Violence among our ape cousins is, in this view, the result of human contact, not the result of evolution favoring aggression as a strategy. But for those hostile to the idea that human violence relates in any way to biology or adaptive behavior, the Human Impacts Hypothesis (HIH) offers an out. We expect that for the majority of primatologists, and among the wider community of animal behavior researchers, the results of our study are neither surprising nor controversial. As Joan Silk notes in her commentary on our paper, “These results should finally put an end to the idea that lethal aggression in chimpanzees is a non-adaptive by-product of anthropogenic influences - but they will probably not be enough to convince everyone” (Silk, 2014: 321). In response to our recent paper (Wilson et al., 2014), Brian Ferguson (2014) critiques the methods we used to test whether chimpanzee violence is the result of human impacts. "Human impacts are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain chimpanzee violence (or bonobo non-violence)," by Michael L. ![]() Keep an eye on this blog for a counter-response from Ferguson. ![]() I find the response far more illuminating than the original Nature paper, and I thank Wilson et al. address the relevance of their work to human warfare. In this response, titled "Human impacts are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain chimpanzee violence (or bonobo non-violence)," Wilson et al. Wilson, just emailed me a response signed by him, Wrangham and most of the other authors, which is published below. The lead author of the Nature paper, Michael L. I also published a guest post in which anthropologist Brian Ferguson offered a detailed critique of the Nature paper. On this blog, I argued that the Nature report " undermines the deep-roots theory of war," because it shows that inter-community killings-which are supposedly analogous to human war-are quite rare. My main interest in chimpanzee violence is its alleged support for the claim-propagated notably by Richard Wrangham, one of the report's co-authors-that the roots of human warfare extend back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. ![]() The report triggered a wave of lurid mass-media claims that, as one British newspaper put it, " Chimps and humans are both 'natural born killers' with an almost psychopathic tendency towards violence and slaughter." Is chimpanzee violence a product of nature or nurture? Genes or environment? Two weeks ago Nature published a report, “ Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts,” in which 30 primatologists came down on the side of nature.
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