Word: alland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...game hunting with females at home minding the kids and gathering vegetables...and a particular emphasis on warfare and the salutary advantages of genocide. But these arguments have arisen before and have been strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. (See for instance A. Alland, The Human Imperative or M.F.A. Montagu, Man and Agression...
...Alland's Rebuttal: Perhaps the authors of the N.Y. Review letter have not read Alexander Alland's book, The Human Imperative, any more closely than they have Wilson's. Although more speculative than Sociobiology, it tends to support the same view of man. For example, Alland states, "Thus there is the possibility that warfare among early hunting peoples could have had an effect on the evolution of modern man." 3 Alland speculates that man has either a potential or a need (he is not clear) for identification with "Socially defined objects, either humans, ideals, territory, or any combination of these...
Here identification is "the social bonding of an organism to another or a group of organisms, usually of the same species. While the ability to identify may be genetically determined..." the form of identification is not. 5 According to Alland, another human universal is the "Tendency to avoid ambiguity" which is "in part also biological." 6 Although I do not feel comfortable with so many non-operational terms, Alland has described here essentially the same characteristics of indoctrinability (Campbell 1972) and xenophobia (in Alland's terms, a distinction between a group-identified-with and others, sharpened by the "tendency...
...Alland, The Human Imperative...
...Alland's most significant conclusion is that neither territoriality nor aggression is instinctive; thus war is not inevitable. "Culture is the major determinant in human existence," he says. For that reason, the "human imperative" is to develop a kind of culture in which war is impossible...