Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals

The Great Game of Life

Henry R. Hermann

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128092958
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Zoologie

Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals: The Great Game of Life examines human nature and the influence of evolution, genetics, chemistry, nurture, and the sociopolitical environment as a way of understanding how and why humans behave in aggressive and dominant ways. The book walks us through aggression in other social species, compares and contrasts human behavior to other animals, and then explores specific human behaviors like bullying, abuse, territoriality murder, and war. The book examines both individual and group aggression in different environments including work, school, and the home. It explores common stressors triggering aggressive behaviors, and how individual personalities can be vulnerable to, or resistant to, these stressors. The book closes with an exploration of the cumulative impact of human aggression and dominance on the natural world.

• Reviews the influence of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and nurture on aggression
• Explores aggression in multiple species, including insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals
• Compares human and animal aggressive and dominant behavior
• Examines bullying, abuse, territoriality, murder, and war
• Includes nonaggressive behavior in displays of respect and tolerance
• Highlights aggression triggers from drugs to stress
• Discusses individual and group behavior, including organizations and nations
• Probes dominance and aggression in religion and politics
• Translates the impact of human behavior over time on the natural world

Chapter 1

Defining Dominance and Aggression

Abstract

Using earlier literature, dominance and aggression in humans and other animals are defined in both biological and ecological sense. The first two sections are devoted to divulging features that characterize dominance and showing how they complement one another to establish a ranking system between competitors, which we call a dominance hierarchy. After discussing the difficulties that arise due to uncoordinated approaches from different fields in the scientific community, the assorted ways in which the terms are used, and the all-inclusive animals that demonstrate dominant and aggressive behavior, examples are provided that lead the reader into the second section.

In the introductory comments, a point is made that since Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, they, as did their predecessors, have lived their lives mostly as social animals and that their existence as enlightened organisms did not emerge until the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of civilizations in the Middle East. As enlightened social animals with a new sedentary lifestyle, they, like other social species, faced new challengers. To maintain homeostasis within their social groups, they were forced to express themselves in intra- and extrafamilial agonistic confrontations to establish themselves in the ranking system.

Expressions of dominance are found in their very evident social qualities and a wide array of technological accomplishments since the beginning of civilizations. Aggression is demonstrated in their inclination toward overpopulation, uninhibited destruction of ecosystems, overharvesting of resources, intolerance toward one another, alternate behavior, and expressions of warlike drives.

In defining dominance in humans, we find that it is not enough to simply say we hold a position of dominance in the world, because the concept of dominance is an enormously complicated affair. In addition, dominance is expressed in a wide variety of ways, and it is influenced by a complex assortment of conditions, most of which involve aspects of aggression. In addition, we find that our current definitions often do not properly describe the functional mechanisms for developing a hierarchy, and they do not consider the behavioral variability of individuals within their populations and communities. Like anatomical variation, behavioral variation is expressed at both the individual and the group level, forming behavioral clines.

To understand dominance in humans or any animals, it is important to realize that the features of being dominant are best expressed in social species. Their ranking system is one in which there is an alpha individual that dominates all others in the group, which forms what appears to be a linear progression of subordinates, and that ends in an omega individual which is the most subordinate. However, many social group rankings may not actually be linear. Behavioral variation in expressions of dominance cloud the issue in how dominance is expressed and how the rest of the group relates to them.

While ecological dominance appears to be a different subject entirely, the point is made that dominant individuals in a population also influence environmental homeostasis. This chapter touches on the initial dispersal of humans around the world and how they became a force to contend with. As a dominant force in the world, humans have grown so populous that they threaten both local and global homeostasis.

As an ever-changing planet, Earth naturally has gone through environmental changes over long periods of time, altering ecosystems in the process. Plant and animal dominants within these changing ecosystems change as well. While most ecological dominants lose their position as climax organisms, humans represent the first animal who could lose their dominant status because of a superior brain and technological expertise.

Both dominance and aggression are animalistic traits, handed down to humans through a succession of predecessors as a means of survival. A brief look at the currently researched aggression models gives us some indication of the complexity of aggression in humans. Later sections in this chapter use this information to show that dominance and aggression play a significant role in defining human personality.

Aggressive behavior is similar to other operant behavior because it is influenced by rewards and punishment. Much aggression in humans is influenced by cultural and social (environmental) factors. The recognition of regional subcultural differences in human aggression in the United States and other parts of the world is dependent upon different local norms for aggressive behavior.

Aggressive behavior can most certainly be a function of national culture. Residents of some countries show a more pervasive tendency to think of violence as a means of solving problems than persons living in other nations, and when these people move from one country to another, they bring with them the behavior they are accustomed to.

Based on our behavior (as a species acting toward the Earth and its inhabitants), we humans rank among the most violently aggressive species. At the same time, we (as a group) also rank among the most altruistic and empathetic. Later chapters point out that at the individual level, these opposing features in human traits are expressed in various ways in different individuals and in different cultures.

Evolution did not haphazardly shape us to be violent or peaceful. As with all animals, it shaped us through natural selection, allowing us to respond flexibly and adaptively to different conditions and circumstances. Our species has changed considerably over time. Our cognitive capabilities have advanced far beyond those of our primate relatives. Our influences upon world ecosystems, national and international politics, religions, local communities and individuals within single populations, the workplace, and other social groups are influenced by the topics present in this chapter. This is equally true for the variation of interactions that affect dominant rank among individuals and groups, as well as the norms and aberrant nature of individuals who often make the rules which others of us must follow.

Keywords

Aggression; Biological dominance; Dominance; Ecological dominance; Environmental homeostasis; Ecosystem; Human aggression; Ranking; Social dominance; Survival

In an individual-based social hierarchy, individuals might enjoy great power, prestige, or wealth by virtue of their own highly-valued individual characteristics, such as great athletic or leadership ability, high intelligence or artistic, political or scientific talent or achievement.

J. Sidanius and F. Pratlo, Social Dominance

Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758, the single extant species of humans occupying planet Earth, arose from predecessor humans in Africa about 200,000 years ago (Henshilwood and Marean, 2003; McBrearty and Brooks, 2000). Since that time, the species has dispersed around the world, living mostly an animalistic existence (Lawlor, 2007; Miller, 1993; Olson, 2008; Fig. 1.1).¹

Its life as an enlightened organism did not emerge until the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of civilizations in lower Mesopotamia, along the Nile in Egypt, Harappa in the Indus Valley (present-day India and Pakistan), and China (Allchin, 1995, 1997; Ascalone, 2007; Lee, 2002; Rice, 1970; Fig. 1.2). Also referred to as the Neolithic Demographic Transition and Agricultural Revolution, that stage of human existence represents a period of immense social change in the human species, commencing about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, during which many human cultures began to move from a hunter-gatherer existence to one of agriculture and settlement (Bocquet-Appel, 2011).

Edwin Black (Banking on Baghdad, 2004) points to Iraq–Mesopotamia as the Cradle of Civilization, which had a “several-thousand-year advance on the rest of humanity. When the last Ice Age receded, some 10,000 years ago, some peoples [emigrated] from the marshy plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates [Rivers], but it was not the first time that groups of people with cognizant brains had come together. Signs of early human aggregations are seen in cave dwellers in South Africa, 70,000 years ago, at which time they recorded symbolic concepts with geometric designs engraved on ocher stones, revealing organized expression and abstract thinking.”

Somewhere between these times and the end of the ice age, people began to gather in specific areas, and “ancient Mesopotamia sprang upon the consciousness of the world.” But it was not a simple gathering point for wanderers. “The world’s view of the cradle of civilization emerged not from organized communal hunting societies in Siberia that learned to share food and nurture clans, or from the spiritual painters of cave art in France, or from thousands of years of continuous township at Jericho.”

While it was necessary for such groups of people to know about the growing and propagation of food plants, Black states that it was more like “the quality of economic life and commerce and its invigoration of all around it that signed the emergence of that most valued social order—civilization.” Their new sedentary life style, in turn, initiated such facets of human life as the building of great civilizations, food-crop cultivation, trading economies, political innovations, organized religion, property ownership, and population increase.

Population increase has brought with it such features as an apparent boundless expansion of cities and towns, the laying down of numerous highways and streets, an increase in world tension, fluctuating economies, increasing violence, overuse of resources, destruction of natural habitat, deforestation, environmental pollution, the pasturing and housing of numerous animals, and production of genetically modified plants.

With global and population-related changes, we have entered a period in which most of our grain and water are channeled to agricultural animals, which we consume, and many of the foods we eat may contain toxic or sterility substances (Engdahl, 2007), which we know very little about.²

As human populations progressed from an animalistic past, the species eventually became the most intelligent, dominant, aggressive, deceptive, and populous vertebrate animal that has ever existed on the planet. Its expressions of dominance may be found in its very evident social qualities and a wide array of scientific and technological accomplishments since the beginning of civilizations, many of which have been quite remarkable (Bunch and Hellemans, 2005; McClellan and Dorn, 2006; Murray, 2004; National Geographic, 2009):

Figure 1.1 Map showing dispersal routes taken by humans (Homo sapiens) from their initial sites in Africa (black dot), along with their respective dates. Most sites of human fossils that have been important in working out the origin of the genus Homo have been unearthed on the eastern side of the continent (the currently perceived Cradle of human origin), but recent evidence has indicated that South Africa may be a prime location as well. As they moved, they began to form isolated pockets, each of which developed separate anatomical features. Later, they began to increase their numbers, especially during the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of civilizations, at which time populations initiated the process of settlement. Their existence during their dispersal and subsequent movements was predominantly an animalistic, hunter-gatherer one.

Figure 1.2 Map ...