AGGRESSION IS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL

Aggression is Necessary for Survival

Aggression is Necessary for Survival

Introduction

Humans, it often seems, are creatures of conflict. Without doubt, the annals of history bear stark witness to the reality of human aggression. By most measures, human conflict and aggression have directly or indirectly resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths over time. If mute statistics had explanatory power, then the inevitable conclusion would be that humans are by their natures irredeemably aggressive. This aggression, in turn, is at the heart of perpetual conflict. Certainly, this view has long been dominant in the West, where the biblical story of human corruption in the Garden of Eden has been a powerful and enduring influence.

Anthropology's particular approach to the related topics of conflict and aggression is biological and cultural, or biocultural. Humans are, first and foremost, animals that have evolved over many millions of years. This evolutionary history has present consequences, not the least of which is that humans are in many ways determined and constrained by their biology. But that is not all. As humans evolved, they developed tools, technologies, language, and knowledge which, taken together, are called culture. These processes were not, of course, separate. Physical change led to cultural change and cultural change promoted physical change. This synthetic process of coevolution has produced the most cultural and potentially aggressive of all animals.

Early Anthropological Views

After centuries of speculation about prehistoric humanity, Darwin finally had provided a theoretical framework within which this issue could be considered scientifically. In the decades following publication of the Origin, anthropology was founded as a discipline. In Britain, Edward Tylor applied evolutionary principles to culture and began assessing archaeological evidence of the past. In America, Lewis Henry Morgan studied native cultures and became a pioneer in ethnographic methods. Not surprisingly, neither Tylor nor Morgan was able to shake free of past prejudices, including those holding that prehistoric humans lived in near perpetual conflict. Both used words like primitive, savage, and barbaric to describe such early humans. The aggressive connotations were unmistakable.

During the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists largely busied themselves traveling the globe in search of little-known or unknown societies. The societies they studied were variously characterized as native, primitive, indigenous, and almost without fail warlike. That early 20th-century ethnographers should find aggression and conflict in the peoples they studied is hardly surprising. These anthropologists, after all, came from state-level societies in which aggression was considered natural and conflict inevitable. These anthropologists may have been looking in a refracted mirror, with the horrors of two world wars serving as background. Though with some notable exceptions (such as Margaret Mead's pacific account of Samoan society), early ethnographies emphasized the aggressive natures of traditional peoples and highlighted their conflicts (Durham, 1976: 385-415).

Dart initially had hypothesized that australopithecines were savanna scavengers; however, his subsequent examination of all the fossils associated with australopithecines caused him to conclude they must have been hunters. But these were not ordinary hunters-they were bloodthirsty ...