lives. This isn't a bad thing, but perhaps it will prevent humans from evolving through survival of the fittest.
I can consider them animals
Humans are animals.
As this graph makes clear, the predominant form of conflict today is not old-fashioned wars between states, but civil wars. As a postdoc at Penn State working on the Correlates of War Project, specifically addressing civil war, I've found that civil wars are increasingly common, increasingly deadly on a per-capita basis, much more lengthy than interstate wars (33 months on average as opposed to only 18), are increasingly internationalized through outside military intervention (at least half of civil wars since 1945 have led other countries to send troops to fight in them), are harder to resolve through negotiation (about 1/8 of the time for civil wars vs 2/3 of interstate wars), and are more likely to be followed by massacres and/or genocide. For several years in the 1990s, the ONLY wars in the world were civil wars. In short, looking at the "statistics of deadly quarrels" without including civil wars is like looking at cancer without including tumors.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Given that the U.S. itself cannot be reasoned with, what religion would you say that the Americans are following that leads them to be such bullies on the global stage? Especially considering that more Islamists have died at the hands of Americans in the last fifteen years than the other way around.
Is there some great big shrine to an oil well somewhere in the U.S. that everybody bows down to? Or is it merely a green god that spreads his word in tens and twenties? Or maybe it's just the God that dwells in its navel that America keeps staring at.
But don't talk about how unreasonable religious fanatics are when the U.S. has a government in power that supports Musharaff's overthrowing Pakistan's democratically-elected predecessor, and is supporting another coup against a democratically elected president in Venezuela. I suppose this is just a logical extension of the fact that the president behind all this himself didn't get the majority of his own country's vote... think he's feeling lonely...?
It's agraculturist nature.
The caveman was perfectly willing to live off the spoils of the land. What good is more land, after all? It's only when you need more land to grow more crops to feed your increasing population that the "elimination of everything in your way" becomes important.
How many different tribes of Native Americans are (were) there? Why wasn't there only one? Because they lived off the spoils of the land, and had no reason to eliminate their neighbors. Pick any tribal culture that lives off the land. You'll find the same cultural diversity living in relative peace.
Sure they had skirmishes. If you don't keep your neighbors off balance, they might think you are weak.
It's not caveman nature. They were far less violent than us. It was only with the agricultural revolution that humans decided there is "one right way to live".
Daniel Quinn has some pretty interesting books on where (he belives) we came from, and where we are headed. One of my personal favorite articles (actually the transcript of a speech) is here.
i have seen this kind of work - forming connected graphs, rings , webs and nets
note: i am NOT discredting the effort or the conclusion but curious as to why these "graph" methods are so popular with people right now especially sociologists
let me try to give examples : debian keyring of trust, stanford web network, open source study [i dont have the paper with me now], the web of wars [given here] are some off the top of my head.
most of them are just number crunching statistics and that too many details looked over [example: civil wars here].
oh...and yes, they look pretty i guess....
Vikram
I think the authors have assigned links due to the Vietnam war to Thailand.
"Thus the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents.
...
war is mostly a neighborhood affair.
...
The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion.
...
At all costs avoid the clash of the titans."
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
This is our delicious Yakisoyba, of course.
YES!! WE HAVE YAKISOYBA!!!
DAMN YOU, RICHARD CRANIUM!!!
you suck at unreal tournament
This is 2002, Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals.
This is 1933, Non-Aryans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals.
The same arrogance you have shown has made it very easy for people like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Hirohito to kill off millions of their own people. The same arrogance you have shown turned the twentieth century into an abbatoir and is promising to make the twenty-first even worse unless the infants in the Middle East grow up soon.
It isn't helpful. It isn't intelligent. It isn't even halfway cogent. It demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of evolution and a level of arrogance we can afford very little of if we wish to avoid war.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
A. Its not arrogance to see that by harming no one, you are better for the world than those who harm everyone.
B. Pacifism leads to utopia, its the only way to get there, and the goal of every society is to reach this. Betraying is a moral issue, because I dont betray people, exploit people or harm anyone, if everyone else were like me also, we'd have world peace.
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Huh? Yes I am more evolved than Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Hitler, come on you think these guys are on my level? Maybe you can relate to them but i cant.
Physical evolution is not where I've evolved, its my mental and emotional evolution that you forget to take into account.
I'm not perfect, but i believe i'm better for the world than these guys I mentioned.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Nonsense. Maybe those emacs nutbars can be thought of as cult members, but those of us who use vi are simply intelligent, rational decision makers.
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
vegitarians have a valid point however, people need protien, you NEED meat, when we have the technology to create meat in a lab or via nano technology, then vegitarians will win.
We are almost at the point where eating real point will be pointless, but not quite yet. Atheletes cant really play sports eating soy.
I agree with vegitarians, but in terms of killing for food, its survival for some, especially atheletes who have to eat meat to be an athelete and do what they do to survive.
Its not the same with dealing with humans, theres enough alternatives to war with humans that war isnt needed. For a boxer like mike tyson theres no way hes going to knock out lennox lewis unless he eats a steak and patatoes meal every night.
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Survival of the fittest isnt the way evolution works on the greater scale.
We arent the fittest creature on earth, the roach is.
Its survival of the strongest, not the fittest!
The fittest are often people like jesus christ, peace making types who if they ran the world, we'd have no wars and would survive alot longer, than if stronger but more self destructive types who love war survive.
You see, people who dare to think out of the box, who may be evolved on the emotional level, they are considered weak because cavemen are more violent.
Survival of the strongest not the fittest.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
No, Hitler wasnt evolved. He didnt try to evolve non arayans, he wanted to "KILL" them.
Hows he evolved when hes the one getting violent? Attacking people shows weakness and instability.
Arrogance? Its not about being arrogant, if you want to be like that, fine everyone whos ever been a monk, every profit, ghandi, jesus, muhammed, buddha, all of them were arrogent.
Do you know why? Because they said the same stuff I'm saying, PEOPLE need to evolve, they need to seek enlightnment.
I'm not hitler, I'm not going to kill you because you arent on my level, Killing you is killing myself, because we are all human and we are one.
Its my responsibility to at least attempt to wake people up and get people to at least attempt to improve themselves.
Improve yourself, constantly, all your life, enlighten yourself. If you have ever attacked or bullied a person, its YOU who need enlightenment, learn to not be so unstable.
Look, its not my job to understand people who i cannot relate to, but i can tell them what they are doing wrong even if i dont understand why they do it.
Why do people murder? I dont fucking know, but i do know its wrong and i can tell you why.
I'm not arrogant, i'm trying to help, it seems everyone who tries to help, gets killed by some guys who call them arrogant.
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The problem is,
If you do evolve morally, and ever share it, people kill you. Every single person who is a moral genius, they seem to get killed, and its because just like in the times when jesus was killed, the bad still outnumber the good. The morally ignorant still outnumber the moral geniuses and until the balance shifts, and the pacifists or whatever the hell you want to call them outnumber the war loving hate loving idiots, well, the worlds headed for self destruction.
When you have a war filled with people who love to hate and who love war, these people will hate anything and that includes themselves, they will have war with themselves until they destroy themselves.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Now heres an interesting article, I thought, as I read...
Statistics of Deadly Squirrels.
Not quite sure what I was thinking.
--sig----
I have a username, but I dont feel like logging in.
Religion frequently serves more as a justification for war, rather than a cause of war. Nationalism is the root of war. There are very few wars fought over matters of principle, the principle is either stapled onto the side, or lost in the rush of nationalistic fever.
When the world's people view themselves as the world's people, then there can't be war. Let's look at the U.S. and Canada. It doesn't really matter what happens between the U.S. and Canada, they can't go to war over it because the people of these two countries don't really differentiate between each other.
War begins with this idea that "this is my nation, and therefore I will make sure no other nation is dominant over it." At its heart, this is an ingrained instinct for territorial defense and social grouping. The problem comes when people start viewing their social group as separate from another social group, and then everything seen and heard becomes biased in favor of ones own social group.
It's like sports teams. There are people who just like a sport, but those people are rare. Usually when people say they like a sport, they really mean they like a particular team or two, and they root feverishly for that team even though they have no personal connection to that team. If their team loses, they don't enjoy the fact that a game they really like was played, but instead lament the fact that "their team" lost.
Team mentality is very similar to nationality. People usually like teams that are from where they are from, just because. People feverishly support their own nation just because that's where they were born. And in this rush to feverishly "defend ones own," everyone forgets the macropicture of humanity.
Patriotism is inherently a great concept, it just gets so twisted and mutilated when people start thinking in war mode. As soon as the mental war mode is enabled, the entire world is viewed through a lense of false dichotomies, where everything is either black or white, us or them, dead or alive, free or enslaved. These false dichotomies bring out the most powerful emotions in people and the quest for the blood of the enemy begins.
As soon as emotions come into play, the brain has to find justifications for its hatred, justifications for why the enemy is different, why the enemy is evil, and why ones own nation is good and just and right. The mind will go to great lengths to find and believe these justifications, on both sides of every conflict, and we end up with two groups of people mindlessly rushing head-on to their mutual impending doom.
The only defense the world has against war is the free dissemination of people, culture, ideas, religions, and values. Only when the world achieves a near homogenous mix will it be difficult to find those differences which make it so easy for humanity to justify thoughts of war.
... all humans were illiterate, because writing had not been invented yet.
5000 years is NOTHING on an evolutionary time scale.
We're all still primates. We display primate behavior all the time. Our weapons have evolved far faster than we have.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I'm not sure the order of magnitude of the effect, but it would seem that the overall stratiegic and tactical theories that are in vogue at the time of the war directly relates to the casualties it produces. A lot of the death toll of the Great War can be laid at Clauswitz's (sp?) feet, while the teachings of Sun-Tzu seem to be SOP of today (special ops are used a heck of a lot more now than they were 100 years ago, and to greater effect).
A. Its not arrogance to see that by harming no one, you are better for the world than those who harm everyone
Your original quote: "Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals"
Believing yourself to be superior or more evolved is arrogant and that particular belief of yours is shared with many who have killed and committed genocide. It is one rationalization they use to commit such acts. Dehumanizing the enemy is a standard technique used to prepare soldiers for war. You are delusional to think that you are evolved beyond such people.
B. Pacifism leads to utopia, its the only way to get there, and the goal of every society is to reach this.
Pacifism leads to extinction, pacifists can only survive if non-pacifists protect them. Violence in the name of self defense, not personal gain, leads to a better society.
Yes I am more evolved than Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Hitler, come on you think these guys are on my level? Maybe you can relate to them but i cant
Given your statement: "Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human? I can consider them animals" your mental process relates with the above far better than you are aware of. You are in denial.
"No, its caveman nature. This is 2002, Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human?"
It's human nature to consider yourself better than everybody else.
Launching a war with at least 60 million plus deaths counts as evil to me.
;-) )
That's a little one-sided.
Was Regan "evil"? Is Bush "evil"? They're launched wars, not knowing what the outcome would be. If sixty million people had died, would they suddenly become evil then?
To pick a case close to home: the US felt justified making (not supporting) a war against Afganistan, because their leaders refused to hand over a "terrorist".
In World War I, Germany supported an ally (Austria) that was making war on Serbia for refusing to hand over a "terrorist".
Britian, France, and Russia supported Serbia's right not to have to answer to Austria (in CNN style purple prose, you in the U.S. might call them "on the side of the terrorists" -- I wouldn't). I think both sides had a case -- in many ways, no one was in the right.
War broke out.
By the end of the war, somehow the winning side claimed the right to own the best lands in Germany, and, by the way, to declare that the ugliest, bloodiest mess in human history was all Germany's fault, and the German people should be forced to pay for all the damages.
Without resources, and a sudden "war debt" they couldn't hope to pay, the German economy collapsed overnight.
Strangely enough, the German people a generation or two later grew up poor, unhappy, and full of hatred towards outsiders. Being told the ugliest war in human history is all your fault doesn't do much for a person's ego, or so I'm told.
So, the people are unhappy. But they're not crazy! When the Communist party becomes a majority party, the majority of the people think to themselves "better dead than Red!", and vote for the other guys. The Nation Socialists, or whatever. They're a bunch of right-wing wing nuts, sure, but at least they aren't the commies!
Then the non-commies took over martial law, lied to their people, inflamed their anger and their hate, and gave them a chance to fight against the people who had quite deliberately engineered their unhappiness.
They were going to take back the lands that had been taken from them! They were going to fight back, and not pay war taxes to the oppressors!
They weren't going to take it anymore! And this time, the British would pay!
( Sound familiar to anyone from the US? It should.
Was their reaction justified? No. Was it human? Yes. People lash out when they're hurt -- they blame others unfairly when they're blamed unfairly. People hate back when they're hated.
World War II was really just the foreseeable outcome of World War I. The atrocities and the death camps that took place are unforgivable, but they weren't even known to the common soldier at the front.
I'd hoped we'ld learn from history. But after watching CNN, and seeing the anger, and the vehemence on both sides of the "War on Terror", I wonder if we've learned anything about the value of human life.
Somehow, I don't think so. If we did, there would be less war planes in the world, and fewer starving children.
P.S. Of course Hitler was evil. But really, why hate him for launching a war, when that was the most forgivable of all his actions?!?
Rendering innocent human in death camps for soap, simply because of their religion -- now that counts as evil!!!
P.P.S: The Goodwin meter on this post just pegged.
:-)
I consider myself better than everyone whos dead.
I consider myself better than sperm which didnt make it into the womb.
I consider myself better than murderers and haters.
Not all humans are equal, i wish it could be that way but its not, humans who harm others along with the enviornment, arent as valueable to that enviornment or to others.
Do you value your best friend, an a random asshole, on an equal level? PLEASE!
There is a such thing as quality of character, some people are good people, some people just arent.
I feel sorry for people who have such problems, and YES THEY DO have a problem. I'd try to help them if they asked for it, its not that I think I'm better, I have problems too, the diffrence, my problems arent as great as theirs, so who do people want to be around, hitler? charles manson? or me?
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We can define it by how much of an animal you are.
Or we can define it by how enlightened you are.
Most people would choose to define being human, by an enlightened picture of buddha, jesus christ, or any of these men, most people do not want to assosiate being human with hitler, bin laden, and those men.
Pick a side.
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Well Humans who act like animals are animals, alot of humans in fact the majority of them act like animals.
My definition of being human is someone whos enlightened. This is my personal definition.
Now, just because the majority of humans are animals and I truely believe the majority of humans act like a bunch of apes, pandas, bears and lions just like the rest of these animals.
Well, why should I lie to myself and pretend they are on my level when they just arent?
Any human who is willing to commit murder, whos willing to steal, rape, and exploit, they are no diffrent than a beast.
Does that mean you have the right to disrespect them? No. Does that mean you have the right to kill them? No.
You respect cavemen equally to how you respect enlightened men.
But this doesnt change the fact that I feel most of the people in this world are cavemen, You know its true, you hear about people killing each other every day, you see what goes on, you can live in denial, you can try to accept people you could never relate to, or you can accept the fact that you'll never understand them and they are apple and you are oranges and that you are two completely diffrent species of human.
They have traits which you dont have.
You have trais which they dont have.
By this, I mean one group is naturally violent and self destructive, one group is naturally peaceful and loving.
Theres no in between here, so you have to take a side on this issue, either you are peaceful, or you arent.
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Protect them from what?
If theres only pacifists theres nothing to protect us from!!
Its the non pacifists who create war, crime, hate and everything bad in the world.
Tell me, if you are a pacifist, and theres no hate in the world, whats going to kill you? The only thing you'd have to worry about are the natural elements, and the animals, and we've had that in check for thousands of years now and that has nothing to do with human nature, thats survival.
Violence in the name of self defensive = pacifism.
I dont attack anyone, but if someone attacks me i'll defend myself. I think 99 percent of the population would defend themselves as well if in the same situation.
The diffrence is, a Pacifist is never the one ATTACKING.
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Because I refuse to assosiate myself with predetors.
Yes alot of people are like that, some people have evolved past that.
I dont have those instincts, some people do, who will win?
Fact is not every human has the same instincts, it starts off the same, everyone knows how to crawl, drink milk and speak, but thats about it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Such arrogance and conceit contradict you claim of superiority.
Belief in one's superiority is evidence of inferiority?
I've heard that one before. It's funny every time.
We need to learn to mind our own business and if a country wants to not be capitalist then let them not be.
Somebody mod that up. US refusal to let Cuba go its own way damn nearly led to WW3 in the early 1960s.
I actually agree with you entirely and, presumably, we already have that technology. I would much rather be a "killing-free" meat-eater than the killful (?) meat-eater that I am. I'm waiting for this to be available at Black Angus.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
I haven't checked all countries, but my very own, Spain, is shown to have been at war with some (but not all) Latin American countries, and also Cuba and the US; if the Spanish-American war of 1898 accounts for that link, then I guess Philippines, who was lost to Spain in the same war, does also. Besides, if the Morocco link is due to the independence from Spain, in the 50's, then Equatorial Guinea should also be included in that link...
There are also other links I can't fathom: Australia against Thailand? Ah, yes, that was the famous III oz-thai war over the debut of "The Beach"... It would really help if it would be possible to access the data over which that graph is based...
It's just a BloJJ
If you are the only person in the room - there is no chance for conflict with anyone else in that room. If there is another person in the room - there is a chance for conflict. Like chemical reactions; conflict goes as the square of the density of the reactants.
What is remarkable is not that there are wars - but that there is not a continuous war with everybody fighting all the time.
Given the possibility for conflict - people actually get along really well the vast majority of the time - if they didn't we couldn't exist.
If war were a common occurrence it wouldn't be newsworthy; the news is reserved for extraordinary events.
The problem with improved communication is that in effect - you expand the size of your 'room' which increases the number of people who are inside of it - thus greatly raising the chance of conflict.
If I don't write anything here there is zero chance of my ideas creating conflict with other poster's ideas. In a very real sense isolationism is the only way to prevent conflict - of course there is an enormous price to be paid for isolationism.
Show me any species of creatures which exist on this planet without conflict - there isn't one - there can't be one; life itself is in conflict with death.
The United States is a scary place in which to live!
Fitness, in this context, is a biological term. It annoys the pedant in me when people take a term, remove it from context, apply a different context's definition to it, then reapply the newly defined term to the old context. You've done it with clones, and you've done it with fitness. Please stop.
Oh that's right, it's not really a fucking war, so there isn't any fucking data.
There is no known enemy, just a behaviour that is being outlawed. At any given point anyone may or may not be "the enemy"
What a crock of shit when compared to REAL wars.
Aye man. Whay-aye.
You are an idiot. Shut up.
You stupid pig fucker. Shut the hell up or I'll shoot you in the head.