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Killer Instinct - The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America (Hardcover)
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Killer Instinct - The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America (Hardcover)
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A historian of science examines key public debates about the
fundamental nature of humans to ask why a polarized discourse about
nature versus nurture became so entrenched in the popular sciences
of animal and human behavior. Are humans innately aggressive or
innately cooperative? In the 1960s, bestselling books enthralled
American readers with the startling claim that humans possessed an
instinct for violence inherited from primate ancestors. Critics
responded that humans were inherently loving and altruistic. The
resulting debate-fiercely contested and highly public-left a
lasting impression on the popular science discourse surrounding
what it means to be human. Killer Instinct traces how Konrad
Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and their followers drew on the sciences of
animal behavior and paleoanthropology to argue that the aggression
instinct drove human evolutionary progress. Their message, spread
throughout popular media, brought pointed ripostes. Led by the
anthropologist Ashley Montagu, opponents presented a rival vision
of human nature, equally based in biological evidence, that humans
possessed inborn drives toward love and cooperation. Over the
course of the debate, however, each side accused the other of
holding an extremist position: that behavior was either determined
entirely by genes or shaped solely by environment. Nadine Weidman
shows that what started as a dispute over the innate tendencies of
animals and humans transformed into an opposition between nature
and nurture. This polarized formulation proved powerful. When E. O.
Wilson introduced his sociobiology in 1975, he tried to rise above
the oppositional terms of the aggression debate. But the
controversy over Wilson's work-led by critics like the feminist
biologist Ruth Hubbard-was ultimately absorbed back into the
nature-versus-nurture formulation. Killer Instinct explores what
happens and what gets lost when polemics dominate discussions of
the science of human nature.
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