Is War Natural?

Old Dog may be right, people don't need a specific war gene, war just comes natural to the human species. What about peace, then, is that natural too? The farther you go back in history, the more war is accepted as a fact of life. Outside of few religious groups, the general public's interest in world peace seems to have originated after World War II. That was the most destructive war in history, and it caused a lot of people ponder that there must be a better way to run a world. Social animals fight among themselves a lot, but most of it is about personal dominance and, once the pecking order is established, the group settles down. I don't think that groups of animals routinely conduct organized warfare on other groups, but there are exceptions.

The wildlife management policy in Lake Superior's Isle Royale National Park is pretty much hands off and let Nature take its course. A couple decades ago the wolves had a population explosion, which threatened the moose population with extinction. If the moose had gone down, the wolves were sure to follow, but the park rangers did not intervene. The wolves resolved the problem themselves by the two largest packs waging a genocidal war on the smallest pack. I'm don't remember reading whether or not the two surviving packs turned on each other after the third pack had been exterminated but, last I heard, there was only one pack on the island, and they were in danger of dying out because of their lack of genetic diversity.

There is a seam in the concrete just outside our garage door that is usually inhabited by a colony of tiny red ants. They mostly stay outside and don't cause a problem, so I let them be. On at least two occasions in the past, I have witnessed the colony being over run by big black ants which, I assume, exterminated the red ants because I observed no ants coming and going for the rest of the summer. The black ants did not occupy the site, they just killed off the red ants and went on their way.

My hypothetical wife reports that, when she worked at the laundromat, people occasionally left their clothes in one of the machines, most likely by mistake. Sometimes the owners reclaimed their clothes in a day or two, and sometimes not. Any clothes that were not claimed after a year were donated to a local charity. Unclaimed dry cleaning was also kept for a year and then sold to the public for the price of the cleaning change.

I guess I was making a little joke with that self reliant thing. Although it's true that I have been pretty self reliant for as long as I can remember, and it's true that I took matters into my own hands at the age of 11, I have no evidence that the one thing led to the other. As we all know, correlation does not, in and of itself, establish cause and effect.