It’s claimed that thorium “eats its own waste.”  In fact, thorium is very promising as a future source of energy, but this is nonsense.  Apparently it’s based on the fact that certain types of thorium reactors actually could burn their own fuel material, as well as plutonium scavenged from conventional reactor waste and other transuranics, much more completely than alternative designs.  This is certainly an advantage, but the fission products (lighter elements left over from the splitting of uranium and plutonium) would still be highly radioactive, and would certainly qualify as waste.  Such claims are so obviously spurious that they play into the hands of opponents of nuclear power.

It is also claimed that “all (thorium) is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7% for uranium.”  In fact, thorium is not a fissile material, meaning that, unlike uranium 235 (U235), which is the 0.7% of natural uranium the author is referring to, it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction on its own.  It must first be converted to a lighter isotope of uranium, U233, which is fissile.  In fact, the U238 that makes up most of the rest of the leftover 99.3% percent of natural uranium is “potentially usable as fuel” in that sense as well, by conversion to plutonium 239, also a fissile material.

The author is vague about exactly what kind of reactors he is referring to, lumping Dr. Carlo Rubbia’s subcritical design, which depends on a proton accelerator to provide enough neutrons to keep the fission process going, and molten fluoride salt reactors, which do not necessarily require such an accelerator.  He claims that, “Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature,” which they certainly could not if the goal were to generate electric power.  I suspect that what he means here is that, unlike plutonium breeders, which require a high energy neutron spectrum to produce more fuel than they consume, thorium breeders could potentially use “thermal” neutrons that have been slowed to the point that their average energy, when converted to a “temperature,” would be much closer to that of the other material in the reactor core. 

In any case, the design he seems to be so excited about is Dr. Rubbia’s “energy amplifier,” which, as noted above, would be subcritical, requiring a powerful, high current proton accelerator to keep the fission process going.  It would do this via spallation, a process in which a copious source of the neutrons required to keep the reaction going would be provided via interaction of the protons with heavy nuclei such as lead, or thorium itself.  This is the process used to produce neutrons at the Oak Ridge Spallation Neutron Source.  Such reactors could easily be “turned off” by simply shutting down the source of neutrons.  However, the idea that they would be inherently “safer” is dangerously inaccurate.  In fact, they would be an ideal path to covert acquisition of nuclear weapons.  Thorium reactors work by transmuting thorium into U233, which is the isotope that fissions to produce the lion’s share of the energy.  It is also an isotope that, like U235 and Pu239, can be used to make nuclear bombs. 

The article downplays this risk as follows:

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

“They were really going after the weapons,” said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high (energy) gamma rays.

What Lillestol is referring to is the fact that, in addition to U233, thorium reactors also produce a certain amount of U232, a highly radioactive isotope of uranium with a half life of 68.9 years whose decay does, indeed, release potentially deadly gamma rays.  It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remove it from the U233, and, if enough of it were present, it would certainly complicate the task of building a bomb.  The key phrase here is “if enough of it were present.”  Thorium enthusiasts like Lillestol never seem to do the math.  In fact, as can be seen here, even conventional thorium breeders could be designed to produce U233 sufficiently free of U232 to allow workers to fabricate a weapon without serious danger of receiving a lethal dose of gamma rays.  However, large concentrations of highly radioactive fission products would make it very difficult to surreptitiously extract the uranium, and it would also be possible to mix the fuel material with natural or depleted uranium, reducing the isotopic concentration of U233 below that necessary to make a bomb.

With subcritical reactors of the type proposed by Rubbia, the problem of making a bomb gets a whole lot easier.  Rogue state actors, and even terrorists groups if we “succeed” in coming up with a sufficiently inexpensive design for high energy proton accelerators, could easily modify them to produce virtually pure U233, operating small facilities that it would be next to impossible for international monitors to detect.  There are two possible pathways for the production of U232 from thorium, both of which involve a reaction in which a neutron knocks two neutrons out of a heavy nucleus of Th232 or U233.  Those reactions can’t occur unless the initial neutron is carrying a lot of energy as can be seen in figure 8 of the article linked above, the threshold is around 6 million electron volts (MeV).  That means that, in order to produce virtually pure U233, all that’s necessary is to slow the incoming spallation neutrons below that energy.  That’s easily done.  Imagine two billiard balls on a table.  If you hit one as hard as you can at the other one, what happens when they collide?  If your aim was true, the first ball stops, transferring all its energy to the second one.  The same thing can be done with neutrons.  Pass the source neutrons through a layer of material full of light atoms such as paraffin or heavy water, and they will bounce off the light nuclei, losing energy in the process, until they eventually become “thermalized,” with virtually none of them having energies above 6 MeV.  If such low energy neutrons were then passed on to a subcritical core, they would produce U233 with almost no U232 contamination. 

It gets worse.  Unlike Pu239, U233 does not emit a lot of spontaneous neutrons.  That means it can be used to make a simple gun-type nuclear weapon with little fear that a stray neutron will cause it to fizzle before optimum criticality is reached.  And, by the way, a lot less of it would be needed than would be required for a similar weapon using U235, the fissile material in the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. 

We’re quite capable of blowing ourselves up without Rubbia’s subcritical reactors.  Let’s not make it any easier than it already is.  Thorium reactors have many potential advantages over other potential sources of energy, including wind and solar.  However, if we’re going to do thorium, let’s do it right.

The hypothesis that innate mental traits or “human nature” plays a significant role in mediating human behavior has been around since long before the days of Darwin. However, beginning in the 1960’s with the popular works of thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz and continuing with the publication of “Sociobiology” and “Human Nature” by E.O. Wilson in the 1970’s, recognition of the significance of innate behavior gained a much wider acceptance. Such ideas were, however, a direct threat to the ideological orthodoxies then prevailing in the academic and professional communities. Those communities reacted in the time-honored fashion of human “in-groups” in all ages to this challenge from the “others;” with hatred, irrational hostility, and demonization. I will discuss the manifestations thereof in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that, unlike differences of opinion over whether Christ was the real or adopted Son of God, controversies over the factors that impact human behavior can be informed by the observation of repeatable experiments. In a relatively short time, the ideological orthodoxy of the 60’s and 70’s regarding human nature was buried under a mountain of facts. In the resulting paradigm shift, culminating only in the last decade or so, the profound impact of the innate on human behavior has finally gained general acceptance.

In a sense, however, the old defenders of the faith in “nurture, not nature” were right. The hypothesis of innate human behavior was a direct threat to their whole belief system. Then as now, by their own admission, the expert communities in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and related fields occupy ideological ground that is substantially left of center. They are predominantly, if not exclusively, characterized by an implicit or explicit belief in legitimate, objective good, more or less vaguely characterized by terms such as “human flourishing” and “human brotherhood,” and by a perception that they should play an active role in guiding the rest of us towards “the good.” However, once the significance of the innate on human behavior has been accepted, it follows that the evolutionary origins of these aspects of our nature must be accepted as well. It is quite obvious that they did not evolve because they had a “purpose,” and that “purpose” was to promote “human flourishing” in a world radically different from the one in which they evolved. It is also quite obvious that they evolved for reasons that had nothing to do with promoting the ideological goals of self-described “liberals” in the 21st century. Those facts have and will continue to have a highly corrosive effect on the belief system of the academic and professional experts who specialize in the study of human behavior, and particularly those who focus on that aspect of our behavior that comes under the general heading of morality.

In previous posts I have discussed the impact of all this on the thought of nine representatives of this expert community who were the keynote speakers at a recent conference on “The New Science of Morality.” As we have seen, all of them, whether explicitly or not, recognize “the good” as a real, objective, thing in itself, independent of what goes on in the brain of any individual human being. As any good Christian or Moslem could tell them, there is no logical basis for this faith of theirs in “the good.” The fact that they believe in it anyway is a testimony to the power of the emotions associated innate human morality in creating the perception of something real where none exists.

The result has been a kind of remarkable doublethink. The role of the innate on human morality is accepted, but it comes with the chimerical belief that, against all odds, those innate qualities of the human brain can be adjusted at will to achieve the kind of “human flourishing” that is the goal of latter day ideologues. The phenomenon was clearly in evidence at the Edge Conference. The keynote speakers all revealed their perception of “the good” as a real thing, and several of them spoke of morality as an adjustable tool for achieving “the good,” going so far as to speak of this form of toying with innate human behavioral traits as “moral progress.” There was an atheist who based his argument on the real existence of moral good on his own capacity for pious indignation, and a professor of psychology who asserted that morality exists to promote the better working of “the system” in the 21st century. A great deal of attention was paid to experimental evidence of innate human “kindness” and “niceness,” and commensurately little to the possibility that hatred, aggression, and demonization of “others” might also be behavioral traits with innate origins. It will be recalled by those who were around at the time that these were the aspects of human behavior that thinkers like Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, who were generally recognized by the professional community at the time as the most significant and articulate proponents of the importance of innate factors in human behavior through the 60’s and early 70’s, wanted to draw attention to. It turns out that, as far as innate influences on human behavior are concerned, they were right, and the professional community of experts was wrong. Under the circumstances, it would seem unwise, if not foolhardy, to dismiss their hypotheses about those aspects of human behavior that aren’t “nice” out of hand.

One finds grounds for optimism that the prevailing illusions about “moral progress” will not be supportable for long in the remarks of the three speakers whose remarks we have not yet discussed. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom discussed experiments designed to explore the emergence of innate “niceness” in very young children and even babies, before such behavior can be taught or acquired via culture or environment. Among other things, he described the ability to infants to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys” as early as six months of age. He notes work by others that points to the conclusion that “kindness” is “part of our hard-wired inheritance.” However, he is not quite so optimistic. As he puts it:

Our minds have evolved through processes such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. We should therefore be biased in favor of those who share our genes at the expense of those who don’t, and we should be biased in favor of those who we are in continued interaction with at the expense of strangers. Also, there is now a substantial amount of developmental evidence suggesting that this kindness that we see early on is parochial. It is narrow. It is applied to those that a baby is in immediate contact with, and does not extend more generally until quite late in development.

After citing some experimental work in support of this conclusion, he continued:

This shouldn’t surprise us. Maybe it’s even better than we could have expected. The dominant trend of humanity has been to view strangers – non-relatives, those from other tribes – with hatred, fear and disgust. Jared Diamond talks about the groups in Papua New Guinea that he encountered. And he points out, for an individual to leave his or her tribe and just walk into another, strange tribe would be tantamount to suicide.

It is noteworthy that Diamond, who is nothing if not politically correct by the standards of the current time, could have so casually written something like this. If he’d said it 45 or 50 years ago, anathemas would have reigned down from him on all sides, and he would have been dismissed as a heretic. As for Bloom, he continues,

So there’s a puzzle, then, because the niceness we see now in the world today, by at least some people in the world, seems to clash with our natural morality, which is nowhere near as nice. How did we end up bridging the gap? How have we gotten so much nicer? Note that I’ve been focusing here on questions of our kindness to strangers, but this question could be asked about other aspects of morality, such as the origin of new moral ideas, such as that slavery is wrong or that we shouldn’t be sexist or racist. These are deep puzzles.

It seems a great deal less puzzling to me. It can only be puzzling if you ignore the obvious fact that, as human culture and human knowledge have expanded and these new kindnesses have emerged as the ancient, innate and virtually unchanged human emotions associated with moral behavior have found expression in the new environmental context, new hostilities have evolved right along with them. The kindness of the French revolutionary proponents of human rights came with the guillotine, and the kindness of the universal brotherhood of Communism came with the deaths of tens of millions of class enemies. Now we see the kindness Bloom seems to so admire in our own day associated with furious hatred and hostility directed by the political left at the members of the Tea Party movement, representing a substantial proportion of the citizens of the United States and openly expressed desires for the deaths of prominent political opponents like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Psychologist David Pizzaro discusses the influence of emotions in shaping what may seem at first glance to be judgments based on reason, focusing on the role of disgust. As he put it:

We’ve shown that disgust sensitivity, that is, people who are more likely to be disgusted, over time end up developing certain kinds of moral views. In particular, we’ve shown that not only are people more political conservative if they’re more disgust sensitive, but they specifically are more politically conservative in the following ways: they tend to adhere to a certain kind of moral view that the conservative party in recent years in the United States has endorsed, that’s characterized by being against homosexuality and against abortion.

Pizzaro goes on to consider the emotional component of liberal as well as conservative beliefs, thereby obliquely undermining the notion that they are logically consistent and legitimate. As any medieval churchman could have told him, such thoughts lead to heresy. We must hope they will do so in the future as they have in the past.

Philosopher Joshua Knobe begins his talk as if he’d been asleep for the last half century:

So far we have been talking about questions in moral psychology. So we’ve been talking about the questions: How is it that people make moral judgments? Do they make moral judgments based on emotion or reason? Is it a capacity that’s just learned or is it something that’s innate?

However, he goes on to describe recent work by philosophers that entailed leaving the ivory towers of pure reason and actually conducting experiments. The result:

But what’s really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn’t end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn’t find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.

What they seemed to be finding is that people’s moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people’s whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.

These, too, are conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with the notions of objective good and “moral progress.”

It would seem, then, that based on the sample we have been considering, while comfortable orthodoxies still prevail in the world of “expert” opinion about morality, general acceptance of the fact that innate, emotional components play a very significant role in moral behavior must inevitably undermine those othodoxies as long as freedom of inquiry prevails. There is room for optimism. Heretics will appear, as they always do, and will start doing experiments and studies of brain function that will demonstrate and establish the less “kind” aspects of human moral behavior. It is to be hoped that this happens sooner rather than later, and when it does, the “experts” will realize that attempts to foster “human flourishing” by manipulating human moral behavior are not only doomed to failure, but will continue to be extremely dangerous, as they always have been in the past.  If we really want to flourish as a species we would do well to finally learn to understand ourselves.  After a long struggle with obscurantist ideologues, we have finally gained general acceptance of the significance of the innate in human nature, but we seem to balking at the next logical step.  We have a marked preference for studying the “nice” and “kind” in human behavior, and ignoring the “not so nice.”  It is time we pulled our heads out of the sand, because unless we thoroughly understand the darker side of our nature, we will have no chance of controlling it.  In a world full of nuclear weapons, the need seems rather obvious.  It’s hard to flourish if you’re dead.

UPDATE: More of the “If you don’t agree with me and you have white skin you’re a racist” narrative from the NYT.

The Danewirk (hattip Biopix)

There’s more cool news from Denmark.  Back in the day of Charlemagne, there was a wall across the base of their peninsula with only one gate in it.  Ten feet thick and 19 miles long, the Danevirke, or “Work of the Danes” is the largest earthwork in northern Europe.  According to Germany’s Spiegel, after seaching for it for a century, archeologist have now found the “gateway to the Viking empire.”

All this should not be too surprising. The people we are talking about have always had a strong conviction of their own moral righteousness, and of the legitimacy of insisting that everyone else on the planet share their notions of good and evil. To give up such beliefs, irrational though they are, would mean abandoning their “in-group” and leaving the comfort of the ideological box they live in. That is not something human beings have an innate inclination to do.

The next speaker at the conference, psychologist Roy Baumeister, provides us with an interesting data point on how the logical implications of innate moral behavior are suppressed in favor of a world view in which “progress” towards the Brave New World favored by the current generation of self-described liberals becomes “natural.”

Of course, there is always the incongruous fact that innate moral predispositions evolved at a time when Baumeister’s Brave New World was unheard of, at a time of social and cultural existence utterly different from the present. Baumeister dispenses with this inconvenience by calling it a bad name; “reductionism.” “Reductionism” is a pejorative term used among scientists and academics, as free of actual meaning as terms like “fascist” or “socialist” in the current world of politics. In this case, it means something like, “One who believes that innate predispositions are a ‘Theory of Everything,’ discounting culture, education, and environmental effects on human behavior.” It is not recorded that any serious thinker ever held such a belief. The first speaker, Jonathan Haidt, put together a whole string of similar jargon to establish his academic gravitas in his introduction:

I just briefly want to say, I think it’s crucial, as long as you’re going to be a nativist and say, “oh, you know, evolution, it’s innate,” you also have to be a constructivist. I’m all in favor of reductionism, as long as it’s paired with emergentism.

It is not recorded that the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project ever used the terms nativism, constructivism, reductionism, or emergentism. Remarkably, the atom bomb worked on the first try in spite of that.

In any case, having dispensed with the effect of innate predispositions on moral behavior by calling it “reductionist,” Baumeister continues with a talk that sounds as if it was coming straight from the lips of a 1960’s “culture is everything” behaviorist. For example,

I’m convinced that the distinctively human aspects of psychology, the human aspects of evolution were adaptations to enable us to have this new and better kind of social life, namely culture. Culture is our biological strategy. It’s a new and better way of relating to each other, based on shared information and division of labor, interlocking roles and things like that.

Here, as he does repeatedly later in his talk, Baumeister alludes to the same phantom that appears in all the other talks. There can be no “better way” unless there is an objective standard for “better.” The objective good-in-itself has, once again, made its appearance. Meanwhile, Baumeister has replaced evolution in individual animals with a social Darwinist theory of “human evolution” that promotes, not the survival of individuals, but “a better kind of social life,” which can be relevant only to groups. Continuing with his quasi-behaviorist (or should I say “reductionist”) emphasis on culture, he writes,

…morality is the set of rules to enable people to live together. It serves the purpose of making the culture work, as culture depends on cooperating with each other, there’s trust, shared assumptions, things like that.

It’s getting fuzzier all the time, isn’t it? Suddenly, innate moral behavior has been “reduced” to a “set of rules.” It “serves a purpose.” A “purpose?” Who’s “purpose” would that be? In Baumeister’s remarks, as in those of all the other speakers, destructive manifestations of human behavior such as warfare are studiously ignored. Apparently we are to believe, with the behaviorists, that innate behavioral traits haven’t the slightest thing to do with it. It’s a mere cultural aberration, evidently caused by incorrect environmental influences.

Why people have to do moral things in practice is because of concern with their reputation, and it’s based, therefore, on long-term relationships.

Here Baumeister tips his hand, abandoning the very notion of hard-wired morality. We don’t act morally because of any innate predisposition to do so, but “because of concern for our reputations.” Once again, he uses the term “moral” in the sense of “objectively good.”

Continuing with his social Darwinist notion of morality, he introduces the notion of the “moral muscle,” by which we exercise “self-control.”

That is why we’ve called self-control the moral muscle. I’m going to unpack that and comment on both parts. It’s moral: self-control is moral in the sense that it enables you to do these morally good things, sometimes detrimental to self-interest… So that’s the moral part of the ‘moral muscle’, it’s a capacity to enable us to do these moral actions, which are good for the group, even though overcoming this short-term self-interest.
Here, again, we find the “moral good” defined as a valid and legitimate thing in itself, which exists for “the good of the group.”

Baumeister next proceeds to illustrate what he means by “the good of the group” for those too dense to “get it” without being beaten over the head.

And perhaps even more, to get to what’s human, you have to have a third party saying no, you got more than this one and that’s not fair, and intervening to redistribute, as happens all over the world in human societies.

Is it starting to dawn on you where we’re heading here? Let me spoon feed it to you:

Morality is the full-fledged sense, and I’m going with the cultural materialist view that culture is a system that basically has to provide for the material and social needs of the individuals. And so it regulates behavior for that, and morality comes with it, in a full-fledged sense, comes with culture. Tells people what to do to override their self-interest, and at least their short-term, and to follow the system’s rules. The system works, and because of that we all live better, but we all have to cooperate to a significant degree in order for the system to work.

So, you see, if you fight against the “system,” impairing its ability to “redistribute,” you are objectively “immoral.”  From the expression of emotions associated with innate behavioral traits, morality has been transmogrified into a “set of rules,” interpreted rationally with the aid of “self-control,” thereby better adapting us to serve a “system” in which “third parties” take resources from us and give them to those they consider “more deserving,” for what they have decided without consulting us is our own “good” in the interests of “human flourishing.”  Is it really necessary for me to point out that evolved emotional traits that predispose us to behave in certain ways have nothing whatsoever to do with such an arbitrary and artificial “set of rules?”  Those innate traits are what they are and will remain what they are regardless of anyone’s opinion, no matter how enlightened, concerning what they “should” be in order to make the “system” work better.  That is not “reductionism,” nor does it imply in any way, shape or form that our destiny is dictated by our genes.  If morality really is the expression of innate mental traits, it is merely pointing out the obvious.  I have no problem with the possibility and potential advisability of devising and adhering to sets of rules that, by general agreement, promote the common welfare.  Other than recognizing that it exists, and that its effect on human behavior must be taken into account, however, morality should not be conflated with these rules assuming we really want to reach the goals they are devised to promote.

In a word, dear reader, we are far from being out of the woods yet. We have made great progress, finally gaining general acceptance of the reality of hard-wired behavior in human beings, but the academic experts and professionals are still very effective gatekeepers in this field of study so critical to the fate of us all, and they continue to blind themselves (and us) with notions of objective good and morality as a tool for social control to make sure we “progress” towards that objective good. Meanwhile, I see no Konrad Lorenz or Robert Ardrey on the horizon ready to throw a salutary bomb in the mix. Let us hope for the best and press on.

The attacker apparently supports building the mosque 560 feet away from Ground Zero.

The blood is on the hands of a lefty.

From Ben Smith at Politico: “But as often at the intersection of politics and violent crime, the story doesn’t appear to fit any easy stereotype: The alleged assailant, Michael Enright, is — according to his Facebook profile and the website of the left-leaning media organization Intersections International — a student at the School of Visual Arts and a volunteer for Intersections, which recently produced a statement of support for the Park51 project and is funded by the mainstream, liberal Collegiate Church of New York.”

Even after that, Little Green Footballs made excuses: “At Politico, Ben Smith notes that Enright’s films were apparently sponsored by a left-leaning group called Intersections: Alleged anti-Muslim attacker works at pro-Park51 group. Smith’s headline is a bit misleading, however, because Intersections is involved in many different projects, not just in supporting Park51. Enright was a volunteer filmmaker for Intersections, and there’s no reason to believe he was involved with or sympathetic to their support for Park51.”

Other than the group just supported the Victory Mosque.

Sheesh.

It was a vicious crime by a 21-year-old coward.

It is attempted murder. I don’t care about this coward’s politics. But connecting this inexplicable act of violence on peaceful protesters is ignorant.

And so far, despite all the wishes of the left, the violence comes and hot rhetoric comes from the left. Need I remind readers of the beating of Kenneth Gladney?

No matter, CNN is still running with the same old narrative. Their headline: “Slashed cab driver to call for end to anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Of course, the editors there have long given up the “objectivity” charade, and realize they’re preaching to the choir. As Stalin said when one of his associates suggested that a piece of propaganda was so absurd that even his fellow traveler dupes in the West might gag on it, “Don’t worry, they’ll swallow it.”

A book of essays entitled “Man and Aggression” edited by behaviorist anthropologist Ashley Montagu representing the opinions of the expert community and specifically disputing the ideas of Ardrey and ethologist Konrad Lorenz appeared in 1968. It should be required reading for today’s nascent experts, along with Lorenz’ “On Aggression” and Ardrey’s “The Territorial Imperative.” One of the learned essayists, Marshall Sahlins, was sufficiently arrogant and stupid to write a “play” ridiculing Ardrey and his ideas. Most of the others attempted more reasoned responses, in many cases substantially more nuanced than the rigid behaviorism of Montagu. I will have more to say on “Man and Aggression” in later posts. However, today I will limit myself to highlighting one of the more interesting disconnects between “expert” opinion then and now; the existence of territorial behavior in the large apes.

Here are some of the “well known facts” about ape behavior in “Man and Aggression,” the product, according to Montagu, of “40 years of anthropological research and discovery in the field and in the laboratory;”

…the more carefully (the large apes) are observed, the more remarkably revealing do their unquarrelsomeness and cooperativeness become. Montagu

But there are many animals that do not exhibit (territorial) behavior… the Hominoidea, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla. Montagu

Chimpanzees, says Dr. (John Hurrell) Crook, vary the size of their parties. As a rule, individual and small groups wander over large home ranges and “territorial behavior appears to be absent.” Sally Carrighar

Our immediate forebears, the apes, seem to have reached something like a summit in nonaggressiveness, since they do not fight either — not as individuals or as clans. Carrighar

Chimpanzees live in “open groups” with considerable interchange of membership and all appear to utilize a common range of sizeable extent. Crook

It is fortunate that a later generation of animal behaviorists did not treat these results of “40 years of anthropological research and discovery in the field and in the laboratory” with undue reverence.  Some of their observations;

Chimpanzees are well known for their territorial behaviour. They are among the few animals that engage in between-group coalition aggression that results in fatalities. Encounters between communities typically take place during boundary patrols. Communities defend an area within the forest known as a territory. This differs from the home range of an individual, which is not defended but remains within the territory of the community in which the individual lives. Males will form border patrols and walk the perimeter of their communty’s territory looking for neighbouring community members who might try to invade their territory. The Jane Goodall Institute

Chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, engage in war-like behavior to gain territory, new research finds. The findings, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, explain why chimpanzees sometimes brutally kill their neighbors. The killings are most often done by patrolling packs of male chimps that are “quiet and move with stealth,” according to lead author John Mitani of the University of Michigan. To the victors go similar spoils of early human wars: land, often-improved security and strength, extra food and resources, and even better access to females. Jennifer Viegas, writing for Discovery News

Although orangutans are generally passive, aggression toward other orangutans is very common; they are solitary animals and can be fiercely territorial. Immature males will try to mate with any female, and may succeed in forcibly copulating with her if she is also immature and not strong enough to fend him off. Mature females easily fend off their immature suitors, preferring to mate with a mature male. Multiple sources, Wikipedia

Given the apparent relevance of these behavioral characteristics of our nearest animal relatives to our own, it would seem germane to ask, how could the “experts” have gotten it so wrong for so many years?

Robert Ardrey

Not to be outdone, the Telegraph reports that the material seized was “enriched uranium.”  Since the caption of the figure that appears in the article notes that the material was U238, commonly referred to as depleted uranium, none of their “fact checkers” apparently has a clue what they’re talking about.

BTW, have you noticed that whenever contraband radioactive and special nuclear material is seized, its usually due to good old fashioned police work, and not to those snazzy new radiation detectors that are being installed hand over fist at ports and border crossings?  That’s not a coincidence.