Violent Man Merely Apes Ancestors

You might glance at a book titled “Demonic Males” and decide to pass it up as probably just another man-bashing feminist screed.

But the subtitle, “Apes and the Origins of Human Violence,” reveals it as something different, and much more interesting.

The authors are Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology at Harvard and a leading authority on primate behavior, and Dale Peterson, who has written a number of books on the subject.

They look at patterns of behavior among our closest evolutionary cousins - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos - for clues to why human males are much more violent than human females and what, if anything, we might do about it.

I hope no one rises up in high dudgeon to dispute the statement that most violence among humans is committed by men. It doesn’t mean that most men are violent; in fact they are not.

And some women are violent, just not as many. Women can be just as competitive as men, but from earliest childhood their aggression is less likely to take a physical form. Picking fights is not a good strategy if you’re small, and that cautious disposition is probably written into our genes as much as it is learned by painful experience.

Wrangham and Peterson’s point is that violence is neither new in human society nor unique to humans. Looking at wars from ancient Greece to modern-day nations, “we can detect no clear pattern in the overall rates of death from intergroup violence, which remain between five and 65 per 100,000 per year.”

The apes, too, murder and rape and go to war, singly or in the marauding bands of young adult males the authors call “demonic.”

But technology has raised the stakes for our species.

“Our Pleistocene ancestors were beleaguered by their own demonic males, surely,” Wrangham and Peterson say. “But they didn’t have automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas, Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons. We do, and therein lies the danger.”

Though violence is common among the apes, it takes different forms.

Rape is common for orangutans, say observers who have followed them in the wild, from a third of all encounters in one study to nearly 90 percent in another.

Some orangutan males are large, more than twice the average size for orangutan females, They appear to have no difficulty attracting willing female companionship. But another group of males remains small, about the same size as females, and they are the ones who commonly commit rape.

For gorillas, the typical sex crime is not rape: it is infanticide.

Observations by Dian Fossey suggest that about one gorilla infant in seven is murdered by an adult male. Gorillas typically live in small groups consisting of one adult male, called a silverback, and several females and their offspring. If that male dies, any infants in the group are likely to be killed when their mothers next encounter a silverback.

What seems particularly troubling is that the death of the baby seems to make the mother more, rather than less, likely to join the killer’s troop and have her next baby with him. When a silverback with no harem succeeds in killing an infant, the mother may leave her old mate and join him. “The females’ choice is imposed by the logic of violence, by the threat to her next infant. The new silverback has become her hired gun in an ape universe of silverback baby killers.”

Chimpanzees are champion batterers. As each male reaches adolescence, and begins to outweigh the grown females in his band, “he enters the world of adult males by being systematically brutal toward each female in turn … “until he has dominated all of them.”

The male’s goal appears to be to control the females so they will be willing to go off with him when they are fertile. It may not work particularly well. An article published last week in the magazine Nature used DNA analysis to show that nearly half of the infants born to female chimpanzees of a group living in the Tai Forest of the Ivory Coast were fathered by chimpanzees from other groups.

Wrangham told a reporter that these matings might have a practical benefit for the females because the chimpanzees’ world is dominated by ferocious battles for territory. Fraternization with the enemy might earn mercy for the infant in a future encounter.

This pervasive violence is not the way we usually think of life in the idyllic rain forest or the peaceful savannah. But as Thomas Hobbes observed, life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” And he was talking about human beings.

In fact, human beings do better. Battery, rape and infanticide certainly occur in human societies, but not as universal or acceptable behavior. Violent crime in general had been on a long-term, slow decline for a century before the 1960s, when the United States simultaneously carried out two disastrous social experiments: sharply reducing the likelihood of punishment for violent crime and greatly increasing the number of children raised outside marriage, who are at much greater risk of committing it.

A more informed knowledge of how we primates are likely to behave in the absence of social controls might have saved us a great deal of misery in the past few decades. Wrangham and Peterson provide it.

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