The author is an anthropologist and protege of the late Jane Goodall, famous for her studies of gorillas. Ghiglieri makes a serious and reasoned argument that males and females have evolved to behave differently. He contends that the problem of violence can be traced back to our evolutionary origins.
Early in the book, he states that the basic premise he puts forth is that we are understandable both from a biological perspective and in an environmental context. "Nature equipped each of us with a complex brain ruled by chemical nejuro-transmitters that spur in us instinctive emotional responses to situations, which in turn influence our behavior," he writes.
"This may not be a comfortable way to look at ourselves, but biology tells us that this is the only accurate way and, more to the point, that it is the onloy way that offers us any real hope of understanding our behavior, including our use of violence," he continues.
He sees a link between the great apes and today's humans, arguing they offer more than just "an eerie glimpse of the basic behavorial software from which humanity emerged." He contends that the apes provide insights into the origins of human violence--"insights that help make it possible to understand the male psyche."
The author is not afraid to tackle the big question: are men born to be lethally violent? "The answer is yes," he states emphatically. "Aggression is programmed by our DNA. A Dutch team even identified a gene for hyperaggression in men. But even normal men are born killers."
Because of man's "jungle legacy of testosterone-induced aggression," Ghiglieri believes that "emotions such as rage, jealousy, fear, lust, love, grief, and gluttony inspire men to kill." He says that violence erupts because "men do not understand themselves."
In a long chapter on rape, Ghiglieri states that "men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage."
Another chapter deals with murder, with statistics showing that the United States continues to lead the world in the number of homicides. Roughly one in 15,000 Americans is murdered each year, he says, which computes to one is every 200 Americans being murdered during an average 75-year life span.
The book puts forth the thesis that human murder is no accident. "Instead,m murder is encoded into the human psyche. People who murder do so deliberately based on their own personal decisions favoring their own ultimate self-interests. They do not murder because they themselves are hapless victims of a society gone haywire."
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