Categories of Homicide

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's Homicide is a lengthy, scholarly examination of the topic of people killing each other. As the authors state in their introductory remarks,

Killing one's antagonist is the ultimate conflict resolution technique, and our ancestors discovered it long before they were people. Homicide is a life-and-death issue to the protagonists, of course, but it is also profoundly interesting to those not immediately involved (p. ix).

The justification for writing the present volume is to conduct and "exercise in 'evolutionary psychology': the attempt to understand normal social motives as products of the process of evolution by natural selection" (p. ix).

According to the authors, their specialization in the area of homicide is the result of some eight years of research into "conflicts that were both genuine and severe. Murders obviously filled the bill on both counts . . ." (p. x). Specifically, while research had previously been done by "sociologists seeking structural explanations for variable rates" and psychiatrists had examined individual homicides "seeking syndromes" (p. x), there had not been substantial research into homicides "in the light of any sort of theory of interpersonal conflict" (p. x).

It is precisely the distribution of "victim-killer" and "killer-victim" relationships (familial or not, age disparities, ethnic, etc.) which had not been given much prior attention that piqued the authors' attention. Their examination is princ

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evelations in this unit is the decades old research of A. J. Bateman that helped explain some of Darwin's nineteenth century observations that "males are almost always the wooers" (pp. 138-139). According to the authors, the principal sex difference is quantitative: Competition among males is more intense than that among females in a simple objective sense: The variance in male fitness is greater than the variance in female fitness. Among men as compared to women, the big winners win bigger, and the losers are more likely to be total losers (p. 140). The authors broadly claim that men have killed men "at high rates as long as there have been men" (p. 143). The competition for limited resources is predominantly "intrasexual" (i.e., female vs. female, or male vs. male). The more intense the competition--the more dissimilar the outcomes--"then the more likely it becomes that selection will favor a psychology prone to risky competitive tactics, including escalated fighting even to the point of death" (p. 145). This leads the authors to conclude that "a large proportion of the homicides in America--and in particular most of those traditionally dismissed as being the result of 'trivial altercations'--have to be understood a

Category: Government - C