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Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Richard W. Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1996. 350 pp.
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins ofHuman Violence is a saga of male primates behaving badly. It is a tale of violence, murder, rape, and war-male behaviors Wrangham and Peterson avow are written in our genetic code and in that of our hominid predecessors going back 6-8 million years to a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. The story is colorful, stimulating, and imaginative; but, contrary to the book cover's optimistic suggestion, it is not "meticulous science." Building on information from recent studies of African apes and of modern humans, the authors equate our violence and killer instincts with those of the common chimpanzee. The latter is characterized as a violent species with intense male competition, maiming and killing strange males ("a gang committed to the ethnic purity of their own set," p. 14), and rape and female battery. From this account of mayhem a reader might think this is normal behavior for male chimpanzees, but often the basis of the characterization is an anecdote, selected data taken from many locations, or a single event unobserved but imaginatively re-created in full color.
Having equated chimpanzee and human violence, not surprisingly, the authors propose a common origin from an ancestor remarkably like their construction of modern chimpanzee life. "Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five million year habit of lethal aggression" (p. 63). Never mind that the gorilla, chimpanzee, and human split is a close and disputed call, and that chimpanzees have been evolving as long as humans. We do not know how the ancestral chimpanzee behaved. A rather larger "never mind" concerns the nature of evidence. Modern primate studies report on entire distributions of patterns of behavior over time. Examples in support of the contentions in this book are selective and anecdotal, with no evaluation of how representative they are for the species.
Chimpanzees in the Gombe and elsewhere lived relatively peaceful lives for more than two decades of study...