Afghanistan, Evolution, and War Part II Save for later Reblogpost

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The Bamiyan Buddhist Statues 

The Bamiyan Buddhist statues were two large statues of the Buddha, 35m and 55m high, respectively, that were found in caves in a remote part of the Bamya province of Afghanistan. They were destroyed by the Taliban using explosives in March of 2001. Using neo-evolutionary theory, along with game theory as I see it applying to evolution, I will analyze some of the literature on the site and explain its construction and subsequent destruction. Evolution is the longest running experiment that we know of, except possibly the Universe itself, in which case evolution is a sub-experiment within the longest running experiment that we know of. Hominins are creatures derived from evolution, acting within an environment created by evolutionary processes using abilities given to them by evolution. Evolution is the process that brought us grass, flowers, algae, HIV, eyes (which evolved independently dozens of times),[1] dinosaurs, flight (also evolved independently several times) and the duck billed platypus. To hold that a given anthropological claim should not be given to evolutionary scrutiny does not make sense. Of course hominins are evolutionary actors in a long running genetic game that has given them the ability to adapt environments and further the adaptation of individuals through external sources. An alternative means of interpreting any anthropological work should first insure that it is commiserate with evolutionary theory, not the other way around.

The Bamya province of Afghanistan lies along the famous “silk road” trade network connecting China, India, the Roman Empire, and Persia. Three of history’s great hegemonic civilizations share borders, or near borders with the region (China, India, and Persia), and nearly impassable mountain chain (even in modern times) lies to the Northwest. The Bamya province became a stopping off and juncture point for caravans travelling the silk road. As a trading hub, the area became developed and was influenced by the various civilizations that surrounded it, or whose wares travelled through it. The statues, and the Buddhist worship sites they are located in, demonstrate Sassanian, Indian, and Byzantine artistic and architectural influence.[2]

For a people to find themselves located at the crossroads of such powerful neighbors cannot be easy, and Bamya was invaded and sometimes conquered many times over millennia. These invaders introduced their cultural affectations, either through fiat or diffusion,[3] and the area and its institutions are hotly contested today. These facts are not odd given the process of invasion. It is not unusual for a conquering people to take brides from those they conquer,[4] and to give their own society’s practices primacy of place in the new land. Both the domination and the influence strategy are completely in agreement with evolutionary biology.

Evolution is, in essence, a series of finite games played within a larger, infinite game. Finite games always have an equilibrium point, but in the evolutionary game players enter and exit, conditions change, and the equilibrium point cannot hold completely true because no player can truly understand all the strategies available to them, nor all the strategies available to all opponents.[5] A society is a player, however, the societies themselves have differing factions, and each faction has factions or individuals within itself that are also engaged in a game within the larger game. The Persians may see themselves as a player, that is, they are trying to maximize their progeny and their progeny’s ability to survive. However, the Mowbeds (priests) of Persia may see themselves as a player playing a game against the military and the Persian royal family. This game can be played satisfactorily while still maintaining the upper hand against the Mauryan Empire of India for control of Bamyan society, though no one foresaw Dar al Islam storming across Mesopotamia into Persia and entering the larger game. These games within games fit nicely within the concept of kin preference, or an organism’s tendency to favor those closely related to it.[6] Both kin preference and the concept of games within games is summed up extraordinarily well by the oft repeated Arab proverb, “My brother and I against my cousin. My cousin and I against the world.”

The Bamiyan statues construction, and their destruction by the Taliban, are an example of game theory applied to evolutionary biology. Mauryans took control of the area shortly after it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BC. He had allowed the Seleucids, a group of fellow Greeks to rule the area. Alexander is shoring up his internal, political game, giving resource preference to his fellow kinsmen, while simultaneously limiting the number of players. The Mauryans were an Empire on the Indian sub-continent, and Bamya was given to them to control (as was the entire Hindu Kush region).[7] This is an excellent military, political, and therefore evolutionary strategy. Governing any larger area, particularly before near instantaneous communication (i.e., the telegraph, telephone, et cetera) is extremely difficult. The greater the cultural divide, the harder it can be to govern a conquered territory, the greater the risk of revolt, or of another power entering to seize control. Allowing an outside, different power to assume the responsibility for managing these problems places the attendant risks of game failure on the additional power, as well as providing a buffer zone should an outside entity, in this case the Chinese, seek to move into their territory.  The Seleucids understood that the risk of losing the evolutionary game is to be destroyed altogether. In any mixed strategy, the domination of one player can result in other players losing or discovering new ways to maximize their reproductive potential at the expense of other players. The written, archeological, and DNA record is full of instances of whole societies destroyed, massacres enacted, and genes replaced. The Seleucids are demonstrating a superb understanding of the rules of the larger game. 

Religions can play a cohesive force in any society, and cohesion leads to perceptual homogeneity, which leads to higher levels of social trust, cooperation, and peace.[8] The Mauryans introduced Hinduism and Buddhism to the Bamyan region. These would be the dominant religions in what is now Afghanistan until the introduction of Islam in the 7^th Century AD and did not seriously fade until the 11^th Century.[9] This added a method of stabilizing the society internally, as within the society given individuals are playing a game with a similar set of cooperative rules. Hinduism has a hierarchy that is certainly imperfect, however, it can lead to social stability and prevention of labor shortages. The Roman Empire, for example, had to pass a series of laws holding the children of tax collectors into their father’s profession, and feudalism also sought to lawfully prevent labor mobility.[10] This allows the ruling class to clarify the rules of their internal game, preserve their access to greater resources, and insure stability for their progeny’s survival. Conquering a territory provides the males of the conquering society access to more females, thus giving them not only greater potential to reproduce, but more genetic diversity within their own lineage. Societies with constricted access to females are more violence prone,[11] and obtaining them from an outside source can also relieve pressure within a society. From the point of view of the conquered, the females would seek more dominant, powerful mates with access to greater resources to insure their offspring’s survival, with the same benefit of genetic diversity. For those males that remain in the conquered territory and are given the opportunity to mate, it would follow that they would adopt those trappings of their rulers that they are able to, as they do seem to indicate a measure of superiority.

The monastic life, too, can be beneficial from an evolutionary point of view. Moral societies tend to be more productive, this makes sense if every individual within the society is given a definite set of rules by which they can maximize their ability to reproduce and those rules proscribe intra-group violence, competition can be diverted into creating more resources for the group as a whole. Effective reproduction may involve some of an organism’s offspring foregoing reproduction, and assisting their genetic relatives to reproduce. It is no wonder that the world’s great religions concern themselves much with who is having sex with whom, and under what pretenses. Though this may not be the prime factor in intra-human violence, competition over mates is certainly a critical factor in societal violence. Even in modern industrialized societies, fights are more likely to occur, and more likely to be violent if a female is present.[12] Rules may need to be shifted, or reinforced, however. In the United States we derive moral authority from movie stars and professional sports players. In Buddhist societies, monks, who have taken a vow of chastity, can contemplate the society’s moral structure within a pre-existing framework. By practicing chastity, the monks have, to a degree, removed themselves from the actual competition for mates. Simultaneously, they are likely to have blood relatives within their society. Not only have they cleared a more direct, conflict free path to mating for those that are genetically similar to them, they can provide a rubric by which the society can enjoy greater stability and less violence, thus furnishing conditions which make the survivability of their relatives’ offspring more likely.

An organism as highly adaptable as hominins would have to have an inherent, developed ability to judge the strategies of its competitors and apply counterstrategies to its own behavior. It is not a coincidence that Islam has embedded in it such hardline approaches to artistic expression, human sexual behavior, and the conduct of women in particular. Islam arose among the dying ashes of the Persian and Roman Empires. The same people of the Arabian Peninsula had been used by both the Romans and the Persians as mercenaries against their respective empires for centuries.[13] A nomadic people could easily observe those two consumptive behemoths and come to the conclusion that decadence is what drove them to be so easily destroyed, particularly as the more morally structured Byzantines held against conquest for an additional 800 years.[14] Early Islamic art is devoid of graphic representation,[15] though graven images are proscribed in the Old Testament, this has typically been held to mean images that are intended to be worshipped (it is interesting to note that both Judaism and Christianity have had sects that developed a similar approach to images as does Islam when threatened from the outside). Having taken huge swaths of territory and resources from their former employers, the new Muslim masters sought to readjust the conquered territories to a winning strategy.

This brings us to the Taliban. Destroying the Bamiyan Buddha statues is certainly in accordance with uncompromising Wahhabi doctrine.[16] It remakes the strategy of the player. If “the hand the rocks the cradle rules the world,” it is necessary to create an environment that is unflinching in its mastery. Many Taliban fighters are not Afghani at all, but from Saudi Arabia (KSA), Qatar, and other majority Muslim countries. Countries, it should be noted, where polygyny is still practiced and therefore competition for a wife can be quite stiff. Using explosives to remove the Buddhas from the landscape reinforces the new tribe potential that already acquired mates have been brought into, and is representational as well. It is not unusual for males of a species to kill the offspring of another male. Gorillas, lions, bears and wolves all practice this form of infanticide. Though male lions will aggressively and vengefully defend their own (or a male they have formed a coalition with) young, a lioness will not go into heat after her pride has been taken over until the incoming male kills any juveniles remaining in the pride.[17] Blowing up statues is a representational killing of the society’s former offspring.

Societies solve the problems they are confronted with whilst trying to solve the ultimate problem, survive to reproduce and not be overtaken by other societies engaged in the same struggle. This is the infinite game. This game can be viewed as a series of shifting, finite games within games governed by evolutionary biology. Though statues are certainly important and mean many different things to different people, their construction and subsequent destruction, as well as the need to preserve them, is fitting within clearly established scientific principles.

[1] Land, M. F., & Nilsson, D. (2012). Animal eyes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[2] Lluveras-Tenorio, A., Vinciguerra, R., Galano, E., Blaensdorf, C., Emmerling, E., Colombini, M. P., . . . Bonaduce, I. (2017). GC/MS and proteomics to unravel the painting history of the lost Giant Buddhas of BÄmiyÄn (Afghanistan). Plos One, 12(4). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172990

[3] Dupree, N. H. (1972). An historical guide to Kabul. Kabul: The Afghan Tourist Organization.

   Puri, B. N. (2007). Buddhism in Central Asia. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

[4] Miller, A. S., & Kanazawa, S. (2008). Why beautiful people have more daughters: From dating, shopping, and praying to going to war and becoming a billionaire–two evolutionary psychologists explain why we do what we do. New York: Perigee Book.

[5] Nash, J. F., Jr. (2015). Non-Cooperative Games (Doctoral dissertation, Princeton, 1950). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Retrieved from https://www.webcitation.org/6YloKPaFj?url=https://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf

[6] Nolin, D. A. (2011). Kin Preference and Partner Choice. Human Nature, 22(1-2), 156-176. doi:10.1007/s12110-011-9113-9

[7] Dupree, N. H. (1972). An historical guide to Kabul. Kabul: The Afghan Tourist Organization.

[8] Aksoy, O. (2015). Effects of Heterogeneity and Homophily on Cooperation. Social Psychology Quarterly, 78(4), 324-344. doi:10.1177/0190272515612403

[9] Puri, B. N. (2007). Buddhism in Central Asia. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

[10] Daileader, P. (2004). The early Middle Ages. Chantilly, VA: Teaching.

[11] Miller, A. S., & Kanazawa, S. (2008). Why beautiful people have more daughters: From dating, shopping, and praying to going to war and becoming a billionaire–two evolutionary psychologists explain why we do what we do. New York: Perigee Book.

[12] Ibid

[13] Holland, T. (2013). In the Shadow of the Sword. Random House USA.

[14] Daileader, P. (2004). The early Middle Ages. Chantilly, VA: Teaching.

[15] Holland, T. (2013). In the Shadow of the Sword. Random House USA.

[16] Baer, R. (2004). Sleeping with the devil: How Washington sold our soul for Saudi crude. New York: Three Rivers Press.

[17] Diamond, J. (2014). The Third Chimpanzee. London: Oneworld Publications.  

    Miller, J. A. (2015). Towards a Better Understanding of Dynamic Interaction Metrics for Wildlife: A Null Mode Approach. Transactions in GIS, 19(3), 342-361. doi:10.1111/tgis.12149

See Also (Not Directly Cited):

Higuchi, T., & Barnes, G. (1995). Bamiyan: Buddhist cave temples in Afghanistan. World Archaeology, 27(2), 282-302. doi:10.1080/00438243.1995.9980308