I well remember an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo when I was a child. (It has since been copied by zoos throughout the world.) It offered a view of the “world’s most dangerous creature,” and was, of course, a mirror. No reasonable person -- least of all anyone with environmental sensibilities -- can doubt the veracity of that assertion, intended to shock the zoogoer into a healthy degree of eco-friendly self-reflection. Nor can anyone doubt that human beings are dangerous not only to their planet and many of its life-forms, but, most of all, to themselves.
Homo sapiens has much to answer for, including a gory history of murder and mayhem. The anthropologist Raymond Dart spoke for many when he lamented that “the atrocities that have been committed ... from the altars of antiquity to the abattoirs of every modern city proclaim the persistently bloodstained progress of man.” An unruly, ingrained savagery, verging on bloodlust, has been a favorite theme of fiction, including, for example, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, while Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde developed an explicit notion of duality: that a predisposition to violence lurks within the most outwardly civilized and kindly person.
There even seems to be a curious, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like ambivalence in humanity’s view of itself. On the one hand, we have Protagoras’ insistence that “man is the measure of all things,” linked theologically to the biblical claim that “God made man in his own image.” The upshot: Human beings are not only supremely important but maybe even supremely good. At the same time, however, there is another, darker perspective, promoted not only by environmental educators but also by certain Christian theologians as well as nonsectarian folks who so love humanity that they hate human beings -- largely because of what those human beings have done to other human beings.
In extreme cases, the result has been outright loathing, often stimulated by the conviction that humanity is soiled by original sin and is, moreover, irredeemable, at least this side of heaven. According to the zealous John Calvin, “the mind of man has been so completely estranged from God’s righteousness that it conceives, desires, and undertakes, only that which is impious, perverted, foul, impure, and infamous. The human heart is so steeped in the poison of sin, that it can breathe out nothing but a loathsome stench.”
Misanthropy can also be purely secular, as in this observation from Aldous Huxley:
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.
In a similar vein, human beings stand accused of being not only murderous but uniquely so, an indictment that has been largely transformed into a guilty verdict, at least in much of the public mind. Writing in 1904, William James described man as “simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species.” A half-century later, that view was endorsed by no less an authority than the pioneering ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, who popularized the idea that lethally armed animals (wolves, hawks, poisonous snakes) are also outfitted with behavioral inhibitions that prevent the use of those weapons against conspecifics. Human beings emerge as the sole exception, since our lethality is “extrabiological,” rendering us anomalous in our uninhibited murderousness. Paradoxically, such claims have been widely and even warmly embraced. “Four legs good, two legs bad,” we eagerly learned from George Orwell, not least because Homo sapiens is supposed to be uniquely branded, among all living things, with this mark of Cain.
There appears to be a certain pleasure, akin to intellectual self-flagellation, that many people -- college students, it appears, most especially -- derive in disdaining their own species. Maybe anathematizing Homo sapiens is a particularly satisfying way of rebelling, since it entails enthusiastic disdain of not merely one’s culture, politics, and socioeconomic situation, but one’s species, too. At the same time, such a posture is peculiarly safe because species-rejecting rebellion does not require casting aside citizenship, friends, and family, or access to one’s trust account; having denounced one’s species, nobody is expected to join another.
In any event, Cain is a canard. We have no monopoly on murder. Human beings may be less divine than some yearn to think, but -- at least when it comes to killing, even war -- we aren’t nearly as exceptional, as despicably anomalous and aberrant in our penchant for intraspecies death-dealing, as the self-loathers would have it.
The sad truth is that many animals kill others of their kind, and as a matter of course, not pathology. When the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy first reported the sordid details of infanticide among langur monkeys of India, primatologists resisted the news: It couldn’t be true, they claimed. Or if it was, then it must be because the monkeys were overcrowded, or malnourished, or otherwise deprived. They couldn’t possibly stoop to killing members of their own species (and infants, to make matters even worse); only human beings were so depraved. But, in fact, that is precisely what they do. More specifically, it is what male langur monkeys commonly do when one of them takes over control of a harem of females. The newly ascendant harem-keeper proceeds, methodically, to kill any nursing infants, which, in turn, induces the previously lactating (and nonovulating) females to begin cycling once again. All the better to bear the infanticidal male’s offspring.
We now know that similar patterns of infanticide are common among many other species, including rats and lions, as well as other nonhuman primates. In fact, when field biologists encounter a “male takeover” these days, they automatically look for subsequent infanticide and are surprised if it doesn’t occur.
The slaughter of innocents is bad enough (by human moral standards), although not unknown, of course, in our own species. But from a strictly mechanistic, biological perspective, it makes perfect sense. It might also seem more “justifiable” than, say, adults killing other adults, if only because the risk to an infanticidal male is relatively slight (infants can’t do much to defend themselves), and the evolutionary payoff is comparatively great: getting your genes projected into the future via each bereaved mother, who would otherwise continue to nourish someone else’s offspring instead of bearing your own. But the evidence is overwhelming that among many species, adults kill other adults, too.
Lorenz was right, up to a point. Animals with especially lethal natural armaments tend, in most cases, to refrain from using them against conspecifics. But not always. In fact, the generalization that animals -- predators and prey excepted -- occupy a peaceful kingdom was itself greatly overblown. Maybe some day the lion will lie down with the lamb, but even today lions sometimes kill other lions, and rams knock down (thereby knocking off) other rams. The more hours of direct observation biologists accumulate among free-living animals, the more cases of lethality they uncover. Indeed, a Martian observer spending a few weeks among human beings might be tempted to inform his colleagues, with wonderment and some admiration, that Homo sapiens never kills conspecifics. She would be as incorrect as those early reports that wolves invariably inhibit lethal aggression by exposing their necks, or that chimpanzees make love instead of war.
In fact, wolves do kill other wolves, showing little mercy for outliers and other strangers. And chimpanzees make war.
Of course, if one defines war as requiring the use of technology, then our chimp cousins aren’t warmongers after all. But if by war we mean organized and persistent episodes of intergroup violence, often resulting in death, then chimps are champs at it. Jane Goodall has reported extensively on a four-year running war between rival troops of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, in Tanzania. Similar accounts have emerged from other populations, in the Budongo and Kibale forests, in Uganda; Mahale Mountains National Park, in Tanzania; and Taï National Park, in the Ivory Coast. Chimpanzee wars are not an aberration.
As to why they occur, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains that “by wounding or killing members of the neighboring community, males from one community increase their relative dominance over their neighbors. ... This tends to lead to increased fitness of the killers through improved access to resources such as food, females, or safety.” These episodes typically involve border patrols leading to organized attacks in which a coalition (composed almost exclusively of males) will attack, and often kill, members of the neighboring troop (once again, almost exclusively males).
At this point, some readers -- struggling to retain the perverse pride that comes from seeing human beings as, if not uniquely murderous, then at least unusually so -- may want to backpedal and point out that chimps are, after all, very close to Homo sapiens. But lethal fighting -- if less organized than chimpanzee warfare -- has been identified in hyenas, cheetahs, lions, and many other species. In one study, nearly one-half of all deaths among free-living wolves not caused by humans were the result of wolves’ killing other wolves.
Even ants are incriminated. According to Edward O. Wilson, America’s supreme ant-ologist, “alongside ants, which conduct assassinations, skirmishes, and pitched battles as routine business, men are all but tranquilized pacifists.” In their great tome of ant lore, Wilson and Bert Hölldobler concluded that ants are “arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered.” The ant lifestyle is characterized, note the authors, by “restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.”
The primatologists Alexander Harcourt and Frans de Waal (the latter having written extensively about “natural conflict resolution,” and, if anything, predisposed to acknowledge the pacific side of animals) conclude that regrettably but undeniably “lethal intergroup conflict is not uniquely, or even primarily, a characteristic of humans.” The bottom line: Our species is special in many ways, and we may even be especially accomplished when it comes to killing our fellow human, but insofar as same-species lethality goes, we are not alone.
Jonathan Swift was no sentimental lover of the human species, verging, and sometimes settling, on outright misanthropy. Thus, during one of Gulliver’s voyages, the giant king of Brobdingnag describes human beings as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Swift himself wrote, “I hate and detest that animal called Man, yet I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” It is Gulliver’s final voyage, however, to the land of the admirable, rational, equably equine Houyhnhnms that constitutes what is probably the most sardonically critical account of humanity, in all its Yahoo nature, ever written. Sir Walter Scott wrote that this work “holds mankind forth in a light too degrading for contemplation.”
Especially degrading -- for Swift, Scott, and, as the story unfolds, the Master of the Houyhnhnms -- is the human capacity for lethal violence, especially during war: “Being no stranger to the art of war, I [Gulliver] gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, seafights; ships sunk with a thousand men; twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flung in the air: smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horse’s feet: flight, pursuit, victory, fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying. And, to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of all the spectators.” Omitted, for obvious reasons: machine guns, submarines, mustard gas, mechanized artillery, land mines, fighter planes, bombers, cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction (and this is a woefully incomplete list), not to mention the use of commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction, or the use of lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion that results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Let’s face it, human beings are a violent, murderous lot, destructive of each other no less than of their environment. But let’s also admit that such misdeeds, grievous as they are, derive less from a one-of-a-kind bloodlust than from the combination of all-too-natural aggressiveness with ever-advancing technology -- which is itself natural, too.
Tennyson was correct, after all. Nature really is red in tooth and claw -- not always, to be sure, but more often than a romanticized view of the animal world would have us believe. And not only when it comes to predators’ dispatching their prey. Also, not merely in tooth and claw, but in antler and horn and stinger and tusk, and in butcher knife and Kalashnikov. We aren’t so much separated from nature as connected to it, for worse as for better, empowered by our culture to act -- often excessively, because of the potent technological levers at our disposal -- upon impulses that are widely shared. And so, one and a half cheers for Homo sapiens, the world’s most dangerous creature, whose dangerousness resides not in the originality of its sin, but in the reach of its hands.
David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book, written with Nanelle R. Barash and based on an article originally appearing in The Chronicle Review, is Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (Delacorte, 2005).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 49, Page B19