Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You

There are not white, black and Asian diseases. However, being white, black or Asian can put you in different social and environmental realities that lead to inequalities in health and disease.

We will never understand violence by looking only at the genes or brains of violent people. Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one

This prevalence of cooperation does not negate aggression or violence and in fact probably enables the kind of intense and extreme violence that is characteristic of modern warfare and civil conflicts. To create and maintain armies you need extremely complex cooperation and to engage in wide-scale warfare, coordination and a near complete suppression of selfish behavior is needed. One might even argue that war is possible directly due to humans' unique abilities to maintain large-scale and intensive cooperation.

is just that the available evidence shows that aggression is neither the primary, nor the most successful, way to achieve dominance and to mate and produce offspring. Although humans and male primates can be aggressive, and humans can be especially violent, there is no indication that this is a consistent or evolved strategy in our species.

This result suggests that there might be differential socialization for males and females (allowing more high aggression in males and dampening the expression of aggression in females), resulting in the different trajectories of retention of patterns of high aggression.47 This is especially interesting given that there does not seem to be a link between physical aggression and the testosterone spike in males at puberty, which might have been an explanation for the maintenance of increased high aggression into adulthood by males.

For anthropologists, the major distinction between sex and gender is one of societal context. Sex refers to the biological differences between men and women and gender refers to the overall differences in perception and actions. Just as we are enculturated into the society in which we grow up, we are also engendered (literally “to become a gender”).

So, while peaceful interaction is a lot more common than war, and more widespread at any given moment, war results in a more immediate and dramatic outcome than peace—death. Warfare is a part of modern humanity and it impacts lives, so the evolutionary history of warfare is important and might be able to give us insight into human aggression.

While it is true that in some species (like chimpanzees, orangutans, and some baboons) males do seem to use aggression to coerce females to stay near them, or even to mate with them, there are also many other species (gibbons, many macaques, marmosets and tamarins, and Asian leaf monkeys) where males are not able to use aggression to coerce females at all. In fact in many species females can group together to form coalitions with which to resist male attempts at coercion or aggression.

That is, just over a third of children in two studies (in the United States and Finland) who demonstrated high aggressive behavior levels at around eight years of age also displayed these levels as adults. Interestingly, the same is true for those children who displayed very low levels of aggression. Not surprisingly another strong correlation with childhood and adult aggression was the aggressiveness of the adults parenting the children. This pattern, where context, learning, and childhood experience and environments are related to the adult expression of aggression, is characteristic of many cultures around the planet

Violence and aggression attract our attention more than nonaggressive or nonviolent interactions. They get more attention culturally and when they do occur they can have serious physical and health impacts. This can sometimes lead us to think that aggression and violence are more important (or at least impactful) than everything else we do, and thus must reflect a specific part of human nature.