Thoughts on "Exploring Our Basic Human Nature"    Robert W. Sussman, 1997
Are Humans Inherently Violent?

• New evidence that killer instincts are not unique to humans, but rather shared with our nearest relative, the common chimpanzee. Some argue that it is this inherited propensity for killing that allows hominids and chimps to be such good hunters.
• Some claim that only two animal species, chimpanzees and humans, live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities "with intense, male initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill.
• Chimpanzee behavior includes an intense competition between males, the violent aggression they use against strangers, and their willingness to maim and kill those that frustrate their goals." Since humans and chimpanzees share these violent urges, the implication is that human violence has long evolutionary roots.
• "Chimpanzees and humans kill members of neighboring groups of their own species is . . . a startling exception to the normal rule for animals." "Fighting adults of almost all species normally stop at winning : they don't go on to kill" There are exceptions -- lions, wolves hyenas, others. The fact is that most species do not have the weapons to kill one another as adults. And the defeated runs away.
• In the case of chimpanzees, every one to four months, males invaid a neighboring territory in search of an isolated individual to kill.
  [ In the case of modern man, every one to four election cycles.]
• Some suggest that earliest man were killers. Other evidence suggests early men were hunted, more than the hunter.
• Students of Bonobos find a female bonded society that chose docile males. Human women select for successful males able to bring food home to the children.
• "Are we doomed to be violent forever because this pattern is fixed within our genetic code?"
  "What does it do for us, then to know the behavior of our closest relatives? Chimpanzees show us some of the worst aspects of our past and our present. Bonobos shows an escape from it.