> -- In energyresources@yahoogroups.com, "dmathew1" wrote:
>
> cut
>
> Humans are also exceptionally violent to each other. You can verify
> this easily enough by reading your local newspaper or watching
> television. Humans are about a billion times more violent than the
> animals and this is the reason why civilization has constructed so
> many tools in order to restrain humans from harming each other.
> These tools are extremely powerful but not effective enough to
> prevent thousands of humans from dying violently every year.

"...Perhaps the most interesting and important result from the first
scientific surveys of this body of evidence is the conclusion that
deaths due to warfare have declined since the prehistoric era, and not
by just a little bit. Lawrence Keeley has estimated that a typical
tribe or chiefdom lost about 0.5% of its population each year, on
average, due directly to warfare....

"Now let's try a thought experiment. What if that same tribal rate
were true for modern states? In this purely hypothetical situation, we
would be seeing 165 thousand Canadian deaths every year from warfare
alone, 2.5 million deaths in the European Union, and 6.6 million in
China! Clearly nothing like this is happening."

http://tqe.quaker.org/2007/TQE159-EN-War.html

Steven Zoraster