[Paleopsych] CHE: David P. Barish: Red in Tooth, Claw, and Trigger Finger
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CHE: David P. Barish: Red in Tooth, Claw, and Trigger Finger (fwd)
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.12
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i49/49b01901.htm
I well remember an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo when I was a child. (It
has since been copied by zoos throughout the world.) It offered a view
of the "world's most dangerous creature," and was, of course, a
mirror. No reasonable person -- least of all anyone with environmental
sensibilities -- can doubt the veracity of that assertion, intended to
shock the zoogoer into a healthy degree of eco-friendly
self-reflection. Nor can anyone doubt that human beings are dangerous
not only to their planet and many of its life-forms, but, most of all,
to themselves.
Homo sapiens has much to answer for, including a gory history of
murder and mayhem. The anthropologist Raymond Dart spoke for many when
he lamented that "the atrocities that have been committed ... from the
altars of antiquity to the abattoirs of every modern city proclaim the
persistently bloodstained progress of man." An unruly, ingrained
savagery, verging on bloodlust, has been a favorite theme of fiction,
including, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William
Golding's Lord of the Flies, while Robert Louis Stevenson's The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde developed an explicit notion
of duality: that a predisposition to violence lurks within the most
outwardly civilized and kindly person.
There even seems to be a curious, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like ambivalence in
humanity's view of itself. On the one hand, we have Protagoras'
insistence that "man is the measure of all things," linked
theologically to the biblical claim that "God made man in his own
image." The upshot: Human beings are not only supremely important but
maybe even supremely good. At the same time, however, there is
another, darker perspective, promoted not only by environmental
educators but also by certain Christian theologians as well as
nonsectarian folks who so love humanity that they hate human beings
-- largely because of what those human beings have done to other human
beings.
In extreme cases, the result has been outright loathing, often
stimulated by the conviction that humanity is soiled by original sin
and is, moreover, irredeemable, at least this side of heaven.
According to the zealous John Calvin, "the mind of man has been so
completely estranged from God's righteousness that it conceives,
desires, and undertakes, only that which is impious, perverted, foul,
impure, and infamous. The human heart is so steeped in the poison of
sin, that it can breathe out nothing but a loathsome stench."
Misanthropy can also be purely secular, as in this observation from
Aldous Huxley:
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,
The prurient ape's defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.
In a similar vein, human beings stand accused of being not only
murderous but uniquely so, an indictment that has been largely
transformed into a guilty verdict, at least in much of the public
mind. Writing in 1904, William James described man as "simply the most
formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that
preys systematically on its own species." A half-century later, that
view was endorsed by no less an authority than the pioneering
ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, who popularized the
idea that lethally armed animals (wolves, hawks, poisonous snakes) are
also outfitted with behavioral inhibitions that prevent the use of
those weapons against conspecifics. Human beings emerge as the sole
exception, since our lethality is "extrabiological," rendering us
anomalous in our uninhibited murderousness. Paradoxically, such claims
have been widely and even warmly embraced. "Four legs good, two legs
bad," we eagerly learned from George Orwell, not least because Homo
sapiens is supposed to be uniquely branded, among all living things,
with this mark of Cain.
There appears to be a certain pleasure, akin to intellectual
self-flagellation, that many people -- college students, it appears,
most especially -- derive in disdaining their own species. Maybe
anathematizing Homo sapiens is a particularly satisfying way of
rebelling, since it entails enthusiastic disdain of not merely one's
culture, politics, and socioeconomic situation, but one's species,
too. At the same time, such a posture is peculiarly safe because
species-rejecting rebellion does not require casting aside
citizenship, friends, and family, or access to one's trust account;
having denounced one's species, nobody is expected to join another.
In any event, Cain is a canard. We have no monopoly on murder. Human
beings may be less divine than some yearn to think, but -- at least
when it comes to killing, even war -- we aren't nearly as exceptional,
as despicably anomalous and aberrant in our penchant for intraspecies
death-dealing, as the self-loathers would have it.
The sad truth is that many animals kill others of their kind, and as a
matter of course, not pathology. When the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy
first reported the sordid details of infanticide among langur monkeys
of India, primatologists resisted the news: It couldn't be true, they
claimed. Or if it was, then it must be because the monkeys were
overcrowded, or malnourished, or otherwise deprived. They couldn't
possibly stoop to killing members of their own species (and infants,
to make matters even worse); only human beings were so depraved. But,
in fact, that is precisely what they do. More specifically, it is what
male langur monkeys commonly do when one of them takes over control of
a harem of females. The newly ascendant harem-keeper proceeds,
methodically, to kill any nursing infants, which, in turn, induces the
previously lactating (and nonovulating) females to begin cycling once
again. All the better to bear the infanticidal male's offspring.
We now know that similar patterns of infanticide are common among many
other species, including rats and lions, as well as other nonhuman
primates. In fact, when field biologists encounter a "male takeover"
these days, they automatically look for subsequent infanticide and are
surprised if it doesn't occur.
The slaughter of innocents is bad enough (by human moral standards),
although not unknown, of course, in our own species. But from a
strictly mechanistic, biological perspective, it makes perfect sense.
It might also seem more "justifiable" than, say, adults killing other
adults, if only because the risk to an infanticidal male is relatively
slight (infants can't do much to defend themselves), and the
evolutionary payoff is comparatively great: getting your genes
projected into the future via each bereaved mother, who would
otherwise continue to nourish someone else's offspring instead of
bearing your own. But the evidence is overwhelming that among many
species, adults kill other adults, too.
Lorenz was right, up to a point. Animals with especially lethal
natural armaments tend, in most cases, to refrain from using them
against conspecifics. But not always. In fact, the generalization that
animals -- predators and prey excepted -- occupy a peaceful kingdom
was itself greatly overblown. Maybe some day the lion will lie down
with the lamb, but even today lions sometimes kill other lions, and
rams knock down (thereby knocking off) other rams. The more hours of
direct observation biologists accumulate among free-living animals,
the more cases of lethality they uncover. Indeed, a Martian observer
spending a few weeks among human beings might be tempted to inform his
colleagues, with wonderment and some admiration, that Homo sapiens
never kills conspecifics. She would be as incorrect as those early
reports that wolves invariably inhibit lethal aggression by exposing
their necks, or that chimpanzees make love instead of war.
In fact, wolves do kill other wolves, showing little mercy for
outliers and other strangers. And chimpanzees make war.
Of course, if one defines war as requiring the use of technology, then
our chimp cousins aren't warmongers after all. But if by war we mean
organized and persistent episodes of intergroup violence, often
resulting in death, then chimps are champs at it. Jane Goodall has
reported extensively on a four-year running war between rival troops
of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, in Tanzania. Similar accounts
have emerged from other populations, in the Budongo and Kibale
forests, in Uganda; Mahale Mountains National Park, in Tanzania; and
Taï National Park, in the Ivory Coast. Chimpanzee wars are not an
aberration.
As to why they occur, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains
that "by wounding or killing members of the neighboring community,
males from one community increase their relative dominance over their
neighbors. ... This tends to lead to increased fitness of the killers
through improved access to resources such as food, females, or
safety." These episodes typically involve border patrols leading to
organized attacks in which a coalition (composed almost exclusively of
males) will attack, and often kill, members of the neighboring troop
(once again, almost exclusively males).
At this point, some readers -- struggling to retain the perverse pride
that comes from seeing human beings as, if not uniquely murderous,
then at least unusually so -- may want to backpedal and point out that
chimps are, after all, very close to Homo sapiens. But lethal fighting
-- if less organized than chimpanzee warfare -- has been identified in
hyenas, cheetahs, lions, and many other species. In one study, nearly
one-half of all deaths among free-living wolves not caused by humans
were the result of wolves' killing other wolves.
Even ants are incriminated. According to Edward O. Wilson, America's
supreme ant-ologist, "alongside ants, which conduct assassinations,
skirmishes, and pitched battles as routine business, men are all but
tranquilized pacifists." In their great tome of ant lore, Wilson and
Bert Hölldobler concluded that ants are "arguably the most aggressive
and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized
nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered."
The ant lifestyle is characterized, note the authors, by "restless
aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of
neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons,
they would probably end the world in a week."
The primatologists Alexander Harcourt and Frans de Waal (the latter
having written extensively about "natural conflict resolution," and,
if anything, predisposed to acknowledge the pacific side of animals)
conclude that regrettably but undeniably "lethal intergroup conflict
is not uniquely, or even primarily, a characteristic of humans." The
bottom line: Our species is special in many ways, and we may even be
especially accomplished when it comes to killing our fellow human, but
insofar as same-species lethality goes, we are not alone.
Jonathan Swift was no sentimental lover of the human species, verging,
and sometimes settling, on outright misanthropy. Thus, during one of
Gulliver's voyages, the giant king of Brobdingnag describes human
beings as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that
nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift
himself wrote, "I hate and detest that animal called Man, yet I
heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." It is Gulliver's
final voyage, however, to the land of the admirable, rational, equably
equine Houyhnhnms that constitutes what is probably the most
sardonically critical account of humanity, in all its Yahoo nature,
ever written. Sir Walter Scott wrote that this work "holds mankind
forth in a light too degrading for contemplation."
Especially degrading -- for Swift, Scott, and, as the story unfolds,
the Master of the Houyhnhnms -- is the human capacity for lethal
violence, especially during war: "Being no stranger to the art of war,
I [Gulliver] gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets,
carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges,
retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, seafights;
ships sunk with a thousand men; twenty thousand killed on each side;
dying groans, limbs flung in the air: smoke, noise, confusion,
trampling to death under horse's feet: flight, pursuit, victory,
fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and
birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and
destroying. And, to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I
assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in
a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies drop down
in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of all the
spectators." Omitted, for obvious reasons: machine guns, submarines,
mustard gas, mechanized artillery, land mines, fighter planes,
bombers, cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass
destruction (and this is a woefully incomplete list), not to mention
the use of commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction, or the
use of lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion
that results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Let's face it, human beings are a violent, murderous lot, destructive
of each other no less than of their environment. But let's also admit
that such misdeeds, grievous as they are, derive less from a
one-of-a-kind bloodlust than from the combination of all-too-natural
aggressiveness with ever-advancing technology -- which is itself
natural, too.
Tennyson was correct, after all. Nature really is red in tooth and
claw -- not always, to be sure, but more often than a romanticized
view of the animal world would have us believe. And not only when it
comes to predators' dispatching their prey. Also, not merely in tooth
and claw, but in antler and horn and stinger and tusk, and in butcher
knife and Kalashnikov. We aren't so much separated from nature as
connected to it, for worse as for better, empowered by our culture to
act -- often excessively, because of the potent technological levers
at our disposal -- upon impulses that are widely shared. And so, one
and a half cheers for Homo sapiens, the world's most dangerous
creature, whose dangerousness resides not in the originality of its
sin, but in the reach of its hands.
David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of
Washington. His most recent book, written with Nanelle R. Barash and
based on an article originally appearing in The Chronicle Review, is
Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (Delacorte,
2005).
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