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The mystical title of this commentary on Professor Davies' provocative and timely key article is intended to emphasize my belief that many of the problems of attempting to relate biology to ‘aggression’ stem from deliberate or inadvertent reification. ‘Aggression’ is clearly a ‘concept’ and not an ‘entity’ and, as such, it is difficult to perceive the very diverse activities receiving this label as having a common physiology. Concepts are adopted (or eventually rejected) on the basis of usefulness not correctness. This is not to deny that any useful reference to aggression must concern animals, i.e., creatures with physiologies. Most individuals in their dispassionate moments would not regard the sea or a volcano as being aggressive and would certainly fail to apply this attribute to dry-rot fungus.

Social aggression shown by male mice from two races from upper Valtellina in Italy with 2n=24 and 26 chromosomes, respectively, was contrasted in dyadic encounters. In encounters with mice of the same karyotype 2n=26 were uniformly more aggressive than their 2n=24 counterparts. When resident mice from both these races were tested against intruders of the other karyotype, 2n=26 mice again were more likely to prove aggressive and to eventually dominate their partners even when they were the intruder. Perhaps those behavioral differences account for the apparent replacing of the 2n=24 chromosome race by the 2n=26 variety in geographical areas where they overlap.