It would be difficult to overstate the popularity in the 1960s and ’70s of Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s hypothesis about human nature. In the United States, their books became bestsellers. Through their theories about human nature, readers made sense of race riots and assassinations, the Vietnam War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Their warning – that humans must accommodate their aggression instinct and re-channel it, before it was too late – was cited by US senators and cabinet secretaries. The message made such a lasting impact that even in the 1980s, UNESCO found it necessary to endorse an official statement that biology didn’t condemn humans to violence.
How did the killer-instinct idea achieve such cultural power? Because it came embedded in story. Like the greatest fictional works, Lorenz’s and Ardrey’s books drew on an ancient motif: that man’s fatal flaw was also his greatest strength, deprived of which he would cease to be human. Their deft use of character, plot and scene-setting, their invocation of myth, their summing up in a moral that readers could apply to themselves, drove the theories of Lorenz and Ardrey to conventional wisdom status.
The sciences on which they built their theories might have been superseded. But today’s sciences of human nature – sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – have adopted the claim for an evolved predisposition for aggression. The 1960s bestsellers ushered in a genre of popular science that still depends on speculative reconstructions of human prehistory.
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