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Judith L. Hand is an evolutionary biologist, animal behaviorist (ethologist), novelist, and pioneer in the emerging field of peace ethology. She writes on a variety of topics related to ethology, including the biological and evolutionary roots of war, gender differences in conflict resolution, empowering women, and abolishing war. Her lectures include recent developments in peace research, which may help us prevent war. Her book, Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace is an in - depth exploration of human gender differences with regard to aggression. Her web site, A Future Without War, a book by the same name, and a paper, To Abolish War. are devoted to the concept of and requirements for abolishing war. The website provides an extensive collection of essays and book reviews, issues a topical newsletter, includes a blog, and is a gateway to other related sites. Hand has been a member of the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE), since its inception in 1972. ISHE is a professional organization whose members study human behavior and come from such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology and psychology. The term "peace ethology" was coined by ethologist, Peter Verbeek, as a subdiscipline of human ethology, one that is concerned with issues of human conflict, conflict resolution, reconciliation, war, peacemaking, and peacekeeping behavior. Verbeek suggests that peace ethology is uniquely positioned to make an important contribution to the newly emerging science of peace. Recent studies show that young children display peacemaking behavior that is remarkably similar in form and timing to peacemaking observed in non - human primates and other animals. In the past, researchers assumed that peace emerges, almost by default, when violence or aggression ceases. Studies on the behavioral biology of aggression emphasized what led up to and happened during competition and aggression. Few studies investigated what happened afterwards. In 1979, Frans de Waal and Marc van Roosmalen found that chimpanzee opponents tend to seek each other out for peaceful contact shortly after aggression has ceased. Three decades of studies indicate that peacemaking, like aggression, is a natural aspect of primate social behavior. Peace is now seen as a concept worthy of study in its own right. Hand
is a social activist committed to the abolition of war. Her argument
for the ability of humans to achieve this goal is developed in Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace and her website. Her
argument rests on several controversial premises: 1) that while the
roots of war do lie in aspects of male biology, war itself is not an
inherited and therefore inescapable feature of human behavior, but
instead is primarily the result of cultural factors; 2) that women are natural allies of nonviolent conflict resolution, and that excluding women from governing is an underlying condition that favors war because male inclinations for dominance using
aggression go unchecked; 3) that to abolish war, a key requirement is
the global empowerment of women (educational, financial, legal,
political and religious). Other requirements for abolishing war and how
long such a campaign might take are also explained on her website and in
the paper, To Abolish War. From 1967 to 1975, Hand taught high school biology at Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica, CA. While still teaching, she began a Ph.D. program at UCLA and in 1979 was awarded a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior, also called Ethology (her subfields were Ornithology and Primatology). Her doctoral dissertation compared vocalizations of two populations of gulls (Larus occidentalis), and the results were used to reclassify the gull population in the Gulf of California as a separate species, (Larus livens), not just a subspecies of Larus occidentalis. After completing her doctorate, she continued behavioral research as a Smithsonian Post - doctoral Fellow at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. (1979 – 1980). This research resulted in published papers on conflict resolution highlighting the use of egalitarian behavior
to resolve conflicts. For example, mated gull pairs in conflict over
nesting duties or access to choice food used such methods as sharing,
first - come - first - served, and negotiation rather than the commonly
studied dominance and subordination behavior to resolve conflicts. Female gulls of the species she studied are always smaller than their mates. In her theoretical paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology (Vol.
61, 1986) she used a game theory approach to introduce the concept of
“leverage” to explain why smaller individuals are sometimes able to
establish an egalitarian relationship with much larger individuals, ones
that could easily dominate them physically. This
paper also introduced the concept of “spheres of dominance” to explain
why, in a given relationship between two individuals, the relative
payoffs to survival or reproduction depends on the context of a
conflict. Different contexts will provide different payoffs to each
individual and consequently determine which individual of the pair will
be dominant in a given context, instead of one individual being dominant
over the other in all contexts. From
1980 to 1985, she was a Research Associate and Lecturer in the UCLA
biology department teaching Animal Behavior and Ornithology. In 1987,
she moved from Los Angeles to San Diego and spent several years writing fiction. In 2003, however, she returned to ethology and self - published Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace. The book draws from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology, primatology, behavior, ornithology, cultural anthropology, neurophysiology, and history. Hand has expanded concepts from Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace into essays on her website site, AFutureWithoutWar.org.
Hand earned a B.S. degree from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, in 1961, graduating summa cum laude, having majored in cultural anthropology before switching to zoology. In 1963, she earned an M.A. degree in general physiology at
UCLA, after which she briefly worked as a laboratory technician at
UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. In 1963 - 1964, Hand was a research
technician at the Max Planck Institute for Neuropsychiatry in Munich, Germany,
where she assisted in brain surgeries designed to evoke vocalizations
in squirrel monkeys; she published her first scientific papers on these
behavioral experiments. From 1965 through 1966, at the Pediatrics Department of the UCLA Medical School, she was head technician in a physiological laboratory studying bilirubin metabolism. After moving from Los Angeles to San Diego in 1987, Hand turned her attention to writing fiction. In 2001, she self - published the novel Voice of the Goddess. In her book Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, Hand
states that she was subsequently drawn back into the subject of war and
women while promoting this book. The novel’s background is the Minoan Culture
which Hand portrays as woman centered, goddess worshipping, and without
wars of aggression, a view she considers valid but which remains
controversial. In
2004, two of her novels were published by New York publishing houses,
the first, an historical epic set against the background of the Trojan War and the second, a contemporary women’s action adventure. More
published novels soon followed; all featuring strong heroines
struggling in epic conflicts in partnership with equally strong heroes.
When
examining the reasons humans kill one another, Hand draws a distinction
between war, murder and revenge killings. She uses the definition of
war as described by the anthropologist Douglas P. Fry: armed conflict between groups where combatants kill members of the other group indiscriminately. Murder is not war, nor is feuding (or self - redress) where revenge or punishment is exacted on specific individuals.
Hand argues that the biological roots of war stem from three aspects of male biology, each a holdover from the Pleistocene:
1) the strong tendency for aggressive male group bonding that serves
for many kinds of hunting, for group defense from predators, and for
survival during natural disasters; 2) the establishment of social hierarchy,
using force if necessary; and 3) willingness of males in a group to
sacrifice themselves to protect the group, in some cases even to the
death. Hand
coined the term “hyper - alpha” for a category of individual, male or
female, who so desires to dominate others that they are willing to kill
or to raise an army to kill other people for them. These
three characteristically male traits, which served us well during our
prehistoric past, can be used to our detriment by a “hyper - alpha” (a
male, group of males, or rarely a female). Unless the group or culture
erects restraints on warmongering, hyper - alphas can use these traits to
manipulate other males so as to raise an army and go to war. Hyper
- alphas are, according to Hand, a small minority in any population,
and they are not to be confused with leaders sometimes described as
alpha males. Hyper -alphas are defined by their willingness to
kill any number of anonymous individuals to achieve domination.
The most common cultural adaptation of human populations during the long and early phases of our evolution was that of nomadic hunter - gatherers. In Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, Hand
argues that a critical element in keeping war in check among these
nomadic hunter - gatherer groups was a strong female preference for
"social stability." This evolved female preference for social stability
is expressed in a number of traits more characteristic of women than
men. Most especially with respect to war, in a strong female proclivity
for negotiation, compromise, “keeping the peace,” and mediation — as
opposed to killing — to resolve differences. This preference is also
reflected in a greater female tendency toward prospicience — a forward
looking attitude which fosters anticipating and heading off potential
conflicts. In most nomadic hunter - gatherer cultures, which are typically egalitarian cultures, women
have strong influences in deciding group behavior. Hand suggests that
the female preference for social stability tends to suppress both male
inclinations to make war and any other social turmoil within their group
that risks the death of women or their offspring.
She suggests, based on behavior and physical traits of the relatively non - violent bonobo (Pan paniscus), such as hidden - ovulation (there are no outward signs of a female's fertile period), forward placed clitoris, and continuous receptivity (females can mate at any time during their estrous or menstrual cycle), that bonobos are a better model for students of human evolution than the highly aggressive and sometimes violent chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace outlines
the selection pressures favoring the female preference for social
stability and the implications of the difference in male and female
responses with respect to physical violence and war for contemporary
cultures. A survey by anthropologist Douglas Fry (The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence), determined that while nomadic hunter - gathers are generally egalitarian
in nature and nonviolent (including non - warring), settled or "complex"
hunter - gatherers tend to develop hierarchical social structure and
female subjugation. Many
such complex hunter - gatherers also make war. Hand expands on Fry to
conclude that a key culprit in the evolution of warfare was settled
living and the subsequent loss of power for women, who are the natural
proponents of nonviolent conflict resolution. These characteristics of
settled hunter - gatherers — the development of hierarchy, the subjugation
of women, and the emergence of war — were greatly exacerbated, Hand
argues, by wholesale settlement that accompanied the Agricultural Revolution, and they continue to the present. Although
war has ancient biological roots, Hand argues that it is currently
fostered primarily by our social environments — by our cultures. War
can be abolished if humanity is willing to engage in major cultural
transformation. On Her website, AFutureWithoutWar (AFWW), Hand explores
nine “cornerstones of a plan of action to create a "warfare
transition,” that is, a shift toward abolishing war that could be as
swift as the demographic transition of the mid twentieth century.
In Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace Hand
coins the term “hidden females syndrome” for the well recognized
tendency among scholars and lay people alike to overlook women when
researcing or writing about the human condition with respect to war and
other subjects. She
argues that this blindness to female significance and dismissal of
female input hinders any full understanding of why and how we engage in
wars.
To
summarize Hand’s position: When women are excluded from decision making
or conflict resolving situations (whether this is within the home, the
community or at state levels), male proclivities for domination, up to
and including domination by violence and threats of violence, are
expressed unchecked and untempered by female proclivities for more
nonviolent, win - win solutions.
With respect to war, the results of unchecked male proclivities are
demonstrated by the historical record of relentless warring. Hope for
abolishing war must include reempowerment of women as full partners with
men so that female preferences for nonviolence can be an equally
powerful shaper of our group behavior, serving as a check on using
physical violence and thereby serving as a positive influence for our
future. She writes, lectures, and networks in efforts to mobilize
leaders, academics, and lay people to begin a campaign to ultimately
abolish war.
Judith
Leon (née Latta) Hand was born in Cherokee, Oklahoma, the
daughter of John Leon Latta & Wanda Hazel Latta (1914 – 1994). Her
father, a successful restaurateur, died when she was nine; her mother, a
registered nurse, raised Hand and her younger sister alone. Hand
graduated from Torrance High School in Torrance, California,
in 1957. In 1967, she married Los Angeles police detective, Harold M.
Hand, and remained married to him until his death in 1996. They had no
children. "Because
of genetic inclinations that are as deeply rooted as the
bonding - for - aggression inclinations of men, most women would prefer to
make or keep the peace, the sooner the better." In Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace "If
women around the world in the twenty - first century would get their act
together they could, partnered with men of like mind, shift the
direction of world history to create a future without war." In A Future Without War: the Strategy of a Warfare Transition (The last
quotation presents a clear bias as far as stereotyping women under a
positive light, while allowing for individual personality differences,
both positive and negative, among men of the same species, exhibiting
gaps, inadequacies and imperfections in the - in any case - imprecise
and vague ``arguments".) |