The upcoming Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis, February 16 – 20, 2006, will have at least one paper session relating to human propensities for peacefulness.

One of the programs in The Human Origins and Culture Tract of the AAAS is titled “Man the Hunted: The Origin and Nature of Human Sociality.” To find it on the AAAS website, search for the Human Origins and Culture Tract in the Symposia search window, then click on the Man the Hunted program. It will be held on Sunday, February 19, 8:30 to 10:00 AM. Among the six papers scheduled for this program, the second, titled “Niche Construction, Complexity and Cooperation: Modeling Human Evolutionary Responses” should interest visitors to this website.

The abstract by authors Agustin Fuentes, Katherine C. MacKinnon, and Matthew A. Wyczalkowski indicate that they will discuss how ecological pressures of foraging and predation may have affected the emergence of the genus Homo. The emergence of Homo, they argue, may have been marked by increased cooperation, sociality, and niche construction. Their paper will be presented by Prof. Fuentes.

The following paper, by Douglas Fry, is on “The Origin and Nature of Human Conflict Management.” His abstract indicates he will argue that the “man the warrior” presumption of much recent writings “rests on a heap of faulty assumptions,” as he puts it. Based on his reading of the anthropological and archaeological data, he feels that humanity could more appropriately be called “man the conflict resolver.”

Information on registering for the conference is available in the Annual Meeting website.