The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (original) (raw)
David Livingstone Smith's The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War is the latest in a seemingly endless procession of popular writings purporting to explain the existence of war by biologically evolved tendencies to kill. In many ways it follows the standard formula: many detailed examples of almost unimaginable brutality, dubious analogies, scoffing at disbelief as wishful thinking, and invoking the standard formulation that only by facing up to the ugly biological truth will we be able to find a way past war. ''Human beings may not be doomed to war. We may be able to break its spell and take control of our future. But to do this we must be willing to look at ourselves, and face some stark unflattering truths'' (p. 27). What makes this book different is that Smith directly confronts some contradictory evidence that other writers ignore, the well-documented fact in American war studies that soldiers in combat very frequently display an extreme reluctance to take others' lives. Thus, humans appear to be ambivalent about war. He finds the answer to this puzzle in evolutionary psychology and a self-deceiving clash of hypothetical mental modules. Chapters One and Two give a general overview of his argument. Chapter Three asserts the necessary foundation for any biological explanation of war: humans have practiced war throughout our archaeological past. In Chapter Four, Smith claims that the roots of war go back to our common ancestors, chimpanzees, and that our propensity to kill has been propagated over the eons because it led to reproductive success. Chapter Five is about evolutionary psychology and its theory that the mind is made up of a mass of evolved, dedicated modules, which process certain types of information and produce particular dispositions for action. Chapter Six is on selfdeception, the idea that different parts of the brain can be disharmonious, one module pulling the wool over the other. Chapter Seven asks
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