Peter Frost and others have written about this process and talked about the extent to which it is genetic.
There is a great deal of genetic predisposition towards violence. If you live in a small tribal society and are violent, you can be the top guy around. That same predisposition in a lawful society will send you to the gallows though.
So the Romans, originally themselves fierce and brave warriors, after centuries of strong and effective government, weeded out their most violent men. The same men who made them fierce warriors would probably also be the most likely to flip their shit and murder someone during peacetime. So they would be executed by the state.
Reading later Roman writers you can see how the entirety of Roman society became less belicose and more refined, people wanted to fight less and wanted to enjoy carnal pleasures more. To the point that Romans had to conscript recently conquered barbarians into their armies.
Well, eventually Rome fell to these same barbarians, but they too set up governments and over time, you see the bellicose German tribes turned into todays Germany which welcomes invaders with open arms and cash payments.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/07/...ation.html
Frost has written a lot about how this process played out in other European states that have enjoyed effective government for centuries on end, how homicide rates have steadily dropped over the past 1,000 or 800 years, as the records permit us to see. Here we see the homicide rate in England over time. Frost cites estimates that from the year 1,200 AD onwards, England executed about 0.5% of its male population a year, undoubtedly most of them being themselves among the most violent of their own era. That process over generations was able to genetically pacify Britain.
![[Image: eisner-england.jpg]](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XITLSeWCIxg/UMNga5pTOxI/AAAAAAAAAbg/T112rVCtGAo/s400/eisner-england.jpg)
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2012/12/...urope.html
Further reading on the same subject:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/11/2...-violence/
There is a great deal of genetic predisposition towards violence. If you live in a small tribal society and are violent, you can be the top guy around. That same predisposition in a lawful society will send you to the gallows though.
So the Romans, originally themselves fierce and brave warriors, after centuries of strong and effective government, weeded out their most violent men. The same men who made them fierce warriors would probably also be the most likely to flip their shit and murder someone during peacetime. So they would be executed by the state.
Reading later Roman writers you can see how the entirety of Roman society became less belicose and more refined, people wanted to fight less and wanted to enjoy carnal pleasures more. To the point that Romans had to conscript recently conquered barbarians into their armies.
Well, eventually Rome fell to these same barbarians, but they too set up governments and over time, you see the bellicose German tribes turned into todays Germany which welcomes invaders with open arms and cash payments.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/07/...ation.html
Frost has written a lot about how this process played out in other European states that have enjoyed effective government for centuries on end, how homicide rates have steadily dropped over the past 1,000 or 800 years, as the records permit us to see. Here we see the homicide rate in England over time. Frost cites estimates that from the year 1,200 AD onwards, England executed about 0.5% of its male population a year, undoubtedly most of them being themselves among the most violent of their own era. That process over generations was able to genetically pacify Britain.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2012/12/...urope.html
Further reading on the same subject:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/11/2...-violence/
Quote:Quote:
In 1300 the homicide rate was about 50 per 100,000 people, or 0.5 per thousand. Homicide must have caused on the order of 1 to 2 percent of all deaths and a much higher proportion of deaths of young adult males. Our assumption of a Normal distribution of the underlying trait immediately implies that the threshold was 3.3 standard deviations greater than the mean (from any table of the Normal distribution). Natural selection, social selection we would say in this case, disfavors homicide and the distribution is shifted so that the homicide threshold is surpassed by only 1 in 100,000 people rather than 1 in 2,000. By the year 2000 the homicide threshold is at 4.3 standard deviation from the population mean. In other words selection has moved the distribution 1 standard deviation in 700 years or 28 generations.