Of course, what is right and what is natural are not the same thing. It is certainly possible that a soldier who kills could be doing what came naturally even if it violated a deeply ingrained -- culturally ingrained -- sense of what's "right."
I'm not sure how to answer definitively the question of whether violence comes naturally to humans. But, in any event, the problem is not those who think that warfare is natural but those who argue that because it is, it is pointless to think that it can be stopped. Wilson, despite his belief that war is natural, also believes that it is wrong. In fact, he is a long-standing pacifist.
To him, understanding that war is natural is a key to stopping it. "Instead of treating it as pathology, we should treat it as a normal human response but one that has become extremely dangerous," he said. "When you were just having a few groups of males going out and spearing one another, for a few million years or so it was not quite the catastrophic behavior that it has now become."
On the subject of war, many seem guilty of what Wilson calls "the naturalist fallacy" -- the belief that because something is in our nature, it is therefore what we ought to be doing. It is not natural to eat with a fork or wear clothes. Yet that seems to have broad acceptance.
All of civilization is the struggle to rise above our base natural instincts -- even what we are hard-wired to do. We can make ourselves better. If someone slaps you on the cheek, I think it is unnatural to turn the other cheek. The natural thing would be to punch him very hard in the mouth. But is that always the better or even the more effective thing to do?
