Why Wrangham’s Hypothesis is Hobbesian (again)

Wrangham’s “reactive aggression hypothesis” carries an unmistakable Hobbesian flavor.

His baseline assumption is that early humans, like chimpanzees, were naturally violent, impulsive, and prone to destructive outbursts. What made us “human” was learning to suppress these brutish tendencies through coalitionary control (groups executing overly aggressive males). Society gets framed as a kind of pacifying mechanism…a necessary check on our otherwise nasty, volatile nature.

That’s basically Hobbes’s worldview in Leviathan…life in the “state of nature” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and order only emerges once violence is curbed by collective enforcement. Wrangham’s twist is to naturalize that process into evolution. Rather than a social contract, it’s genetic selection against hotheaded males.

He’s shoehorned self-domestication into the same tired civilization-as-the-pinnacle-of-human-achievement narrative. We tamed ourselves, became more peaceful, and thus enabled cooperation and culture. But he overlooks that cooperation can be coercive, that proactive aggression thrives inside systems, and that flattening diversity isn’t the same as “progress.” He gives us what might be the rosiest view of civilization so far…as though its violence is an aberration, rather than built into the very logic of control.

To his credit, however, Wrangham doesn’t dismiss hunter-gatherers as “brutish” in the Hobbesian sense. In fact, he often emphasizes that foragers, especially recent and modern ones, are comparatively egalitarian, cooperative, and less violent than chimpanzees. The Hobbesian tone only creeps in his baseline assumption about the deep evolutionary past, with regard to earlier humans (who were, in his view, originally chimp-like in temperament). The shift toward hunter-gather egalitarianism, in his model, only becomes possible after reactive aggression is curbed (beginning about 300,000 years ago). Meaning we were…chimp-like up to that point? That discounts a lot of pre-domesticated human behavior that clearly indicates coordination (as far back as Homo erectus).

Wrangham’s view of hunter-gatherers is positive, then, but conditional. He treats them as the first beneficiaries of domestication…the evidence that our “self-taming” worked, rather than evidence that humans were never that brutish to begin with.

I agree, of course, that hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian…but I don’t treat that as “proof of tameness”. On the contrary, I see that as the feedback mechanism that keeps domestication in check.

Domestication is attenuation and control, with disruptive reactivity being flattened (in plants, animals, landscapes, and people). Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism works differently…the group prevents runaway control. They do this by enforcing sharing, mocking or ostracizing would-be dominators, and keeping hierarchies shallow. That’s negative feedback at the group level…it resists concentration of power.

Seeing early humans as brutish is largely our own bias. We can’t seem to fathom wild pre-civilized people as being cooperative. They were cooperative, but their cooperation didn’t require heavy attenuation. They didn’t demand sameness for its own sake…only enough coordination to keep the group functional. In predictive coding terms, they didn’t overweight social priors. Reality (food, predators, ecology) was the primary anchor. Where’s my evidence for this? I’ll get to that.

For now, suffice it to say that hunter-gatherers sit before runaway selection (for control/compliance/consensus). Their egalitarianism is a brake on domestication. It ensures no one individual (or coalition) gets too much control. This is why hunter-gatherers show humans living in species-appropriate systems…feedback-rich, low hierarchy, high tolerance for diversity of behavior.

In short, Wrangham’s story is that egalitarianism is what domestication made possible. But I’m saying that egalitarianism was the protective mechanism that kept humans from being fully domesticated (until agriculture and states removed it).