Yet more anthropological explanations for "male violence"

From: offshore eddie (eddie_at_nospam.com)
Date: 07/26/04 

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 08:21:03 GMT

In this article an anthropologist insists that "male violence" is hard-wired
by centuries of evolution. He has a lot of good reasons for taking this
view and not the feminist men-are-just-the-product-of-their-culture view.
He cites male-on-male violence, violent behavior among other primates, for
example, to conclude:

   "On a purely biological level, the youths involved in
   Toews' killing may unknowingly have been acting
   out a primal instinct by weakening or killing potential
   rivals and thereby enhancing their own chances of
   survival. This, and not the specter of "evil," as some
   would have it, Wrangham says, lies at the root of
   almost all violence, including warfare."

But he is still too scared by his politically correct academic culture to
mention that females must have selected the most violent and aggressive
males as mating partners, without regard to their criminality, in order for
such traits to have won out in a Darwinian environment. Thus, we see many
women today seeking out the most "violent" and aggressive males, and there
is no condemnation of women for doing so. There is condemnation of sports
teams for condoning "violent" males, especially males who are "violent"
toward women, but no condemnation of the women who consort with such males.
Although not handsome, Donald Trump is a man of status, power and wealth,
but his aggressive business tactics are certainly not something women hold
against him. He could impoverish a hundred men and suffer no condemnation,
but if he slapped a woman he would be a pariah.

- (Offshore Eddie, 2004)

*********************************************************

March 22, 2002
Are our genes 'wired' for violence? Expert thinks it's a primal instinct
By Alex Tizon
Seattle Times staff reporter
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134424186_wrangham22m.html

No single theory can explain why a roving gang of boys descended on Tacoma
resident Erik Toews as he walked home from work one night in August 2000.
The boys, ages 11 to 19, beat Toews into a fatal coma. Police called it a
random attack. The oldest of the eight assailants was sentenced last month
to 26 years in prison. When given the opportunity to make a statement, he,
like the others, offered no explanation for the killing.

Invariably, after such crimes, social commentators lament the rise of youth
alienation or the glamorization of violence in the media. Community
activists blame the prevalence of deadly weapons. To the usual post-mortem
theorizing, add this controversial perspective: It's genetic.

Harvard author and anthropologist Richard Wrangham, in Seattle this week,
says that human beings, particularly young men, have a biological
predisposition for violence and that such behavior stems in part from a
primal survival instinct. This predisposition, he says, "is written in the
molecular chemistry of DNA," which is a technical way of saying it's
hard-wired into us.

On a purely biological level, the youths involved in Toews' killing may
unknowingly have been acting out a primal instinct by weakening or killing
potential rivals and thereby enhancing their own chances of survival. This,
and not the specter of "evil," as some would have it, Wrangham says, lies at
the root of almost all violence, including warfare. Wrangham says the Sept.
11 attacks and the subsequent war on terrorism can be explained through the
prism of this theory, which arises from the nascent field of evolutionary
biology. Violence, such as the kind visited upon Toews and the warfare
witnessed today in the Middle East, has been a constant throughout history,
occurring across race, culture and nationalit and even across species. In
fact, Wrangham's theories come from studying great apes, whose genetic
makeup nearly mirrors our own.

Tracing behavior
Wrangham is also a primatologist. He's in town this week to lend Ivy-League
weight to a chimpanzee-protection conference sponsored by the Glaser Family
Foundation (of RealNetworks' Rob Glaser) and attended by scientific
luminaries such as Jane Goodall and Stephen Wise. Wrangham's ideas,
presented in his book, "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human
Violence," are based on studies of chimpanzee communities in the wild.
Although released several years ago, the book continues to make its way
through scientific and academic circles, and not without loud dissent. One
critic called the book's thesis "titillating and simplistic." Others deemed
it dangerous, opening the way for a legal defense of ruthless killers. After
all, how can society blame any individual if violence is a genetic
imperative of our species?

The Harvard professor is part of an increasingly influential web of
scientists who trace all aspects of human behavior to evolutionary
selection. Their basic premise: People behave the way they do because their
ancestors made behavioral adaptations to survive that then were passed on.
Wrangham writes that modern humans are "the dazed survivors of a continuous,
5 million-year habit of lethal aggression."

"Demonic Males," co-authored by evolutionary biologist Dale Peterson, argues
that on the most basic level, primate (and therefore human) violence is
driven by the need to survive and procreate. The best fighters, the ones who
wield violence most successfully, are the most likely to reproduce.

Because humans and chimpanzees share nearly the same genetic package - their
DNA are 99 percent identical - Wrangham and a growing number of scientists
see chimpanzees as windows to the origins of human behavior. How chimps
behave, the theory goes, is probably how early humans behaved. But this is
exactly where many scientists disagree.

Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, says
Wrangham and Peterson make an incredible - and ultimately unscientific -
leap by linking the behaviors of chimps and humans. Marks says the
"connection," upon which the whole book is based, should be seen as merely
an "imaginative projection" by Wrangham and Peterson of human
characteristics onto chimpanzees. The authors, Marks says, never prove the
connection.

Waging war
Nevertheless, chimps, like the other great apes, have been widely shown to
have the capacity to feel and communicate complex thoughts and emotions, to
exhibit loyalty and affection as well as cruelty. Only in the past three
decades have researchers documented the kind of violence among chimps
traditionally ascribed only to humans - namely, waging war. Wrangham and
Peterson contend that homicide committed by roving bands of young males can
be seen as a primitive form of war, one that humans have practiced for eons.
The scientists refer to it as "raiding." It's committed by one group as a
way of weakening a rival community. In scenes eerily similar to the attack
on Toews in Tacoma, "Demonic Males" describes in vivid detail raids by
groups of young chimpanzee males who randomly select and beat to death
isolated members of other bands.

The Sept. 11 attacks, Wrangham says, conforms to the definition of a raid.
They occurred by surprise, made no immediate material gains and killed
members of the enemy. The goal was to weaken the United States. Wrangham
disparages as "naïve" attempts by U.S. leaders to characterize the enemy, in
this case Osama bin Laden and al- Qaida, as "evil."

"It is to a large extent just name-calling," he says. "Each side calls the
other evil. Both sides invoke their own gods. This explains nothing about
the roots of the conflict."

>From an evolutionary biologist's point of view, the conflict is a
consequence of resource competition and power balances (and imbalances):
Each side wants to secure more resources and more power.

Make love, not war
Wrangham does offer a way out of our genetic bind by citing the example of
another primate, the bonobo, also known as the pygmy chimpanzee. The bonobo
is the make-love-not-war sibling of the primate family. This primate rarely
fights with its own kind or with other animals but instead makes love
constantly and freely with friends, family and strangers. Food was more
abundant in the areas where bonobos lived, allowing the species to evolve
into a life of less struggle and isolation. In addition, females are equal
in stature and status to males, creating a more egalitarian society, and
tempering testosterone-driven (read: male) impulses toward aggression.

The hope lies in that primate societies, including our own, have the ability
to structure communities in a way that effectively checks violent behavior.
Some examples of human success: early 17th-century New England, early
20th-century Iceland and mid-20th century Malaysia among Semai tribal
members. All of these societies experienced strikingly low levels of
violence. Besides having great uniformity in genes and ideology, the other
main key was "controlling the young males" and not allowing them to become
emotionally and socially detached from the rest of the community. These
examples, Wrangham says, have been rare exceptions.

Alex Tizon can be reached at 206-464-2216 or atizon@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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