Skip to main content
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Rights and Permissions
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian
  • Log in
  • My Cart

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • Archive
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • Highlights from Latest Articles
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Purpose and Scope
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • For Reviewers
    • Author FAQ
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Rights and Permissions
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian

User menu

  • Log in
  • My Cart

Search

  • Advanced search
Home
Home

Advanced Search

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Latest Articles
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • Archive
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • Highlights from Latest Articles
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Purpose and Scope
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • For Reviewers
    • Author FAQ

New Research In

Physical Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Physics
  • Chemistry
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Applied Mathematics
  • Applied Physical Sciences
  • Astronomy
  • Computer Sciences
  • Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Statistics

Social Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Anthropology
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Economic Sciences
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Political Sciences
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Social Sciences

Biological Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Agricultural Sciences
  • Anthropology
  • Applied Biological Sciences
  • Biochemistry
  • Biophysics and Computational Biology
  • Cell Biology
  • Developmental Biology
  • Ecology
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Evolution
  • Genetics
  • Immunology and Inflammation
  • Medical Sciences
  • Microbiology
  • Neuroscience
  • Pharmacology
  • Physiology
  • Plant Biology
  • Population Biology
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Sustainability Science
  • Systems Biology

Partitioning aggression

Martin Daly
PNAS January 23, 2018. 115 (4) 633-634; published ahead of print January 11, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720838115
Martin Daly
aDepartment of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada L8S 4K1
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • For correspondence: daly@mcmaster.ca
  • Article
  • Authors & Info
  • PDF
Loading

This article requires a subscription to view the full text. If you have a subscription you may use the login form below to view the article. Access to this article can also be purchased.

Human Nature: Nasty or Nice?

Have aggression and violence been ramped up in human evolution or dialed down? This sounds like a question that empirical research might have settled long ago, but it remains strangely contentious. In PNAS, Richard Wrangham (1) proposes that debates persist because too many evolutionary anthropologists mistakenly conceive of aggression as unitary and that a well-established distinction between “proactive” and “reactive” aggression holds the key to a resolution.

In what Wrangham calls the Hobbes–Huxley paradigm, people are considered violent animals whose destructive tendencies must be contained by cultural constraints and penalties. The alternative Rousseau–Kropotkin paradigm sees our species as naturally peaceable and interprets violence as a consequence of some execrable aspect of modernity. Twentieth-century versions of these visions have tended to be less overtly political but scarcely less flamboyant. Raymond Dart (2), the discoverer of Australopithecus, for example, proposed that “the loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features,” which he attributed to our “carnivorous and cannibalistic” origins. In a popular book translated into English as On Aggression, the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz (3) asserted that only two species routinely kill their own kind: rats (Rattus norvegicus) and ourselves.

Neither Dart nor Lorenz knew anything about the behavior of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in the wild (although Jane Goodall had begun her famous studies at Gombe when Lorenz wrote). These apes, our close cousins, certainly kill one another too. Wrangham is one of the scientists who followed Goodall to Gombe, where he added to our knowledge of the opportunistic lethal raiding that constitutes a kind of chronic “warfare” between chimpanzee communities. He has noted how the deliberateness and cooperativeness of that …

↵1Email: daly{at}mcmaster.ca.

View Full Text

Log in using your username and password

Forgot your user name or password?

Purchase access

You may purchase access to this article. This will require you to create an account if you don't already have one.

Subscribers, for more details, please visit our Subscriptions FAQ.

PreviousNext
Back to top
Article Alerts
Email Article

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on PNAS.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Partitioning aggression
(Your Name) has sent you a message from PNAS
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the PNAS web site.
Citation Tools
Partitioning aggression
Martin Daly
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jan 2018, 115 (4) 633-634; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720838115

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Request Permissions
Share
Partitioning aggression
Martin Daly
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jan 2018, 115 (4) 633-634; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720838115
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Mendeley logo Mendeley

More Articles of This Classification

  • Auditory motion parallax
  • The labyrinth of human variation
  • Physiological constraints on marine mammal body size
Show more

Related Content

  • Two types of aggression in human evolution
  • Scopus
  • PubMed
  • Google Scholar

Cited by...

  • No citing articles found.
  • Google Scholar

Similar Articles

You May Also be Interested in

Recent flooding events highlight why flood-risk governance in the United States needs a major overhaul. They also suggest why the necessary refocus on shared responsibility will not be easy.
Opinion: How to achieve better flood-risk governance in the United States
Recent flooding events highlight why flood-risk governance in the United States needs a major overhaul. They also suggest why the necessary refocus on shared responsibility will not be easy.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock/michelmond.
Bridget Scanlon discusses the use of global hydrologic models for studying changes in water storage worldwide.
Global hydrologic models and water storage
Bridget Scanlon discusses the use of global hydrologic models for studying changes in water storage worldwide.
Listen
Past PodcastsSubscribe
PNAS Profile of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.
PNAS Profile
PNAS Profile of Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth.
Researchers estimate the risk of infectious disease transmission on board transcontinental airline flights.
Infectious disease transmission on airplanes
Researchers estimate the risk of infectious disease transmission on board transcontinental airline flights.
Image courtesy of Pixabay/PublicDomainPictures.
Researchers report early evidence of Maya animal management.
Early Maya animal rearing and trade
Researchers report early evidence of Maya animal management.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 115 (16)
Current Issue

Submit

Sign up for Article Alerts

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Human Nature: Nasty or Nice?
    • Case Closed?
    • Footnotes
    • References
  • Authors & Info
  • PDF
Site Logo
Powered by HighWire
  • Submit Manuscript
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS Feeds
  • Email Alerts

Articles

  • Current Issue
  • Latest Articles
  • Archive

PNAS Portals

  • Classics
  • Front Matter
  • Teaching Resources
  • Anthropology
  • Chemistry
  • Physics
  • Sustainability Science

Information for

  • Authors
  • Reviewers
  • Press

Feedback    Privacy/Legal

Copyright © 2018 National Academy of Sciences.