Behavior/Violence is *GENETIC*(was: more anthropological explanations...)
makemyday_at_worldnet.att.net
Date: 07/28/04
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Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 09:38:13 GMT
offshore eddie wrote on sci.anthropology et. al.:
>
> 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.
Experts weigh in (at the risk of political incorrectness). This is
the DAFN problem in a nutzhell, the most primitive/savage/uncivilized
segment of (sub) humanity...
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