Word: ardrey
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...fact, sociobiologists believe, conflict?both in the family and with outsiders?is the essence of life. But they do not think that man is at the mercy of an irresistible aggressive instinct, as Lorenz (On Aggression) and Author Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) insisted in their popular books more than a decade ago. For sociobiologists the trick in becoming an evolutionary winner is to hit just the right level of aggression. Too little, and the organism may be muscled out by competitors. Too much, and it may die in battle without reproducing, or use up time and energy in fighting...
...Many of Ardrey's conclusions about man arise from his readings of recent primate studies. The chimpanzee, for example, turns out to be more than a mischievous vegetarian. Bands of male chimps have been observed hunting small game, not primarily for food but for entertainment. One adult male was even seen eating its own young. Associating freely in the ethological record, Ardrey reasons that as long as primates remained treed, where food and safety were readily available, meat eating could be a sometime thing. He goes on to extrapolate that the earliest manlike creature made its appearance in rather...
...Hunting, runs this hypothesis, laid down the foundations of human institutions: the development of weapons, cooperative action, the need to share food and the division of labor into hunting males and child-rearing females. The nonhunting female, Ardrey believes, contributed vitamins to the diet by foraging for plants. But it was man's bringing home the meat that provided the proteins needed for the evolution of complex nerve and brain cells...
Vegetarians and feminists will not be pleased. Neither will readers who, while granting Ardrey the run of his special territory, require more rigor with their speculation. He frequently exhibits what might be called the rhetorical imperative. For example: "Are the qualities that we regard as uniquely human the consequences of being human beings, or have we evolved as human beings because of the earlier evolution of qualities that we regard as uniquely human?" This need to impose a dramatic unity on unimaginable lengths of time can also lead to inconsistencies. Ardrey says at one point that science has failed...
...touch of apocalypticism is an appropriate conclusion to this idiosyncratic book. The accompanying nostalgia is something else. It is generally agreed that the human animal appears to have evolved because of hardship, not in spite of it, but Ardrey seems almost too wistful for the times when we survived by the skin of our fangs. R.Z. Sheppard