The Dark Side Of Man

ISBN-13: 9780738203157

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 04-07-2000

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Series: Helix Books

Michael Ghiglierireceived his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and is currently Associate Profesor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Arizona. He is the author of East of the Mountain of the Moon: Chimpanzee Society in the African Rain Forest (Free Press, 1988), The Chimpanzees of Kibale Forest: A Field Study of Ecology and Social Structure (Columbia University Press, 1984), and Canyon (University of Arizona Press, 1992).

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Born to Be Bad?

There were dead people along the road, so my friends gave up trying to go to Fort Portal," Tedi explained. She had just walked eight miles through the primeval rain forest, a hike no Mutoro woman in her right mind would make due to its dangers. But her husband, Otim, was my game ranger, and she had come to warn us. The dead people, Acholi and Langi—both East Nile tribes—were victims of Idi Amin Dada's latest (February 1977) genocidal pogrom.

    A Kakwa from the West Nile, Amin was determined to erase from Uganda all Langi and Acholi people, hereditary enemies from the east. President Milton Obote, whom Amin had deposed six years earlier, was a Langi. And Obote's tribesmen, all conveniently bearing surnames beginning with the letter O, could never be anything but enemies. For Amin, the only good enemy was a dead enemy. Our problem was that Otim was a Langi.

    Only a dozen miles away from our tiny encampment at Ngogo, in the center of Kibale Forest, blood was flowing. Amin had ordered his army of West Nile rogues, illiterates, and sadists to eliminate all Langi and Acholi occupying all official positions, from postal clerks and schoolteachers to district commissioners. His gangs of armed thugs were breaking into schoolrooms, offices, businesses, private homes, and even bush huts to drag off innocent Langi people. Once these people were outside, the thugs hacked off their heads with pangas (machetes). Thousands of Acholi were simply machine-gunned en masse. A dozen miles from our enclave in the jungle, entirerooms full of living Acholi and Langi prisoners were wrapped together with wire, doused with kerosene, and set ablaze.

    That same night, Amin's censored Voice of Uganda radio network broadcast allegations that an invasion force from Tanzania (where Obote still lived in exile) had violated Uganda's borders and was being assisted by Langi and Acholi rebels under Obote's leadership. By definition, all Langi and Acholi were state enemies. Amin's dreaded gestapo, the State Research Bureau (SRB), was now carrying out mass executions of them. Outside this jungle that concealed us, Otim would die.

    I worked out a plan for Otim's escape into the forest should we hear Land Rovers approaching. Engine noise two miles away would be audible, giving us plenty of time to make him vanish. With only a little luck, I reckoned, Otim would live through this pogrom. And when Amin cooled off again, Otim could seek sanctuary in Tanzania or Kenya.

    Meanwhile, the Voice of Uganda reported a new twist in the alleged Tanzanian invasion. The rebel force was being assisted by American mercenaries. All Americans in the country (there were forty-six of us, mostly missionaries and pilots) were ordered by Life President Idi Amin Dada to assemble immediately at Entebbe International Airport for expulsion—after signing over all our personal property to the government of Uganda.

    Being only three months into my research on wild chimpanzees but already having made major breakthroughs, I was now about to lose out again to African politics. I perused my maps. The nearest escape route would skirt the southern fringe of the Mountains of the Moon into Zaire. To avoid becoming one of Amin's three thousand murder victims this week, I would have to avoid all roads and villages, travel at night, and bivouac in thick foliage. But I had not seen much of this terrain yet, and the trip would take several days even if everything went well. Either way, I would carry all of my data sheets.

    Should Otim come along? Or should we both sit tight a bit longer? One thing we had going for us was that Ngogo was incorrectly located by several miles on government topo maps. Even so, there were villagers out there who knew where we were. And some of them were poachers whom we had chased out of the nature reserve — men with grudges.

    I decided to stay put a bit longer. Maybe we'd survive Amin's genocide against rival tribes (including Americans) long enough for me to gain some insights from the wild chimpanzees on the origins of such barbaric genocidal behavior.

* * *

Differences Between Girls and Boys

My wife, Connie, and I have a daughter and a son eighteen months apart. By age three, our daughter, Crystal, spent hours building beds for her dolls, stuffed animals, ponies, and even her dinosaurs and a Halloween bat. She tucked them lovingly into their blankets and propped their heads on pillows. She put bandages on their imaginary wounds. She talked and sang to them and brushed their manes. She arranged them all in a cozy circle around a tablecloth and fed them with a spoon at polite, orderly picnics. She nurtured her menagerie as if she had studied child psychology. And she scolded them if they acted naughty. She also demanded of her mother and me—on pain of a tantrum—that she wear dresses, even in two feet of snow. She had to look feminine. Today, eight years later, Crystal no longer insists on dresses, but she is fixated on horses and is even more nurturing and security-conscious.

    At three years old, her brother, Cliff, shot the same stuffed animals with toy guns, stabbed them with a rubber knife, hacked them with his plastic sword, and toppled them off the staircase in death plunges. His dinosaurs did nothing but attack and kill each other and gorge themselves on the bloody carcasses. Cliff never spoon-fed, hugged, bandaged, consoled, instructed, or scolded anything. His clothes simply had to be comfortable. Today he's a Boy Scout, wants to be a river guide and a U.S. Air Force pilot, and plays computer and video games like an addict. The goal of these games? To kill the bad guys.

    As the years pass, the gender gap continues to widen.

    So a brother and sister are different, you might say. Big deal. Two kids prove nothing.

    Two friends of ours, one a social psychologist and the other a psychoanalyst/social anthropologist, have a girl and a boy of similar ages. To avoid programming their four-year-old son with violent tendencies, the mother allowed him no toy weapons. Much to her dismay, he relentlessly prowled the woods around their house in search of sticks shaped like guns, which he used to shoot things. Her daughter never did this. Instead, she acted like a girl. This tormented the mother. But this also proves nothing.

    Scientific or not, most of us know that men and women, or boys and girls, are different. Parents know it. Teachers know it. Husbands usually suspect it about their wives. Wives are certain about their husbands. It is no secret, despite the politically correct insistence that men and women are equal in every sense. Of course, women and men are equal in their value as people and in their legal rights. But otherwise men and women really are different—so different, so early, that infant boys and girls behave as if they were programmed for widely divergent roles. As if men were born to be bad.

    We do know that children everywhere identify as masculine or feminine before they are two years old and that they insist on copying their own gender. Not even surgical sex changes on male babies eighteen months old can reverse the pattern to female. Children fine-tune their behavior by watching older people. By age two, girls copy or imitate their mothers (or, if they lack a mother to copy, they imitate other mothers), boys imitate their fathers. Significantly, this division seems to prime boys for violence. It happens everywhere.

    All this is clear from an astoundingly detailed global study by German ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. It reveals that older boys worldwide mostly play contest games of pursuit and scuffling, do experiments, and commonly practice fighting—despite their being punished far more often than girls for being aggressive. Girls, meanwhile, play more sedate and even solitary games that often focus on security. Even more intriguing, children are likely to imitate behaviors that they see as appropriate to their own sex regardless of the sex of the actor. American experiments in child development, for example, reveal that a girl will copy "feminine" behavior seen in a man before she will imitate aggressive or bullying "masculine" behavior seen in a woman.

    The human urge to adopt an "appropriate" gender is so powerful that it succeeds even without gender roles to copy. The Israeli kibbutz experiment provides an inadvertent test of this. This Israeli system tried to create monogenderal roles by rearing children communally. But most of the children, who had no family role models to copy, invented their own families. The kibbutz also failed to eradicate stereotypical roles, even during play. Girls grew up focusing not only on female role models but also on maternal role models. The fact that gender among kibbutz children emerged as the most powerful and unchangeable root of their identity, despite communal rearing, hints at the depth of the human instinct to lock into the "right" gender.

    Yes, parents do reinforce this natural process, often unconsciously, and they usually do so from the moment their children are born. Mothers and fathers, however, nurture their sons and daughters differently. Mothers, for example, soothe and comfort their infant girls more than their infant boys, but they burp, rock, arouse, stimulate, stress, look at, talk to, and even smile at their infant boys more. Mothers also hold their infant boys closer.

    Still, it is children's self-directed sex differences so early in life that spotlight the most fundamental question of human behavior and men's violence: Are the psyches of men and women intrinsically different in design? And if so, how and why? Are men somehow born to be bad? Or do they start out innocent and then get corrupted?

The Evolution of Sex Differences

Admittedly, these questions about the basic designs of the human male and female psyches are politically radioactive, but the answers to them are matters of life and death. Finding these answers demands that we sweep the table clean of several widely held but now untenable ideas about human behavior. As the nineteenth-century humorist Artemus Ward observed, "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so."

    That Homo sapiens is still locked in an identity crisis is ironic. How hard could it be for us to figure ourselves out as a species? Why can't we simply stand in front of the mirror of science, so to speak, and look at ourselves with an objective eye? The answer is that the old nature versus nurture debate fogs the mirror. For example, the claim by Franz Boas, Friedrich Engels, John Locke, Karl Marx, Margaret Mead, and B. F. Skinner that humans are born as malleable blank slates that become pure products of cultural indoctrination has consistently sabotaged the exploration of human nature by denying that we have a psyche equipped with instincts. It is society, the modern-day protégés of these philosophers and social scientists still insist, that creates the mental software that rules people's behavior. Meanwhile, the rival claim by many biologists that we humans carry a legacy of instincts from our primeval past—a human nature—disturbs some of us so much that the heat we feel during such discussions stops us from seeing the light.

    To break the cycle of dogma here, biologists insist, we first must admit that humans are a biological phenomenon. Like all other mammals, we must eat, breathe oxygen, excrete, and seek warmth—in short, survive. If our DNA is to make it to the next generation, we must also mate and rear our offspring successfully. Just how biological are we? For the answer, ask any medical doctor how she was trained. She will tell you that she was inundated with every known aspect of human biology. Boring though this may seem to many of us, it is a good idea. If medical doctors instead focused mostly on sociology and political theory for their medical training, we would likely feel far more nervous than we already do when that ice-cold stethoscope stings our chest.

    OK, so we're biological. But is human behavior truly influenced in a substantial way by our biology—by our genes? We know that behavior in other animals is. Robert Plomin found that many behaviors can be enhanced, created, or eliminated through selective breeding. More to the point, Plomin discovered that inheritance plays a role in human behavior. For example, at least one hundred different gene effects, most of them very rare, are now known to lower IQ. The specific genes that influence behavior are numerous "needles in the haystack" of the DNA molecule. "Just 15 years ago," Plomin concludes, "the idea of genetic influence on complex human behavior was anathema to many behavioral scientists. Now, however, the role of inheritance in behavior has become widely accepted, even for sensitive domains such as IQ."

    Another study found that the IQs of 245 adopted children more closely matched those of their biological parents than those of their adoptive parents, who created the children's environment. Among identical twins from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, 50 to 70 percent of variance in IQ was associated with genetics. Even more amazing, note Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., and his colleagues, authors of the study, "on multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as monozygotic twins reared together!"

    Human behaviors now known or suspected to be based on genetics include amount of alcohol consumed, autism, language disability, panic disorder, eating disorders, antisocial personality disorder, and Tourette's syndrome. Even the tendency to divorce a spouse seems significantly influenced (52 percent heritability) by one's genes. Recent research by psychologist Jim Stevenson suggests that personality traits, especially "nice" traits, are genetically linked. Working with twins, Stevenson found that more than half of the variance associated with "prosocial" behavior was linked to genes. Only about 20 percent of "antisocial" behavior was.

    In short, much of our behavior is substantially influenced by our genes, but much also is influenced by our environment. "Any analysis of the causes of human nature that tends to ignore either the genes or environmental factors," concludes physical anthropologist Melvin Konner, "may safely be discarded."

    The basic premise of this book is that we are understandable both from a biological perspective and in an environmental context. Nature equipped each of us with a complex brain ruled by chemical neurotransmitters that spur in us instinctive emotional responses to situations, which in turn influence our behavior. This may not be a comfortable way to look at ourselves, but biology tells us that this is the only accurate way and, more to the point, that it is the only way that offers us any real hope of understanding our behavior, including our use of violence.

    The counterargument that humans are impossible to understand because our culture shapes our behavior far more than biology does is often little more than a monkey wrench tossed into the discussion to grind it to a halt before it treads on politically incorrect turf. To deflect this monkey wrench and to test ideas about human violence, this book will look not just at human beings but also at our nearest living relatives, the great apes, none of which have been immersed in human culture. Indeed, a close look at orangutans, gorillas, or chimpanzees is as startling as walking in 'front of a mirror, knowing the reflection is of ourselves but seeing someone else's face.

    The great apes offer us more than just an eerie glimpse of the basic behavioral software from which humanity emerged. They also provide us with insights into the origins of human violence—insights that help make it possible to understand the human male psyche.

    This glimpse of our evolutionary past did not come easily. It took more than thirty-five years of field research by hundreds of scientists to reveal how and why the great apes socialize with each other. We now know that each individual ape socializes—cooperatively or aggressively—based on its own decision on how to enter the reproductive arena, an arena that demands being social in some way. The lives these apes lead are shaped by instinctive social "rules" that are violent, sexist, and xenophobic. Understanding how these rules work offers us the only informed approach to understanding the roots of human violence. The upcoming chapters on rape, murder, and war each offer a short natural history tour of similar violence by great apes. First, however, we must look at the evolutionary process that made the priorities of males and females so utterly different and made men so violent.

    If not for the insights of a medical school drop-out who became a naturalist on a five-year voyage around the world, we still might not have a clue as to why the sexes differ. The reasons are revealed first in Charles Darwin's 1859 blockbuster, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, a book that sold out the same day it hit the book shops, and for good reason. In it Darwin redefined the "Hand of God."

    Although Darwin is now a household name, many of us are hazy on what he actually said. So here is Darwin's concise definition of evolution's prime architect:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.... This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.<

What People are Saying About This