Word: ardrey
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...longer appears in his ancient theological raiment; he is more subtly lodged in the human personality-a seventh circle of the psyche-where he is currently known as the instinct of aggression. Such is the description he has been given by ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who argue that fundamental drives are the basis of human behavior. In the '60s, it was commonly supposed that the devil could be banished by improving human institutions, but he seems scarcely daunted by such superficial change...
...those of, say, Charles Darwin. A 51-year-old mother of three children who lives in Mountain Ash, Wales, she earned an Oxford degree in English and gleaned most of her information about science "from reading books." Two men in particular inspired her. The first was Amateur Ethologist Robert Ardrey, the failed but imaginative playwright whose views she now rejects. The second was Oxford Zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, an authority on plankton who thought up a nonsexist version of aquatic evolution about a dozen years...
...naked ape dominated by his own savage biology and driven by killer instincts. More sophisticated scientists think otherwise, and one of them, Anthropologist Alexander Alland Jr., has now produced a ringing rebuttal. In a new book called The Human Imperative (Columbia University; $8.50), Alland counters the sophistry of Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) with a view of man as a human animal, a creature whose biologically rooted nature can be modified by the uniquely human creation that sets man apart from the apes, his culture...
Disciples of Ardrey's popular theory of territoriality-the notion that man's primary motivation stems from a biological urge to defend whatever area he regards as his-also get their comeuppance. Like aggression, territoriality can be proved natural for man only if it is universal, automatic and "imperative," as Ardrey would have it. In fact, says Alland, it is none of these, not even in the most primitive societies...
...classic heroic response to a virtually feudal situation. Yet David, in defending himself against the threat to what Robert Ardrey would call his territorial imperative, soon becomes as bestial as the attackers. Peckinpah asserts with gripping, merciless logic that any man, no matter how cold or cowardly, is capable of committing the most appalling violence -and of enjoying it. "You never took a stand," Amy accuses David early in the film; when he finally does, he acts not from any sense of honor but from animal instinct. The assault on the cottage and his defense of it produce...