Human dominance and aggression are deeply rooted in our evolution and influence social and political behavior. Without conscious effort, these primal drives will continue to cause inequality and division.
Professor Jorge A. Colombo, MD, PhD, argues that as global conflicts increase and democracies face challenges, understanding how these instincts fuel division is crucial. In his book, A New Approach to Human Social Evolution, he explores how neuroscience, anthropology, and behavioral science offer new insights.
Colombo explains that dominance, survival instincts, and competition are hardwired into humans and still shape global politics, economic inequality, and social structures. Without conscious efforts to counter these instincts, we risk ongoing power struggles, inequality, and environmental destruction.
Understanding how ancient survival mechanisms shape human behavior is crucial today, especially with rising authoritarianism, economic inequality, environmental crises, and nationalism. Increased political polarization, resource conflicts, and the struggle for social justice highlight the need for education and universal values to overcome these instincts and create a sustainable and equitable society.
Professor Colombo, a former Full Professor at the University of South Florida and Principal Investigator at the National Research Council (CONICET, Argentina), explains that human behavior evolved from ancient animal drives focused on survival, social gain, and profit. These drives are deeply rooted in our basic neural systems and survival behavior.
Humans’ transition from prey to universal predator changed the brain’s organization. They also had to deal with the concept of mortality, so our core neural circuits (mainly in the basal brain) still contain our basic drives (reproductive, territorial, survival, feeding), basic responses (fight, flight), and thresholds for behavior.
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Due to brain plasticity, human brains develop new abilities over time, such as creativity, cognitive expansion, artistic expression, toolmaking, and verbal communication. However, these new traits didn’t eliminate ancient survival drives; they only diverted or temporarily repressed them. Humans are still influenced by ancestral demands like territorialism, reproduction, survival, secure feeding sources, dominance, and cumulative behavior, which often conflict with cultural drives.
Ancient survival drives remain in humans and are expressed in different ways. Fight and flight are still basic principles, and even under religious or mystic beliefs, aggressive and defensive behaviors emerge to defend or fight for peaceful beliefs, as shown throughout history.
Examples of dominance include:
- Politics: military oppression, propaganda, financial repression.
- Religion: punishing gods, esoteric threats.
- Education: punishment, thought process conditioning
Colombo argues that dominance through political, economic, social class, or military power creates privileged structures in society. As a dominant species with advanced cultural and technological strategies, humans have over-exploited natural resources, developed destructive weapons, fostered consumerism, and manipulated public opinion, resulting in poverty, deprivation, marginalization, and oppression.
Without education and the promotion of universal values, more communities will suffer from poor health, inadequate education, and poverty. Colombo points to AI as an example of an educational gap that reinforces socioeconomic disparity. He believes policies should promote a viable, multicultural, equitable humanity and a sustainable planet.
He suggests that humans must recognize their fundamental nature to change their ancestral drives. Profound cultural changes are only possible if humans face their primary condition.
Reference:
- Jorge A. Colombo. A New Approach to Human Social Evolution Persistence of Ancient Drives in Behaviour and Development. DOI: 10.4324/9781003571544
