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for several years (e.g., Dagg, 2000), Harding asked her about the practice in silvered leaf monkeys. Although she had not studied this species, Dagg told him that the hypothesis had become so pervasive in sociobiology that it was often assumed without evidence. We wondered what other errors of observation or interpretation might have biased the scientific and popular understanding of male aggression in primates. We began to turn up quite a list.
We found, for example, that the male infanticide hypothesis had been misapplied to the 29 or so species of Southeast Asian leaf monkeys and 16 species of gibbons (and by extension to most other primates). Their biology precludes any possible benefit of infanticide, which, in fact, has never been observed in most of these species.
While the infanticide fallacy was sweeping sociobiology, another fascinating finding was creeping into the professional and public consciousness in the 1970s: New genetic analysis techniques had shown that human DNA is 98.9% identical to that of chimpanzees. Anthropologists rushed to equate human behavior with that of this species, and some taxonomists even proposed moving chimpanzees into humans’ own genus, Homo.
Several long-running chimpanzee studies by Jane Goodall and others were particularly damning because they documented many cases of infanticide and other homicides in humans’ closest living relative which had nothing to do with the hormonal cycles of females. These ideas—that males are inherently aggressive and infanticidal, and that they are rewarded for killing infants other than their own by (a) having more sex and (b) passing on more genes—not only took sociobiology by storm, but captured the public imagination. Here, it seemed, was an evolutionary explanation for certain otherwise disagreeable behaviors in the human species: Men are inherently aggressive, even murderous, and use every means, no matter how heinous, to spread their genes. The idea explained a lot: wars, adultery, violence against women. It was, after all, just boys being boys.