He calls Sapolsky “unbalanced” and a “partisan critic” because he rejects the deep-roots theory of war. Wrangham, reviewing Behave in The New York Times, begins on positive note, calling it “a quirky, opinionated and magisterial synthesis of psychology and neurobiology” and “the textbook you will regret never having had in college.” He even praises Sapolsky for cautioning that the links between genes and biology are rarely straightforward. Although he is a pessimist “by nature,” his research has convinced him that “there is room for optimism” about humanity’s future, and especially the prospects for a more peaceful world. He delves into what science can tell us about the causes of violence and aggression as well as cooperation and empathy. Sapolsky’s new, 790-page book Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst is his magnum opus. Sapolsky is one of our smartest, most eloquent scientific communicators, and he is a potent counterweight to the crude biological determinism that pervades popular accounts of human behavior.

He employs this tactic against neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, who for decades has studied baboons in East Africa. 'Chimpanzee-like violence,” Wrangham writes, “preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.' As evidence against this claim has mounted, Wrangham has aggressively defended it, accusing critics of being motivated by wishful thinking rather than science. In his influential 1996 book Demonic Males (co-written with a journalist), Wrangham asserts that our warlike ways extend back millions of year to our common ancestor with chimpanzees, who share our predisposition for group aggression. I call this claim the deep-roots theory of war. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, a specialist in chimpanzee behavior, is famous for arguing that war, defined as violence committed by one group against another, is ancient and innate, stemming from an instinct bred into us by natural selection. When a scientist refuses to acknowledge flaws in the theory that made him famous, things can get ugly.

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