Behavior: So Much For The Naked Ape

It is a cliché of popular ethology that man is no more than an animal among animals, a naked ape dominated by his own savage biology and driven by killer instincts. More sophisticated scientists think otherwise, and one of them, Anthropologist Alexander Alland Jr., has now produced a ringing rebuttal. In a new book called The Human Imperative (Columbia University; $8.50), Alland counters the sophistry of Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative), Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression) and Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) with a view of man as a human animal, a creature whose...

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