November 25, 2013

War, Peace, and a Nuclear Iran

By Edward Bernard Glick
When I was a young man, two books impressed me. They still do. One is Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression. An M.D. and a Ph.D. and a 1973 Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology, Lorenz established the field of ethology, the study of the behavior of animals within their natural environment. In his prologue to his book, Lorenz wrote, "the subject of this book is aggression, that is to say the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species." According to him, animals, particularly males, are biologically programmed to fight over resources and turf and this behavior is part of natural selection. To a great degree, aggressive behavior is innate. The other book that influenced me is Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative. He popularized and expanded on Lorenz's ideas. After reading Ardrey, a Book-of-the Month News reviewer asked: "Are we a territorial species? Do we defend ourselves, whether by war or other means, because we have learned to do...(Read Full Article)