The Murderer Next Door

"There have been a number of books about the violent nature of humans, particularly men. I chose The Murderer Next Door both because it is well-written and because it is relatively new, published in 2005. David M Buss is a psychologist, and he writes well about the natural murderousness of our species. There’s a lot of data to support natural human murderousness, and not just murder rates in modern societies. Anthropological evidence indicates that between 15% and 25% of prehistoric males died in warfare. This murderousness resulted in an evolutionary pressure to be clever. Here’s Buss writing about it: “As the motivations to murder evolved in our minds, a set of counterinclinations also developed. Killing is a risky business. It can be dangerous and inflict horrible costs on the victim. Because it’s so bad to be dead, evolution has fashioned ruthless defences to prevent being killed, including killing the killer. Potential victims are therefore quite dangerous themselves. In the evolutionary arms race, homicide victims have played a critical and unappreciated role – they pave the way for the evolution of anti-homicide defences.” Those defences involved trust and societal pressures to induce trust."