Dear Si-Fu,
I am interested in the behaviour of animals and have read that contrary to the prevailing view you mention, there is certainly pronounced territorial behaviour and even murder amongst the apes.
A. Leverkusen, Ulm

Dear Andre, I fear you are right. I already came across corresponding research results before publishing my book, but was probably reluctant to give them credence for understandable reasons, especially since my father owned a little private zoo and we had a pet chimpanzee named ”Monkey”, with whom my father would sometimes take a walk through the streets of Kiel.

The researcher Jane Goodall (The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour, 1986, and In the Shadow of Man, 1988) has observed chimpanzees and arrived at the conclusion that they certainly exhibit territorial behaviour. This is disconcerting in view of the fact that if researchers are to be believed we share more than 98% of our genes (DNA) with the common chimpanzee (pan troglodytes) and are only separated from this species by approx. six million years. Clearly the friendly, sociable nature of the chimpanzee has its limits, only extending to members of its own group (not even species). A group of chimpanzees has around 30 to 50 members, all of whom know each other. A stranger or singleton is immediately identifiable and comes under attack if he strays into their territory. In social terms chimpanzees therefore divide the world into “us” and “them”, in the same way as humans. Jane Goodall even reports incidents where groups of chimpanzees have attacked a former group members who left the group to start their own. These attacks, which were carried out using weapons such as large stones, led to the complete annihilation of the defecting group. Accordingly there is genocide among the apes, though other researchers deny this.
Ashley Montagu (1978) shared my own wishful thinking with his view that “There is no warlike instinct”. At that time (“flower power”) love and war were held to be irreconcilable. Montagu particularly objected to the term “instinct“, which he did not like to see applied to humans. After all, how would we be able to combat it? Would it not be terrible if we humans had after all inherited something like an instinct for waging war from our antecedents, the primates? Accordingly Jane Goodall does not refer to “instinct”, but rather to “preadaptation”, i.e. attributes probably possessed by chimpanzees which allow a war to take place for example living in groups, territoriality, hunting techniques and an aversion to strangers. In addition, male (!) chimpanzees have a tendency to find aggression attractive, and particularly aggression towards neighbours.

So is man not a friendly, social animal after all, but rather a naked killer-ape?
Charles Darwin thought the two were reconcilable, “for social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species”. As Judith Harris has rightly remarked, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” very recently received on Mount Sinai in no way prevented Joshua from cruelly slaughtering all the inhabitants of Jericho, Al, Makkeda, Libna, Lachis and Eglon. It did not occur to him that God might have forbidden him to kill these people, who were members of an alien group. The evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangheim (Double Mystery, The New Yorker, 45-62, 7th August 1995) has written: “War between groups ... has already been part of our human and pre-human heritage for millions of years”.
Perhaps our ape ancestors at some time began to attack the neighbours because they wanted more space or the females from next door, leading to a pattern which then became automatic behaviour according to the motto:
“Let’s kill the others before they kill us”. It is not for nothing that I consider automatic behaviour, i.e. an unconscious semi-trance, as the real sin of mankind. Hate born of xenophobia or fear of strangers is probably the most ugly aspect of our animal inheritance. Dawkins thinks we are born selfish, but Eibel-Eibesfeld believes we are born hating outsiders. The principal task of education should be to counteract this in a sensible way.