Robert Ardrey

American playwright (1908–1980)

Robert Ardrey (October 16, 1908 – January 14, 1980) was an American playwright, screenwriter and science writer perhaps best known for The Territorial Imperative (1966). After a Broadway and Hollywood career, he returned to his academic training in anthropology and the behavioral sciences in the 1950s. His most famous play is Thunder Rock. Ardrey's science writing challenged models in the social sciences of his time. African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966), two of his most widely read works, increased public awareness of evolutionary science. His work was so popular that some scientists cited it as inspiring them to enter their fields.

Ardrey was born in Chicago, the son of Robert Leslie Ardrey, an editor and publisher, and Marie (née Haswell). His father died in 1919 from pneumonia during the influenza epidemic and he was raised by his mother. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended the nearby University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1930 as a Ph. B. While in attendance, he studied creative writing with Thornton Wilder, who would become his lifelong mentor. His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935 and lasted only a few days, but resulted in the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship. There he wrote many screenplays, including those for adaptations such as The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), Madame Bovary (1949), and The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum; The Wonderful Country also had a cameo from famed Negro leagues pitcher Satchel Paige). He also wrote original screenplays, including the screenplay for Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay. At the same time and largely by accident, he renewed his interest in human origins and human behavior, which he had studied at the University of Chicago. The plays opened ten days apart and were massive failures. In his preface to Plays of Three Decades Ardrey writes:

In his 1964 book The Analysis of Prose, William D. Templeman used African Genesis as his third lesson. The volume included analysis and questions from his students at the University of Southern California. A. J. Jacobs, who wrote the 2004 book The Know It All, about reading the entire Encyclopædia Britannica, asserts that a quote in the philosophy section from African Genesis was the most profound thing he read while reading the Encyclopædia. Ardrey wrote for popular audiences on topics in paleoanthropology, which encompasses anthropology, ethology, paleontology, zoology and human evolution. He was praised for crossing the boundaries of scientific specialism. The Observer, for instance, in its review of The Social Contract, wrote that "Robert Ardrey leaps across the fences with which scientists nowadays surround their special subjects. He reports their findings in clear English. He attempts to relate them in a single science of Man, by which all of us may try to know ourselves." This single "science of Man" was postulated in Ardrey's influential Nature of Man Series, which is composed of four books: African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961), The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (1966), The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder (1970), and The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (1976). Along with Raymond Dart and Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey became one of the three most famous proponents of the hunting hypothesis and the killer ape theory. Ardrey postulated that precursors of Australopithecus survived millions of years of drought in the Miocene and Pliocene epochs, as the savannah spread and the forests shrank, by adapting the hunting ways of carnivorous species. Changes in survival techniques and social organization gradually differentiated pre humans from other primates. Concomitant changes in diet potentiated unique developments in the human brain. He challenged the reigning blank slate hypothesis (similarly aligned with cultural determinism). The blank slate hypothesis was defended (and Ardrey was famously attacked) by Ashley Montagu. This debate led to popular interest in human origins. Ardrey's ideas influenced director Sam Peckinpah, to whom Strother Martin gave copies of two of Ardrey's books, More recently, according to archeology expert K. Kris Hirst, reviewing the Dawn of Humanity (2015 PBS film) documentary which describes the 2015 studies of fossils of Homo naledi, the violent behavior of apes in the "Dawn of Man" sequence of 2001 has been "proven false", since contemporary evidence suggests that they were actually vegetarians. Though some of Ardrey's theses on aggression have been disproven,

A 1966 review by Edmund Leach said Ardrey was "a mine of scientific sounding misinformation" and his book was "noisy and foolish". A 1967 review by Patrick Bateson said "The arguments on which he bases his conclusions are shot through with such elementary mistakes, and his definitions are so loose, that he will surely mislead anyone who takes him seriously . Ardrey seems to be scarcely aware of the interactions involved in biological processes and to know nothing of the scientific method." A 1970 review by Carroll Quigley said "Ardrey pretends to be a scientist, or at least a science reporter; but in this book there is no more science than there is in a comic strip . It is true that Ardrey has read a great deal about animal behavior, but he never seems to grasp what it all means, and his biases prevent him from seeing what is really there." A 1970 review by C. E. S. Franks said "however well written they may be, his books are neither scientific works nor the works of a scientist. Robert Ardrey has misunderstood two of the basic concepts of the new biology, "aggression" and "territory", and has misapplied them in discussing human society". A 1972 review by anthropologist Michael G. Kenny said "though Ardrey says on occasion that one cannot reasonably argue from animals to man, he systematically ignores his own advice" and that Ardrey "does not in general cite any clear evidence for his case" and "pays no attention at all to much material which, for good or ill, could bear on his case. The result is that he became so thoroughly muddled there was no possibility that he might have given some kind of sense to the analysis of the bio social nature of society". A 1972 review by David Pilbeam said Ardrey's ideas were "based upon misinterpretation of ethological studies and a total ignorance of the rich variety of human behavior documented by anthropologists". A 1984 article said "the hard evidence for Ardrey's killer ape hypothesis, all from Dart, is slim" and was refuted in the early 1970s by paleontologists, in particular CK Brain and Elisabeth Vrba.

There are a number of university libraries that house Robert Ardrey's papers. The primary archive for the Robert Ardrey Collection is at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. Rutgers, and the University of Chicago.