Nature/Nurture Revisited I: A Review of the Biological

Biologically oriented approaches to the study of human conflict have thus far been limited largely to the study of aggression. A sample of the literature on this topic is reviewed, drawing upon four major approaches: comparative psychology, ethology (including some popularized accounts), evolutionary-based theories, and several areas of human physiology. More sophisticated relationships between so-called "innate " and "acquired " determinants of behavior are discussed, along with the proper relevance of animal behavior studies for human behavior. Unless contained in a comprehensive theory which includes social and psychological variables, biolog-ically oriented theories (although often valid within their domain) offer at best severely limited and at worst highly misleading explanations of complex social conflicts. The review concludes with a list of several positive contributions of these biological approaches and suggests that social scientists must become more knowledgeable about them. Until recently, social scientists-including those interested in social conflict-have been able to ignore with impunity biological approaches to social and political phenomena. Perhaps it is a measure of the lack of cross-disciplinary communication that so many of us could have consid-ered the spate of best-selling books by Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, and Lionel Tiger a mere passing fad. In fact, they were the popularized tip of a very serious iceberg, for there has been emerging over the past decade or two a growing set of interrelated fields which have developed biologically based theories of human behavior, steadily spread-ing into the social sciences, with apparent relevance for the study o