The Human Animal

This chapter turns to the work of Konrad Lorenz. Primarily interested in the scientific study of animal behavior, Lorenz believed that understanding how and why animals behave the way they do would shed light on the predicament of human behavior and the problem of nuclear escalation. Whereas Ardrey had lumped together hunting, cannibalism, and murderous rage into a single entity that defined humanity, Lorenz carefully distinguished the hunger associated with the killing of other species for food (an interspecific behavior) from (intraspecific) aggression inherent to killing a member of one's own species. Hunters and warriors were not the same thing—and between them, Lorenz was interested in only the latter. One of the deepest intellectual splits between Ardrey and Lorenz concerned the timing and causality of man's relationship with tools of war: whereas Ardrey insisted that the accidental discovery of weapons drove our intellectual and social development as humans (the weapon made the man), Lorenz flipped these, asserting the far more commonly held belief that early humans self-consciously developed weapons as tools for hunting.