Well, my personal opinion is that a better understanding of human nature will come from the traditional means (interacting with people, study of literature and history and human institutions, and, even more controversially, maybe even religion) than trying to analyze human behavior from the point of view of apes dominating each other. I don’t think anyone with any reasonably sound theory of human nature would hold the assumption of “people [behaving] rationally in pursuit of well defined goals”.
