Review of M. P. Ghiglieri, The dark side of man: tracing the origins of male violence.

 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(3): 591-592 (2002).

This book claims to uncover the roots of homicide, war, and ‘terrorism’. Since the author is a well-known primatologist – described on the dust-jacket as ‘a protégé of Jane Goodall’– I expected a controversial but at least scholarly account. I was wrong.

Each chapter – ‘Rape’, ‘Murder’, ‘Genocide’, ‘War’, etc.– begins with a tabloid-style sensationalist account of pathological violence. In the case of the ‘rape’ story, this is particularly harrowing, leaving few details to the imagination. As its climax approaches, the narrative suddenly breaks off, whereupon Ghiglieri – now donning his ‘scientist’ mantle– elaborates on the inescapably violent sexual urges of the human male.

‘Murder is coded in our DNA’, Ghiglieri tells us, ‘just as it is in the genes of our close ape cousins’ (p. 154). Mountain gorillas are ‘natural born killers’ (pp. 129-33). The great apes lead lives ‘shaped by instinctive social “rules” that are violent, sexist, and xenophobic’ (p. 8). Among apes,‘not only does “might make right”, but superiority in combat is the only sure road to reproductive success’ (p. 12). Humans share with our mammalian relatives the same ‘basic biology’, hence the same political drives – explaining why ‘ten times more men than women worldwide are politicians’ (p. 26).

Ghiglieri is no social or economic historian. For him, a male is a male is a male. Osama bin Laden, Idi Amin, an assortment of psychopaths and rapists, wild-living mountain gorillas, and !Kung Bushmen are lumped together as case-studies – the latter counting as ‘war-like’ rather than ‘harmless’ on the basis that they ‘defend waterholes and foraging areas’ (p. 164).

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M. P. Ghiglieri – The dark side of man: tracing the origins of male violence. xii, 323 pp., table, notes. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1999. £17.95 (cloth)