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mahir007's review against another edition
5.0
على الرغم من أن مقارنة ألدوس هكسلي الموسعة بين تشريح الغوريلا وتشريح الإنسان هي بالفعل تشير بقوة إلى أصل مشترك ، إلا أنه كان هناك دائمًا احتمال آخر ، مهما كان بعيدًا. عبر الانتقاء الطبيعي ، يمكن للأنواع المختلفة أو ذات الصلة البعيدة أن تتطور نحو التشابه المادي كاستجابة لضغوط بيئية مماثلة. وهذه العملية ، التي تسمى التقارب ، لا يمكن أبدًا استبعادها كتفسير للتشابه التشريحي للأنواع.
ضع في اعتبارك ، على سبيل المثال ، حقيقة أن البشر وأنواع القردة الأربعة العليا لديهم عظام ذيل بدائية. التفسير الأكثر احتمالاً لهذه الخاصية المشتركة هو الانحدار من سلف مشترك. ومع ذلك ، لا يزال من الممكن أن ينحدر البشر والقردة الأربعة من سلالات منفصلة ، مع عظام ذيلهم البدائية نتيجة انتقال كل مجموعة بشكل مستقل إلى نفس المكان البيئي ، وبالتالي تتطور بشكل منفصل بسبب بعض الضغوط البيئية المماثلة التي تعزز غياب الذيل : تكيف منفصل مع نتائج متقاربة.
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Richard Wrangham
Demonic Males
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
ضع في اعتبارك ، على سبيل المثال ، حقيقة أن البشر وأنواع القردة الأربعة العليا لديهم عظام ذيل بدائية. التفسير الأكثر احتمالاً لهذه الخاصية المشتركة هو الانحدار من سلف مشترك. ومع ذلك ، لا يزال من الممكن أن ينحدر البشر والقردة الأربعة من سلالات منفصلة ، مع عظام ذيلهم البدائية نتيجة انتقال كل مجموعة بشكل مستقل إلى نفس المكان البيئي ، وبالتالي تتطور بشكل منفصل بسبب بعض الضغوط البيئية المماثلة التي تعزز غياب الذيل : تكيف منفصل مع نتائج متقاربة.
.
Richard Wrangham
Demonic Males
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
onesonicbite's review against another edition
4.0
Sadly I didn't get to finish this book all the way through before someone snatched the book from the store. I picked up the book originally because I forgot to bring a book into work, and someone left this one behind. The previous owner read it for class, but I read it for pure pleasure.
What is great about the book is that it is an easy read for non-fiction. Even better is that it isn't repetitive or overly simple like other easy to read non-fiction like [b:Guns, Germs and Steel|1842|Guns, Germs and Steel|Jared Diamond|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1158959888s/1842.jpg|2138852]. I didn't need to know a lot about monkeys or evolution to understand it.
I would love to pick up this book again and finish it up. But sadly my library doesn't have a copy and I have a huge bookshelf full of unread books. One day maybe I will run across it again.
What is great about the book is that it is an easy read for non-fiction. Even better is that it isn't repetitive or overly simple like other easy to read non-fiction like [b:Guns, Germs and Steel|1842|Guns, Germs and Steel|Jared Diamond|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1158959888s/1842.jpg|2138852]. I didn't need to know a lot about monkeys or evolution to understand it.
I would love to pick up this book again and finish it up. But sadly my library doesn't have a copy and I have a huge bookshelf full of unread books. One day maybe I will run across it again.
cetian's review against another edition
5.0
A great work in evolutionary biology, that chalenges the nature vs nurture dilemma popularized by Francis Galton. Wrangham studied chimpanzee behaviour with Jane Goodall and was among the first scientists to witness primate violence, that would later be the subject of comparatives studies. Chimpanzees, like other primates, like humans, form male groups that perform acts of violence against outsiders. They raid, seeking other groups, behaving in a very organized way, and they attack and kill. In a brutal, effective, xenophobic way.
Wrangham traces the origin of our behaviour, in the evolutionary timeline. But he starts by doing something very interesting. He looks into the myths that anthropology and literature had about humans. In many cultures and periods in history people believed paradise was a physical place on earth, and it was always a recurring theme in culture with many representations. By the late Renaissance, Europeans were debating the possibility that the American continents represented "a real-world expression of the ancient fantasy [of paradise]". And by the 19th century, "many people turned their hopes to the South Pacific". The idea was that human nature, before it was poisoned by modern culture and its vices, or in other words, before God expelled man from paradise, was peaceful, in harmony with Nature, virtuous, not knowing war or illness or anger or greed, or jealousy or any other "modern" vice. Gaugin and Mellvile contributed to this idea of idyllic islands, where people lived in biblical paradises, like Adam and Eve, naked, before they knew sin. Margaret Mead went to Samoa and came back to write her book, "Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation" in 1927, further confirming the idea that primitive cultures did live in a state of bliss, away form the harms of western modern decay. She confirmed the notion that "nurture far more than nature wrote the human script". Those ideas were later confronted with the reality of human lives, and their contrasting difficulties and joys, everywhere in the world, in every culture.
Wrangham's book is interesting in the way he introduces several notions at once. Violence is not, was not a human invention. Other primates also kill and rape and brutalize. We should give up that idea that other animals only kill when they are hungry or defending themselves. The type of violence we see perpetrated by humans against humans started before humans. We see it in chimpanzees, that raid other groups to terrorize and kill. We see rape, frequently, in orangutans. Patricarchy, he writes, is usually seen as the product of nurture. But is it completely so? Where did this come from and how could this be different? The answer, the author attempts to seek it by comparing the primates (including humans) that do have a tendency for violence to another primate, the bonobo, that seems to be more peaceful. And it lies, according to the author, in the way bonobo society is organized around female bonding, a response to females defending against male violence, that proved effective.
Wrangham traces the origin of our behaviour, in the evolutionary timeline. But he starts by doing something very interesting. He looks into the myths that anthropology and literature had about humans. In many cultures and periods in history people believed paradise was a physical place on earth, and it was always a recurring theme in culture with many representations. By the late Renaissance, Europeans were debating the possibility that the American continents represented "a real-world expression of the ancient fantasy [of paradise]". And by the 19th century, "many people turned their hopes to the South Pacific". The idea was that human nature, before it was poisoned by modern culture and its vices, or in other words, before God expelled man from paradise, was peaceful, in harmony with Nature, virtuous, not knowing war or illness or anger or greed, or jealousy or any other "modern" vice. Gaugin and Mellvile contributed to this idea of idyllic islands, where people lived in biblical paradises, like Adam and Eve, naked, before they knew sin. Margaret Mead went to Samoa and came back to write her book, "Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation" in 1927, further confirming the idea that primitive cultures did live in a state of bliss, away form the harms of western modern decay. She confirmed the notion that "nurture far more than nature wrote the human script". Those ideas were later confronted with the reality of human lives, and their contrasting difficulties and joys, everywhere in the world, in every culture.
Wrangham's book is interesting in the way he introduces several notions at once. Violence is not, was not a human invention. Other primates also kill and rape and brutalize. We should give up that idea that other animals only kill when they are hungry or defending themselves. The type of violence we see perpetrated by humans against humans started before humans. We see it in chimpanzees, that raid other groups to terrorize and kill. We see rape, frequently, in orangutans. Patricarchy, he writes, is usually seen as the product of nurture. But is it completely so? Where did this come from and how could this be different? The answer, the author attempts to seek it by comparing the primates (including humans) that do have a tendency for violence to another primate, the bonobo, that seems to be more peaceful. And it lies, according to the author, in the way bonobo society is organized around female bonding, a response to females defending against male violence, that proved effective.
marcantel's review against another edition
3.0
Peterson and Wrangham have offered a fascinating book which probably has more appeal to the layman than to primatologists. Demonic Males draws a comparison between humans and chimpanzees (which share 98% of the same DNA) in the way both species engage in violence with other members of the species. The assumption (although never stated explicitly) is that humans and chimps engage in the same kinds of internecine violence because we share the same evolutionary developmental path. Chimpanzee social organization and violence with respect to other bands is treated in depth; humans, not so much. The authors are quick to write off pre-historic human social relations as Hobbesian: nasty, brutish, and short.
Rather than look at the remarkable variety of social forms that modern anthropologists have encountered and grapple with the complexity of what pre-agricultural humanity might have looked like, the analysis is extended to include social organization, male-directed violence, genocide, infanticide, and rape among not just chimpanzees but all of the other great apes, as well as hyenas (a matriarchal counterpart to primates). The authors argue that violence among the animals examined can be completely accounted for by reproductive ends. Male Gorillas killing the offspring of a displaced alpha male ensures that his progeny, not that of his predecessor, forms the reproductive line. Dwarf orangutans deemed unattractive to females engage in rape, which gives them the opportunity to continue the transmission of their genetic material. The problem is this explanation seems inadequate when dealing with human cultures. In the chapter "Taming the Demon" the authors give almost as many counter examples as support for this, and a wider anthropological analysis shows that most human cultures have as many forms and rituals to ensure reproductive parity between males (that there is not the same attention given to females does fit into the author's overall thesis).
Ultimately, the comparison focuses on the differences between chimps and bonobos, who as a species have managed to reduce the level of overall inter-species violence through a social form of female sexual bonding. Female sexual bonding is so strong that females form a united front against male aggression. What the authors argue is that the same kind of female power applied socially in humans could form a counter to male aggressiveness. It seems like a simplistic thesis based more on wishful thinking than anything else.
And this is the greatest shortcoming of an otherwise interesting book. More is not made of the ways human males themselves have used to defuse the concentration of power in "big men" or chieftains, or how two hostile tribes have managed to ritualize the violence between them in order to limit casualties and cause the destruction of both, or even how symbolic activity has produced nearly complete non-violent societies, whether primitive cultures or religiously motivated subgroups with modern society. Granted, this is probably beyond the scope of this book, but any comparisons between humans and apes has to take into account how vastly different homo symbolicus (to borrow Cassirer's phrase) is from his primate cousins.
Rather than look at the remarkable variety of social forms that modern anthropologists have encountered and grapple with the complexity of what pre-agricultural humanity might have looked like, the analysis is extended to include social organization, male-directed violence, genocide, infanticide, and rape among not just chimpanzees but all of the other great apes, as well as hyenas (a matriarchal counterpart to primates). The authors argue that violence among the animals examined can be completely accounted for by reproductive ends. Male Gorillas killing the offspring of a displaced alpha male ensures that his progeny, not that of his predecessor, forms the reproductive line. Dwarf orangutans deemed unattractive to females engage in rape, which gives them the opportunity to continue the transmission of their genetic material. The problem is this explanation seems inadequate when dealing with human cultures. In the chapter "Taming the Demon" the authors give almost as many counter examples as support for this, and a wider anthropological analysis shows that most human cultures have as many forms and rituals to ensure reproductive parity between males (that there is not the same attention given to females does fit into the author's overall thesis).
Ultimately, the comparison focuses on the differences between chimps and bonobos, who as a species have managed to reduce the level of overall inter-species violence through a social form of female sexual bonding. Female sexual bonding is so strong that females form a united front against male aggression. What the authors argue is that the same kind of female power applied socially in humans could form a counter to male aggressiveness. It seems like a simplistic thesis based more on wishful thinking than anything else.
And this is the greatest shortcoming of an otherwise interesting book. More is not made of the ways human males themselves have used to defuse the concentration of power in "big men" or chieftains, or how two hostile tribes have managed to ritualize the violence between them in order to limit casualties and cause the destruction of both, or even how symbolic activity has produced nearly complete non-violent societies, whether primitive cultures or religiously motivated subgroups with modern society. Granted, this is probably beyond the scope of this book, but any comparisons between humans and apes has to take into account how vastly different homo symbolicus (to borrow Cassirer's phrase) is from his primate cousins.
paulasnotsosecretdiary's review against another edition
3.0
I read this for book club. Many of the theories are interesting, but don't completely explain why men are so violent. It contains great ideas for discussion, but there aren't any answers.
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