title: Wars and increased solar-geomagnetic activity: aggression or change in intraspecies dominance?
abstract: Human beings are extremely aggressive animals who are emersed within a steady-state geomagnetic field. A small component of this field displays periodic changes in amplitude. Symmetrical lag/lead analysis (-6 years to +6 years) in the present study, involving annual global geomagnetic activity, inferences of solar activity, and the release of the total, global seismic energy indicated that the numbers of armed conflicts (wars) for the first half of the twentieth century were moderately associated (rs approximately .50; 25% of the variance) only with the global geomagnetic activity of the same year. When the residuals between the predicted annual geomagnetic activity from the solar cycle and the observed geomagnetic activity were allowed to enter the equations, a comparable proportion of the variance in numbers of wars was accommodated. A factor associated with geomagnetic activity might, it is speculated, modulate changes within emergent processes that control the relative dominance of large aggregates of humans. Wars may have been the more obvious manifestations of these changes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Persinger
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008280:Magnetics; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012930:Social Dominance; D019445:Solar Activity; D014857:Warfare