#86： Demonic Males With Dr. Richard Wrangham
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Summary
Dr. Richard Wrangham is the co-author of the book Demonic Males: The Origins of Human Violence, and the author of Demonic Females: A Primates and the Origins of Manhood. He argues that there is a biological component to why men tend to be more violent, aggressive, and competitive than other primates.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, a few months ago, I wrote an in-depth series on the anthropology, the history, the
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philosophy, the biology of the culture of manhood that we find across the globe and across
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Yes, there are differences between culture to culture, small ones, but they all have these
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high-level general principles in common on what it means to be a man and what manhood
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And one of those high-level principles is that a man is supposed to be a protector, and that
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means using violence and aggression to protect his family, his tribe, and also to invade other
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And we make the case that's sort of the core of masculinity on what it means to be a man
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Why is it that men are called upon to fulfill this role as protector and are expected to
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be aggressive and competitive and sometimes willing to do violence if necessary?
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Some would say that it's just completely a cultural construct, and that if you change
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the culture, you can change the way men behave.
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But our guest today has an argument that there is a biological component to why men tend to
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be more violent, more aggressive, more competitive.
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He's a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, and he's the co-author
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of the book, Demonic Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
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And in his book, he highlights research that's been done in recent years among primates, specifically
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the great apes, and specifically the chimpanzees, on male violence.
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And what he's found is that there's a lot of similarities, specifically between male chimps
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and male humans, on how we approach violence and how they form male-bonded groups.
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Male chimps also are very violent, and we'll talk about how they actually engage in warfare
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Male chimps tend to form male-bonded groups, like little armies, basically, little gangs,
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And we only scratched the surface in this conversation, so I recommend you go pick up
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the book after you listen to this podcast to delve deeper into this.
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So without further ado, let's get on to the show with Dr. Richard Wrangham.
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Well, before we get to talking about your book, Demonic Males, let's talk a bit about
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your profession, because I think this is interesting.
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I never heard of this before until I read your book.
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Can you explain what biological anthropology is?
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That is, of course, just the study of people from many different perspectives, but particularly
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And then biological anthropology is the biological component of that.
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And to some extent, it looks at differences among cultures.
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But actually, the great majority of its attention is given to thinking about us as a species in
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They're asking questions about why is it that we have different kinds of bodies, different
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kinds of physiology, different kinds of behavior, in my case, from other species.
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Well, I started studying chimpanzees in the 1970s.
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And when I did that, I was not an anthropologist.
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I was just an ordinary biologist thinking about the evolution of animal behavior.
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But there's something so striking when you study chimpanzees.
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And after about 20 minutes of seeing them close up in the wild and just seeing the way they
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use their eyes and their facial expressions and their gestures, you realize that there's something
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about chimpanzees that is sort of half human, half animal, to put it at its crudest.
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You know, they have a lot of complexity in the way that their behavior and their mental
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And so that draws you, as a biologist studying chimpanzees, into the study of anthropology.
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And it's about apes and the origins of human violence.
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And until fairly recently, scientists thought that human beings were the only species of
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animal that deliberately killed members of their own species in acts of warfare or murder.
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And they often blamed our ability to reason or civilization for our violent tendencies.
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But that changed because of an event that happened in the 1970s, where primatologists observed
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an incident amongst a pack of chimps that forced them to re-evaluate humanity's monopoly on
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I mean, even in the late 1960s, there was a very famous book called On Aggression by the
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The thing is that people hadn't watched animals much at that point.
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And there we were in 1974 with chimpanzees in the wild, already realizing that there was
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something pretty intense going on about their relationships.
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Because we were working with two groups of chimps, which had been one about five years before,
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And in January 1974, a small group of chimpanzees from one of those communities moved towards
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the territorial border and went into the area that's normally occupied by the neighboring
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And they found one individual in the neighboring group who they stalked as if they were prey,
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as if it was lions stalking an antelope, and got sufficiently close that the victim was
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He was chased down, and they grabbed him and pummeled him really hard.
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He was able to drag himself away, but he died a couple of days later.
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And that was the first case that any of the chimp people saw, in which you had really
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deliberate hunting and killing of a member of their own species, another adult of their
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Yeah, the way you described it, it just seemed really brutal, because chimps are, they're
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And they're like three or four times stronger than human beings or something like that?
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I mean, one of the amazing things, as we've now accumulated much more information since
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in the last 20 years, is that you can take something like 100 kills that have been seen
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with real confidence in the wild, and in not a single case has any of the attackers been
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Well, that's amazing, considering that you've got an animal three or four times as strong
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as a human, fighting for its life, absolutely desperate, but it can't put any wounds on
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Because they always choose, when attacking, to attack in sufficient number that they're
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So, basically, if four of them each take one limb and hold it down, then the fifth can do
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They can drum on the ribcage of the victim, and nothing's going to happen.
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And, in fact, what they do is they tear out their thorax, and they tear off the testicles,
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and they pull skin back by gripping it with their teeth just to pull it away from the body.
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And yet, they don't get hurt because they've immobilized the victim.
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And that's because they're smart enough to organize a group of four or five or eight or
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ten or twelve or whatever it is to isolate one victim and then do their worst.
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Because in most species, animals just defend territory, but what you're describing here
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and what primatologists have observed countless more times since then is that these chimps
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are actually organizing and going into other communities and basically raiding them.
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It's not that they take over the neighboring group.
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It's just that if they attack members of neighboring groups and kill them, then it's more likely
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that they will be able to use that area in the future, that it will be poorly defended by the neighboring group.
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So, they just increase slightly the area that they use.
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It's because the bigger the area, then we know this very clearly, the more food they get
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and the more food they get, then the faster they're able to reproduce and the better they're able to survive
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because energy coming from food is always limiting.
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And the more you can get, then the better you can survive and reproduce.
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So, are chimps the only primate that does this besides human beings?
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I mean, do orangutans or gorillas do this sort of raiding?
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None of the other close relatives of humans do, but it don't look as though there is some very similar behavior
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in actually a monkey that lives in the Americas from Mexico to Peru, the spider monkey,
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because they have a rather similar pattern to chimpanzees of instead of living in a stable troop,
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they break up into small units like chimpanzees do.
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And it's because of this breaking up, a constant fission and fusion of the parties
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that leave sometimes a big group and sometimes an isolated individual,
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that you can get these great asymmetries with one group being able to isolate a lone individual.
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It's not so much that chimps are closely related to us.
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It's more that they have the same kind of grouping pattern.
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Interesting. So, you talk about the chimps organize themselves in these little patrols,
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Are these strictly male groups or are there females involved?
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And the classic example is there was one particular female called Gigi,
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who is now long dead, but when she was alive in Gombe in Tanzania,
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Now, the funny thing about Gigi is she never had a baby.
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She was apparently sterilized early in life or maybe genetically sterile for some reason.
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She would watch the males doing all the terrible beating and attacking,
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So, that showed that even when a female was there, it's a male activity.
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And in fact, the parties, the subgroups that you find within the center of the community range of chimpanzees,
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they are very much mixed, say, 50-50, male and female.
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But as they move towards the edge, you find the females dropping off.
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And then by the time they get to the right of the edge of the territory, it's pretty much 100% males.
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So, what similarities have you found between the way chimps engage in warfare,
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from what we can call it that, and how they bond and group, and what we see in humans?
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Well, the things that are found in chimps are very much similar to what you find in humans.
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But humans make it more complicated, of course.
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But the elements of a group of males taking the opportunity to attack helpless victims,
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that is something that you see in small-scale societies of humans.
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And indeed, you can say that you see it in modern warfare.
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You know, the aim of a modern warfare, the aim of a good commander,
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is to send his men on an attack that will leave them all safe,
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In other words, you know, you're always trying to arrange for asymmetries of power
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What humans do that is more complicated is several things,
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So, if you look at the literature on warrior behavior in small-scale societies,
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or there's a very quick defense mounted by the defenders.
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And this reflects the fact that some kind of benefit is needed to compensate the warriors for this,
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you have various kinds of rewards that everyone knows about,
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and you will get access to some of the resources that are at stake.
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So, humans are able to inculcate a militarization of a basic biological tendency.
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is that chimps are doing this from just one particular community of up to 200 individuals
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But, of course, what humans can do is organize the coalitions to be between neighboring villages or neighboring groups.
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And then that tremendously enlarges the whole operation.
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So, one of the things that this book did for me is it kind of shattered that myth that a lot of people have
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about civilized cultures being the only type of culture that is engaged in warfare,
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and that primitive hunter-gatherer societies live in peace and harmony.
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But the research shows that warfare is actually very ubiquitous,
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or was very ubiquitous amongst hunter-gatherer societies.
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Can you describe some of the research that shows how likely someone was to get killed in a hunter-gatherer society,
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or how likely they were to actually kill another person?
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Because I think, I mean, yeah, there's this idea, I guess, that the noble savage is the myth that people have.
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Where did that myth come from, and, yeah, like, why do we have that?
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Historically, you can talk about it being the musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
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the 18th, 19th century French intellectual who was just very impressed by a few primitive
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or a few sort of small-scale peoples that he came across.
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But as with many of these people, they had already been affected by modern life.
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And the basic answer to your question about why is it that we tend to think
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that people living at hunters-and-gatherers are so peaceful is that they've very rarely been studied,
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except where they're living next to militarily powerful farmers,
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and they're smart enough to know they're not going to do well fighting against the farmers.
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And if you look further, you find the evidence that the farmers had in the past defeated them, essentially.
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The critical question is, what happens when you look at hunters-and-gatherers
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that have been neighbored by other hunters-and-gatherers who speak a different language?
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And there are something like six culture areas around the world where you can find such cases.
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So as long as you look in the right areas where you don't have the hunters-and-gatherers
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already having been dominated by a much more powerful group,
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then you find this sort of somewhat chimpanzee-like behavior.
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So, I mean, the question is, you know, you're a biological anthropologist.
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And so there must be a reason why chimps and humans, human males specifically,
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I mean, why was it that males in both these species developed a violent temperament?
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Well, in a tragic way, it seems to benefit both the males and the females.
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If you think about the community of chimpanzees, they are always going to be surrounded by other groups of chimpanzees.
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And the only way they can get more access to the food that is so important for ultimately turning and producing more babies
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and having evolutionary success is to expand at the expense of the neighbors.
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And it so happens that in chimpanzees, the ecology that they have evolved with is one in which it pays to live in groups
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that sometimes you travel alone and sometimes you travel in a bigger group, which gives rise to the asymmetry.
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Okay, so now males and females are both interested in getting a larger group, a larger area, as I'm trying to say,
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But only in chimpanzees or very rarely elsewhere do you have the regular asymmetry that enable killing to be favored.
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And it's very dangerous for them to get involved in the attacks.
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And over evolutionary time, natural selection has favored mothers who are relatively fearful of going to the edge
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and getting involved in these fights, whereas it's favored males who relish the idea,
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who get very excited by the prospect of going up and beating up their neighbors.
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And the net result is that their group does well.
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They are able to increase the number of babies they pass on to future generations.
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Human beings are not only related to chimpanzees.
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In recent, particularly in the media, they talked a lot about the bonobos, or bonobos,
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I don't know how you pronounce it, as sort of this docile or peaceful, you know, close relative of ours.
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So, yeah, the chimps and the bonobos have a different culture,
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where the chimps are more aggressive and the bonobos more peaceful.
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Can you describe a little bit more detail the difference between chimps and bonobos
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and why these differences emerge between the two?
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Yeah, it is a totally fascinating story, and we still don't understand all of it.
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But you said there's a different culture between them, and in a sense that's right.
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But if we're going to be strictly accurate, it's a different biology.
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You know, you put chimpanzees and bonobos into zoos in identical conditions,
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and there's a complete difference in the way they behave.
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Now, this is very, very striking, because bonobos are very like chimpanzees to look at.
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In fact, they're so similar that Western scientists had seen bonobos for some time,
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several years, before they realized that they are a different species.
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It's a number of things, but more striking than anything, the bonobos are, as you said,
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It doesn't matter whether you're talking about captive or wild, males or females,
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whether they've been fed by humans or they're in nature, whether you're talking about within-group
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In all these ways, chimpanzees are far more aggressive than the bonobos.
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There's more non-conceptive sexuality among the bonobos.
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They're famously diverse in their sexual practices.
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But the important thing, from a biological perspective, the most important thing seems to be the reduced
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Well, the one thing I think we can say about this with some confidence is that bonobos have
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evolved from a chimpanzee-like ancestor rather than the other way around.
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And the reason you can say that is because of a fascinating similarity between bonobos and
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So this is a little bit surprising that I suddenly introduced a totally different species.
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In other words, dogs have evolved from wolves by reducing aggression.
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And bonobos have evolved from something like chimpanzees by reducing aggression.
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And the reason we can say this is because, just as you find in all domesticated animals,
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there are certain features that change in the skull.
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The skull becomes relatively small in dogs compared to wolves.
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Well, all of these things happen in bonobos compared to chimps.
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It's a fascinating story of a parallel in the wild to what we see in domesticated animals.
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And the parallels mean that there was natural selection against aggressiveness in bonobos.
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And they ended up being this nicer, kinder species.
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They're still somewhat aggressive, but just enormously less so than chimps.
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This probably started happening just a little less than a million years ago,
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long after the chimpanzee-bonobo line had split off from humans about six million years ago.
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And why it happened, it's a fascinating question.
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And I think the answer is something to do with the fact that bonobos live in stable groups,
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unlike these constantly varying groups of chimps that give rise to the power asymmetries
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where aggression can be easily carried out very safely.
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The reason that bonobos live in more stable groups is because they have access to different kinds of foods from the chimps.
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And the specific foods that appear to be really important are those that are also eaten by gorillas.
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There are no gorillas in the areas of Africa where bonobos live.
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So chimps and gorillas compete over these certain foods.
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And because there are gorillas that are eating them, then the chimps can't.
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And by the way, that leads them to live in stable groups.
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The foods we're talking about are meadows of edible herbs on the forest floor.
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So in the bonobo areas, no gorillas to eat them.
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And when they're eating them, they can stay together in stable groups just like the gorillas can.
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So we think that there is a deep ecological difference between these two species
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that's led to a difference in grouping patterns,
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that's led to a difference in the economics of aggression such that aggression doesn't pay in the bonobo world.
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And they've ended up self-domesticating, a bit like ending up like a dog compared to a wolf.
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So is it, I guess, resource abundance that leads to stability?
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I mean, is this herb pretty abundant where you don't have to really fight for it or take a risk for it?
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Yeah, it's a kind of a local resource abundance.
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It's the way the food is distributed that enables bonobos to take this different evolutionary path.
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And it just shows how arbitrary it is, whether or not a species ends up being more or less aggressive.
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So let's move on to this because I thought this was really interesting.
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It's a hot topic amongst social scientists and feminists.
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And it's popularly thought that patriarchy is this complete social or cultural construct.
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However, you highlight research in your book that not only from primatologists, but also from anthropologists,
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that patriarchy is much more ubiquitous than we formerly thought and that there's likely a biological reason for it.
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Can you describe the theory of how patriarchy has a biological underpinning?
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Yeah, I mean, this is one of these classic confusions when people are looking at somewhat related questions
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and appearing to disagree when actually they don't really.
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In other words, sure, patriarchy is strongly cultural in the sense that there are lots of differences among different human societies.
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Some are much more patriarchal, some are much less so.
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And those differences are going to be due to culture, not to differences in genes or anything like that.
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But at the same time, if you look at humans compared to other species,
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then you find that we are sort of a particular characteristic form.
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And that is, we are a species in which overall there is a very consistent tendency for patriarchy in every society.
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So were there any true matriarchal societies among hunters and gatherers or anybody else?
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You find people sometimes drifting in that direction.
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You find sometimes women's houses or women's being able to take important roles in communal decisions.
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But if there is ever a clash between what the men want to do and what the women want to do,
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then the authority always resides with the men.
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So in that sense, every single human society is patriarchal.
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And by the way, this is not just some man saying this.
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I mean, if you take, there was a book edited by two strong feminists called Women, Culture, and Society in the 1980s,
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and there was endless chapters by women anthropologists, and everyone agreed.
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This is a very firm conclusion from an analysis of the political lives of people living in every different kind of society.
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And so what is—so we all see patriarchy not only in humans but in chimps in a way.
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I mean, so why—is it because males, both in chimps and in humans, are physically stronger
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and that they have to do these raids to go and, you know, get more territory?
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I mean, is that the biological underpinning of patriarchy in both species?
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I mean, it may well have played a role, but it clearly isn't enough.
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The bonobos provide a fascinating counterpoint, because in bonobos, the males are bigger than the females.
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And if it was just a matter of strength, then the bonobos would undoubtedly be able to dominate the females.
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But if there are conflicts between males and females in bonobos, the females routinely win.
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And you can talk about them being sort of co-dominant between the males and the females,
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or sometimes you can say that the females seem to be dominating the males,
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but you never say that males are dominating the females.
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So there is a case where the differences in strength are not enough to account for the differences in social behavior.
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And the missing piece is the motivation of individuals to get together with other members of their own gender,
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or sex in the case of bonobos and chimpanzees, and form alliances.
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And in chimpanzees and humans, you have this very strong motivation of men to form really effective alliances that fight alongside each other.
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And it's quite clear that that would have paid off in evolutionary time in the context of fighting against neighboring groups.
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And I think that a very reasonable interpretation of the evolutionary history of patriarchy is that it stems from that tendency.
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So men now are able to use the alliances that they have come to so readily form in the context of war to dominate life within each society,
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whether it's modern-day America or hunter-gatherers living on the African plains.
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And, by the way, you know, one should recognize that patriarchy in this sense of male dominance is cultural in this sense,
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that it depends on the relationships among men or among women at the level of communal discussion.
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But if you're talking about just a man and a woman alone in their house,
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then it's quite wrong to think about males always being dominant.
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I mean, in some marriages, a man might be dominant to a woman.
00:30:37.340
It's once you get to the social, cultural area that you get the consistency.
00:30:42.180
But what is so striking, as you said, is that it occurs both in humans and in chimpanzees.
00:30:51.760
So I guess you're at Harvard University, correct?
00:30:55.620
So I think one of your colleagues, Stephen Pinker, wrote The Better Nature, Angels of Ourselves,
00:30:59.880
and he makes the argument that violence is decreasing in the world.
00:31:03.360
So, I mean, if violence and aggression is an evolved trait in male humans,
00:31:12.800
Can culture tame the beast, or is there something else that's going on that
00:31:16.460
because we live in an environment that has resource abundance,
00:31:19.520
we no longer have to be violent to gain an advantage in the world?
00:31:26.800
So the answer to that, I mean, there's this big question.
00:31:29.660
You say, well, if it's an evolved tendency, then how come it's,
00:31:35.780
The implication of the question is that if something has a biological component,
00:31:42.600
But that's an inappropriate implication, and I'm glad you brought it up
00:31:47.780
because it's really important for people to recognize that just because there's an evolved tendency,
00:31:54.040
And, yeah, Pinker did a wonderful job in showing that everywhere you look,
00:32:01.340
there is a tremendous evidence of a reduction in the actual frequency of death by violence,
00:32:07.760
or torture, or slavery, or all sorts of things that were far worse in the past in terms of violence.
00:32:18.760
Well, one of your ideas was, have we become so well supplied with the resources that we don't need to fight?
00:32:27.460
I don't think that's a very powerful explanation because if you look in history and if you look in animals
00:32:36.820
and if you think about it theoretically, you actually expect that animals, individuals, groups of humans
00:32:43.640
that have the great ability to use resources to attack their neighbors will do so.
00:32:52.100
There are many examples where as you get more resources and have more power, then you use it.
00:33:00.940
So merely more power for some groups is not so important.
00:33:05.560
But, however, if you say everybody is doing better and so we're all able to put up more effective defenses,
00:33:17.100
I think they, I mean, Pinker drew attention to, I think he had six different forces that he reckoned were very important,
00:33:23.500
and some of those were moral, you know, the spread of a different kind of morality towards people of neighboring groups.
00:33:38.840
To me, the really exciting area is the development of institutions that have been going on for several hundred years
00:33:54.220
A tremendous number of ideas and organizations are being brought into play
00:34:02.240
to try and control the violence that's going on in the Middle East.
00:34:07.240
Well, a thousand years ago, it would have just played itself out
00:34:11.200
and people would have massacred each other without anyone intervening.
00:34:14.880
So there's now a much greater effort at all levels to reduce violence wherever it appears.
00:34:26.480
So your book, the title of the book is Demonic Males,
00:34:29.540
and I think some people who would read it or would get the idea that, you know,
00:34:34.600
men are inherently flawed because they have this violent tendency
00:34:37.720
and human culture is somewhat helplessly at the mercy of the male propensity towards violence.
00:34:42.320
But are there reasons, you know, for optimism in your research?
00:34:45.980
And what do you hope people take away from these insights in your book?
00:34:50.720
I think, you know, I'm generally a positivist who thinks that the more we understand them,
00:34:56.100
the better we can take advantage of our understanding.
00:34:59.320
And I do feel that there's reasons for optimism.
00:35:03.340
I think that one of the things that Demonic Males reminds us
00:35:09.220
is that there are important psychological differences between men and women,
00:35:13.360
and I think it's a real stimulus to help promote the notion of increasing political power for women.
00:35:24.700
I think it's just great that countries like Rwanda and some of the Scandinavian countries
00:35:31.380
have now got around 50% of the legislatures at the national level being composed of women.
00:35:39.220
I think one can confidently expect that that will tend to lead to less aggressive policies.
00:35:47.340
Among men purely, I think that if we can understand that aggression is motivated by power difference,
00:35:56.500
which is what much different kinds of research suggests,
00:36:00.520
then we are reminded that it's really valuable to try and erode power differences
00:36:07.880
to make sure that we have bounces of power at all sorts of different levels.
00:36:12.280
Because the way natural selection and evolution work is that individuals don't want to take risks.
00:36:19.260
And if we can reduce the cultural enjoinments for militarization,
00:36:26.800
then if we can arrange society in such a way that there aren't huge imbalances of power,
00:36:32.920
we can expect that we will live in a much nicer world.
00:36:39.040
Well, Dr. Ringham, this has been a fascinating discussion.
00:36:41.320
Thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:36:43.380
Well, thank you so much for the interview. It's wonderful to talk to you.
00:36:48.620
He is a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University
00:36:52.300
and the co-author of the book, Demonic Males, Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
00:37:01.220
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:37:05.120
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:37:09.640
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00:37:14.060
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00:37:18.960
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00:37:24.420
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00:37:29.800
So until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.