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"But the archeologist Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers -- which is our best source of evidence about this way of life -- has shown a rather different conclusion. Here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging or hunting and gathering societies. The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea highlands and the Amazon rainforest. ... If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been 2 billion deaths rather than 100 million."

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I believe that human sociobiologists have made a fundamental mistake in categories. They are seeking the genetic basis of human behavior at the wrong level. They are searching among the specific products of generated rules -- Joe's homosexuality, Martha's fear of strangers -- while the rules themselves are the genetic deep structures of human behavior. For example, E.O. Wilson (1978) writes: "Are human being innately aggressive? This is a favorite question of college seminars and cocktail party conversations, and one that raises emotions in political ideologues of all stripes. The answer to it is yes." As evidence, Wilson cites the prevalence of warfare in history and then discounts any current disinclination to fight: "The most peaceable tribes of today were often the ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future." But if some people are peaceable now, then aggression itself cannot be coded in our genes, only the potential for it. If innate only means possible, or even likely in certain environments, then everything we do is innate and the word has no meaning.

"Aphrikan maigc isn't much like Avrupan magic, or even Hijero-Cathayan magic. Avrupan magic is individual. Even when teams of magicians work together on something, they do it by each casting one particular spell that fits together with all the other spells, like the teeth on a set of gears fit each other. If one magician gets it wrong and his piece fizzles or it blows up, the big spell doesn't work, but it doesn't hurt any of the other magicians or affect their magic. Still, you have to be very precise to work as part of a team of Avrupan magicians, because nobody wants to waste all that effort just because someone else got it wrong.

Hijero-Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells. They're good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries -- at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero-Cathayan magicians who cleaned out the last few nests of dragons in Ashia and Avrupa and made all the land safe for people to live in.

Hijero-Cathayan magicians almost always work in groups, with all the magicians linked together by a spell so they can pool their power. The trouble is that if even one of the magicians makes a mistake, the whole spell can come apart, and when it does, it can hurt or kill every magician who is part of it. The leader of the group, who channels all that power, usually burns out after a couple of years, if his groupworks steady. I could never make out why anybody would take up magic at all, if they knew that was in store for them, but I guess the Hijero-Cathayans don't see it that way.

But different as they are, both Avrupan and Hijero-Cathayan magic have one thing in common: The main idea is to raise up and control enough magic to do things. That's why learning either of them starts the same way, with doing small spells, and then bigger spells, using more and stronger magic to do larger and larger things each time.

Aphrikan magic starts with looking, not doing. Instead of calling up magic and controlling it, Aphrikan conjurefolk find the places where magic is already moving and then guide it somewhere else. It means the Aphrikan magicians can work together a lot more safely and easily than Avrupan or Hijero-Cathayan magicians, because they don't have to match up their spells precisely, or worry about burning each other out. It also means that Aphrikan spells hardly ever work the same way twice. Sometimes what the magicians wants to make happen is too different from the way the natural magic is moving, and he can't get it to do what he wanted at all. Because of that, most Avrupan magicians think Aphrikan magic is unpredictable and unreliable."