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 66
... theory to the analysis of human motives and perceptions of self - interest , and we were interested in where and why individual interests conflict . We doubted the utility of the usual psycho- logical research methods ( questionnaires ...
... theory of interpersonal conflict , evolutionary or otherwise . No - one had compared an observed distribution of victim - killer relationships to any sort of " expected " distribution , nor asked about patterns of killer - victim age ...
... theories seem to have been more successful at provoking hostility than explaining it . Thinkers from St. Paul to Konrad ... theory of the origins of violence . Yet even if one accepts , for the sake of argument , the dubious concept of ...
... theory of human nature is already available in an existing general theory of the nature of all life . This general theory was first proposed well over a hundred years ago and is today about as legitimately controversial as , say , the ...
... theory with endless implications about what we are likely to encounter in the natural world , and about how we should go about investigating it . If anyone has come up with a third alternative to explain why organisms are adaptively ...
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 |