Taming Cheney

An interesting article in the New York Times about the genetics behind aggression. The article speaks primarily to research done in the Soviet Union (and now Russia) over the past 40 years or so, breeding rats, foxes and other animals to select for tameness on one hand and aggression on the other.

One sentence stood out to me: "The genes, if Mr. Albert finds them, would be of great interest because they are presumably the same in all species of domesticated mammal. That may even include humans. Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, has proposed that people are a domesticated form of ape, the domestication having been self-administered as human societies penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive."

My question is, why has our society rewarded the aggressive individuals (Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz, et al.) instead of ostracizing them?