I wonder why???
Posted on 05/29/2005 8:04:20 AM PDT by Dog Gone
ON May 11, 2005, a jury convicted Pete Terrazas of murdering his next-door neighbor, Miguel Ruiz. Terrazas had been dating Ruiz's housekeeper, Maria Santillana, whom he deeply loved. When she abruptly broke off the relationship, Terrazas concluded that she had begun an affair with Ruiz. Terrazas loaded his .410-gauge shotgun, went over to his neighbor's driveway, blasted Ruiz in the back and then took deadly aim at the man's chest.
Pete Terrazas had never before been violent. Nor had Scott Peterson before he killed his wife, Laci. Nor had Clara Harris before she ran over her adulterous husband with her Mercedes in a hotel parking lot in Houston.
My own interest in studying murder began when I witnessed a close friend, a highly accomplished academic, fly into a murderous rage and come frighteningly close to killing his wife. This raised a disturbing question: Could "normal" people become killers? In seven years of research on murderers, I discovered that an astonishing 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women in five different cultures have had at least one vivid fantasy of committing murder.
As my research continued, I became convinced that we all have the capacity to become murderers. There's a compelling reason why. Over the long sweep of deep time, killing has conferred such powerful advantages in the ruthless game of reproductive competition that natural selection has forged in all of us minds designed to murder. Murderers' genes prevailed over those of their unfortunate victims, and we are their descendants.
Our minds are designed to kill. It's part of human nature.
Previous theories about why people kill typically invoke single factors — the murderer is pathological, or the violent product of poverty, or warped by child abuse, poor parenting or exposure to media violence. But I concluded that every one of these theories is wrong.
The unfortunate fact is that killing has proved to be a disturbingly effective solution to an array of adaptive problems in the unforgiving evolutionary games of survival and reproductive competition: preventing injury, rape or death; protecting one's children; eliminating a crucial antagonist; acquiring a rival's resources; securing sexual access to a competitor's mate; preventing an interloper from appropriating one's own mate; and many others. The logic of evolutionary struggle is all about reproductive competition. Those strategies that lead to greater reproductive success are selected for, over eons of evolution, and come to characterize our species.
The statistics on contemporary circumstances in which people kill reveal precisely what's at stake, reproductively speaking — rivals who have poached on one's mate, romantic partners who have defected to an interloper, women who are pregnant with another man's child, and children whose lives are in danger when they live with genetically unrelated step-parents.
Evolutionary theory also explains why men kill so much more than women — 87 percent of killers worldwide are men. Women are the more valuable reproductive resource because of a fact of human reproductive biology: Women, not men, bear the burdens of the nine-month investment to produce a child. Competition is always fiercest among the sex that invests less. As a result, men battle to avoid mating failure and to "win big" by getting to the top to mate with desirable (and sometimes multiple) women. Mating is inextricably intertwined with murder.
If we all have mental mechanisms designed for murder, why don't more of us kill? For one thing, killing is so costly for victims that natural selection has fashioned finely honed defenses — anti-homicide strategies — designed to damage those who attempt to destroy us. We kill to prevent being killed, so attempting murder is a dangerous strategy indeed. Second, we live in a modern world of laws, judges, juries and jails, which have been extremely effective in raising the cost of killing. Homicide rates among cultures lacking written laws and professional police forces are far higher than those in Western cultures. Among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and the Gebusi of Africa, for example, more than 30 percent of men die by being murdered.
It may be disturbing to think of killing as evolutionarily adaptive and part of human nature, but this does not mean approval or acceptance of murder. I would suggest that those who create myths of a peaceful human past, blame killing on the contemporary ills of modern culture and cling to single-variable theories that have long outlived their scientific warrant are the ones treading on dangerous moral ground. The problem of murder cannot be solved by wishing away undesirable aspects of human nature.
>>As my research continued, I became convinced that we all have the capacity to become murderers. <<
Stopped reading after this comment.
See 'Original Sin.'
Not me. My shrink says I'm a very cold, detached person who likes to start fires. 8>)
LOL!
Well, duh! Either we control our impulses, or we don't. Some of us think we don't have savage impulses....but they are indeed there, even if we have not yet suffered just the right miserable life experience to trigger it.
Wow, all of mankind is born with an inate capacity to commit evil and sin. The author could have saved some time by reading Genesis...
I wonder why???
Kill the shrink....
Ahhh. . .you too?
It's those of us who don't recognize and accept this that really scare me.
I'd agree with that; and it's contingent for a civilized society to hold one responsible for when one does this.
If a mother kills an intruder who theatens her child; this is justifiable. The intruder had not business in the home, and the woman has every right to defend her child.
But, if someone is jealous; it is up to that person to control his impulses; unless you are Muslim, then you can kill 17 people after reading an un-confirmed statement in a news magazine.
Everyone of us is a murderer. We've all hated at some point.
Moral/Social/Personal restraints keep us from imagining further or acting upon the hatred we all have or had in us.
Bzzzzzzt! Wrong! Nice read, but killing one of your own species is counterproductive. In nature, species who do battle with a conspecific purposefully hold back to avoid fatally injuring the opponent (e.g., deer, crabs, snakes, just about everything else).
Usually, scientists peg the reason for this as "it's for the good of the species." This assertion has no basis in reality--that's one thing this article got right; we fight for our own selfishness.
However, to NOT to kill has a selfish basis in it too: if we went into competitive battles fully expecting that one rival will die, well, we stand a good chance of dying ourselves. So nature has evolved such that conspecific rivalry very rarely results in death.
In terms of game theory, the best strategy to adopt is not either the Hawk or Dove approach, but rather to be peaceful unless someone comes to you with the intent to kill, in which case killing in the name of self-defense is perfectly acceptable.
We're all animals.
Keeping our instincts in check is what makes us human.
No one is ever a murderer until after his first murder.
I'm not sure about that. There are many examples of cannibalistic species in nature. For example, the Black Widow spider is aptly named.
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