Article on aggression...good read







Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA 1979 [abridged- 3020 words] [abstract- 360 words] - on human
aggression

Are human beings innately aggressive?

This is a favorite question of college seminars and cocktail party
conversations, and one that raises emotion in political ideologues of
all stripes. The answer to it is yes.

Throughout history, warfare, representing only the most organized
technique of aggression, has been endemic to every form of society,
from hunter-gatherer bands to industrial states.

During the past three centuries a majority of the countries of Europe
have been engaged in war during approximately half of all the years;
few have ever seen a century of continuous peace. Virtually all
societies have invented elaborate sanctions against rape, extortion,
and murder, while regulating their daily commerce through complex
customs and laws designed to minimize the subtler but inevitable forms
of conflict. Most significantly of all, the human forms of aggressive
behavior are species-specific: although basically primate in form, they
contain features that distinguish them from aggression in all other
species...

Theoreticians who wish to exonerate the genes and blame human
aggressiveness wholly on perversities of the environment point to the
tiny minority of societies that appear to be nearly or entirely
pacific. They forget that innateness refers to the measurable
probability that a trait will develop in a specified 'set of
environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all
environments. By this criterion human beings have a marked hereditary
predisposition to aggressive behavior...

Like most other mammals, human beings display a behavioral scale, a
spectrum of responses that appear or disappear according to particular
circumstances... Because there is a complex scale instead of a simple,
reflex-like response, psychoanalysts and zoologists alike have had an
extraordinarily difficult time arriving at a satisfactory general
characterization of human aggression...

Freud interpreted the behavior in human beings as the outcome of a
drive that constantly seeks release. Konrad Lorenz, in his book On
Aggression, modernized this view with new data from the studies of
animal behavior. He concluded that human beings share a general
instinct for aggressive behavior with other animal species. This drive
must somehow be relieved, if only through competitive sports...

Both of these interpretations are essentially wrong. Like so many other
forms of behavior and "instinct," aggression in any given species
is actually an ill-defined array of different responses with separate
controls in the nervous system.

No fewer than seven categories can be distinguished: the defense and
conquest of territory, the assertion of dominance within well-organized
groups, sexual aggression, acts of hostility by which weaning is
terminated, aggression against prey, defensive counterattacks against
predators, and moralistic and disciplinary aggression used to enforce
the rules of society.

Rattlesnakes provide an instructive example of the distinction between
these basic categories. When two males compete for access to females,
they intertwine their necks and wrestle as though testing each
other's strength, but they do not bite, even though their venom is as
lethal to other rattlesnakes as it is to rabbits and mice. When a
rattlesnake stalks its prey it strikes from any number of positions
without advance warning. But when the tables are turned and the snake
is confronted by an animal large enough to threaten its safety, it
coils, pulls its head forward to the center of the coil in striking
position, and raises and shakes its rattle. Finally, if the intruder is
a king snake, a species specialized for feeding on other snakes, the
rattlesnake employs a wholly different maneuver: it coils, hides its
head under its body, and slaps at the king snake with one of the raised
coils. So to understand the aggression of rattlesnakes or human beings
it is necessary to specify which of the particular forms of aggressive
behavior is of interest...

Continuing research in zoology has also established that none of the
categories of aggressive behavior exists in the form of a general
instinct over broad arrays of species. Each category can be added,
modified, or erased by an individual species during the course of its
genetic evolution, in the same way that eye color can be altered from
one shade to another or a particular skin gland added or eliminated.
When natural selection is intense, these changes can occur throughout
an entire population in only a few generations. Aggressive behavior is
in fact one of the genetically most labile of all traits... There is no
evidence that a widespread unitary aggressive instinct exists.

The reason for the absence of a general aggressive instinct has been
revealed by research in ecology. Most kinds of aggressive behavior
among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the
environment. Animals use aggression as a technique for gaining control
over necessities, ordinarily food or shelter, that are scarce or are
likely to become so at some time during the life cycle. They intensify
their threats and attack with increasing frequency as the population
around them grows denser. As a result the behavior itself induces
members of the population to spread out in space, raises the death
rate, and lowers the birth rate. In such cases aggression is said to be
a "density-dependent factor" in controlling population growth. As
it gradually increases in intensity, it operates like a tightening
valve to slow and finally shut off the increase in numbers...

Other species, in contrast, seldom or never run short of the basic
necessities of life... Such animals are typically pacific toward each
other, because they rarely grow numerous enough for aggressive behavior
to be of any use to individuals. And if aggression confers no
advantage, it is unlikely to be encoded through natural selection into
the innate behavioral repertory of the species...

The clear perception of human aggressive behavior as a structured,
predictable pattern of interaction between genes and environment is
consistent with evolutionary theory. It should satisfy both camps in
the venerable nature-nurture controversy. On the one hand it is true
that aggressive behavior, especially in its more dangerous forms of
military action and criminal assault, is learned. But the learning is
prepared. We are strongly predisposed to slide into deep, irrational
hostility under certain definable conditions. With dangerous ease
hostility feeds on itself and ignites runaway reactions that can
swiftly progress to alienation and violence. Aggression does not
resemble a fluid that continuously builds pressure against the walls of
its containers, nor is it like a set of active ingredients poured into
an empty vessel. It is more accurately compared to a preexisting mix of
chemicals ready to be transformed by specific catalysts that are added,
heated, and stirred at some later time.

The products of this neutral chemistry are aggressive responses that
are distinctively human... Territoriality is one of the variants of
aggressive behavior that can be directly evaluated by the new insights
of biology. Students of animal behavior define a territory as an area
occupied more or less exclusively either directly by overt defense or
indirectly through advertisement. This area invariably contains a
scarce resource, usually a steady food supply, shelter, space for
sexual display, or a site for laying eggs...

Close studies by zoologists of the daily schedules, feeding'
behavior, and energy expenditures of individual animals have revealed
that territorial behavior evolves in animal species only when the vital
resource is economically defensible: the energy saved and the increase
in survival and reproduction due to territorial defense outweigh the
energy expended and the risk of injury and death. The researchers have
been able to go further in some instances to prove that in the case of
food territories the size of the defended area is at or just above the
size required to yield enough food to keep the resident healthy and
able to reproduce. Finally, territories contain an "invincible
center." The resident animal defends the territory far more
vigorously than intruders attempt to usurp it, and as a result the
defender usually wins. In a special sense, it has the "moral
advantage" over trespassers.

The study of territorial behavior in human beings is in a very early
stage. We know that bands of hunter-gatherers around the world are
commonly aggressive in their defense of land that contains a reliable
food resource...

Areas defended by hunter-gatherers are precisely those that appear to
be the most economically defensible. When food resources are scattered
in space and unpredictable in time, the bands do not defend their home
ranges and in fact often share occasional discoveries of rich food
sources. The Western Shoshoni, for example, occupied an arid portion of
the Great Basin in which the amount of game and most plant foods was
poor and unpredictable. Their population density was very low, about
one person in twenty square miles, and hunting and foraging were
usually conducted by solitary individuals or families. Their home
ranges were correspondingly huge, and they were forced into a nomadic
existence. Families shared information on good pinon crops,
concentrations of locusts, and forthcoming rabbit drives. Western
Shoshoni seldom aggregated long enough to form bands or villages. They
had no concept of ownership of land or any resource on it, with the
single exception of eagle nests.

In contrast, the Owens Valley Paiute occupied relatively fertile land
with denser stands of pinon pine and abundant game. Groups of villages
were organized into bands, each of which owned sections of the valley
that cut across the Owens River and extended up the mountains on either
side. These territories were defended by means of social and religious
sanctions reinforced with occasional threats and attacks. At most, the
residents invited members of other bands, especially their relatives,
to pick pinon nuts on their land.

The flexibility displayed by the Great Basin tribes parallels that
occurring among other populations and species of mammals. In both men
and animals its expression is correlated with the richness and spatial
distribution of the most vital resources within the home range...

The biological formula of territorialism translates easily into the
rituals of modern property ownership. When described by means of
generalization clear of emotion and fictive embellishment this behavior
acquires new flavor- at once intimately familiar, because our own
daily lives are controlled by it, and yet distinctive and even very
peculiar, because it is after all a diagnostic trait of just one
mammalian species. Each culture develops its own particular rules to
safeguard personal property and space.

Pierre van den Berghe, a sociologist, has provided the following
description of present-day behavioraround vacation residents near
Seattle:

Before entering familial territory, guests and visitors, especially if
they are unexpected, regularly go through a ritual of identification,
attention drawing, greeting and apology for the possible disturbance.
This behavioral exchange takes place and is preferably directed at
adults. Children of the owners, if encountered first, are asked about
the whereabouts of their parents. When no adult owners are met
outdoors, the visitor typically goes to the dwelling door, where he
makes an identifying noise, either by knocking on the door or ringing a
bell if the door is closed, or by voice if the door is open. The
threshold is typically crossed only on recognition and invitation by
the owner. Even then, the guest feels free to enter only the sitting
room, and usually makes additional requests to enter other parts of the
house, such as a bathroom or bedroom.

When a visitor is present, he is treated by the other members of the
[vacation residence] club as an extension of his host. That is, his
limited privileges of territorial occupancy extend only to the
territory of his host, and the host will be held responsible by other
owners for any territorial transgressions of the guests ... Children,
too, are not treated as independent agents, but as extensions of their
parents or of the adult "responsible" for them, and territorial
transgressions of children, especially if repeated, are taken up with
the parents or guardians...

War can be defined as the violent rupture of the intricate and powerful
fabric of the territorial taboos observed by social groups. The force
behind most warlike policies is ethnocentrism, the irrationally
exaggerated allegiance of individuals to their kin and fellow
tribesmen. In general, primitive men divide the world into two tangible
parts, the near environment of homes, local villages, kin, friends,
tame animals, and witches, and the more distant universe of neighboring
villages, intertribal allies, enemies, wild animals, and ghosts. This
elemental topography makes easier the distinction between enemies who
can be attacked and killed and friends who cannot. The contrast is
heightened by reducing enemies to frightful and even subhuman status...


The proneness toward violent aggression is a good example that cultural
practices are directed to some extent by genetic traits favoring entire
groups while disfavoring the individual members that display them...

The particular forms of organized violence are not inherited. No genes
differentiate the practice of platform torture from pole and stake
torture, headhunting from cannibalism, the duel of champions from
genocide. Instead there is an innate predisposition to manufacture the
cultural apparatus of aggression, in a way that separates the conscious
mind from the raw biological processes that the genes encode. Culture
gives a particular form to the aggression and sanctifies the uniformity
of its practice by all members of the tribe.

The cultural evolution of aggression appears to be guided jointly by
the following three forces: (1) genetic predisposition toward learning
some form of communal aggression; (2) the necessities imposed by the
environment in which the society finds itself; and (3) the previous
history of the group, which biases it toward the adoption of one
cultural innovation as opposed to another.

To return to the more general metaphor used in developmental biology,
the society undergoing cultural evolution can be said to be moving down
the slope of a very long developmental landscape. The channels of
formalized aggression are deep; culture is likely to turn into one or
the other but not to avoid them completely. These channels are shaped
by interaction between the genetic predisposition to learn aggressive
responses and the physical properties of the home range that favor
particular forms of the responses. Society is influenced to take a
particular direction by idiosyncratic features of its preexisting
culture...

Although the evidence suggests that the biological nature of humankind
launched the evolution of organized aggression and roughly directed its
early history across many societies, the eventual outcome of that
evolution will be determined by cultural processes brought increasingly
under the control of rational thought. The practice of war is a
straightforward example of a hypertrophied biological predisposition.
Primitive men cleaved their universe into friends and enemies and
responded with quick, deep emotion to even the mildest threats
emanating from outside the arbitrary boundary. With the rise of
chiefdoms and states, this tendency became institutionalized, war was
adopted as an instrument of policy of some of the new societies, and
those that employed it best became- tragically-the most successful.
The evolution of warfare was an autocatalytic reaction that could not
be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process
unilaterally was to fall victim. A new mode of natural selection was
operating at the level of entire societies...

Keith Otterbein, an anthropologist, has studied quantitatively the
variables affecting warlike behavior in forty-six cultures, from the
relatively unsophisticated Tiwi and Jivaro to more advanced societies
such as the Egyptians, Aztecs, Hawaiians, and Japanese. His main
conclusions will cause no great surprise: as societies become
centralized and complex, they develop more sophisticated military
organizations and techniques of battle, and the greater their military
sophistication, the more likely they are to expand their territories
and to displace competing cultures.

Civilizations have been propelled by the reciprocating thrusts of
cultural evolution and organized violence, and in our time they have
come to within one step of nuclear annihilation. Yet when countries
have reached the brink, in the Formosan Straits, Cuba, and the Middle
East, their leaders have proved able to turn back. In Abba Eban's
memorable words on the occasion of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, men use
reason as a last resort...

To recapitulate the total argument, human aggression cannot be
explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is
it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human
beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to
external threats and to escalate their hostility sufficiently to
overwhelm the source of the threat by a respectably wide margin of
safety.

Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are
inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens, in the same
sense that birds are inclined to learn territorial songs and to
navigate by the polar constellations. We tend to fear deeply the
actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression. These
learning rules are most likely to have evolved during the past hundreds
of thousands of years of human evolution and, thus, to have conferred a
biological advantage on those who conformed to them with the greatest
fidelity.

The learning rules of violent aggression are largely obsolete. We are
no longer hunter-gatherers who settle disputes with spears, arrows, and
stone axes. But to acknowledge the obsolescence of the rules is not to
banish them. We can only work our way around them. To let them rest
latent and unsummoned, we must consciously undertake those difficult
and rarely traveled pathways in psychological development that lead to
mastery over and reduction of the profound human tendency to learn
violence...

With pacifism as a goal, scholars and political leaders will find it
useful to deepen studies in anthropology and social psychology, and to
express this technical knowledge openly as part of political science
and daily diplomatic procedure. To provide a more durable foundation
for peace, political and cultural ties can be promoted that create a
confusion of cross-binding loyalties... If the tangle is spun still
more thickly, it will become discouragingly difficult for future
populations to regard each other as completely discrete on the basis of
congruent distinctions in race, language, nationhood, religion,
ideology, and economic interest. Undoubtedly there exist other
techniques by which this aspect of human nature can be gently hobbled
in the interest of human welfare.


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