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favours restricted aggression.

As mentioned earlier, aggression has an enormous range of variability, and human aggression stems from a large number of different factors, which is why the biological theories have seriously being questioned by most social psychologist as there are not any scientific basis that aggression stems form innate tendencies. In most of the animal fighting behaviour from Lorenz?s studies most of the animals fighting does not lead to serious injury or death, as compared to human aggression where millions are killed or serious injured. Innate tendencies to engage in such lethal behaviour make little sense from an evolutionary perspective. In addition, violence within a given culture varies dramatically over time as social conditions change (Baron and Byrne 2000). Such facts are inconsistent with the idea that human beings are genetically programmed for aggression.

Learning theorist are associated with two main theories to try and explain the inevitability of aggression. The first of the two is the cognitive association theory; this suggests that aggression is linked with aggressive cues, such as in films. Experiments have been carried out which support this theory, using guns as aggressive cues (Berkowitz 1989), which lead to the hypothesis ?the trigger pulls the finger?

The second main theory is that of the social learning theory by Bandura (1977, cited in Hayes 1998) who suggested that aggression is not inevitable as learning can occur firstly through direct experience reinforcement, for example, the classic study by Bandura and Walters (1977, cited in Hayes 1998) on adolescent boys.

Bandura?s worked sparked much research on effects of aggressive content in the media, such as television and films. However, Bandura did not believe his experiment should be taken too literally, as just because children and adults watch violence does not automatically mean they will mimic it. However, he believed also that aggression is not an inevitable emotion, but a learnt one.

The social learning theory does not explain how aggression was present centuries ago, as aggression was present before technological advancements. However, the socio-biology argument drawn from the observation of a limited time period concludes that aggressive behaviours are instinctive and therefore are natural and inevitable emotion, which has an adaptive value. Taking into account that evolutionary changes takes hundred of years and not all developments are adaptive, why should aggression be adaptive and therefore not inevitable? The methodology that was used does not seem to be equipped to look at the effects of the environment and learning through the evolutionary ladder as it is argued that the learning process increases in any species as they progress up the evolutionary ladder suggesting aggressive behaviours could be learnt.

Since evolutionary theory rests on the assumption that aggression is innate or biologically determined, to suggest that it is inevitable means that we are genetically determined to commit some forms of aggression. Although, this is a possibility, there is no conclusive proof to support this hypothesis. Much scientific speculation is directed towards genes and their influence on behaviour and aggression, linkage studies have failed consistently to identify the loci of relative genes. We should not readily assume that any behaviour is gene coded rather than a learned response to the environment, for there is much more evidence to explain the latter rather than the former, despite neither paradigm being able fully to explain human aggression.

The concern for evolution theorist is that their theories are untestable, because it is impossible for evolutionary psychologists to replay the process of evolution in their laboratories, they must relay on after the fact phenomenon.

The conclusion as to whether evolutionary theory suggest that aggression is inevitable, needs to combine the two main theories and accept that aggression is innate, but also that it is stimulated and conditioned by society. The evidence of similarities and difference between animal and human aggression has further cast doubt on evolutionary theories. Evolutionary theory may benefit from replacing its heavy reliance on assumption with a firmer grounding in tangible data, and testable hypothesis.



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