An extra-fine fountain pen would be perfect. Modern European or American nibs tend not to be as fine as they were in the past. If you want something really fine, I'd recommend either a vintage pen such as a Parker 51. Or a Japanese pen such as a Pilot / Namiki. Or you could go with a custom extra-fine nib made by a nib expert such as Richard Binder. A fountain pen is not a cheap option but nor does it have to be extremely expensive. And it's a myth that (as someone posted here earlier) no one else can write with your fountain pen once you have "broken it in". There's really no breaking in required.

I have about a dozen fountain pens and I like them so much that I rarely write with anything else.

Yes, it does look like an attempt to get publicity. I tried the game and it's actually quite well done. I don't really see why TFA is so disparaging about it. I found it rather amusing -- or perhaps I am just easily amused.

That's an interesting point. Mary Douglas, who in the 1950s studied the Lele tribe (10,000 people in what was then the Belgian Congo) reported that they expressed incredulity that grown men would ever come to blows over any topic other than women. This has been interpreted by some people as evidence that they were not very warlike. But there might have been taboo involved. Or perhaps they were joking.

I see what you are saying but my definition was deliberate. If we do not specify that we are talking about group violence, we cannot distinguish between war and murder. And I'm not arguing that murder can be eliminated. I was originally objecting to someone's rather casual statement that war is human nature.

Well, my objection was that you were assuming an unproven innateness and you are still assuming that innateness, aren't you? I mean, you describe a mechanism that would work in a world where people can only be pacifists or killers, and they are assigned to one or other category by genetics. And I understand that you are deliberately simplifying the situation to describe the mechanism but what is missing is the evidence for any kind of innateness at all.

Yes, that's a good point. My point was that this type of behavior is not as common as some popular science in the press has suggested, but you are quite right -- in the right circumstances, chimpanzees will go to war. Your ant example is also a good one (and there may well be other examples among social insects, but I'm not aware of any). Still, war in the rest of the animal kingdom (i.e., among non-humans) is really quite uncommon.

I'm talking specifically about war: the resolution of conflict using lethal group violence. Not about the strong dominating the weak, nor about self-defense, murder or slavery. I did not deny that humanity has a darker side. I was objecting to the idea that war is because of "human nature". I think the case for that is unproven because:

1. The archaeological record shows that there is no evidence of warfare before 10-13k years ago. Someone in a different branch of this thread objected that that might be because the human population was so sparse back then. It's an interesting idea and I plan to do some reading on that.
2. There are human cultures that lack war (the !Kung of the Kalahari). Would you agree that if there is a human culture where groups of humans live near each other without war, war cannot be "human nature"?
3. People often do not want war and are tricked into accepting it by leaders using organized propaganda who know that they must find a pretext for war (for example, the Tonkin non-incident, or the Iraqi WMD debacle).
4. There's another interesting book called 'On Killing', by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He argues that, until military forces started to psychologically condition soldiers using video games and more realistic weapon drills, most soldiers did not fire their weapons or aimed over the heads of the enemy. Dave Grossman is a lecturer at West Point.

I do not believe that we can end conflict. In fact, as an enthusiastic supporter of pluralism I think conflict can be a good thing. But I do believe we can eliminate war as a means of conflict resolution.

The Russian link would be fine. I read Russian.

OK, I will read a paper copy of that 'Science' article at the library (the link you provided leads to a paywall). And I will look for the oxytocin articles.

By the way, in case I was unclear, I am emphatically not making a Rousseau-style "good savage" argument. My point is that warfare is not universally present in human culture, and therefore cannot be explained as "human nature" (it was my objection to that idea that spawned this series of replies). So the presence of warfare in "paleolithic" cultures does not prove the point either way. It's the cultures (e..g., !Kung) that reportedly do *not* have warfare that are interesting from my point of view.

One other thought:

Have you seen the bonobo literature? It doesn't correspond to that description at all. They often resolve conflicts with sexual contact, not just within their group but also with other groups of bonobos. I'm not aware of any eyewitness accounts of bonobos killing other bonobos, as individuals or as a group.

John Horgan (in 'The End of War') cites the !Kung of the Kalahari desert as an example. However, there's also a book by Lawrence Keeley ('War before Civilization') that argues they were warriors in the past. To me, this is all the more interesting: they appear to be a culture that had war and got rid of it.

The problem with that argument is that if genome and culture develop in lockstep, then either 1) there cannot be any significant differences between cultures, or 2) there must be significant, culturally-determined genetic differences between cultures. But there clearly are differences between cultures, so it can't be 1). And humans are not genetically diverse enough for 2) to be plausible.

Let's define war as lethal group violence within a species. There are some limited examples of this in chimpanzees. Where else in nature would we find it?

We would look for skulls that had been bashed in with blunt tools, or ribs damaged by sharp tools, in significant enough numbers that we would know that we were looking at group violence, not just one-on-one. That is what does not show up in the archaeological evidence until 10k-13k years ago.

I'd be really fascinated if you would point me to the evidence. I read the John Horgan ('End of War') book in fact-checking mode, seeing whether I could find holes in his evidence. If you have this evidence, it would indeed be a hole. Bear in mind that "violence from other humans" is not good enough. We are talking about war, not murder. It must be group violence.

Yes, this is possible, and an interesting argument. If we found a culture who lives in proximity to its nearest neighbor, but does not engage in war, would the argument be able to accommodate that?

Cave paintings date back to around 40,000 years ago. The first known musical instrument was around 25,000 years ago. I think those items are evidence of "real civilization".

You are assuming that the absence of war means "peaceful, harmonious society". It's likely that there has always been conflict, and always will be. The question is how that conflict gets resolved. It does not have to be (and has not always been) through war.

I challenge you to read the book (Horgan -- 'End of War'). It's a quick read and his points are well made.

Human nature implies innateness. The innateness of war is unproven and I would argue that there is plenty of evidence that war is not innate (cultures that do not go to war, the majority of individuals who are reluctant to wage war).

In a cumulative total of 215 years of observation by researchers, there have been 17 instances of lethal group violence by chimpanzees. So yes, there is group violence by chimpanzees against other chimpanzees but it is not as common as some might imagine. And it has been suggested that some of these confrontations were the result of habitat loss (caused by humans).

I'm not aware of any other species who go to war (I'm defining war as lethal group violence within a species). Note the "within species" part, so hunting does not count. Can you suggest any?

Your logic with regard to evolution is circular. My point was that war is not innate (human nature), but a cultural phenomenon. You are arguing that war is inescapable because the winners of war will breed more. And there will be more winners of war to breed because war is inescapable. But you are assuming an innateness that is unproven. I would argue that, since most people are reluctant to wage war (see Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book: 'On Killing'), and there are cultures where war is unknown, war cannot be innate.

Warfare is not human nature. It's the way that our culture has developed. The first archeological evidence of warfare is from 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, long after homo sapiens reached anatomical modernity (which was around 200,000 years ago). And we have archaeological evidence of other cultural activity (such as cooking, religion, music, and burials) that goes back much further, which suggests that it's not merely a case of our not *yet* having found the evidence of earlier warfare. Also, there are human societies that do not wage war.

It's an important distinction because if war truly were human nature it would mean that we will *never* be rid of it, and there would be no point in trying. Whereas cultural features can fade away over time.

There's a very well-argued book on this topic: 'The End of War' by John Horgan.

I followed an unusual path into programming. I did various jobs before joining a large company as a trainee programmer. After a couple of years as a programmer, I left and did CS degree. In my first job after graduating, I immediately started finding the stuff I learned in school directly useful in my job. One of the first things I worked on was a parser that used a state transition network. I would never have known to use that approach to the problem before I took CS, and I believe I would have got bogged down in the problem without that knowledge.

So it really depends what problems you want to solve. If you want a job generating reports from a database, a CS degree is probably overkill. I in no way mean that as an insult to people whose work involves database reports -- I've done plenty of that too. But if you also want to solve more challenging programming problems I think a CS degree is a good way to go.