Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals The Great Game of Life

About this book

Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals: The Great Game of Life examines human nature and the influence of evolution, genetics, chemistry, nurture, and the sociopolitical environment as a way of understanding how and why humans behave in aggressive and dominant ways. The book walks us through aggression in other social species, compares and contrasts human behaviour to other animals, and then explores specific human behaviours like bullying, abuse, territoriality murder, and war. The book examines both individual and group aggression in different environments including work, school, and the home. It explores common stressors triggering aggressive behaviours, and how individual personalities can be vulnerable to, or resistant to, these stressors. The book closes with an exploration of the cumulative impact of human aggression and dominance on the natural world.

Contents

Chapter 1. Defining Dominance and Aggression
Chapter 2. Traits of Dominant Animals
Chapter 3. The Significance of Comparative Studies
Chapter 4. Social Nonprimate Animals
Chapter 5. From Whence We Came: Primates
Chapter 6. The Human Animal
Chapter 7. Similarities Between Humans and Other Living Organisms
Chapter 8. Human Nature
Chapter 9. Alternate Human Behavior
Chapter 10. The Chemical, Physical, and Genetic Nature of Dominance
Chapter 11. Dominance and Aggression in the Workplace
Chapter 12. Dominance in Religion
Chapter 13. Dominance in Politics
Chapter 14. Human Aggression: Killing and Abuse
Chapter 15. Killing Humans
Chapter 16. Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?
Chapter 17. Attempts to Save the Natural World
Chapter 18. The Nature of Things

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Biography

Henry R. Hermann has been a biological researcher and university professor for over 50 years, focusing primarily on the fields of behaviour, morphology and evolution. He has numerous publications, including over 20 books and nine book chapters on a wide variety of subjects. As editor and author of four Academic Press books on social insects between 1979 and 1982 and a book on insect defences by Praeger Scientific, he played an important role in facilitating an understanding of animalistic social behaviour and opening the door for further investigation in that field. He has studied social interactions in organisms from ants and wasps to humans and has published on human behaviour with several papers and a historical and behavioural account of Native American music in Making the Wind Sing: Native American Music and the Connected Breath. Undergraduate studies were at New Orleans University and graduate school was completed at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. As a professor and researcher of defensive systems in social species, he spent 30 years in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Georgia where he taught a wide variety of courses, including evolution, medical biology, social behaviour, histology and comparative morphology. He currently teaches human anatomy and physiology at Florida SouthWestern State College in Ft. Myers, FL, and is carrying out research on social species in that area.