The Animal Inside: Scientific and Popular Depictions of Human Nature in the Age of Nixon

Historians of science frequently cite the mid-1970s as crucial to establishing biologists’ authority as experts on human nature. However, such attention obscures the fundamental importance of scientific and popular cultures of the previous decade in defining what it meant to be human. Starting in the mid-1960s, anthropologists like Irven DeVore, Lionel Tiger, and Robin Fox used studies of baboon behavior as a model for interpreting the aggressive encounters of competitive men. Ethologist Desmond Morris, on the other hand, suggested that human sociality and kindness were extensions of sexual response. These scientific conversations reflected dramatic changes in popular representations of human nature. In National Geographic, for example, articles on primate societies and “Stone Age” human cultures stripped away the contaminating influences of modern civilization (culturally, temporally, biologically) to reveal a bare, universal human nature. Many New Hollywood films of this era similarly depicted urban jungles and rustic wildernesses in which men found the very essence of their humanity challenged. Removed from civilization, the heroes of these films used every means possible to survive the emotional and physical brutality of life (think of Clint Eastwood’s westerns or Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs). In both the scientific and popular imagination, the causes and answers to social problems could not be located in any given cultural or legal system, but instead lurked inside each one of us. This paper suggests that by exploring this interplay between scientific and popular cultures during the Cold War, we can better understand how Americans sought to answer the question, “What is human about human beings?”