Homicide

"It is one of two books that first excited me about evolutionary psychology. The other was Donald Symons’s The Evolution of Human Sexuality . Homicide is a cornucopia of insights into human nature. The husband-and-wife team of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson were not so much interested in homicide itself as they were in human conflict – how the life goals of one person can clash with the life goals of another. They reasoned that homicides are the most extreme manifestation of violence, and that violence is the most extreme manifestation of conflict. As they put it in the book’s first sentence, “Killing one’s antagonist is the ultimate conflict resolution technique, and our ancestors discovered it long before they were people.” “Violence has always been a source of inspiration for great dramatists and novelists, such as Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy” The wonderful thing about homicide – sorry, you start to talk like that when you work on this topic long enough – is that it leaves behind unambiguous evidence. To wit, a dead body. Homicides have always attracted people’s attention, and they are easy to count. So homicide rates have been tabulated across the centuries and across societies in a more precise way than any other measure of conflict. By looking at the way homicides are distributed across different human relationships, you gain insight into the conflicts that animate social life more broadly. No, one of the striking findings about violence is how little of it involves physical resources. Tribal battles are often fought over women, sorcery and revenge. Police-blotter homicides are often triggered by insults, curses, jostling and other signs of disrespect, together with sexual jealousy. Very much so. That’s no coincidence. Shakespeare was one of the great students of human nature. Daly and Wilson approached emotion more prosaically. They divided killings by relationship: Homicides between unrelated men, spouses killing each other, siblicides, filicides, parricides, infanticides and various other kinds of -cides. Then they looked at the basic kinds of human conflict over resources like parental investment, sexual access, status and dominance, and how they could lead to antagonism and, in the extreme case, homicide. In other words: What do men and women have to fight over? What’s at stake in conflicts between unrelated young men? When do parents and offspring not want the same thing? These are the most fundamental questions one could ask about what brings people together, and what drives them apart. Daly and Wilson also reproduced in their book a graph from the social scientist Ted Gurr, which plotted homicide estimates in England from the 13th to the 20th century, and showed a decline by a factor of almost 50. I found this astonishing. Like most people, I had thought that the modern world had ushered in high levels of personal violence, like muggings, drug wars and drive-by shootings. I had no idea that by historical standards we were living in harmonious times. More than any other epiphany, that graph led me to write The Better Angels of Our Nature ."

"Yes. And when murder is more likely to happen. When it was recommended to me, I read it and thought it was fantastic. I thought it must be quite obscure, so I was almost disappointed to find that lots of evolutionary psychologists love this book. Homicide is really interesting from an experimental perspective, because the data is so good. You can argue about whether somebody is abused or whether somebody is angry, or whether somebody is lying to you. But when you’ve got a murder, you’ve got a body; this definitely happened. And the police have got an incentive to find out who did it. So you’ve got really, really good data. It’s clearly evolutionarily important, because if you’re murdered, you’re not having any further children and you’re not looking after your existing children. So when we look at much earlier stages—what makes you angry or, who you fancy, or whatever, it’s not necessarily clear that they lead directly to behaviours that influence your gene success. Murder really does do that. And that allows them to test lots of hypotheses of evolutionary psychology. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Step-parents are more likely to kill their children than natural parents. That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother. But I think it was Daly and Wilson who first actually collected the data, and proved that this was so. When you’ve got natural children, they share half your genes. When you’re a stepparent, they’re absorbing your partner’s energy, which they could be putting into your own natural children. It’s all quite horrible stuff—you’re more likely to kill very young children, for example. But if you stripped away what everybody says about morality and how they would behave, how they care about their stepchildren, it’s a little bit like what you’d expect. Lions, when they take over a pride, kill the cubs. It happens to a much, much lesser extent in humans. But it’s still measurable. It’s the young cubs that get killed, and they get killed by stepparents. The data allows us to ask questions: Why do men kill more than women? When do they kill more? Under what circumstances? Is it rich people or poor people? And what are they killing for? It’s generally not to get rich. It’s often to do with new partners, relationships, and so on. It’s at once a horrible book and an interesting one. There are these questions, and they’re very hard to answer, I think because people will always lie about these things. And it’s so careful, the care they take over their data, their care about comparing the theories, it’s breathtaking. And deserves to be popular. Right. I don’t think people are ever aware of it. They wouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to kill him because he’s my cousin two steps removed, and therefore less valuable to me than my brother.’ Your brain causes you to do things, but doesn’t always give you direct access for why you do these things."