Competitive and aggressive behavior

Bibliographic Data

ID3086788
AuthorsEdward O Wilson (Harvard University, corresponding author)
Year1970
Volume9
Issue6
Pages123-154
Publication date1970-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science Information (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0539-0184 • E-ISSN: 1461-7412
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/053901847000900607
OpenAlexW2053975117
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited57

The current popularity of animal behaviorists comes in good part from the comfort and assurance their discoveries offer to humanity. It is, after all, comforting to think that our sins are only animal sins (original sin if you wish) and that we are no more than naked apes momentarily disoriented by our jerry-built civilization. We want to believe that the beastliness in human nature is beastliness in the primordial sense and not some dark angelic flaw, to trust that we have not escaped so far from our ancestral genes to be due for an early extinction. Perhaps all that is needed, the popular exponents of ethology seem to be saying, is to understand the adaptedness of our behavior and to learn to operate within its constraints. These writers-Robert Ardrey (1961), Konrad Lorenz (1966), Desmond Morris (1967), Anthony Storr (1968), and others- speak of territorial and aggressive in-stincts which long ago originated as stereotyped, strictly inherited behavioral repertories in our primate ancestors. The instincts are said to survive today in man in slightly abated and more diffuse form, hedged in by social conventions that tend to minimize their overt effects. Of course nothing so starkly Darwinian could go unchallenged for very long. The contrary view has been argued by those of liberal humanist per-suasion, such as Edmund Leach (1968) and Ashley Montagu (1965), and also by animal behaviorists with experience in the raw source material, including S. A. Barnett (1967) and Peter Klopfer (1968). These critics declare that there are no such things as unitary instincts, or drives, that persist through phylogenetic lineages as do vertebrae and eardrums. They point out that territorial behavior and aggression are not universal in lower animals and that when such traits do occur they are expressed in myriad ways, performing functions that shift subtly from species to species. They condemn as facile

Business · Cultural Differences and Values · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Psychology

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