enemy images: culture or biology

Enemy images: culture or biology
(Coordinator Comment)

Although the Seville Statement on Violence has shown, through the scientific evidence, that warfare is a cultural and not a biological behavior, there remains another persistent and related question: are enemy images cultural or biological in origin.

As I explain in The History of the Culture of War, for those who wish to find the evolutionary precursors of enemy images in our biological ancestors, I recommend that they begin looking at the origins of cultural rather than biological motivational stimuli, and a good place to begin would be the cultural phenomenon of punishment. To this day when political and military leaders call upon their people to "punish the enemy", they are drawing upon an image that is known by almost every human being from the behavior of their own family.