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 79
... Killing Kinfolks Who kills whom ? Some American data 17 18 Do relatives pose a lesser risk ? 20 Collaborative killing in 13th - century England 24 Some other studies with higher proportions of blood kin Fraternal strife 26 Kinship and ...
... 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 Stepparents and offspring age 90 Parricide : Killing Parents The logic of parent ...
... kill must surely be those about which they care most profoundly . Moreover , since homicide is viewed so seriously ... killing was a regular component of the selective events that shaped the human passions we shall discuss ; in either ...
... killing their wives and 9 women were convicted for killing their husbands . Were these the only cases considered , one would never suspect that more women in fact killed their spouses in Detroit in 1972 than did men . It so happens that ...
... kill one's father is a normal , perhaps universal , element of the male psyche . Women need not feel slighted : Various writers have insisted that normal girls are equally eager to kill their mothers . And of ... Killing -2- Killing Kinfolks.
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 |