Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: War and peace since life began: toward a unified evolutionary theory of intergroup relationships

Workshop 2021/2022

War and peace since life began: toward a unified evolutionary theory of intergroup relationships

23.–24. September 2021

Intergroup conflict has been proposed as one of the major forces shaping the evolution of social behaviour in biological systems, and is a pervasive and often destructive force in the life of modern humans. Yet nature also shows that peace and cooperation between distinct groups is possible, from teams of genes to human societies. An evolutionary approach has the potential to provide a coherent explanation for these patterns of war and peace at different levels biological complexity and in different human contexts. This workshop will draw together researchers working on a range of social organisms and human systems to take the first steps toward a general evolutionary theory of intergroup relationships.