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 59
... 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 collaborative homicide revisited 20 30 34 —3— Killing Children ...
... theorists , including the staunchest antinativists , seek to describe human nature at some cross - culturally general level of abstraction . The genuine disagreement is not about the relative importance of 8 Homicide and Human Nature.
... relatives covary , and do so increasingly the closer the relationship . Siblings , for example , each have a stake in the others ' survival and reproductive success , because nieces and nephews are vehicles of fitness , although less ...
... relatives . Ego's daughter , for example , carries half of Ego's genes by direct descent ; Ego's sister also carries half of Ego's genes ( on average ) by virtue of descent from the same parents . From Ego's perspective , then ...
... relatives . ) Those 127 victims related to their killers included only 32 consanguineal relatives , however ( Daly & Wilson , 1982 ) . Of the other 95 , 80 were spouses ( 36 women killed by their husbands and 44 men killed by their ...
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 |