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On Aggression (, "So-called Evil: on the natural history of aggression") is a 1963 book by the ethology Konrad Lorenz; it was translated into English in 1966. Das sogenannte Böse zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression, Original edition : Verlag Dr. G Borotha-Schoeler, 1963 ("So-called evil, Toward a Natural History of Aggression"). As he writes in the prologue, "the subject of this book is aggression, that is to say the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species." (Page 3)
The book was reviewed many times, both positively and negatively, by biologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and others. Much criticism was directed at Lorenz's extension of his findings on non-human animals to humans.
However, Lorenz does not state that aggressive behaviors are in any way more powerful, prevalent, or intense than more peaceful behaviors such as mating rituals. Rather, he negates the categorization of aggression as "contrary" to "positive" instincts like love, depicting it as a founding basis of other instincts and its role in animal communication.
Edmund R. Leach, comparing the book with Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative in The New York Review of Books in 1966, calls On Aggression "no landmark, but .. modest and wise, while Ardrey's version is only noisy and foolish." Leach writes that where Ardrey focuses on territoriality, Lorenz aims to demonstrate that "animal aggression is only a 'so-called evil' and that its adaptation consequences are advantageous or at least neutral." Leach is however less sure that Lorenz is correct to equate animal and human aggression, the one taking standard ritualized forms, the other far more complex.
The mental health researcher Peter M. Driver reviewed the book in Conflict Resolution in 1967 alongside two by Ardrey and one by Claire Russell and W. M. S. Russell, Human Behavior – A New Approach. He commented that those against the book, especially S. A. Barnett, T. C. Schneirla, and Solly Zuckerman, were specialists in animal behaviour, while most of the favourable reviews came from "experts in other fields". Driver stated that Lorenz had provided a "powerful thesis" to explain the "aggression gone wrong" in humans, mentioning the millions of deaths in world wars, aggression resembling (Driver argued) the unlimited interspecific attack of a predator on its prey rather than the kind of intraspecific aggression seen in nonhuman animals which is strictly limited. Driver concluded that ethology could contribute, alongside neurophysiology and psychology, to resolving the problem of conflict.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, writing in The New York Times in 1972, called Lorenz's theory "complicated and sometimes fuzzy". Fromm considered that in one way Lorenz had succeeded where Sigmund Freud had failed, Lorenz's hydraulic theory of aggression, innately programmed, being in Fromm's view a better explanation than Freud's opposed passions, the supposed Libido (eros) and Death drive (thanatos). However, Fromm noted that the ethologist Nico Tinbergen had rejected the hydraulic theory, and that Lorenz himself "modified it" in 1966, but without indicating that in the English translation of On Aggression. Fromm cites evidence from neuroscience that aggression is "essentially defensive", arising in "phylogenetically programed brain areas" for fight or flight when an animal or person feels threatened. Fromm points out that "self-propelling aggressiveness" is seen in people with brain disease, but not in "normal brain functioning".
The biologist E. O. Wilson, in On Human Nature (1978), argues that both Lorenz and Fromm are essentially wrong. He lists a variety of aggression categories, each separately subject to natural selection, and states that aggressive behavior is, genetically, one of the most of all traits. He maintains that aggression is a technique used to gain control over necessary resources, and serves as a "density-dependent factor" in population control. He argues against the "drive-discharge" model created by Freud and Lorenz, where substitute aggressive activities (such as combative sports) should reduce the potential for war, and in support of Richard G. Sipes's "culture-pattern" model, where war and substitute activities will vary directly. Wilson compares aggression to "a preexisting mix of chemicals ready to be transformed by specific catalysts that are added," rather than "a fluid that continuously builds pressure against the walls of its containers."
The anthropologist Donald Symons, in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), accused Lorenz of inadequately documenting his major thesis.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins described Lorenz in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a "'good of the species' man". He criticises On Aggression for its "gem of a circular argument" that aggressive behaviour has a "species preserving" function, namely to ensure "that only the fittest individuals are allowed to breed". In Dawkins's view, the idea of group selection was "so deeply ingrained" in Lorenz's thinking that he "evidently did not realize that his statements contravened Neo-Darwinism."
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