Further Thoughts on “The ‘New Biology’ and the Causes of War”

Abstract

Mr Colton's conclusion 1 is that we ought to assume human aggressiveness and territorial instincts in the hope that "Deprived of all chance of rushing into the millennium, statesmen might concentrate on bringing a measure of rationality to this century." This might well be a sensible way for statesmen to act, but there is nothing in the "new biology" which justifies any sort of assumption on human aggressiveness. The arguments propounded by Lorenz and Ardrey have been thoroughly criticized by a great many biologists and other scientists. 2 These critics quite rightly call into question both the validity of concepts such as "instinct" and "imperative" in describing human behaviour, and the processes by which Ardrey and Lorenz extrapolate from the behaviour of lower animals to human behaviour. Of the two, the errors of Ardrey are by far the greater.Lorenz, an eminent biologist, is one of the founders of the study of ethology. Robert Ardrey on the other hand is neither a biologist nor a social scientist. Ardrey's career has been largely as a dramatist and popular writer. His two recent works 3 are his personal interpretations of the relevance of findings in the fields of biology and human paleontology to human behaviour. However well written they might be, his books are neither scientific works nor the works of a scientist. Robert Ardrey has misunderstood two of the basic concepts of the new biology, "aggression" and "territory," and has misapplied them in discussing human society. A look at the way ethologists use those terms, and at their relevance to human behaviour shows how wrong Ardrey, and to a lesser extent, Lorenz are in some of their basic assumptions.Lorenz and other ethologists have discovered that in animals aggression has a high value as a survival factor. Aggression and the activities connected with it serve among other things to delimit feeding grounds, to protect nesting sites, and to enable animals to compete and select mates. However, there is a big difference between aggression and actual violence in animal behaviour. In fact, it is relatively rarely that aggression leads to fighting. Aggressive posturings and behaviour warn and threaten; it is only when the animal warned and threatened does not back down that fighting results. In animal populations that are overcrowded so that confrontations are common, and in some species during the mating season, conflicts as well as aggression are frequent. Normally, however, conflict is much rarer than aggressive behaviour. timothy Colton, "The ' New Biology' and the Causes of War," this JOURNAL, n, no. 4 (Dec.