Will and Power

This video might help you with your New Year's resolution!



The claim that one has a fixed budget of will power or self-discipline ("ego depletion") may be yet another non-replicating "result" of shoddy social science. Note that the ego depletion claim refers to something like a daily budget of will power that can be used up, whereas Jocko is also referring to the development of this budget over time: building it up through use.

Jocko on BJJ and mixed martial arts:





See also My Navy SEAL Story.

UFC training in Ko Samui

from THE REEM on Vimeo.

Great documentary of Overeem fighting in Boston and training in Ko Samui. The locations look very familiar to me even though I was last in Thailand almost 20 years ago. At the time I think I was the only guy on the island who knew any BJJ. I'm glad I didn't mix it up with any Muay Thai fighters, although I was tempted :-)

@26 min: great discussion by one of the trainers about the fast evolution of MMA techniques and tactics. @32 min, the attraction of the fight game.

MMA and paleo

"From cave to cage: Mixed martial arts in ancestral health" by Tucker Max from Ancestry on Vimeo.

Via Seth Roberts. Beyond the technical coolness of MMA, I just like the idea that if you and I mix it up, you'll end up unconscious or with a broken limb.

My Navy SEAL story

As everyone knows, it was a SEAL team that got Bin Laden. I only have two data points, but I'm pretty confident those SEALs are tough SOBs :-)

My BJJ training partner for several years (late 1990s) was a former Navy SEAL. Dave had served in Bosnia and was finishing up his undergraduate degree at Oregon. When we started training together he was pretty green and I usually had the upper hand. Physically we were pretty even -- he's about 5"10 and 190 lbs, so a few inches shorter and a bit bulkier than I am -- but my technique was superior. By the time we stopped training together he was a purple belt under Megaton Dias and kicked my butt regularly. The thing I remember about Dave is that he would never quit. A few times I choked him out completely (eyes rolled back, drooling, even memory loss) because he wouldn't tap.

He also never got tired, so after my technical advantage went away I always knew things would go bad for me if we rolled long enough -- he'd just wear me down! In peak condition we'd sometimes go 10 or even 15 minutes before one of us could finish the other. One time we rolled so long I got flat out exhausted and actually tapped because I was so tired I couldn't go on. (To be precise I thought I had him in a submission and blew myself up trying to finalize it; when he reversed the position I was so gassed I just gave up.) Dave was outraged that he'd been denied the chance to really finish me -- he wanted me to keep fighting, but I just couldn't go on! I realized at that moment I'd done something no Navy SEAL would ever do: QUIT! We might be on equal terms as athletes but I had nowhere near his mental toughness. (Mental toughness is what always comes to mind when I watch BUDs training videos, which I love.)

My other SEAL data point was an Annapolis grad, a former wrestler who used to come by the judo room at Yale to spar a little bit. He was a good athlete but didn't know much about submission fighting (this was the mid 1990s), so was easy to tap out. I lost count of the number of times I caught him in a guillotine. Many people think SEALs or other military guys know how to fight hand to hand, but that's a myth. They spend almost all their time training with weapons, which makes sense because unarmed combat is pretty rare on the battlefield. These days there might be some MMA technique taught in the military, but I'll take a trained fighter over a Krav Maga guru any day ;-)

Silva - Fedor MMA

Gracies break down the technical aspects of the Silva - Fedor fight.




Here is the actual fight. Fedor needs to drop to 205 if he wants to continue to compete. He used his superior quickness and explosiveness to go for the knockout, but Silva was striking effectively and in the second round managed to get Fedor down. A 280 lb BJJ black belt in the top position is very hard to deal with. They call Fedor The Last Emperor, and he had a great run in MMA, but his time is nearly over now.

On the mat

Title IX is killing a lot of non-revenue men's college sports, like swimming, gymnastics and wrestling. Oregon, which produced a number of NCAA individual champions (and UFC fighter Chael Sonnen), eliminated its wrestling program a few years ago.

An indication of the overall weakness of collegiate wrestling programs is that Cornell is the preseason #1 ranked team this year!

NYTimes: ... every N.C.A.A. wrestling championship since 1989 has been won by teams from Iowa, Oklahoma or Minnesota — with only 4 of 80 N.C.A.A. championships won from outside those states in history — this season, Cornell is the unanimous preseason No. 1.

It is the first time a team from the Ivy League, which prohibits athletic scholarships, has had the top ranking in wrestling and is one of the rare times an Ivy team has been ranked No. 1 outside sports like lacrosse, fencing, squash, and ice or field hockey.

But Cornell is carrying a flag for more than the Ivys. Cornell, which finished second to Iowa in last season’s N.C.A.A. championships, is seeking to become just the second Eastern-based team to win the national wrestling title. Penn State won it in 1953.

I grew up in Iowa, a wrestling hotbed. Both Dan Gable and Cael Sanderson, perhaps the greatest American wrestlers of all time, competed for Iowa State University, in my hometown. I never competed in wrestling, but I remember learning the techniques in gym class and on the playground. In HS it seemed like at every keg party you had to be ready to grapple because some drunk wrestler might grab you and want to roll around on the living room floor or in the back yard! Guys in other sports would try to get out of it by calling the wrestlers gay ("get off me, you homo!"), but in reality they (even football players) wanted nothing to do with close contact with a wrestler. (Note there are no wrestlers in this picture, although wimpier Ivy sports like swimming, cross country and tennis are well represented ;-)

The last actual fight I had (a long time ago!) was with a kid who went on to wrestle for ISU! It started with me hitting a single leg on him and tossing him into a locker. Then we hit each other in the face for what seemed like a long time before a teacher broke it up. One thing I learned from the fight is that two untrained guys can trade shots to the head for a long time before anyone goes down (this is also evident from early UFC fights). I was initially reluctant to hit the other kid in the face (I had never really had to do it before), but he showed no similar reluctance :-)

I did do Judo as a kid (my parents wouldn't let me do Karate or Tae Kwon Do) and later competed in both Judo and BJJ as an adult. I noticed that my Iowa background meant I could usually wrestle better than anyone who hadn't actually competed in wrestling (i.e., at a high school level or higher). If I wanted to get any judoka or jiujitsu player to the ground I could pretty much do it. Judokas would always complain that I was using leg attacks and not nice nagewaza (upper body throws), but this is basically just a convention and wrestling takedowns are all legal in Judo. In any first randori with another judoka I could always get a takedown by faking coming to grips and instead shooting for a leg.

I sometimes worked out at the ISU weight room in Beyer Hall, where the wrestlers trained. The summer between my junior and senior year of HS my schedule (I think determined by some math class I was taking) coincided with that of 1981 World Champion Chris Campbell, an ISU assistant coach. One of my wrestler friends had an amazing poster of Campbell hitting a souffle (suplex) on a Russian en route to winning his world title. Campbell and the Russian are both flying through the air and only the tip of Campbell's toe is touching the mat. He was by far the most amazing physical specimen I had seen at that point in my life. Campbell usually ran in the sweltering heat before lifting weights. He would warm up by doing hyperextensions with a 45 pound plate behind his head. You can see his exceptional lower back musculature in this video (yes, that bulge is his erector spinae), showing him competing in the 1992 Olympics at age 37 (he won the bronze -- see picture below)! But he was much more impressive as a younger man in the early 1980s. Unlike a lot of the Iowa kids, who had wrestling rooms in their basements and competed in tournaments while still in grade school, Campbell started wrestling fairly late. But his physical powers were such that he reached the highest levels of the sport. Somehow it was obvious to me even then that no matter how hard I trained I would never have strength, stamina or quickness like his.

The fundamental asymmetry of MMA

I once almost fought a Golden Gloves boxer. Almost.

"F@ck jiujitsu -- I'm gonna break your nose."

"Maybe, but if I get my hands on you there's no tapping. I'm tearing your arm off."

In MMA, it's unfair that the striker gets to hit the other guy at full power, but the grappler has to release the hold when the other guy taps. If there was no referee the striker would think very, very hard before mixing it up.

When I was faculty advisor for the Yale jiujitsu club we considered t-shirts with "Snap, Crackle, Pop" on them, but went with something more conservative like "Yale Brazilian Jiujitsu" :-)

Jacare

Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza is one of the top jiujitsu fighters of all time -- 5 time world BJJ champion! His potential in MMA is still unrealized.

If you have Showtime, you can watch Jacare fight tonight on the Strikeforce Houston card. The light heavyweight fight featuring Mo Lawal should also be interesting. Lawal is a top freestyle wrestler, also making the transition to MMA.


Here's a highlight video. Jacare is Portuguese for alligator :-) His judo skills are apparent, although getting a takedown on a BJJ guy isn't exactly hard. By the way, that little tapping motion by the opponent means the fight is over :-)




Watch Jacare dominate Olympic silver medalist (Greco) Matt Lindland in an earlier fight:

On Japan

Readers of this blog have probably noticed that I regularly post about China and globalization. I've devoted much less space to Japan, even though I once lived in Tokyo as a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow. While in Tokyo I dated an All Nippon Airlines stewardess, trained in MMA with local fighters and spent too much time in Shibuya (pictures above and below). I scandalized my physicist hosts by (a) visiting Thailand on the way to Tokyo and (b) investigating all kinds of weird social phenomena in my spare time (see below).

Below are a few old pictures, the first four from Thailand (Ko Samui) and the rest from Kamakura, Japan.





While in Japan I wrote a travelogue which I posted on the internet. That may not sound very radical, but this was back in 1997, long before the appearance of blogs :-) The travelogue covers topics like girlie bars, muay thai and expats in Thailand, Judo vs BJJ in Tokyo, physics lectures in Kyoto and at KEK, Japanese youth culture, etc. Any Hollywood producers or directors interested in making this into a movie should contact me right away ;-)

For those who are interested in Japan but don't want to read my stuff, I recommend the following.

Lafcadio Hearn: the grandfather of foreigners writing in English about Japan. Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890 as a journalist, eventually becoming professor at Tokyo Imperial University. See here for a collection of his work.

The blog Neojaponisme, edited by Harvard grad W. David Marx (an expat writer and musician in Tokyo) offers excellent writing about Japan, often informed by the latest academic research. For example, The misanthropology of the late stage kogal is about the kogal (video) and enjo kosai phenomena, which very much puzzled me when I was in Tokyo. (Having access to this research at the time could have saved me a lot of field investigation ;-) Kyabaio Japan is about hostess clubs, a topic covered with much less insight recently in the Times.

Unbelievable

Anderson Silva, king of the 185 pound division, moves up to 205 to face Forrest Griffin, a former light heavyweight champ.

This clip says it all -- Silva toyed with Griffin. An amazing example of world class athletic dominance -- reminds me of Usain Bolt at the Beijing Olympics.

Silva has no respect for Griffin's striking. Hands down, head movement only; it's an homage to Roy Jones Jr., who is in the audience. A casual right dismisses Griffin.

BJ Penn -- GSP

The biggest fight in MMA history will take place tomorrow, between BJ Penn and Georges St. Pierre. Penn, the 155 champ, is moving up to take on GSP at 170. The weigh-ins are today, but by fight time GSP will be around 180+ and Penn will be 170.

GSP is probably the best pure athlete in MMA. The strongest part of his game is his wrestling, which he has developed over only the last few years. He trains with the Canadian Olympic team and outwrestled former NCAA champions/All-Americans in his last fights. Penn is a freakishly gifted jiujitsu player (world championship 3.5 years after starting to train; his nickname is "the prodigy") and striker.

Visit the UFC site to see the weigh-ins today.

Here is some prefight hype footage of the Penn and GSP training camps. More training footage of GSP. A Penn highlight video.

Training Frank Mir

Here's a great interview with MMA coach Ken Hahn, in which he describes training UFC heavyweight Frank Mir.

Mir recently won a huge upset over Rodrigo "Minotauro" Nogueira to take the title. The interview hints at how technical the sport of MMA has become. Fighters have to master different ranges of striking (kicks, knees, elbows and punches) as well as grappling (throws, takedowns, the clinch, submissions, striking on the ground), drawing from disciplines like boxing, muay thai, wrestling, judo, and jiujitsu.

See below for fight video and some Hahn training video.

Nogueira was training with Forrest Griffin and Wanderlei Silva for this fight; that’s all the people he trained with. Those three guys just got together and hugged each other while I had Frank train with reputable professional boxers - one heavyweight and one light heavyweight. Then I had him spar with kickboxers, wrestlers and Olympic-level judo players.

When you have a chance to train with so many different high-level guys, there’s just no way around improving. ...


We had access to pro boxers. … Not guys that just turned pro. I’m talking about top-30 pro boxers. These guys are legitimate, 10-fights, seven-KOs, legitimate guys. They are two Native American brothers. One guy is 175 pounds, and the other is 260 pounds.

So when you get both of those guys at pro level hitting him, he’s going to get punched the way it’s supposed to feel. He’s going to have the movement to where he can’t touch you. Why do you think his distancing got so much better? When he has to chase down pro boxers that move and slip, you start figuring out the same thing.

If you roll with a champion jiu-jitsu guy, you’re going to go, “Whoa, this is different.” But the more you train with him, the more you pick up. ...

I think just offering up different types of fighters for Frank was important. Sometimes I would feed him guys that weren’t that good so he could get his skill level up. It’s one thing to train with the best guys, but you have got to use those guys efficiently. You can’t spar with them all the time or they will beat you up. You can spar with them once every other week.

The other times, you need to be sparring on [crappier] guys so you can build your confidence and work on stuff without paying the ultimate price. Try to work on new stuff with a really good guy, and you’re going to end up getting knocked out. Try it on the [crappy] guys and they don’t have the skill level to make you pay, so when they do tag you it’s not going to be that bad. But if you go against a pro boxer and you drop your hands trying to do something, you’re out cold. ...


Basically, I watched an entire history of his [Nogueira's] fights twice, and then I developed my strategy. The only guys that he submitted were guys that didn’t have jiu-jitsu, and the submissions came toward the end of the rounds when his opponents were tired. But everyone knocks him down, so you can definitely land punches on him.

And when I was watching “The Ultimate Fighter” and saw Ryan Bader sparring with him and punching him in the face, I was like, “Wait a minute. If Bader’s doing that, you’ve got to do the same thing.” And if he’s not respecting the punch, then he’s not respecting Frank until he gets roughed up. So now when you go back and watch videos, you can see how many mistakes Nogueira makes. I noticed a lot of important things the second time I watched his fights.

Here's some video of Hahn teaching a combination.


MMAJunkie.Com - Ken Hahn "The Ultimate Fighter" Blog



Clips from the Mir-Nogueira fight:

Great MMA photos

If you like these photos, you might consider buying this book. (Or, even if you hate these pictures, you can buy the book for me -- shipping address here :-)





Genki Sudo after knocking out Royler Gracie.





Mark Coleman embraces his daughters after a loss to Fedor Emelianenko.





Wanderlei Silva after knocking out Rampage Jackson.






Rampage Jackson after knocking out Chuck Lidell.





Enson Inoue armbars Randy Couture.





Poster for Pride 10 featuring Kazushi Sakuraba.

Ecotopia

The Times recalls the 1970s cult novel Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach.

The Novel That Predicted Portland

SOMETIMES a book, or an idea, can be obscure and widely influential at the same time. That’s the case with “Ecotopia,” a 1970s cult novel, originally self-published by its author, Ernest Callenbach, that has seeped into the American groundwater without becoming well known.

The novel, now being rediscovered, speaks to our ecological present: in the flush of a financial crisis, the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States, and its citizens establish a sustainable economy, a cross between Scandinavian socialism and Northern California back-to-the-landism, with the custom — years before the environmental writer Michael Pollan began his campaign — to eat local.

White bicycles sit in public places, to be borrowed at will. A creek runs down Market Street in San Francisco. Strange receptacles called “recycle bins” sit on trains, along with “hanging ferns and small plants.” A female president, more Hillary Clinton than Sarah Palin, rules this nation, from Northern California up through Oregon and Washington.

Note that Callenbach actually lives in Berkeley, where the climate is better :-(

On the other hand, Brad DeLong was impressed by our six kinds of recycling at U Oregon.



It's easy to forget that today's widely accepted environmentalism started as a crazy fringe social movement only 35 years ago. I can clearly remember during my childhood when it suddenly became not OK to just throw trash out the window of your moving car. (Remember the crying Indian chief TV spot? See below!) This development is captured nicely in an episode of the AMC TV series Mad Men (about 1960s Madison Ave. ad men), in which Don Draper and his lovely WASP upper class family have a nice picnic in the woods, and in the final shot leave behind a pile of rubbish and beer cans sitting in the grass. I think this means that there is hope for humanity -- we'll eventually figure out that preserving the environment is in our best interest as a species.





Incidentally, Mad Men is the only thing on TV I watch regularly, aside from ultimate fighting. At a holiday party earlier in the week the show came up in conversation and I found that randomly selected literature and film professors also love it :-) Sadly, I don't know anyone on the faculty who is excited about BJ Penn versus Georges St. Pierre in January.

Judo in the WEC

Last night's 170 lb title fight had some of the most beautiful judo throws I've ever seen in MMA. We call those "high amplitude" throws: when the legs of the guy getting thrown describe a big arc.

Miura ultimately lost to Condit, but the outcome might have been different if they had been fighting in a parking lot :-)

Note to physicists: WEC = World Extreme Cagefighting, a sister promotion to the UFC, not Weak Energy Condition.

Back and jetlagged!

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I am digging out after returning from Paris.

Here are some sports links I found of interest :-)

Ulitmate fighting on CBS tonight -- first time on a national broadcast network! Kimbo Slice, one of the headliners, rose to fame thanks to YouTube video of his street fights. Although he has fan appeal, he's far from a top level fighter at this stage of his development.






US military embraces ultimate fighting! See here, here and slides.


Profile of China's surprisingly successful rowing program. (video, slideshow.) They've recycled tall athletes from track and field and other sports into rowing. I've always thought the talent pool in rowing was relatively thin, and China's success partially supports this viewpoint.

Some projections have the Chinese olympic team edging out team USA in the overall medal count in Beijing.

Elbow strikes

Somehow my 2.5 year old son Max has learned how to use elbow strikes. When he sits on my lap, or on top of me on my chest (the mounted position, in jiujitsu), he drops perfect strikes using his elbows. No sign that his twin sister has mastered the technique, though :-)

I've tried not to watch ultimate fighting while the kids are around (in fact, mom doesn't allow it), but he must have figured it out somehow. So far his overall jiujitsu is pretty weak, though :-)

Related: David Mamet is a purple belt, and his recent movie Redbelt is about jiujitsu and the fight game!




The real deal: Marcelo Garcia, best pound for pound in the world. Watch this video to see some beautiful jiujitsu! The submissions are all at the end. The beginning and middle are all takedown and position game. At about 2 minutes he smokes my old instructor Renzo Gracie. At 5 minutes in you can see him against heavyweight Ricco Rodriguez, who he taps with an ankle lock.

Crossfit: cult or ultimate training?

Having played a lot of sports and done a lot of physical training, it's not often that I see something in the gym that shocks me.

But recently I came across the Crossfit training system. It's based around short, hyper intense workouts using basic bodyweight gymnastic moves (pushups, pullups, burpees, rope climbing), olympic and power lifts (cleans, jerks, presses, squats) and track sprints and rowing. The goal is to engage the large muscle groups and push them to both anaerobic and aerobic failure at the same time. For experienced athletes, the idea of using olympic lifts for cardiovascular stress training seems over the top, but anyone who can survive this is going to get very, very fit.

The founder of Crossfit, former gymnast Greg Glassman, is the guru behind this movement. He rails against bodybuilders who lack functional strength, and runners, cyclists and triathletes who are so specialized that they lack overall athleticism. (He doesn't have any bad words for ultimate fighters, though, some of whom use his system :-) The point I think Glassman overlooks is that the traditional training methods are meant to minimize injury and allow regular performance by an average person. It's telling that Glassman, 49, doesn't Crossfit train anymore. (See this NYTimes profile from a few years ago; the followup reader discussion is very good.)

If you have any athletic background at all (endurance training doesn't count -- it's gotta be something with a little explosiveness and testosterone ;-), watch the videos and tell me you are not freaked out.





More video:

Uneven Grace mov wmv
(check out the women doing 30 clean and jerks with 85lbs in 5-7 minutes!)

GI Jane mov wmv
(pushup, burpee, pullup -- basic, but so brutal. Greg Amundson is a badass!)

Interview: Coach Greg Glassman

CFJ: What’s wrong with fitness training today?

Coach Glassman: The popular media, commercial gyms, and general public hold great interest in endurance performance. Triathletes and winners of the Tour de France are held as paradigms of fitness. Well, triathletes and their long distance ilk are specialists in the word of fitness and the forces of combat and nature do not favor the performance model they embrace. The sport of competitive cycling is full of amazing people doing amazing things, but they cannot do what we do. They are not prepared for the challenges that our athletes are. The bodybuilding model of isolation movements combined with insignificant metabolic conditioning similarly needs to be replaced with a strength and conditioning model that contains more complex functional movements with a potent systemic stimulus. Sound familiar? Seniors citizens and U.S. Marine Combatant Divers will most benefit from a program built entirely from functional movement.


CFJ: What about aerobic conditioning?

Coach Glassman: I know you’re messing with me – trying to get me going. Look, why is it that a 20 minute bout on the stationery bike at 165 bpm is held by the public to be good cardio vascular work, whereas a mixed mode workout keeping athletes between 165-195 bpm for twenty minutes inspires the question, ”what about aerobic Conditioning?” For the record, the aerobic conditioning developed by CrossFit is not only high-level, but more importantly, it is more useful than the aerobic conditioning that comes from regimens comprised entirely of monostructural elements like cycling, running, or rowing. Now that should start some fires! Put one of our guys in a gravel shoveling competition with a pro cyclist and our guy smokes the cyclist. Neither guy trains by shoveling gravel, why does the CrossFit guy dominate? Because CrossFit’s workouts better model high demand functional activities. Think about it – a circuit of wall ball, lunges and deadlift/highpull at max heart rate better matches more activities than does cycling at any heart rate.

A fighter's heart

I recommend Sam Sheridan's book A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting to anyone who is interested in the fight game (ultimate fighting, martial arts, boxing).



When I started on Sheridan's path 15 years ago, I thought I'd write about it someday, but I never got past a single short essay I posted on my web page.

Sheridan studies muay thai (kickboxing) in Thailand, boxing at Harvard and later in Oakland (with Andre Ward), MMA in Iowa with the Miletich camp, and jiujitsu in Brazil (with BTT). He also travels to Tokyo with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueria ("minotauro" -- former Pride and current UFC heavyweight champion) for his decisive encounter with Fedor Emelianenko.

Sheridan's insights and writing are good. The only problem is the guy has no ground game, so he writes about grappling -- the real heart of fighting -- like a mere journalist :-)

Humans bad at violence?

The Chronicle of Higher Ed interviews sociologist Randall Collins on his new book Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton University Press). I haven't read the book yet, but I find many of his points quite plausible. I always found the S.L.A. Marshall statistics (see below) that only about 25% of soldiers fire their guns in combat quite interesting -- believable, particularly for conscripts, but presumably correctable with training.

Collins notes that most people are generally quite reluctant to initiate violence. It's also true that very few people are competent (in a technical sense) at inflicting injury on others.

Violence, Up Close and Personal: A sociologist challenges prevailing theories of when, and why, people lash out

Randall Collins, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks human beings are bad at violence. Is the man mad? Any newspaper would seem to falsify his claim, offering up a bestiary of child killers, cross-tribal ethnic cleansers, and suicide bombers, not to mention military attacks sanctioned by law but still brutally sanguinary.

Collins, author of the new book Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton University Press), is not so naïve as to deny that the globe is drenched in blood. But he argues that to confront another human being and do him harm is far more psychologically difficult than most social scientists appreciate. "There is," he writes, "a palpable barrier to getting into a violent confrontation." And the resulting anxiety makes people lash out incompetently. Most people back down from fistfights after a bit of trash talking. And in war, more soldiers cower than attack the enemy effectively.

To make his case that we have no talent for violence, Collins adduces evidence ranging from the low casualty rates in most Greek and Roman battles to photographs documenting how few people in "violent" crowds on the West Bank are actually wreaking havoc. (Modern photojournalism has opened doors for this subfield of sociology, he argues.) He also includes his own voyeuristic accounts of confrontations on the streets of Philadelphia and other American cities, which tend to confirm that most showdowns peter out at the bluster stage.

In a discursive, 550-page book, Collins manages to fold into his theory such topics as domestic violence, British sports hooliganism, and the history of duels (a method of cabining violence to a scale where humans can stomach it). Along the way, he rips into some prevailing sociological theories, including the idea that much violence among disadvantaged groups amounts to a form of political "resistance." That theory, he suggests, has a "twisted quality," lauding thugs who are the violent exception and who prey mostly on members of their own low socioeconomic groups.

He also has few kind words for the reigning evolutionary-psychological interpretation of violence, which sees it as a holdover from a long prehistory in which men competed ruthlessly for status and mates. Collins does not reject biology but cites a different Darwinian drive: the human desire to form social bonds. A visceral aversion to throwing a punch, even if the recipient richly deserves it, he writes, "is the evolutionary price we pay for civilization."

The seed of the book, Collins says, lay in his 1975 book, Conflict Sociology, which examined the competition among various economic, ethnic, and cultural groups. "After having written that, I realized it was about conflict, all right, but nobody ever did anything to each other," he says. "There was no real fighting in it."

He's remedied the omission — and then some. Now he is so immersed in real violence that it will spill over into a sequel, which will encompass topics given short shrift in Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, including rape and decisions by states to go to war.

[Interview follows] ...

A lot of people would say that nature is red in tooth and claw and all that — that modern violence is a carry-over from the evolutionary past. What's wrong with that picture?

If you look at the history of fighting, you find that primitive people are actually not very good at fighting. We do have some anthropological films of tribes in wars, and it looks almost like a dance routine. You'll get 100 or so men of the tribe shouting and chanting and waving their spears and bows and arrows, and out of that group a few — six or eight — will run up toward the front line. One or two will dash across the line, throw a spear, then turn around and run and come back in. This may go on for a while until someone gets a spear — usually in the back — when they run away. Then they decide to stop.

Early in the book you put a lot of weight on the finding of the military historian S.L.A. Marshall that only something like 15 percent to 25 percent of American infantrymen fired their weapons in combat. Have his figures held up? And is that figure still true in current conflicts?

There's been controversy about that. At the time of the Second World War and the Korean War, some officers, typically higher officers, said they didn't believe [that figure] — it was just an insult to the troops. Other officers said they thought it was approximately right. It's generally thought now that Marshall was sort of giving a ballpark figure. Surveys from the Vietnam War show generally much higher figures if you ask them whether they ever fired their guns. If you ask them if they are doing a lot of firing, it starts looking more like Marshall's figures: Twenty to 25 percent are really gung ho and do lot of firing, and most of the others fire some of the time, but they aren't very enthusiastic about it.

You talk about panic firing during military combat, and firing among troops. And in an analogy you draw, you also find a lot of panicked firing and incompetent shooting among gang members, and only a few people taking part.

We've got sort of a sieve that goes down by two levels. The first level is whether people are actually engaged in the violence, whether it's shooting guns or throwing punches. Then there's the second level of how competent they are at it: whether they actually hit what they intended, whether they hit anything. … That's true in the case of cops and robbers — both sides — as well as in the Army. U.S. forces have been trained to try to overcome this nonfiring problem [by doing] a huge amount of firing, and so it's not too surprising that in that situation bystanders get hit.

... How is it ugly in one-on-one situations?

In one-to-one situations, it's usually not ugly so much as it is boring. There's a really strong tendency for people to jaw at each other, and then eventually the fight winds down because it becomes so repetitive. It's not difficult to keep fights from escalating as long as it's one on one. All you have to do is be really boring. They will keep on trying to escalate the fight, but you just stay at the same level.

Bore your opponent into submission. I think I could handle that.

You can actually see in videotapes people say the same thing over and over and over again, 10, 20 times. That's actually quite distinctive of conflict talk.

What if people are violent and want to be violent, but they also don't want to be hurt, so they need to get themselves pumped up or otherwise push themselves forward into violence? Couldn't that be another explanation for what you've observed?

We can actually take a fair amount of pain if it's not in a conflictual type of situation. People in disasters tend to behave quite heroically; people in medical situations who are under a lot of pain tend to behave surprisingly well. Soldiers are put through painful body-stressing exercises. But the same people seem to have trouble with the notion of actually hitting somebody else in a combat situation or even in a fistfight. It looks as though people have more trouble inflicting violence on other people than taking it.