Anthropologist Brian Ferguson Challenges Claim that Chimp Violence is Adaptive | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network

ADVERTISEMENT In my last post, I critiqued “Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts,” a new paper in Nature that represents a broadside in the old debate over whether war is innate. Although the paper does not mention human warfare, two of its lead authors, primatologists Michael Wilson and Richard Wrangham, told reporters that their data “bolster the theory that we humans have a tendency toward violence rooted deep in history,” as the Boston Globe put it.