The catchy title of a recent review of a new and extremely interesting book on African apes misrepresents these amazing beings as ultraviolent. But this really isn't who they are. Sure, great apes and other animals fight and on occasion harm and kill one another, but this is extremely rare. Even the authors of this new book agree that "extreme violence is rare." Sensationalist media often misrepresents animals as the beings we want them to be, rather than the individuals who they are.
Available data show animals are far more cooperative than we've previously thought. Jane Goodall noted in her book The Chimpanzees of Gombe " . . . it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones; mild threatening gestures are more common than vigorous ones; threats per se occur much more often than fights; and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones." John Horgan noted the evidence for hard-wired warfare in animals is very weak and those who claim that great apes and other animals are inherently demonic aren't paying attention to what we really know. He summarizes current data as follows: "All told, since Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park in 1960, researchers have directly observed 31 intergroup killings, of which 17 were infants .... researchers at a typical site directly observe one killing every seven years . . . "
Similarly, Robert Sussman, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues Paul A. Garber and Jim Cheverud, reported in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2005) that for many nonhuman primates, more than 90 percent of their social interactions are affiliative rather than competitive or divisive. A new book edited by Sussman and C. Robert Cloninger shows clearly that cooperation is far more typical of other animals than is divisive competition and aggression.
Humans too, are highly cooperative and egalitarian, even among strangers. It's been suggested that large-scale cooperation may have set humans on the path to success. A recent book reviews what we know about the importance of human cooperation in the evolution of human social behavior.
Let's not continue to use false representations of our animal kin to justify our violent and destructive ways. There's extremely little evidence that suggests we should look to animals to understand our violent tendencies. We should be proud of our animal heritage. Calling someone an "animal" is really a complement.
