Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill?

ISBN-13: 9780197506752 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 552 str.

R. Brian Ferguson

Opis

The question of whether men are predisposed to war runs hot in contemporary scholarship and online discussion. Within this debate, chimpanzee behavior is often cited to explain humans' propensity for violence; the claim is that male chimpanzees kill outsiders because they are evolutionarily inclined, suggesting to some that people are too. The longstanding critique that killing is instead due to human disturbance has been pronounced dead and buried. In Chimpanzees, War, and History, R. Brian Ferguson challenges this consensus. By historically contextualizing every reported chimpanzee killing, Ferguson offers and empirically substantiates two hypotheses. Primarily, he provides detailed demonstration of the connection between human impact and intergroup killing of adult chimpanzees. Secondarily, he argues that killings within social groups reflect status conflicts, display violence against defenseless individuals, and payback killings of fallen status bullies. Ferguson also explains broad chimpanzee-bonobo differences in violence through constructed and transmitted social organizations consistent with new perspectives in evolutionary theory. He deconstructs efforts to illuminate human warfare via chimpanzee analogy, and provides an alternative anthropological theory grounded in Pan-human contrasts that is applicable to different types of warfare. Bringing readers on a journey through theoretical struggle and clashing ideas about chimpanzees, bonobos, and evolution, Ferguson opens new ground on the age-old question--are men born to kill?

Recenzje

Men are not born to kill, but they can be cultivated to kill. Don't blame evolution.' The last line of Ferguson's incredible survey of studies of the higher primates, showing definitively that all the analogy-based talk of humans as the killer apesDLthose ferocious monsters at the beginning of 2001: A Space OdysseyDLis just that: talk. In an age when it seems that war will never end, understanding human nature and the distorting effects of culture is vital. There can be no better starting place than Chimpanzees, War, and History.

O autorze

R. Brian Ferguson is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He has studied war since the 1970s and has developed a general theoretical perspective that encompasses ethnology, archaeology, biological anthropology, historical anthropology, and militarism in the world today. Ferguson engages both theoretical and contemporary issues of public concern and has published for specialist and public audiences.