Primate Aggression Analysis

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In economics, firms look to optimize their profit by producing the ideal amount of goods. They would be losing out on profit in cases where they produced any more or less. It is in this way that humans partake in calculated aggression: enough to be evolutionarily superior, but not enough where it would counter-productive to their goals. Evidence of this assertion can be seen not only through the archaeological record, but also by observing modern pre-states as well as genetically related primates. The resulting conclusion is that humans are innately aggressive, although they have evolved to tolerate different thresholds of violence. Although there are no written documents that characterize pre-history societies, the archaeological record speaks much to what life was like. The first presence of violence in the record appears 430,000 years ago at the Sima de los Huesos site in Spain. A …show more content…
As close evolutionary partners, humans and chimpanzees are genetically similar, and thus tendencies of one species can provide insight to the tendencies of the other. Primates are extremely territorial and violent, going as far as to send out patrols of males to secure their perimeters (Yong, 2016). Chimpanzees also engaged on a much larger scale of warfare, as primatologist Jane Goodall observed two factions of chimpanzees continually partaking in interspecies violence (Tzabar, 2015). The chimpanzee’s display of violence may shed some light onto humans’ own psyches. Through a compilation of years of research, it appears that chimpanzees are genetically predisposed to violence as an evolutionary necessity. Even if humans are not completely on par with chimpanzee aggression, it would be naïve to suggest that they completely eradicated the aforementioned genetic attribute. Consequently, one can conclude that humans have a share, at least in part, of this innate