Richard Wrangham

Richard Wrangham was born in Britain in 1948. He studied biology at Oxford and Cambridge and began field research on chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania, within the research circle of Jane Goodall. He later became a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. In 1987 he founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, and from long-term observation of chimpanzee communities he went on to address questions about the origins of human behaviour. He also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987.

In "Demonic Males" (1996, with Dale Peterson), he argued that men's group violence and coalitionary aggression share an evolutionary root in chimpanzees and humans. In "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" (2009), he proposed that the control of fire and the cooking of food, by increasing the energy yield of food, played a central role in the biological transformation of the human species, including the enlargement of the brain and the shrinking of the digestive tract. This hypothesis remains debated among researchers.

In "The Goodness Paradox" (2019), he distinguished between reactive and proactive aggression. He argues that over the course of evolution humans became more docile in terms of reactive aggression through the collective elimination of aggressive individuals, and he links this process of "self-domestication" to the relatively gentle temperament of humans. Even so, our capacity for organised, premeditated violence remains. Wrangham was also a co-editor of "Primate Societies".