Empathy, Mirror-Neurons, Technology and War

Empathy, Mirror-Neurons, Technology and War

The inhibitory apparatus in place for 'professional' killer animals, those with teeth designed to rip and puncture flesh, jaws that are built to crush bones, claws intended to shred meat and capture prey, which prevent them from annihilating their own species is not in place for humans. Humans were not designed to be specialized killers, like panthers, lions, or tigers. Early humans, similar to other primates were largely foragers, scavengers, and opportunists. Nobel Prize winner and zoologist Konrad Lorenz notes that a human being is:

... Basically It was the first flint chiseled into a jagged point that became the human's bloody 'tooth and claw.' Technology made humans lethal, not evolution.

If there was no inhibitory mechanism, what then, stopped early humans from annihilating their own species? Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential thinkers of the Enlightenment would say it was innate 'pity' or compassion:

Such is the pure motion of nature, anterior to all manner of reflection; such is the force of natural pity, which the most dissolute manners have as yet found it so difficult to extinguish... It is therefore certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating in every individual the activity of self-love, contributes to the mutual preservation of the whole species. It is this pity which hurries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see in distress; it is this pity which, in a state of nature, stands for laws, for manners, for virtue, with this advantage, that no one is tempted to disobey her sweet and gentle voice: it is this pity which will always hinder a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or infirm old man.
Twenty-first century neuroscientists are more likely to call it 'empathy', a function of brain cells called 'mirror' neurons.