If war just comes naturally to us therefore it is in our genes. There may have been some confusion with the term war gene, making it sound like there is a particular gene like those pea genes that Mendel studied. A warlike tendency is something more complicated than that, probably several genes working together.
I had never heard of wolves going to war, but then they have one thing you need to go to war which is a pack mentality. You never see cats of any kind going to war. I guess bison have a pack mentality but you never see them going to war, so probably there is something more to that.
I believe there is a set of genes which cause aggression, seems like aggression can be measured and is found to oh, run in families, so it is likely to be genetically inherited. That doesn't mean the inheritor will be signing up for the army, maybe he will just hang out in bars and get in fights, or maybe he will make a million bucks with ruthless business tactics.
Ants seem to be slaves of their genes. They don't have any schools, they don't grow up with a mom and pop that might put ideas into their heads, they seem to just work. You don't see the queen making deals with her cronies and taking lavish vacations to that ant spa on the other side of the sidewalk. She just lays eggs until she is plumb worn out and dies.
I've read that maybe ants are best considered as each colony is a single organism. You know like those cells on your foot don't get tired of being walked on and walk out and form their own foot cell colony.
Chimps make war. If you were to raise some chimps in the lab and take away their warlike genes and put them out in the wild they would get wiped out by the other chimps because they wouldn't fight back. Gorillas are huge and kind of scary, yet they don't make war. Why doesn't some tribe of gorillas mutate their own set of war genes and make war on the other gorillas until they wipe them out and then there are no more peaceful gorillas? I don't know, Gorillas are strictly vegetarian while chimps like a bit of meat every now and then. Wolves eat meat and bison don't, but I don't know how far that goes.
Thomas Jefferson had this idea of the Injuns being like regular citizens of the United States. All you have to do, he told them is stop having all those consarn wars which interfere with regular trade and industry. But, they told him, these wars are how we pick our chiefs. How will we know who to make chief if we don't test their valor in warfare? Jefferson moved onto other matters.
Well I read that in a book somewhere, but brief internet research fails to back it up so I don't know. I did come across this about Thomas Jefferson though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_Native_Americans
I've never been a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. I don't trust those whose words stir our souls. I think are souls are better off unstirred.
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