An Evolutionary Perspective on War Heroism

Humans are one of the most cooperative and altruistic species on the planet. At the same time, humans have a long history of violent and deadly intergroup conflicts or wars. Recently, contemporary evolutionary theorists have revived Charles Darwin’s idea that human in-group altruism and out-group hostility might have co-evolved. Groups with more cooperatively aggressive men, they suggest, were more likely to prevail in the frequent lethal quarrels of human pre-history, and these men, therefore, were more likely to have passed on their genes. After a short introduction to evolutionary perspectives on war heroism, we describe selected characteristics of 988 modern war heroes, the American Medal of Honor recipients of WWI, WWII, the Korean and the Vietnam War, and discuss whether an evolutionary perspective can help us understand why these men risked their lives ‘beyond the call of duty’.