Madness or predictable human behavior?

These ongoing daily tragedies are, of course, not restricted to Kosovo.

They are almost everywhere there are people -- in Bosnia, Iraq, Angola, East Timor, Burundi, Israel, and the list goes on and on.

Disheartening is the fact that these murderous events are happening hard on the heels of the Persian Gulf War and not far ahead of Rwanda, Somalia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti or even Korea -- not to mention the two biggest wars in the history of the human race. All have occurred in this very same 20th century in which we brag about mankind's technical advancement.

Surely it is time to face up to the reality that there is a flaw in the complex organizations and murderous behavior of our species. These terminal activities are not even shared in the animal kingdom where battles to the death, except for food for survival, are extremely rare. Furthermore, the type of ritualized warfare we are engaging in is too often started when the "old men" (our wisest), send off the "young men" (our least experienced), to fight and die in the name of "defense of territory."

This blind, innate propensity of human behavior is at the root cause of most of the conflicts that jam the history books. It has been pretty much the same ever since Cain struck Abel, the hordes of Genghis Khan swept over Europe and the current Serbian onslaughts in Kosovo. Worse, there is no evidence that it is getting any better with the passage of time. If anything, the records show that wars are more frequent and intensifying as we perfect the human's primary skill, the invention of ever longer range and more deadly weaponry.

It is time to end these outrages. To stand a chance of accomplishing this, however, we must also accept the truth that such behavior is strongly rooted in the "genetic wiring" of our species. It is the end result of 10 million generations that survived by successful and aggressive "defense of territory."

Those who were not successful defenders of territory are not here. You and I, however, are the evolved, perfected and specialized primate animal. We are the selectively reinforced beings of a line of successful, instinctive and aggressive turf defenders. If it were not so, we would not be here to contemplate the problems that such response mechanisms create.

Humans will instinctively lay down their lives for defense of territory. This is not something that is taught nor learned. It is instinctive and can be triggered into action immediately, almost without a second thought. No other innate propensity gives a man the instant willingness to lay down his life other than the threat or reality of a territorial intrusion.

Furthermore, there is added strength and determination given to the defenders of territory. Such acts are legendary. Do you remember what a small band of Greeks did at Thermopylae, or a small stand of Texans at the Alamo, or how an insignificant number of white shrouded soldiers from Finland stood off the massive might of the Russian Army in the snowy woods beyond Helsinki in the 1940s?

Why did they even try to fight against such odds? All were in a "David vs. Goliath" type of confrontation. The answer to their willingness to die in defense of territory is only explained by 10 million years of nature's selective evolution.

Early in 1970, author Robert Ardrey and I walked the cobbled streets of ancient Rome. The location was in the oldest section of Rome, where he lived at the time. After some initial correspondence he had invited me to "Come on over and let's talk together."

As I now write these words, almost 30 years later, I realize again that the location of our initial meeting was also the ancient headquarters of the Roman Empire. That special place provides yet another reminder of the instinctive traits of aggression and defense of territory by our species. From there, the Roman Legions conquered the whole known world. They held it together by war and force for almost a thousand years until the conquered finally rose up and took back their lands.

Robert and I spent five days together in Rome, contemplating the "origins of man" and the future possibilities in a world then threatened by an avalanche of nuclear bombs because of the Cold War.

An outgrowth of these initial meetings was a realization of the need to focus more study on man's innate aggressive violent ways and his legacy of terror-strewn trails.

Later that year, we met again in London and then in New York City. What turned out to be our final meeting took place in my home in the new town of Columbia, Maryland, near Washington D.C. During all these visits, we continued our dialogue, hoping to find understanding and the potentials for fostering a more peaceful civilization despite the realities and disturbing records of human misbehavior and the growing mass of anthropologic evidence.

Key discussions at our meetings often revolved around Robert's "Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations," as recorded in his then-latest book, "The Territorial Imperative."

The truths of his commentary haunt me to this day and are predictably evolving even now by the slaughter occurring in the hills and mountains of Yugoslavia. History unfortunately tells us this will not be the last murderous conflict over territory.

Our consensus for a potentially better future for our species was determined to lie in making enlightened additions to education. We saw the need to add knowledge based on the teachings of biological science, the social-behavioral sciences and applied cultural anthropology then being recorded through the work of the world's greatest ethnologists.

This was deemed critical to ultimate survival in the nuclear age. We reasoned that in no other way could an understanding emerge on mankind's propensity for violence, the disposition to dominate and the aggressive attacks and defense of territory that are at the root cause of so much terror in the history of mankind.

But we still teach the same old reading, writing and arithmetic to our young. Classes in human behavior with an evolutionary approach to human dilemmas are not to be found in schools or community colleges. Someday, this will hopefully change and we will have a society that comes to know "why we are what we are" and "do what we do."

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