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 42
... proportions of blood kin Fraternal strife 26 Kinship and collaborative homicide revisited 20 30 34 —3— Killing Children : I. Infanticide in the Ethnographic Record 37 Desperate decisions 37 Women's life histories 39 Discriminative ...
... proportions , we should probably be justified in doubting that its primary function is pumping and in hypothesizing that its efficiency as a pump is compro- mised by the contrary demands of another function , as yet unknown . It may not ...
... proportion to its closeness . Recent studies of animal behavior abundantly confirm the above theory . A particularly interesting example is that of female ground squirrels who discriminate between those of their littermates who are 10 ...
... proportion of Ego's genotype . The two relatives are equally " valuable " to Ego as vehicles of fitness , and one may therefore anticipate that Ego's evolved motivational mechanisms should be such as to cherish both . ( Though perhaps ...
... proportion by relatives . ) Those 127 victims related to their killers included only 32 consanguineal relatives ... proportions of victim - killer relationships in previous studies that fall into the broad categories of strangers , " Who ...
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 |