Born That Way

by William Wright

  African Genesis was written in a highly colorful, exuberant, often lyrical style and was packed with intriguing evidence—tasty gossip about our fellow animals—to support Ardrey’s thesis. A vast audience was gripped to read about the scrappy, status-obsessed natures of meadowlarks, field mice, and tropical fish. It turned out, for instance, that the warblers’ song was not a lyrical burst of joy at the beauty of nature but a surly warning to other warblers to stay out of the singer’s territory.

  When Ardrey arrived at humans, he cited at one end the fossil evidence of early human nastiness that left no doubt about within-species foul play, that is to say, homicide. At the other end, he pointed to mankind’s sorry career of bloodshed. Speaking of the earliest humans, he produced scene-of-the-crime evidence that lethal weapons go back to the very origin of the species. One of the most vivid was the skull of a young male Australopithecus that had clearly been cracked by a blunt instrument. On the basis of such clues Ardrey proclaimed that the human race had been born with a weapon in its hand and has been wielding it with gusto ever since. Hello, N.R.A.

  Ardrey’s powerful and dramatic assertion of inherited behavioral traits boldly confronted the behaviorists, still solidly in power. And not only was this screenwriter challenging their dictums that behavior was learned, he was also saying that our inherited behaviors were nasty. Given the utopian, all-babies-are-good cast to the behaviorist canon, this news was a doubly unpleasant jolt. It was bad enough to hear that we might be born with any behavioral leanings; but that those leanings included homicidal violence was not a happy message for those who saw our species as a higher form of life bursting with morality. It also did damage to hopes for a peaceful, more civilized world.

  In spite of the disagreeable message, Ardrey’s thesis, for many, struck a plangent chord of recognition and seemed to hold out a more realistic, more insightful explanation of man’s endless warfare than historians who pondered what had gone awry at the Congress of Vienna or the Versailles conference. African Genesis was widely read, and its ideas about our killer-ape heritage seeped into the public consciousness. Even more significantly, it marked the beginning of wide-scale consideration of inherited aspects of human behavior. It was a Fort Sumter shot fired at the tabula rasa bulwark behind which the social sciences then operated. This intellectual shift has gained momentum ever since.

  While a highly successful screenwriter and a respected dramatist, Ardrey had no scientific credentials whatsoever. Although his amateur status may have liberated him from academic caution and emboldened him to state forthrightly the implications of others’ research, it permitted his critics, often people who did have scientific credentials, to treat him with disdain. He ran smack into the problem faced by all who promulgate new ideas; their writing more often than not is appraised by experts in the field, people deeply wedded to the very ideas the new work is challenging. The experts the rest of us might assume would be the most stimulated and inspired by new ideas relating to their fields are far more likely to marshal their expertise to fight off the upstarts. A sorry rule is that fresh theories are rarely weighed on their merits but instead trigger displays of intellectual territoriality that guarantee a fiery gauntlet for anyone threatening prevailing orthodoxy. Since most men and women engaged in the idea arena know this nasty fact, few are willing to jeopardize respected professional niches with disruptive theories. It almost requires an amateur like Ardrey—in his case, one with a talent for vivid, gripping communication—to undergo the inevitable pillorying. And pilloried he was. Knowing how influential his book had been, I was astounded to go back and read the reviews, almost all of which were by experts in the field and almost all of which were scathing.

  If Ardrey was subjected to the contempt of scientists, he was no wimp at returning it. In a later book, he presented a summary condemnation of the environmentalist dogma that is a fine example of killer-ape vitriol. His academic opponents present for him a picture, he says, of “cultural anthropology, behaviorist psychology, and environmental sociology like three drunken friends leaning against a lamppost in the enchantment of euphoria, all convinced they are holding up the eternal light when in truth they hold up nothing but each other.”

  Ardrey’s thesis about humans’ built-in aggressiveness was anathema to the many who had been brought up to believe Margaret Mead and her colleagues’ conclusion: We could have been as sweet and lovable as the Samoans of Mead’s imagination if our corrupt societies, our rotten cultures, hadn’t turned us mean and vicious. To preserve this vision, we today have the more specific whipping boy of television and film violence to blame for our lost Samoa. At the time of African Genesis, however, murder rates were down and our country hadn’t been slaughtering foreigners in any major way for a peaceful sixteen years, so to the middle-class academics who had never killed anything more than the random roach or mouse the suggestion we might have innate homicidal leanings was an absurd slander.

  So repugnant was Ardrey’s charge, and so counter to the prevailing orthodoxy, that not only reviewers but also paleontologists and other academics rose up in angry phalanxes to fight him with a territorial desperation that would have impressed Siamese fighting fish. One point they seized on had to do with human teeth. Important to Ardrey’s man-the-killer argument was that our species started out as meat eaters, a fact he felt was proven by the visible wear on fossil teeth. But this proof, in the eyes of many experts, was anything but conclusive; they produced counterevidence to show that we had started our species career as vegetarians—not that this diet would mean that we were nice, but probably nicer than a species with an urge to rip apart animals with its teeth.

  In The Third Chimpanzee, his fascinating 1992 book on evolutionary psychology, anthropologist Jared Diamond sums up the counterarguments to Ardrey in an early essay that cites the shaky paleontological grounds for believing Homo sapiens had always been carnivorous, that our fondness for lamb, beef, and veal chops might not be something we picked up from Julia Child but has been with us from the get-go. As Diamond puts forth the rebuttals, he picks up the what-does-he-know-about-science tone typical of Ardrey’s critics. Later in the same book, in an essay written some years later, Diamond examines mankind’s sorry history of homicide, presenting a plethora of grotesque statistics that would seem to place killing high above altruism and incest taboos for a cross-cultural, specieswide trait. With admirable candor, Diamond acknowledges that Ardrey appears to have been right in his main thesis; we have a homicidal genetic heritage. Wrong about the teeth, he in effect says, but right about our nasty nature.

  Whether or not we started out as meat eaters, the evidence is everywhere that we sure do like to kill. The frenzy with which the opposing scientists struggled against Ardrey’s construct was almost touching. They seemed to believe that a different interpretation of the grinding marks on the Australopithecus incisors would expunge two thousand years of planetwide bloodshed and render us a gentle, agreeable species that had been turned bad by the Industrial Revolution, Swiss bankers, the Pentagon, Madison Avenue, The X Files, lead poisoning, and a host of the usual environmental suspects.

  In spite of the critical trouncing of African Genesis, it still received major attention from the most influential and widely circulated publications. Not only was the book reviewed everywhere, but also the critiques, although mostly negative, often were the lead reviews, an honor usually reserved for books the editors consider important. This conflict between serious attention and negative assessment suggests that while the scientific reviewers had no use for the book, the nonscientist editors were fascinated.

  For all African Genesis’s groundbreaking novelty, Ardrey in his first chapter acknowledged his debt to the animal-behavior research of others. He cited especially W. C. Allee, a zoologist at the University of Chicago, whose 1940 book The Social Life of Animals posited the universality of a dominance instinct. Ardrey credited another book with initiating the entire train of thought about inherited behavior: a 1920 work by an English bird-w
atcher, Eliot Howard, entitled Territory in Bird Life. He also gave credit to an American zoologist, R. C. Carpenter, who “brought matters perilously close to home” with his studies of territoriality in apes and monkey societies living in natural states.

  While this research may have made a profound impression on Ardrey, few others paid much attention. Similarly, the work of Lorenz and Timbergen, which he also cited, was of interest only to a small group of psychologists. Because this work dealt exclusively with animals, the psychologists could take from it whatever implications for humans they wished. Konrad Lorenz, in his 1952 book King Solomon’s Ring, draws a few mild parallels between animal and human behavior, but he doesn’t hammer the point as Ardrey does. For the most part, however, until Ardrey, the environmentalists had convinced the world of the irrelevance of instinct to humans, and the animal behaviorists were too timid to insist on it.

  By contrast, African Genesis forced widespread attention to the ethological premise—that we can learn much about ourselves by studying animals. The Boas/Watson/Skinner forces, with their vision of a human unencumbered with behavioral predispositions, had succeeded in disconnecting our species from the rest of evolution; almost single-handedly, Ardrey linked us back up. Not only was Ardrey, with his three-million-year-old unsolved murders, claiming that evolution has saddled us with a battery of behavioral traits, but he was also reckless enough to emphasize the most repugnant, the killer impulse. This inflammatory claim certainly won Ardrey attention, but the angry controversy it provoked almost obscured his main point: that human behavior is as much a product of evolution as the human body. This generalization was so much more palatable than his specifics about killer instincts that it almost slipped by with little fuss. A great tectonic plate of intellectual thought had lurched into motion and has been picking up speed ever since.

  In the next few years a number of ethological books emerged that had comparable, even greater impact: Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups (1969), and The Imperial Animal (1971), which Tiger wrote with Robin Fox. All of them emphasized the major role played by genetic inheritance in human behavior. Lorenz’s book was treated far more respectfully than Ardrey’s, undoubtedly because of his eminence as a scientist (he won the Nobel Prize in 1973), but basically it made the same point about humans’ homicidal aggressiveness. All of these books contributed mightily to an evolving awareness among the thinking public about the behavioral legacy that has come down to all humans through the eons. Little was said by these writers about how it came to us, but everyone knew there was only one way: genetic transmission.

  In my own conversion, African Genesis was the first of these books that I read, and it made an enormous impact on me. I felt that at last someone was not only talking sense about human nature but also was speculating intelligently on the evolutionary origins of that nature. That Ardrey was my first exposure to this thinking, I assumed, was happenstance, the luck of the library draw; I made no claim to be on top of every new development in ethology and anthropology. I assumed African Genesis appeared about the same time or after the other books. When, however, thirty years later I began researching the subject in earnest, I was stunned to learn that Ardrey’s book, which made as forceful a statement about our inherited behavior as any of them—and was far more widely read—preceded the others by five years. Hooray for amateurs!

  While African Genesis had a bumpy road to its eventual impact, Ardrey’s next book, Territorial Imperative, was a solid hit from the start and enjoyed a long run on the New York Times best-seller list. It benefited not only from the millions of readers who had been excited by African Genesis but also by the near simultaneous publication of Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, a highly readable yet scholarly book that provided strong validation for Ardrey’s ideas from a world-renowned scientist.

  My awe at Ardrey’s audacious accomplishment continued to grow. When I interviewed Lionel Tiger for this book, I asked what drew him to the subject of evolved behavior in humans. Because he was a respected scholar, I assumed he had been researching the subject for years before the ethological books, his and the others, burst onto the scene in the 1960s. A professor of anthropology at Rutgers and the author of many papers and books, Tiger had all the scientific credentials that Ardrey lacked; I had believed him to be a pioneer in placing evolutionary-behavioral thinking before the public. I was therefore startled when Tiger told me his interest had been stirred by his reading African Genesis, that the book had been a major factor in his shift to ethology and the evolutionary perspective on human behavior.

  With Ardrey way out in front, a civilian Joan of Arc leading a handful of seasoned generals, the combined influence of all these books was powerful indeed on the reading public. Together they shattered the fortress of behaviorism and open the gates to consideration of our species’ innate behavioral characteristics. The willing, almost eager acceptance of this concept was reflected by the appearance in the public discourse of terms like territoriality, pecking order, and fight-or-flee impulses.

  I suspect that the quick adoption of these terms into the vernacular said more about the broad recognition of their relevance to humans than to their novelty or wit. Has anyone worked in an office and not perceived a pecking order, or heard loud music from the next apartment without feeling a murderous surge of territoriality? I further believe that throughout the environmentalist heyday, the public at large paid little attention to the dictums of top psychologists and knew full well that humans were born with personality traits and behavioral dispositions. The ethological books of the early 1960s only provided scientific validation to long-standing popular wisdom. Whatever resonance the books had with the general public, they initiated a gradual migration of many thoughtful people to a balanced view of a human nature, a nature shaped by both the environment and genes.

  A favorite jab of the critics is that the biological perspective reflects conservative political thinking and resurfaces during zeitgeist swings to the right. It is therefore worth noting that the resurgence of behavioral genetics thought occurred during the 1960s, one of the most politically liberal periods in the country’s history. The pervasive mood of rebellion did nothing to slow the advance, nor did the day’s progressive spirit provide any tailwinds for the new view of human nature, the kind of assist environmentalists received from the progressive movement earlier in the century. Ardrey, Lorenz, and the others made such convincing cases for the human inheritance of behavioral patterns that more and more people acknowledged the point’s validity without brooding about the political implications or jumping to conclusions about dire ramifications for society. To many, the ethologists were offering plausible explanations for behavioral phenomena that were all too apparent.

  None of the books claimed that inheritance was all-powerful in human behavior, only that we had certain vestigial impulses that operated in concert with environmental influences. The sensible balance of this view, however, was quickly threatened. As with so many new ideas that finally take hold, the genetic perspective appeared to be careening toward overkill. After only a few years of acceptance, the new thinking seemed to be lurching toward an exclusively biological view of behavior. Because of the forty-year moratorium on such thinking among educated people, the inherited side of human nature was the exciting news of the day, and the news was being seized upon as a thrilling new perception that would replace environmentalism. Non-scientific kibitzers wanted a fight with a winner and a loser. This led to many mischaracterizations and overstatements in press coverage. Responsible scientists held firmly to the concept of a draw, of innate nature interacting with nurture.

  Even this modest adjustment to basic assumptions about behavior, many knew, necessitated discarding, or at least rethinking, most of the psychological research done in the preceding decades. In spite of the wasted effort and misspent careers, many took heart in the belief that the study of the human was at last on a valid track after forty years of radic
al environmentalism. The new push to disentangle genetic from environmental influences was called behavioral genetics. To none joining the new quest did this mean the environment no longer mattered but only the door had at last been opened to one half of the human equation that had been ignored for fifty years.

  FOURTEEN

  SURVIVING THE JENSEN FUROR

  THROUGHOUT THE 1960s, the new train of thought—gene-influenced behavior—was lurching forward, picking up a number of important passengers, and signaling to believers that the behaviorist tyranny was finished and that they could emerge from hiding. The hard-won receptiveness to genes was, however, abruptly derailed in 1969 by the publication of Arthur Jensen’s paper that claimed I.Q. differences between blacks and whites were not explained by cultural differences but were, in fact, genetic. The resulting explosion all but killed off the infant field of behavioral genetics and certainly set it back ten years. Since the same debate erupted again in 1993 with the publication of The Bell Curve, it might be useful to review the earlier conflagration.

  Throughout the decades when environmentalism ruled, the incendiary subject of I.Q. managed to slip by the moratorium on talk of inherited traits. It was granted a special status, separate and distinct from other aspects of behavior, or at least on the border between a personality trait and the physical self. Perhaps one reason for the dispensation was that intelligence tests had grown increasingly refined and their validity was generally accepted by educators who found them useful in assessing whether or not little Jane or Johnny should be admitted, or once admitted, if they were doing their best. Whether or not this thing that was measured, called I.Q., or “g,” was inherited, was not central to the educators’ pragmatic need for some sort of classifying test. As a result, the controversial point was not pushed. I.Q. malleability or lack of it was certainly relevant to educational strategies, but few psychologists felt the data was conclusive enough to insist on a genetic basis.