After this week’s readings, I don’t think I would be able to clearly say that I was “surprised” by any one piece of information or reading. I have known for a long time that if you break down our lives, even with as complicated and advanced as the human life first seems, it does come back down to the basics. Our lives are centered around food, danger, and sex; Darwin’s ideas that are discussed in the second lecture. If you think about any modern day situation, it would be highly probable that you could boil it down to, or tie it back to one of those three things. For example, even something as trivial as being upset that your crush doesn’t text you back, or you’re jealous of someone else’s relationship; those can both be boiled down to our biological want and need to reproduce. We often worry about money, something that is very much a modern-day creation, because it plays into our attractiveness to potential suitors. Money also dictates how much food we will be able to obtain, thus our ability to survive. Money can also even dictate our ability to fight against danger, such as living in more secure areas or equipping our homes with security.  

The reason why it is so much easier to understand human behavior by studying our biological cousins like chimpanzees is because life for them is free of those modern-day, sociological structures that complicate human life. Their life, though still relatively advanced for mammals, is the closest you can find to mirroring our life but lacking our complication. 

I was especially intrigued by the article entitled, “What is War Good For? Ask a Chimpanzee.” The article was both surprising and not surprising at the exact same time for a few reasons. In a sense, I always somehow understood that the human action of violence was somehow tied to an innate nature or tendency. But I also liked how the article reasonably discussed how violence could not simply be due to a genetic predisposition, but instead it must have social and environmental causes. This goes along with some of what we learned and discussed last week, and what I discussed in my blog post; the argument of nature versus nurture. I think there is a biological and learned/social effect in everything we do. So why would violence and war be any different? This was discussed in one of the last lines in the article that stated, “Warfare probably didn’t escalate in size and frequency until the past few hundred thousand years, as Homo sapiens evolved and developed greater brainpower and more complex culture, and more things to fight over.” This sentence shows how even though homo sapiens and other related species may have a biological tendency towards violence, the evolution of culture plays into our levels of violence just as much. 

Overall, I would not say that I was surprised by any of the information learned this week although I did learn more about human tendencies through the lectures and articles that discussed primate behavior, which proves once again that studying these species are important and useful to our human understanding.