Humanity, War, Evolution

The trend in the history of human warfare has been the involvement of larger and larger groups, for more and more abstract reasons, i. e. from between tribes over territory, to between religious sects over theological details, to between superpowers over Economic principles.  So, examination of war reveals in individuals not, as Hobbes posits, an instinct for Self-Preservation, but an identification with an increasingly larger group, for reasons that have less and less to do with survival.  In other words, even in the seventeenth-century, a more rigorous application of Hobbes' own Empiricist method to his privileged phenomenon, namely war, can lead to the conclusion that human history is determined by a collective Evolutionary principle, rather than by individual Self-Preservation.