Science Quote by Arthur Keith

A scientist calling war the "main force" in human evolution is a deliberately cold provocation, and Arthur Keith knew it. The phrasing borrows the authority of physics: force as something measurable, impersonal, almost inevitable. It yanks moral debate out of the sentence. War isn’t framed as a failure of politics or imagination, but as a motor with a long track record. That choice of language is the subtextual power move: if war has been the engine so far, then appeals to human goodness start to sound like wishful thinking, not policy.

Keith was writing in a period when evolutionary ideas were being stretched from biology into social theory, often with grim confidence. Born in the age of empire and writing through the First World War and the rise of modern nationalism, he sat close to the intellectual currents that treated competition between groups as a kind of natural law. "Hitherto" matters: it implies contingency, a history up to this point, not an eternal commandment. The line carries a faint opening for change while still insisting that the past is dominated by organized violence.

The intent, then, is less to glorify war than to argue that peace projects must contend with the brutal fact pattern of human history. It’s a warning disguised as a diagnosis: if war has been the primary instrument shaping societies, then any evolving world that hopes to replace it needs a new force as strong, as organizing, and as socially binding as conflict has been.