“Violence Vanquished” Response * Do you agree or disagree with Pinker's idea about violence? Why or why not? * Using the ideas from Gilbert (surrogates, super-replicators, predicting the future) how can we encourage society to further decrease violence in the future? Should we? * What connections do you see between Gilbert's argument, Pinker's argument, and our topic of future studies?

I would say that I do agree that the rate of violence has substantially decreased, over the years since prehistoric history, but I ultimately would have to conclude that the rate of violence hasn’t been demarked to the status of miniscule, or, seemingly, vanquished. Violence is an act of aggression which demonstrates itself by stemming out of turbulent, hostile environments, and then spreads- quite like a pestilence growing from a natural and biological waste area. It can be used as an act to defy other individuals, or people, with intent to physically harm- and will generally incite more violence as a reaction.
True, violence ran rampant in ancient times, in circumference to the authoritarian police ruling of our present-day court proceedings, but this doesn’t exclude the decisions of individuals or groups to continually act out their aggression and frustrations in domestic areas, during sporting events, as a means to accomplish a crime against fellow humanity, or even as a riot against civil demonstrations. Violence is still enacted on every nation-state, by one-another, as a means to defeat the enemy in wartime scenarios, as Russia recently accomplished by invading, defeating, and occupying its ex-soviet country of Ukraine.
Daniel Gilbert’s ideology of incorporating a “super-replicator” into the problem of violence, throughout civilization’s history, would most likely be to incorporate a legislative and judicial system to enforce strict laws of