The Incredible Evolution Of Aggression - Dr Richard Wrangham

If you look at males, it turns out that in a number of animals, males who have a relatively broad face are more aggressive. There was a Canadian team that looked at hockey teams and looked at the number of minutes that individual players spent in the penalty box for being too aggressive. There was a positive relationship between breadth of the face and the number of minutes spent in the penalty box. (wind blows)

Is it right to say that humans are an aggressive species, do you think?

Well, yes, uh, in some ways we are incredibly aggressive because, uh, we are responsible for more deaths of members of our own species than is typical of other animals. And yet, at the same time, of course, you know, the great paradox about this is that in some ways, we're just incredibly nice and tolerant and friendly and unaggressive. Um, and for years, we've grappled with how to resolve these two contrary sides of our personality, but we cannot deny that part of us is, uh, is a really aggressive streak, and we're seeing it at the moment in, in wars that occur around the world and, um, and those of course have gone on throughout history.

What does it suggest about human nature or w- what our role is or what would be adaptive for us that we seem to be very effective at the barbell ends of aggression?

Well, you know, one of the great questions about human nature for, uh, two or three hundred years has been, are we biologically predisposed to be aggressive or are we biologically predisposed to be tolerant? Are we a- an inherently aggressive species that is tamed by society or are we a- an inherently tolerant, unaggressive species that is made aggressive by society? A- and, you know, my view, and I think the increasing view is that that's- that question is misconceived. You know, 'cause the answer is that we're both or we're neither, if you like. That whether or not you look at our, our tremendous capacity and even interest in committing, um, aggression, uh, or whether you look at our tolerant, uh, aversion to aggression, both of them are part of our biology. So I think that what we're learning about ourselves is that we have to recognize that we are a mixture and society is not responsible either for taming us or for, uh, making us the, the sometimes horrible species that we sometimes are. You know, th- this is us. Take us or leave it.

Who were the two philosophers that had this big push? Was one... It wasn't Foucault. Who was the one, who was the French guy, went and lived in the woods?

The French guy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

That was it? Sounds like Fou- Foucault, yeah.

U- Uh, writing j- just, uh, just before the French Revolution, uh, at the end of the 18th century, um, and, um, and- and you know, sort of very ironic really, you know, because he b- has become associated with the notion that we are inherently non-violent and of course, everyone had such high hopes for the French Revolution and then, you know, there's, there's this wonderful charitable, uh, exotic new dawn of humanity turns into the guillotine and, uh, and then, you know, Napoleon, uh, and so on. You know, the, the disaster that, um, that befell, uh, the, the sort of growing sense of civilization, uh, in Europe at that time. And then the other great philosopher... So he, so Rousseau is associated with the notion that, that humans are inherently, um, unaggressive, uh, made, made aggressive by society. And, uh, and then the opposite side was Thomas Hobbes, who was living in the time of the English Civil War, uh, in the second half of the, uh, 17th century and, uh, and he was impressed by the fact that, uh, you really had to lock your door and, uh, you had to worry about who your neighbors were because, uh, they might come and kill you. And, you know, the civil war was a terrible thing. And so he was associated with the notion that, uh, there is something just inherently competitive, uh, uh, cruel, violent about humans and that what you need to be able to control them is a superior body, uh, uh, an ultimate authority. Uh, he called it a Leviathan, uh, we would now think about it as the state, you know, at that time might have been the, the monarch, um, to keep everybody under control. And- and you can look at, uh, both of these, these great philosophers who have been representing these two opposing views of, you know, superficially opposing views and think that in many ways both of them were right. You know, they, they had a lot to them and that's, that's why people have s- sort of supported one or the other over these years. But, um, uh, you know, the wonderful thing is that we can now put the, uh, the nature of human nature into a much broader perspective than ever was done by political philosophers who were basically, of course, sitting in their armchairs. You know, I mean, from the point of view of modern science, they weren't trying to, to really figure out what was going on in terms of the wet biology or in terms of our evolutionary relationships. Uh, but we can do that now and- and we can look at our close relatives, uh, the great apes, and we can see elements of, uh, all these, these two contrasting types of behavior in our cousins. And the fascinating thing about that is not that we can...... say, "Oh, well," you know, we have inherited a particular kind of quality from a particular kind of ape. But instead, what we can see is that evolution works in, you know, fascinating ways to generate in one species, uh, a certain level of, uh, some kinds of aggression, in another species a different kinds of aggression, and we can figure out that there is a, a logic to the evolutionary history that leaves us deposited, in our case, on the 20th century or 21st century, um, with the particular set of inherent tendencies.