Lots of people think lots of things. But even if your idea were true it wouldn’t explain why some males with high testosterone level engage in ths behavior and others don’t. Nor would it explain cultural differences. The bottom line is that your idea is nothing more than a personal opinion – we have no good science on this stuff.

Nonetheless, I think that space aliens coming here for the first time would quickly see highly destructive violence by groups of men as one of the most salient features of our species, and the things that set off that violence – religious differences, political or economic disputes, etc, as secondary.

In the case of mental illness, I’m perfectly willing to concede that real-world stresses – relationship problems, job stress or loss, economic difficulties, can “set off” someone prone to depression or anxiety disorders, just as the social conditions in the prior paragraph can set off male violence. But there’s only so far you can go in trying to treat mental illness by eliminating stress. Ultimately you have to treat the disease itself.

It’s all fine and good to try to “treat” male violence by reducing social inequities, providing more economic opportunity or improving social justice. But the data on whether that actually works is very inconclusive. It’s a bit like dealing with a homicidal maniac by not saying the phrase “Niagra Falls” around him. That works fine until someone slips up. It’s better to get him some treatment.

First of all, calling something “scientific” doesn’t make it scientific. The fact is that we have nothing resembling hard science to describe human behavior or societies.

As far as “reorganizing society” – ALL policies and theories, whether they have to do with crime, economics, politics, or foreign policy, are based on some ideas or other but none of those ideas have any scientific rigor. In other words people are goin to try to structure society anyway, so it would be nice if they had a clue.

Young men get together in groups, arm themselves and do harm to other people that they pereceive are not in their group. Are these young men street criminals, NAZI stormtroopers, Hezbollah guerrillas, Tamil Tigers, Crusaders for Pope Urban II, Union and Confederate soldiers at the battle of Antietam, Catholics and Protestants in Ulster, Shiites and Sunnies in Iraq, or headhunters on some remore Pacific island? Does it matter?

I don’t think it matters as much as everyone else here does. What I’M suggesting is that it’s like talking about whether the schizophrenic thinks that he’s Napoleon, or believes that space aliens are beaming messages into his head, or imagines that he has an invisible green girlfriend. It’s still the same disease.

The propensity of male humans to get together in groups and do violent harm to people outside their group is a big problem in our world and lies at the root of many other problems. It cuts across culture and history and there’s pretty good evidence that some other primates (e.g., chimps) also share this trait. Given that much of human history is written in the blood spilled by these young men it’s amazing that we have no scientific understanding of it.

Understanding “why we are the way we are” to what end? It doesn’t matter how long, or how hard or how rigorously we study a why a fish is the way it is, its never going to be able to live on land and serve us our coffee at Starbucks. Prior attempts to re-organize society along “enlightened scientific theory” led to scientific socialism and its cousin fascist eugenics, and both of these attempts to apply a scientific understanding of man filled a lot of graves.