Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: Utilities of Aggression
the use of "love darts" by snails, which cause slight tissue damage but appear to facilitate courtship in these hermaphrodite animals.
AGGRESSION AS A CONCEPT
A basic problem with the everyday use of the term aggression is that people generally think they are discussing an entity ("thing") rather than using a concept. We humans essentially have to deal with a complex world in which a vast array of so-called independent variables (potential causes) may be related to an equally large collection of dependent variables (potential consequences). Humans are not computers, and they attempt to make sense of the world by creating intervening variables that link together groups of independent and dependent variables. The concept of aggression is one of these intervening constructs. The trouble with concepts is that they are theoretically definable in many ways—one does not assess a concept by its accuracy but by its usefulness (as an explanatory device).
Aggression and Communication
Aggression in animals involves communication with any or all of the sensory modalities (as we shall see later, hormones can influence the cues used in such communication and the sensitivities of the sensory systems that respond to them). It has also become apparent that most species have a range of threatening and attack-related activities that can be used in different contexts or for different purposes.
Utilities of Aggression
It is recognized that animals fight and threaten for a wide range of reasons, such as selection of mates, obtaining exclusive access to an area (territory) that is a prerequisite for breeding, gaining status within a social hierarchy, or defending themselves from conspecifics and predators. Status determines the animal's ease of access to a mate, food, water, or nest sites. One misconception is the view that, because particular animals may employ aggression to obtain a mate, territory, or elevated social status, behaviors receiving the same label in humans necessarily serve one or more of these functions. There is little evidence that humans are intrinsically territorial, always obtain their mates by
