The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War

by David Livingstone Smith

Almost 200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the last century, and there is no end of slaughter in sight.
The Most Dangerous Animal asks what it is about human nature that makes it possible for human beings to regularly slaughter their own kind. It tells the story of why all human beings have the potential to be hideously cruel and destructive to one another. Why are we our own worst enemy? The book shows us that war has been with us---in one form or another---since prehistoric times, and looking at the behavior of our close relatives, the chimpanzees, it argues that a penchant for group violence has been bred into us over millions of years of biological evolution. The Most Dangerous Animal takes the reader on a journey through evolution, history, anthropology, and psychology, showing how and why the human mind has a dual on the one hand, we are ferocious, dangerous animals who regularly commit terrible atrocities against our own kind, on the other, we have a deep aversion to killing, a horror of taking human life. Meticulously researched and far-reaching in scope and with examples taken from ancient and modern history, The Most Dangerous Animal delivers a sobering lesson for an increasingly dangerous world.

Genres: Psychology, History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, War

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

David Livingstone Smith is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of London, Kings College, where he worked on Freud's philosophy of mind and psychology. His current research is focused on dehumanization, race, propaganda, and related topics. David is the author of seven books and numerous academic papers. His most recent book Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others (St. Martin's Press, 2011) was awarded the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for nonfiction. He is also editor of How Biology Shapes Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) , and he is working on a book entitled Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, which will be published by Harvard University Press.

David speaks widely in both academic and nonacademic settings, and his work has been featured extensively in national and international media. In 2012 he spoke at the G20 summit on dehumanization and mass violence. David strongly believes that the practice of philosophy has an important role to play helping us meet the challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century and beyond, and that philosophers should work towards making the world a better place.g

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Livingstone Smith is a proud atheist and Darwinian. He is a trained philosopher too. So given that I've read a fair amount of anti-religious screeds over the past few years from the New Atheism camp about how "religion" (that vague umbrella term seemingly never defined by our New Atheist hacks so they can get the maximum amount of traction for their rants) is the cause of all the wars and violence and other evils perpetrated on the face of the earth, I figured I'd read what a more careful atheist thinker had to say on the matter.

Much to my satisfaction I was greeted by a fairly honest assessment of our violent situation. Smith makes it abundantly clear that "religion" is not the cause of wars and violence. It's not even a necessary or sufficient cause. What is? Human nature. Hey, I knew that from reading Romans!

Of course I don't subscribe to the Darwinian reduction present in the book; indeed, that's the book's intellectual downfall. But I think this book should be required reading for atheists and Christians. I'll deal with the reasons why in order:

Atheist: There are two main reasons why I recommend this book for you. The first is so that if you are tempted to toe the party line of the New Atheism in blaming "religion" for all of societies' ills, you can hopefully drop that anti-scientific and unscholarly rant. Not only are there obvious counters such as Dahmer, Bundy, atheistic governments, and democides, the multifarious proximate causes of war and violence are sufficient to defeat New Atheist screeds.

Smith claims that, "War can be approached from many angles. We can consider it from the standpoint of various disciplines. All of these are important, but there is one dimension that underpins them all: the bedrock of human nature" (p. xiii). And, “Today’s genocides and ethnocide often take place at the behest of multinational corporations eager to acquire resources, typically by dispossession and environmental degradation. These include oil interests in Ecuador, Burma, Nigeria, copper and cold West Papua, farming in Tanzania, logging in Malaysia, and uranium mining in Australian” (219). And, "“Wars are purposeful. They are fought for resources, lebensraum, oil, gold, food, and water or peculiarly abstract or imaginary goods like God, honor, race, democracy, and destiny” (p. 7).

So not only that, but you need to see his very consistent neo-Darwinian reasoning applied to various ethical issues. Slavery, rape, homicide, and war are things done by non-human animals (his term) and all have and had an obvious survival value. Why whine about the Bible's reports of genocide and slavery and rape (assuming your premises for the moment) when certain types of ants do the same thing? What's the difference? Or, take rape. What you have here is one way the less brawny and studly males get their genes into the next gene pool. And in the context of war, rape is very common. It provides an biological desire for war. A chance for the stronger males to rape the defenseless women as well as having the pick of women back home. Maximum gene disbursement. You wants to bring up "morality?" Well Smith demolishes that notion for you too. One unfortunate problem with that appeal, for the Darwinian naturalist, is that it is simply a willow-the-wisp. You never see "the badness" of an act. And acts can be described without recourse to "morality." So it has no explanatory value. So, time to get consistent and knock off the whole "God is immoral" tirade.

Christians: Not only should you read this to better familiarize yourself with the other side, and to learn how to give Darwinian analysis of our various likes, dislikes, and various other human activities, this book has tremendous apologetical value. Someone gives you a Dawkins or Hitchens book, give them this one. Use the atheists to fight the atheists. Not only that, you will be able to see the superiority of your own worldview. You can say that rape and murder, among other things, are objectively immoral. That they are immoral (or that things are moral) are actual facts of our world. People really ought not do certain things, full stop. Your atheist friend must say to the mother of 2 that was raped, "That sucks, but that guy was only getting his genes into the next gene pool. He's simply a gene machine. A house for genes to live in and reproduce."

You can also agree up to a point with Smith. These wars are caused by man's nature. The Bible teaches that man is sinful. Smith makes much of the claim that we are self-deceived and don't even know why or how we do the things we do. This is also taught in the Bible: Man's heart is wicked and deceitful, who could know it?

I do not agree with his evolutionary answer of his more specific thesis. For example, Smith says that we treat the enemy as non-human. He refers to a picture of a fisherman in a boat and a shark coming to eat him, the shark was labeled "China." And so he says that we dehumanize our enemies while keeping our group human. But I think this is false. America represents herself as a "snake" or an "eagle." I also know people in the military. They know full well that they are killing humans. And, not all of them are as psychologically troubled as Smith thinks, and it's not that they are sociopaths either. Smith also has a defeater for his beliefs given his acceptance of the conjunction of naturalism and evolution. His bold and repeated admissions that the brain developed without much concern for truth so mach as survival walks right into Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. His somewhat sloppy claim that the mind either "emerges" or "supervenes" or "is" the brain walks right into Reppert's argument from reason.

And, perhaps Smith is deceiving himself since he's a non-warrior? Perhaps an evolutionary account can be given for what he's doing. The weak, non-warring types had to polish their sophistic skills and justify their weakness as part of their proper functioning optimistic overridder feature of their cognitive faculties so as to convince themselves that they weren't nobodies and thus portray the sort of confidence that early human females would have needed to see before they gave themselves to them. I don't know, sounds as plausible as his story . . .

[Andrés Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most amazing things you could ever read.

It tackles the question "why do we make war?", in such a clear way and with scientific facts taken from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and history.
War is human, and the author clearly points out many reasons about why we tend to be biased to act like that. The word "war" referres of the systematic process that we humans are clearly good at. We have always killed and probably keep doing that.

Several thesis propose that we started raiding, probably that created a system to hunt in groups (or viceversa), and killing was transmitted as a -positive trait- in our genes. Why? Simple. Those who refused to defend themselves, were killed. I don´t know if that's a good or bad thing, I'm just another human being like the one who's taking the time to read this and I'm not here to judge. This is important.

Nowadays progressives live in a world similar to that of John Lennon's "Imagine" in which we are all the same, we are equal and we are little kittens who hug each other all the time; they believe owning morality and that's bullshit. Human beings tend to be racist, and xenofobic and most of the time males are violent, and that's an evolutionary vestige. That's the truth. What do we need to do? Learn and overcome the fact we are no longer living in Africa one hundred thousands years ago; we no longer need to be racists (we had reasons for this zillion years ago because we feared humans who were not part of our "tribe", the same happens to chimps), or violent all the time. This is the kind of books that need to be in a list to learn how to be critical.

The anecdotes in this book, are bizarre, each one of them more human than the former.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. The author goes beyond the usual clichés (boastful or condemning, depending on the writer's view, but in both cases too simplistic) about how savage and bloodthirsty we are as a species. He digs into history, sociology, anthropology, modern psychology, and brain science to look at the evidence for and against homo sapiens as 'the killer ape'.

Smith finds a lot of theoretical structure and supporting data to indicate that on one hand, our species is highly predatory toward others, and often within itself. That much is obvious from any history book or newspaper. But he also points out considerable evidence that almost all human beings have a hard time killing other people, or even other creatures that resemble us in key ways.

Getting most people to kill others takes considerable cultural and military training convincing them that 'the enemy' are not really human but are some hostile other species, usually predatory or parasitic, and conditioning them to kill too quickly to have time to mull it over first. Often the aftermath, once they do have time to think, haunts them lifelong, as in the case of the PTSD many veterans and police officers feel after having to kill people in the line of duty. It's interesting to read this, and juxtapose it with Kevin Dutton's 'The Wisdom of Psychopaths', in which that author concludes that our society (globally, not in any one country) is becoming more psychopathic, but less violent toward one another.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in psychology, history, sociology, or anthropology.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 4 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

إن كلمة "الحرب" هي كلمة عادية وعملية ، وعلى هذا النحو ، فهي تشارك في جعل الكلام العادي غامضاً أحياناً . مثل هذه الكلمات هي أدوات عملية للتعامل مع العالم المحير في كثير من الأحيان من حولنا ، وما تفتقر إليه من الدقة تعوضه في المرونة. مثل مفك البراغي ، الذي يمكن استخدامه أيضًا لفتح علبة طلاء أو رفع باب من مفصلاته ، فإن كلمات مثل "حرب" لها استخدامات متنوعة. لذلك لا ينبغي أن نتوقع إيجاد خطوط فاصلة بين الحرب وأشكال العنف الأخرى.

هناك خطر في جعل مفهوم الحرب أوسع مما ينبغي ، لأن هذا يخفف من معناها. تصور بعض الفلاسفة الحرب كمبدأ عالمي ، وديناميكية تنبض في قلب الطبيعة. اعتقد اليوناني القديم هيراقليطس أن الحرب هي الصدام العنيف بين الأضداد والقوة الدافعة وراء كل تغيير ، طبيعي واجتماعي. بعد عدة قرون ، استخدمت الكلمة العربية "الجهاد" للإشارة إلى نوعين مختلفين جدًا من الحرب المقدسة: الكفاح المسلح ضد الكفار والنضال الداخلي من أجل الكمال الروحي. في القرن السابع عشر ، اقترح توماس هوبز أن البشر الذين يعيشون في عالم من الموارد المحدودة محكوم عليهم بالتعارض مع بعضهم البعض عبر جهودهم للحصول على شريحة من الكعكة. اعتقد هوبز أن العداء يغلي تحت سطح جميع التفاعلات البشرية ، ويهدد باستمرار بالاندلاع والتحول إلى عنف مميت ، وأن المشكلة تكمن في المساواة بين البشر. اعتبر معظم المفكرين المساواة شيئًا جيدًا ، لكن هوبز أعطى المساواة لمسة جديدة. كتب: "من مساواة القدرة هذه تنشأ مساواة بالأمل في بلوغ غاياتنا".
.
David Smith
The Most Dangerous Animal
Translated By #Maher_Razouk

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thesis is that war is both highly adverse on the personal level to most (while being attractive to a minority) while also being desirable at the societal level for instinctual reasons related to instinctual fear of the other. Nothing particularly unique but an interesting collection of source material nevertheless.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although fascinating, I found this a difficult book to read because Smith's entire approach lies in dismantling self-deception. The psychology of warfare requires the soldier to dehumanize the opponent by making him a beast, a parasite, a scourge, a swamp thing. To do this, it requires great leaps of the imagination combined with xenophobia, ethnophobia, and a dash of nepotism (my family trumps your family). Also, there is a carnivorous appetite we possess in the killing. To kill on the battlefield requires the soldier to downgrade the humanity and make the other livestock or less.

The kill or be killed equation runs deep. Smith lays out his case convincingly. Now I am inclined to think liberal democracy and its core humanitarianism is a blip in humanity's five million-year-old timeline. Being able to sustain equality over barbarism may not be possible.

But don't let my squeamishness distract you from reading the book. I recommend it highly. But I found it a rich diet and could only read a few pages at a time. It may be that my own self-deception has been getting peeled open by Smith's can opener one turn at a time.

[Kevin McAllister · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and informative treatise on why humans have an innate, biological & evolutionary propensity to wage war despite having such a strong aversion to killing.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am deeply troubled by the number of instances of murder, rape and torture and I am unable to understand how this can be. Until I read this book. I understand the causes better, but I still struggle with the reality of it. Very well researched book, and very relevant to our current affairs. From the review: "Almost 200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the last century, and there is no end of slaughter in sight. The Most Dangerous Animal asks what it is about human nature that makes it possible for human beings to regularly slaughter their own kind. It tells the story of why all human beings have the potential to be hideously cruel and destructive to one another. Why are we our own worst enemy? The book shows us that war has been with us---in one form or another---since prehistoric times, and looking at the behavior of our close relatives, the chimpanzees, it argues that a penchant for group violence has been bred into us over millions of years of biological evolution."

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

War from an evolutionary psychological point of view

Once upon a time we were little australopithecine animals living in mortal fear of the great carnivores as we tried to steal bones from their kills, sleeping at night in trees where great snakes and huge eagles treated us as prey. Then some time later we grew larger and smarter and begin to ward off the carnivores with sticks and stones and group cohesion. And then there came the day when we became the most feared predator of them all.

This little history, according to the lengthy and perceptive analysis in this most engaging book, sheds important light on why we wage wars and kill with such ferocity.

“The Most Dangerous Animal” is us. We have guns and walls and locks to protect us not from lions and tigers but from each other. But to gain the right ferocity and the sheer bloodlust needed to defeat our human enemies, we had to turn them into beast and vermin and other non human creatures because, simultaneously with our ability to kill, we had a mental module that urged us not to kill our kind. Therein lies, according to Professor Smith, who is both a philosopher and a psychologist, the terrible dialectic that is the human mind as warrior. For the tribe to survive it had to be able to stir its young men to a killing rage like chimpanzees tearing a strange chimp to bits with their teeth and bare hands. But at the same time, this violent ferocity must not be turned upon family, friends and other members of the tribe. And so these two assortments of mental neurons (mental modules) exist simultaneously in the human brain, and depending on circumstances lead us to brotherhood or to genocide.

The question that confronts us today is will we always have war? When I was an undergraduate I argued against the affirmative with others and in particular with one of my psychology professors. In the final argument it came down to the definition of war. If war is any violence of humans against humans, then, yes, war will never end until our nature changes, possibly through some kind of biological engineering. But if war is tribe against tribe, nation against nation, then it is possible that through the rule of law imposed internationally upon all people, war may end. Possibly. Smith is pessimistic, and I can say--no longer an undergraduate--that unless human nature changes, there will always be disputes that sadly cannot be settled in any other way. War is “politics by other means.”

Smith defines war as “premeditated, sanctioned violence carried out by one community (group, tribe, nation, etc.) against members of another.” (p. 16) He recalls the work of Jane Goodall and others who observed chimpanzees carrying out “raids” against other chimps in a purposeful way that is very much like humans going to war. Since we are genetically very much like chimpanzees, their behavior suggests a common inherited source of warlike violence. But Smith also points to the bonobos, the smaller chimps who practice what can only be called “love not war”—or at least “sex not war.” They too are our close cousins. And how like caricatures of the human left-right political dichotomy are the two types of chimp! I think what we need to understand is that those who believe in the war system and those who do not, come by their beliefs genetically. Their beliefs are ingrained. And in many of us both beliefs are held simultaneously leading to cognitive dissonance.

What we do, as Smith so painstakingly demonstrates, is we lie to ourselves. We practice self-deception to an amazing degree. Smith even argues that self-deception is adaptive in the Darwinian sense. He cites biologist Robert L. Trivers as arguing that self-deception is adaptive because it is easier to fool others when we have first fooled ourselves. (p. 126) Furthermore, how do we avoid guilt and self-loathing after killing another human being in cold blood on the battlefield? Or better yet, how do we get our young men to do this killing? We convince ourselves first, and then them, that our adversaries are monstrous vermin, that they are subhuman, that, although they have a human form, they lack the “essence” of being human. Smith gives many examples of people from ancient times to the present day as doing exactly this. The prelude to genocide is the dehumanization of others.

But this book is about more than the war system. Professor Smith demonstrates a profound understanding of human psychology in other areas as well. His take on consciousness is one of the best I have ever read. He writes: “…it is a mistake to imagine that there is something in the brain corresponding to our notion of consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing inside the brain rubbing shoulders with the anterior cingulated gyrus or tucked away discretely behind the amygdala. Consciousness—if one wants to use this slippery term at all—is something that the brain does. The fact that the word “consciousness” is a noun half-seduces us into thinking of it as a thing. The word ‘consciousness’ should have a verbal equivalent: we should be able to say that the brain is ‘consciousnessing’.” (p. 104)

Actually we do have such a verbal equivalent. It is “perceiving.” Consciousness is perception, but perception writ large, including partial perception of our inner states and our mental activities, and the feelings that come from our emotions, as well as what has happened, is happening, and is likely to happen, around us. This is in addition to the perception that comes from the “third eye”—the mind. This perception, at which we are the planet’s clear leaders, combines knowledge from perceptions about things past and present, about things seen and heard and told about, and puts all that information together in a grand mental perception about what has happened, is happening or is to come.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have mentioned, this book is a fairly excellent read and a good introduction to the theories presented in it, though it isn't new for people familiar with sociology. The material is presented in a solid and engaging way, and it's a quick read.

That said, it still has several flaws that prevent me from giving it a higher rating. Some of the logic used stems from an obviously male-centric standpoint, and he tends to oversimplify some things. This is especially true on the subjects of women and rape respectively.

I would recommend this book only as an introduction to the theory of our origins and how they inform our views of war/violence, but only an introduction.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

FASCINATING....maybe because i am a pessimist who thinks humans are well...don't get me started.
makes numerous good points and sites evidence...yes i am a big nerd. but you should read this.

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish this book. I'm not in the mood this month to learn about beheadings and terrible tortuous deaths at the hands of the enemy.

[Julio Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most amazing things you could ever read.

It tackles the question "why do we make war?", in such a clear way and with scientific facts taken from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and history.
War is human, and the author clearly points out many reasons about why we tend to be biased to act like that. The word "war" referres of the systematic process that we humans are clearly good at. We have always killed and probably keep doing that.

Several thesis propose that we started raiding, probably that created a system to hunt in groups (or viceversa), and killing was transmitted as a -positive trait- in our genes. Why? Simple. Those who refused to defend themselves, were killed. I don´t know if that's a good or bad thing, I'm just another human being like the one who's taking the time to read this and I'm not here to judge. This is important.

Nowadays progressives live in a world similar to that of John Lennon's "Imagine" in which we are all the same, we are equal and we are little kittens who hug each other all the time; they believe owning morality and that's bullshit. Human beings tend to be racist, and xenofobic and most of the time males are violent, and that's an evolutionary vestige. That's the truth. What do we need to do? Learn and overcome the fact we are no longer living in Africa one hundred thousands years ago; we no longer need to be racists (we had reasons for this zillion years ago because we feared humans who were not part of our "tribe", the same happens to chimps), or violent all the time. This is the kind of books that need to be in a list to learn how to be critical.

The anecdotes in this book, are bizarre, each one of them more human than the former.

[Miguel Miró · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read. It is well sourced and organized.

It gives a compelling argument for the Darwinian cause of War:
"morality is a matter of feeling"
"that we are extremely dangerous animals, and the balance of evidence suggests that our taste for killing is not some sort of cultural artifact, but was bred into us over millions of years by natural and sexual selection."


Extracts:

"Hume’s theory suggests that it is natural for human beings to be ethnocentric, xenophobic, and nepotistic. This is why he thought that we should try to overcome these built- in biases, and to treat other people more evenhandedly. Hume thought that we need to make a conscious effort to adopt what he called “the general point of view.” This is based on the idea that moral principles must apply across the board, and therefore “what is wrong for you cannot be right for me merely because I am I and you are you.” 13 An ideally moral person would treat all people with equal respect and compassion."

"Indirect, impersonal killing has little if any effect on the soldier’s psyche."

"Perceiving the enemy as nonhuman would liberate us from inhibitions against killing them."

[Guillermo V Mimila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very realistic

This lecture help to get a better understanding about how we react one each other and to think seriously what kind of animal we are

[Ambika R · Rating 5 out of 5]

A plausible work from David Livingstone Smith. In this book, he went far beyond the cliché about wars, its milieu and much more through history, evolution, psychology and anthropology. He gathered the strands of love and dread of killing, self-deception and the modularity of mind to find out the factors that precipitate war.

[Hemen Kalita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the book is too old, published in 2007, to be revealing anything new about dark human traits, let alone be shocking. I found the premise obvious and the book a bit boring.

[Bradley White · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disturbing book on why we are so eager to wage war and kill, in the most horrendous way, our fellow humans.



Hell is empty and all the devils are here. William Shakespeare

[Deane · Rating 4 out of 5]

war and humanity

A thorough evaluation of war from many aspects throughout history and why killing their own species is found only in Homo sapiens.

[Ann Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapter 1 is titled, A Bad-Taste Business, and the quote that follows by W.H. Auden says it all, "Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table." The author provides a cohesive argument that violence is in our DNA. As evidence he cites examples from evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, and animal studies.

If you are like me, you think human beings are the most fascinating thing on earth. We are wonderful, terrible, and maddening. In the last two categories is our penchant for killing each other. The author believes that, "War is not a pathological condition; it is normal and expectable." How's that for an uplifting thought? He also mentions that war kills more civilians, most innocent, than combatants, many of them children.

If the purpose is to understand why, scientifically, we came to this point in time, from a long-ago past that required humans to kill in order to survive, then why haven't we evolved past our primitive leanings? Why do we resort to violence to resolve differences? Examples are given of genocide, terrorism, lust for war and killing, hostility to those who are different (xenophobia), and what could be called thirst for power. Humans try to justify war based on moral or religious grounds, the fight between good and evil, but who decides? The truth is some like killing as, "The act of killing is supremely rich in sensory input." He cites The Lord of the Flies as an example of how humans regress to a more primitive state if left to their own devices.

Mr. Smith gives the reader much to think about, even if you don't buy all of his arguments. He also tries to give hope for the future, but with the deadly weapons we have now, I wonder if humans will destroy each other before we can fully understand and control the complex causes that lead to war?

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very honest and thorough evolutionary psychology answer to the question of why people fight. Livingston traces the evolution of humans who have a latent and natural fear of the unknown predation. This later evolves into early social groups, who are forced to protect themselves from other groups engaged prominently in raiding forms of warfare against hunter/gatherers. In addition to the natural selection that lead those with the warrior spirit to be better able, are also the sexual selection that comes when men capture women, and as women are more likely to sexually select the successful warrior. At the same time, humans have a natural aversion to killing their own species, which must be overcome through a self-delusion in which individuals imagine their enemy as the predatory beast or the infected diseases of he days when we were hunted by animals. A solid, well written, well argued read.

[B Doyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author establishes an interesting framework for conceiving of war, and a decent exploration about human ambivalence towards it. The book ends with an exploration of common human response mechanisms, such as disgust, which seem readily malleable to dehumanize opponents in war.

I found the book limited in it's emotional based approach. However, it seems like a good starting point for others to develop the theory implicitly developed in the work.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Engaging and accessible. David Livingstone Smith prefaces his book with a claim that he is not a pacifist, yet his powerful blend of evolutionary history and contemporary anecdote will most likely be read as at least moderately anti-war. Most of the material will be repetition to those familiar with basic sociology, but for those new to the subject, a better introduction can hardly be imagined, especially as a great many other pertinent books are referenced for further reading.

[Joel Crofoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the single best book I have ever found on the subject of the bad side of human nature. It covers the topic very thoroughly from many different perspectives, such as evolutionarily, psychodynamically, neurologically, etc. Some of the atrocity descriptions are horrendous to read, but serve to make the author's point about the evil side of human nature. I believe that this should be mandatory reading for psychologists as we deal with the effects of evil in our work on a daily basis.

[gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

also for my JUPS class! didn't get to read the whole thing only select chapters -- but Smith presents a variety of lenses in order to explain and evaluate the origins of human conflict, from biological to social and psychological theories. I found his arguments about wartime dehumanization and demonization of victims and enemies in the chapter "Predators, Prey, and Parasites" to be quite compelling.

[Emmy D. Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. I believe there is plenty of evidence out there, anthropological and otherwise, to suggest that Smith may be off base with his "man the killer ape" theory. I did, however, agree with his theories of self deception.

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know why you think the way you do, read this book. Our species has flourihed due to its violent nature. Smith pealsl apart the social norms that allow us to kill

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting book concerning war and human nature. I suggest it to all.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Well-written, with clear arguments backed by solid reference material. The author has a strong grasp on the ambiguities of human nature - we are both good wolf and bad wolf.