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    Women--Not the Peaceful Creatures You Think

    "I am a man who will fight for your honor

    I'll be the hero you are dreaming of."

                                from a pop song sung by Peter Cetera

     Males play the greatest role in stirring up bloodbaths.  They do

    most of the killing, and they also do most of the dying.  This makes

    men sound pretty atrocious.  And, indeed, they are.  Males by far

    outdo females in aggression.  Remove the testicles from a rooster and it

    becomes a peace-loving bird.  Sew the testes back into its stomach and

    the masculine hormones once again flood the fowl's bloodstream.

    Now the recently mild-mannered chicken struts off to start a fight.

    It's not surprising when folks declare that if only we had female

    leaders, war and international aggression would rapidly disappear19.

    Many people are convinced that females are inherently peaceful.  OK,

    so Margaret Thatcher, the female Prime Minister of Britain, won the

    Falklands war, supplied the British military with nuclear submarines,

    and packed those subs with atomically-tipped ballistic missiles.  Indira

    Gandhi led a military campaign against Pakistan, jailed her opponents

    and suspended civil liberties.  And Peru's Shining Path guerrilla

    assassination squads were headed almost entirely by women.20    But

    surely these are just aberrations.  Or are they?

    The evidence from the world of our closest relatives in the

    primate family indicates that the cheerfully idealistic picture of women

    is a bit of self-delusion.  Females, too, are victims of the Lucifer

    Principle.

    Diane Fossey, the chronicler of the Central African mountain

    gorillas, had been following a gorilla band for nine years when she

    suddenly noticed that one of the tribe's babies had disappeared.  This

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