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Summary: A male-bashing mistake
Review: What could have been an interesting and thought-provoking exploration of the evolutionary roots of human warfare becomes, instead, a mindless exercise in male-bashing. The authors' logic: Chimpanzees raid other chimp territories with the apparent intent to kill or maim members of the other group. These raiding parties are primarily composed of males. Therefore males are the root cause of interpersonal violence. The field observations of chimps, bonobos and gorillas that have been accumulated over the last several decades provide rich material for comparisons with human behavior. But Wrangham and Peterson force this data into a Procrustean bed at every turn, interpreting every piece of data to support their thesis that every human society is essentially violent, and that it is the males in every society that cause the violence. In their attack on Margaret Mead's description of Samoan society in the 1920s, (not that Mead's work is above criticism) they seek to refute her by citing Samoan crime statistics from the 1970s - long after anyone would describe Samoan society as being uncontaminated by outside influences. Their attitude towards males is not limited to primates, by the way. They describe male lions' practice of killing the cubs when they take over a pride (thus causing the lionesses to go into estrus and become pregnant by the new pride leaders - an obvious reproductive advantage for the male lions): "In the Serengeti, a quarter of all infants are sacrificed on the altar of male selfishness." Females in all primate species are pacifists, according to the authors. The peacefulness of bonobo society is attributed to females cooperating to curb male violence. The fact that twenty per cent of chimp raiding parties may be composed of females is mentioned, but conveniently ignored. The observations of primate behavior that these authors rely on are indeed important. But they must await analysis and interpretation by others with more wisdom and fewer axes to grind.
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Summary: Where do we come from, where are we going? :-)
Review: A clever and well written book. A must-read if you are interested in evolutionary psychology etc. Couldn't put it down. On par with "The selfish Gene" by Dawkins.
Rating:
Summary: Where do we come from, where are we going? :-)
Review: A clever and well written book. A must-read if you are interested in evolutionary psychology etc. Couldn't put it down. On par with "The selfish Gene" by Dawkins.
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Summary: Imagine the Victorians reading this book
Review: Bonobos and chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans and their social behavior as it relates to ours. How we are similar, how different. Chimpanzees are surprisingly violent and make gang raids on neighboring tribes and kill (with their bare hands, by the way) if the raiding party has a big advantage. We and the chimps broke off from a common ancestor about five million years ago. We went out of the forest and onto the woodlands and the savannas. We learned to dig up and eat roots and of course bone marrow from kills. This is how we survived the loss of the forest and the recurring dry seasons. We are a little less closely related to gorillas and orangutans, but the point the authors are making is we are the fifth ape, and it is valuable to study how the other apes behave so as to gain insight into ourselves. While the authors seem to lay the problem of human violence squarely at the feet of males, it is allowed-albeit only briefly and incidentally (p. 239-240)-that women choose these demonic males through sexual selection, and ultimately the problem of male violence is a human problem. What is especially interesting here is the thorough examination not only of the violence practiced by apes, but of their differing sexual practices: gorillas form harems with a single silver back male getting most of the reproductive tries, while orangutans live alone and the males often engage in rape. In contrast the bonobos are so frequently and openly sexual that genital rubbing is a way of greeting while the father of the little ones could be any one of the males. This is evolutionary psychology with a wary eye on political correctness. I note that Edward O. Wilson does not appear in the bibliography but Naomi Wolf and Andrea Dworkin (for example) do. In fact, this book is something of a blatant attempt to make evolutionary psychology palpable to women. The authors even have a category they call "evolutionary feminism" represented by "writers like Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Hrdy, Merdith Small, and Barbara Smuts" united in their opposition to "the patriarchy" (p. 124). This is all to the good of course because a thorough going understanding of human nature will lead us all to the inescapable conclusion that blaming one sex for the human problem of violence really misses the profound truth of sexual equality. The authors even suggest (p. 125) that "If all women followed Lysistrata's injunctions and refused their husbands, they could indeed effect change." Amen. By the way: ugly dust cover.
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Summary: This is not for evolutionary psychologists
Review: Critiquing this book from the vantage point of evolutionary psychology is like a present day aeronautical engineer critiquing the feasibility of DaVinci's helicopter specs. This is a popular book that makes a very important speculation about the possible origins of human violence. None of the negative reviewers mention the important and politically impartial hypothesis put forward by the authors that ape communities with abundant resources are less violent than those with limited resources. Also, there is nothing wrong with the feminist community rallying around this book. This book isn't about taking away male power, it is about mitigating all violence.
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Summary: Interesting Start.
Review: Demonic People This book is part of the new anthropological topic: The study of maleness. Although part of the premise is based on evolutionary-biology, this book squarely places a foot in the cultural anthropology camp where the manifestation of violence has to do with the structure of society. This no doubt will get the hard line evolution biologists and the hard line cultural anthropologist in a collective huff. The first part of the book is a good overview of where humans fit into the evolution tree. For those who learnt about the great apes and our relation to them before genetics proved that chimps are more closely related to humans, than gorillas and chimpanzees. This section is a good way to catch up on the newest evolution theories. Mixed into this section is a comparison of the offensive warfare of humans and chimps. The second part of the book, takes us into the jungles of African and Indonesia, and discusses the different kinds of violence that manifest between Orangutans, Gorillas, and Chimps due to their social structure. For example: Orangutans practice rape, Gorillas practice infanticide, and Chimps on the most part practice battering, but a mixture of all three does prevail. Then the third part of the book, discusses the behavior of a ¡§recently¡¨ discovered fifth species of great apes, the Bonobos. This species formerly believed to be chimpanzees, are the only peaceful society among the five great apes. T he authors posits that because of the sexual nature of these beasts and the practice of lesbian relationships between the females create a special bond and female centered power structure. Male violence is easily stamped out by female coalitions and thus violence is not a good reproductive strategy and through time has been weaned out of the bonobos society as well as genetic make up. From this, the thesis is human violence can be stamped out if females in our society gains more power and we as a society finds a different criteria outside of strong physical males as an ideal mate. Unfortunately, the authors then go onto a long spiel about human¡¦s relation to paradise in comparative literature. Which brings the book and its theories to its weakest point. I found it terrible disappointing that the authors would find a hardly read novel about a female centered society written in Victorian times to prop up their argument. However, with the 20 pages of oddball ranting aside. This book definitely is an interesting read on cultural implications of evolution and vice versa. And just a damn good read for those who are interested violence, in maleness, or primate behavior but find acedemic papers heavy going. It¡¦s definitely the first full length book on this topic and hopefully other better researched, better defined studies will come out of it. It¡¦s very much a manifesto of sorts, filled with funny and interesting anecdotes, such as orangutans practices oral sex, bonobos had to be taken out of zoos because of their promiscuity that upset grandparents, and less scientific than most academics would like.
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Summary: Excellent service to human knowledge
Review: Despite the fact that some people apparently are threatened by the idea that males do more of the things that people describe as "evil", this book is an exceptional, unbiased look at why men and women *nowadays* behave the *many* ways in which they do. Despite what other people have said, there is *no* message of inferiority or superiority on the part of men and women. That perception is more a reflection of those who perceive it. This book is merely an examination of what *is* known, and some new information that wasn't before, about human violence. Why should we be so ashamed upon learning that men *are* more disposed to violence, at least of certain kinds, then are women? Knolwedge has a purpose, and that is to educate that we may do things better *if we wish*. That is what this book is about.
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Summary: This shouldn't be your first book on evolutionary psychology
Review: Don't misunderstand. This book has a lot of interesting information about apes. But when the authors try to extrapolate human behavior from ape behavior, they blow it. If you want to learn about human evolutionary psychology, try "The Adapted Mind" by Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby or "The Moral Animal" by Wright. If you're trying to understand the evolutionary origins of human violence, read "Homicide" by Wilson and Daly. If you want to learn about chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates, start reading de Waal. And if you want to understand just why nature is so nasty, read "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins. After you've read those, you may be able to correctly interpret this book, but after all that, why bother. The authors leave out a bunch of important information. There is no mention or analysis of Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory, Triver's reciprocal altruism theory or Axelrod's computer simulations of Triver's theory. The authors point out that homo sapiens is a patriarchal species, but fail to mention that, specieswide, women are much more sensitive than men to the socioeconomic status of their prospective mates and, unlike men, their sensitivity is directly proportional to their own status. (see "The Evolution of Desire" by Buss.) They never mention that, unlike the other apes and 97% of mammalian species, human males provide significant investment in their offspring, making husbands vulnerable to cuckoldry, which sometimes necessitates violent precautions and responses by the husbands and their genetic kin. The authors gloss over the critical importance of fitness variance within the male and female genders and differences between these two variances. The authors mention that, like orangutans, male elephant seals commit rape, but fail to mention that with the help of the females, about 5% of the males do about 80% of the breeding, increasing the odds of the other males' genetic death. They attribute the peaceful nature of bonobo society to massed female power but, unlike de Waal, fail to mention that males may accept this because females' extreme promiscuity thoroughly obscures paternity and almost certainly shrinks both male fitness variance and the difference in variance between males and females. And they reduce sperm competition to a footnote. The book has the tone of a feminist propaganda piece. The authors repeatedly attribute violent male behavior to stable and internal factors while attributing violent female behavior to external factors. (For a different view, see "When She was Bad" by Pearson.) They adopt a narrow definition of violence which makes men look bad and women look good. (The most general definition of violence is: Individual A is violent toward individual B if (1) A gains, (2) B loses, and (3) B cannot keep A from controlling if and how the transaction occurs.) And unlike most books written by professional social scientists, this book uses the vocabulary of morality to describe issues of gain and loss. But morality is simply a methodology and set of rules to manipulate, modify and control other people's behavior, in other words, a mechanism for doing violence to its victims. That's why feminists virtually always cast women's self-interest as universal moral imperatives.
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Summary: Top Book! Unputdownable Read! Get it Now!
Review: Excellent and scholarly book, parts of which will annoy the politically correct no end. Takes the myth of cultural relativism, examines it in the light of known facts and data, and then comprehensively stomps on it...
Has 30 pages of notes and another 30 odd of references, plus is strewn with footnotes - but dont worry, it is nothing like as dry and academic as that implies, this is a surprisingly easy read. It is just that it is also very thoroughly researched, and provides ample data to support the authors hypotheses and suggested solutiuons which are at times of a controversial nature. Not all of it is controversial by any means, there is as much here to delight the politically correct as there is to offend :-) Thats the joy of it, you know that these guys (and yes, both authors are male) are taking a balanced and fearless look into the depths of the problem of violence.
The field of sociobiology that this book delves into is an exciting and growing area of science that promises some real and lasting solutions to some of our more pressing problems. And when combined with these authors' insights from primatology and anthropology, then we have some powerful tools to enhance the world for all.
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Summary: All apes take one step forward!!!
Review: For those of us who wondered why human males act like such apes, and always "knew" there was connection, well here is why: WE ARE APES! This enlightening volume describes and shows the connections mankind has with his cousins in the natural world. The author's attempt to remain politically correct throughout the book is heartening, but the conclusion is solid: mankind (Males in particular) is genetically and historically driven to war, rape and violence. They do try to offer hope, and certainly don't condone modern male behavior, but the facts stand against male homo-sapiens
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