You might glance at a book titled "Demonic Males" and decide to
pass it up as probably just another man-bashing feminist screed.
        But the subtitle, "Apes and the Origins of Human Violence,"
reveal it as something different, and much more interesting.
        The authors are Richard Wrangham, professor of anthropology
at Harvard and a leading authority on primate behavior, and Dale
Peterson, who has written a number of books on the subject.
        They look at patterns of behavior among our closest
evolutionary cousins — chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and
bonobos — for clues to why human males are much more violent than
human females, and what, if anything, we might do about it.
        I hope no one rises up in high dudgeon to dispute the
statement that most violence among humans is committed by men. It
doesn't mean that most men are violent; in fact they are not.
        And some women are violent, just not as many. Women can be
just as competitive as men, but from earliest childhood their
aggression is less likely to take a physical form. Picking fights
is not a good strategy if you're small, and that cautious
disposition is probably written into our genes as much as it is
learned by painful experience.
        Wrangham and Peterson's point is that violence is neither
new in human society nor unique to humans. Looking at wars from
ancient Greece to modern-day nations "we can detect no clear
pattern in the overall rates of death from intergroup violence,
which remain between five and 65 per 100,000 per year."
        The apes, too, murder and rape and go to war, singly or in
the marauding bands of young adult males the authors call
"demonic."
        But technology has raised the stakes for our species.
        "Our Pleistocene ancestors were beleaguered by their own
demonic males, surely," Wrangham and Peterson say. "But they didn't
have automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas,
Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons. We do, and therein lies the
danger."
        Though violence is common among the apes, it takes
different forms.
        Rape is common for orangutans, say observers who have
followed them in the wild, from a third of all encounters in one
study to nearly 90 percent in another.
        Some orangutan males are large, more than twice the average
size for orangutan females, They appear to have no difficulty
attracting willing female companionship. But another group of males
remains small, about the same size as females, and they are the
ones who commonly commit rape.
        For gorillas, the typical sex crime is not rape: it is
infanticide.
        Observations by Dian Fossey suggest that about one gorilla
infant in seven is murdered by an adult male. Gorillas typically
live in small groups consisting of one adult male, called a
silverback, and several females and their offspring. If that male
dies, any infants in the group are likely to be killed when their
mothers next encounter a silverback.
        What seems particularly troubling is that the death of the
baby seems to make the mother more, rather than less, likely to
join the killer's troop and have her next baby with him. When a
silverback with no harem succeeds in killing an infant, the mother
may to leave her old mate and join him. "The females' choice is
imposed by the logic of violence, by the threat to her next infant.
The new silverback has become her hired gun in an ape universe of
silverback baby killers."
        Chimpanzees are champion batterers. As each male reaches
adolescence, and begins to outweigh the grown females in his band,
"he enters the world of adult males by being systematically brutal
toward each female in turn . . . "until he has dominated all of
them."
        The male's goal appears to be to control the females so
they will be willing to go off with him when they are fertile. It
may not work particularly well. An article published last week in
the magazine Nature used DNA analysis to show that nearly half of
the infants born to female chimpanzees of a group living in the Tai
Forest of the Ivory Coast were fathered by chimpanzees from other
groups.
        Wrangham told an AP reporter that these matings might have
a practical benefit for the females because the chimpanzees' world
is dominated by ferocious battles for territory. Fraternization
with the enemy might earn mercy for the infant in a future
encounter.
        This pervasive violence is not the way we usually think of
life in the idyllic rain forest or the peaceful savannah. But as
Thomas Hobbes observed, life in a state of nature is "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short." And he was talking about human
beings.
        In fact, human beings do better. Battery, rape and
infanticide certainly occur in human societies, but not as
universal or acceptable behavior. Violent crime in general had been
on a long-term, slow decline for a century before the 1960s, when
the United States simultaneously carried out two disastrous social
experiments: sharply reducing the likelihood of punishment for
violent crime and greatly increasing the number of children raised
outside marriage, who are at much greater risk of committing it.
        A more informed knowledge of how we primates are likely to
behave in the absence of social controls might have saved us a
great deal of misery in the past few decades. Wrangham and Peterson
provide it.