Man and aggression

The comparatively new science of ethology, or the study of the behavior of different species, has given rise to a number of hypotheses about manʹs instinctual nature. A conception of manʹs inborn aggressive drive -- a twentieth-century form of neo Ssocial Darwinism advanced by the eminent ethologist Konrad Lorenz, and popularized in books by Robert Ardrey -- has recently gained a wider acceptance than scientific objectivity can support. In this volume, edited by a distinguished anthropology and social biologist, fourteen experts offer a critique of this Hobbesian view of man, which is related…