Book review of _The Egalitarians -- Human and Chimpanzee_ by Margaret Power

Abstract

This book combines some very interesting ideas with stunningly poor scholarship to create a potentially missleading book. Because the basic thesis -- that episodic extreme aggression seen among chimpanzees at Gombe and Mahale has been artificially induced by provisioning -- has been widely considered and parallels other criticisms of nonhuman primate data (e.g. debates over the 'naturalness' of langur infanticide), there is a risk people unfamiliar with the chimpanzee data will accept her conclusions uncritically. At the same time, her attempt to integrate developmental psychology with socioecology in humans and apes is interesting and it'd be a shame to dismiss that approach simply because of the poor application. Secondarily, the book should be of interest to historians of science because it maps so clearly onto the tradition of contrasting Rousseauian and Hobbesian views of (human) nature.