HomicideThe human race spends a disproportionate amount of attention, money, and expertise in solving, trying, and reporting homicides, as compared to other social problems. The public avidly consumes accounts of real-life homicide cases, and murder fiction is more popular still. Nevertheless, we have only the most rudimentary scientific understanding of who is likely to kill whom and why. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson apply contemporary evolutionary theory to analysis of human motives and perceptions of self-interest, considering where and why individual interests conflict, using well-documented murder cases. This book attempts to understand normal social motives in murder as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. They note that the implications for psychology are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparison and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and the phenomenology of the self. This is the first volume of its kind to analyze homicides in the light of a theory of interpersonal conflict. Before this study, no one had compared an observed distribution of victim-killer relationships to "expected" distribution, nor asked about the patterns of killer-victim age disparities in familial killings. This evolutionary psychological approach affords a deeper view and understanding of homicidal violence. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 93
... child is born The child's changing risk of homicide at parental hands Mothers who kill older children -5- Fathers who kill Substitute parents 61 62 63 64 69 77 80 83 8 ≈ ≈ N 888 72 73 Risks to children living with stepparents 85 ...
... child's age and several other variables , and there is impressive evidence , as we shall see in Chapters 3 and 4 , that this theory of maternal motivation , inspired by evolution- ary theory , is correct . Several critics of ...
... child psychoan- alyst Dorothy Bloch ( 1978 ) , turns out to be our fear that our parents will decide to do us in ! If social scientists are to be believed , these murderous impulses within the family are not merely the stuff of our ...
... children in the census data for the reference population , we have done likewise for the homicide sample . Now , as it happens , the eight victims who were " offspring " of their killers include two 5 - year - old children killed by ...
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Contents
10 | |
17 | |
Kinship and collaborative homicide revisited | 34 |
Femaleselective infanticide | 53 |
II Parental Homicide in the Modern | 61 |
Stepparents and offspring | 90 |
Oedipal conflict and the primal parricide | 107 |
Conflict over what? | 114 |
7 Why Men and Not Women? | 137 |
8 The Logic of SameSex Conflict | 163 |
9 Till Death Us Do Part | 187 |
10 Retaliation and Revenge | 221 |
11 Calling the Killers to Account | 253 |
12 On Cultural Variation | 275 |
Summary and Concluding Comments | 293 |
References | 299 |
6 | 120 |
Index | 323 |