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Creatures
of Cain The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America
Erika
Lorraine Milam
Princeton:
University Press, 2019 Hardcover.
xiii+398 pages. ISBN 9780691181882. $29.95
Reviewed by Roger Chapman Palm Beach
Atlantic University
Is the human being a
“killer ape”? Creatures of Cain
explores how this idea was a popular notion in the United States between 1955
and 1975, representing a shift from an optimistic view about human nature to a
negative one, a view of biological determinism that was introduced by
discussions pertaining to evolution. Author Erika Milam, professor of history
at Princeton University, explains that the “evolutionists sought to inscribe in
human nature the moral depravity of Cain’s descendants” [2]. The discussion is
said to have been driven by the pessimism following two world wars, the
Holocaust, and the advent of the nuclear age and its potential for world
destruction. The backdrop of the “killer ape” thesis was the Cold War, the
global struggle in which both sides engaged in ruthless violence. According to Milam,
the “killer ape” theory was rooted “in the texture of American intellectual
life during the Cold War” [7] as certain scientist (from primatologists to
anthropologists to zoologists) sought to offer a genetic explanation for the
overall aggressive human behavior, the assertion that “human origins lay in our
capacity to kill” [230] as related to an evolutionary split from the apes. Milam’s work, which was
shortlisted for the John Pickstone Prize of the British Society for the History
of Science, is broken down into five sections of three chapters each, plus an
introduction and a very short coda, covering from the 1950s through the 1980s.
In addition, some thirty illustrations of the period under study augment the
overall narrative. The volume is richly based on archival sources from
university archives to the US Library of Congress (i.e., the Margaret Mead Papers). Supplementing the primary sources
are interviews conducted by the author of fifteen figures involved in the debate
under study—from BBC Radio writer Elaine Morgan (a feminist who challenged the
“masculine” view of evolution) to Peter Dow (who helped design the 1950s
curriculum for MACOS or Man: A Course of Study). Nearly a hundred pages of
endnotes cite the work; plus there is an index. Readers with a dry sense of
humor will appreciate some of the clever chapter titles (e.g., “Battle for the Stone Age,” “Woman the Gatherer,” “The
Academic Jungle,” “The White Problem in America”). The title of the book
is partly inspired by the first illustration shown in the introduction—a
drawing of a man (labelled “MANKIND”) having his forehead bloodily etched by
the index finger of a hand and forearm (labelled “AGGRESSION”). The drawing
originally accompanied a 1976 Newsday
editorial titled “The Mark of Cain.” Milam explains, “Just as the biblical
story in which Cain slew his brother Abel had introduced murder as a human
vice, contemporary evolutionists [of the 1960s and 1970s] sought to inscribe in
human nature the moral depravity of Cain’s descendants” [2]. While it is true that
Cain is the first murderer mentioned in the Bible, in the story the “mark of
Cain” has to do with the protection God placed on him after he was punished by
having to roam the earth (which actually did not happen because instead Cain
built a city and settled down). The mark was to prevent him from being murdered
by others. In other words, the metaphor “Mark of Cain” is being applied differently
than its original meaning in the Book of Genesis. Though trivial, it suggests
the messiness, hence imprecision, of “marking” humans with universal qualities
while claiming such findings as scholarly. Creatures
of Cain
explains the evolution of the “killer ape” thesis through to its extinction. It
began with postwar scientists acting as public intellectuals (whom their critic
colleagues scorned as “visible scientists” and whom Milam refers to as
“colloquial scientists”), connecting their research findings to current issues.
The presupposition was that by studying animals in nature insights could be
gained about the human condition and its unique attributes. The “killer ape”
argument is the belief that the human is an evolved ape uniquely advanced due
to acquiring a predisposition for violence. This belief was popularized in
America by the publication of American playwright and science writer Robert Ardrey’s
African Genesis : A Personal Investigation into the Animal
Origins and Nature of Man (1961) and Territorial
Imperative :
A Personal Inquiry into the Animal
Origins of Property and Nations (1966); Austrian zoologist Konrad
Lorenz’s On Aggression (1963, though
originally published in English in 1966); and British zoologist Desmond Morris’
The Naked Ape : A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (1967)
and The Human Zoo : A Zoologist’s Classic Study of the Urban
Animal (1969). The unraveling of the
theory (explained in part five of Milam’s work) occurred when chimpanzees named
Passion and Pom (mother and daughter, respectively) were discovered killing
infant chimpanzees—this was documented by Jane Goodall while doing field work at
the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania—suddenly human beings were not the
unique primate the “killer ape” theory supposed. The book is a
cautionary tale on what can happen when scientists seek to make their work
“relevant” for social science and tailored for popular culture (such as for
interviews in Playboy). Milam warns
that too great a reliance on science for explaining human nature is a legacy of
the history of the “killer ape” theory. Overall, the debate is part of the
larger ongoing debate that will probably never end, the “nature versus nurture”
question. At stake with too much siding with “nature” is the possibility to
rationalize any negative status quo as being biologically determined, which in
its extreme form implies humans are “programmed for Armageddon” [231|. In 1974,
when E.O. Wilson published Sociobiology,
he aroused a spirited response from the paleontologist Stephen Gould. Speaking
against biological determinism, Gould scoffed, “With Konrad Lorenz as
godfather, Robert Ardrey as dramatist, and Desmond Morris as raconteur, we are
presented with the behavior of man, ‘the naked ape,’ descended from an African
carnivore, innately aggressive and inherently territorial” [246|. For Gould and
those who rejected the “killer ape” thesis, this was a type of fatalism, if not
an excuse, to not do anything to improve society and its institutions. The
excuse would blame war and violence on biology, naturalize economic inequality,
and rationalize sexism and institutional racism, etc. Indeed, Ardrey thought blacks and whites were two different
subspecies and reasoned a “high likelihood that integration is impossible” [179,
Ardrey’s own words]. A belief in biological determinism, Gould argued, has political
implications, forcing society to either choose totalitarianism to deprogram the
collective “killer ape” or to “remain nasty and vicious within democracy” [246].
Margaret Mead, who was skeptical of a universal human nature, earlier opined in
1955, “Whatever man has invented, man can change” [22], adding, “War can become
as obsolete as dueling.” The book is also a
cautionary tale about interpreting evidence. Contrary to the subtitle, Milam’s
work does not deal much with the Cold War. Those carrying out the Cold War were
not giving any major attention to the “killer ape”—it is safe to say the theory
was not a driving factor in decisions about US foreign policy. Obviously, the
Cold War was occurring while scientists were engaged in their debate, but it is
safe to say their research had a life of its own (despite those “colloquial
scientists” who were looking for their fifteen minutes of popular culture fame,
not to mention royalties from popular books). Scientists attempted to unveil
“the universal human nature” by integrating three kinds of evidence: (1) the
fossils of extinct hominids, (2) studies of existing indigenous people living
in primitive hunter-gatherer clans, and (3) observations of animals out in the
wild (especially gorillas, baboons, and chimpanzees). Certain paleontologists,
bent on tracing the source of human aggression, determined that certain fossilized
bones fragments represented early weapons until it was later theorized that
those fragments probably were the consequence of extracting bone marrow for
food. That anecdote could serve as a warning of how historians choose backdrops
for their narratives. Creatures
of Cain
is likely to become a classic in history of science studies. The work is
beautifully written and has layers of rich detail, much of which could be mined
for gaining insights on contemporary debates. Those who are curious about why
during the COVID pandemic there were skeptics refusing to get vaccinated for
protection from the coronavirus could gain insight from Milam’s narrative,
which documents a trend of public access to science (whether or not the public
has the appropriate skills and judgment to derive wise conclusions). Despite
any justified criticism of “colloquial scientists,” it seems a poor idea to
have scientists only communicating with scientists with the general public
reading over their shoulders and misinterpreting a substantial portion. This is
why, for instance, climate change for some Americans remains a debate.
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