Dark SIde of Man Notes and Summary

THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, by Michael P. Ghiglieri; Perseus, 1999; [p. 179] "The central 'truth' of sociologists is that nature, especially that of humankind, is nice and that people are designed to do things that, all in all, favor the survival of their species. Hence people could never be equipped by nature with instincts to kill other people. This idea comes from the Bambi school of biology, a Disneyesque vision …

…latent violence in our natures. Society foils our impulses in this direction right now (in particular the criminal justice system does), but need not. So I recommend this book. It's a good read, with statistics but also with stories, and its conclusions do not get out too far ahead of its numbers. (Stats on human behavior, of course, are almost always shaky!). And it will teach you some things you didn't know about chimpanzees, too.