Homicide - Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, 1988.
Evolutionary psychology - belief that the natural selection has been able to act on psychology as well, thus creating certain psychological adaptations p. 6
Kinfolks - much more likely to help in a homicide than be a victim of one; it is surprisingly often spouses/nonrelatives that are killed p. 23
Infanticide - probability decreases with mother’s age p.63
Females do not kill spouses and children; they kill children more often than males p. 83
Stepparents pose great risk to the child p. 92
Folktales as manipulative devices - promoting virtues that serve the elders p. 118
Same-sex bias in parent-offspring homicides p. 120
Polygynous marriage - legitimate in 93% of 849 societies (Murdock ethnographic atlas) p. 132
“A well-guarded harem of nubile women is the realization of a male fantasy. It is a fantasy that has apparently arisen in men’s minds repeatedly and independently in a variety of cultures, and has been so appealing as to be implemented again and again, at great expense, when men have somehow amassed the means to do so. It is the fantastic aspiration of a male psyche with a natural selective history” p. 135
“It is in such a social milieu that man’s psyche was shaped, a psyche obsessed with social comparisons, with the need for achievement, and with the desire to gain control over the reproductive capacities of women” p. 136
“Our point is not to blame the late Dr. Mead for the liberties that others have taken with the myth she created. What is of interest is how t h e m y t h f i l l s a n e e d for social scientists and commentators. It seems to demonstrate that our social natures are pure cultural artifacts, as arbitrary as the name of the rose, and that we can therefore create any world we want, simply by changing our ‘socialization practices’ (this may sound a remarkably totalitarian vision, but it’s not, you see, because the new, improved socialization practices will be designed by n i c e people with everyone’s best interests at heart, and not by nasty, self-interested despots.) The social science that is used to legitimize this ideology can only be described as b i o p h o b i c.” pp. 153-154
Correlation of monogamy and jealousy - due to the costly risk of being cuckolded p. 181
Dowry exists in 22 out of 860 societies p. 189
Adultery law invariably applies only to married women in its fullest because of the risk of cuckoldry again p. 193
“There is a great difference between the offence of infidelity in a man and that of his wife” / “the difference is boundless. The man imposes no bastards upon his wife” p. 193
Adultery and a physical assault on the person/their relatives - the only provocations that mitigate so much killer’s criminal responsibility p. 196
Jealousy/adultery as the main reason behind spousal homicides p. 202
“But is there even one exotic land in which the men eschew violence, take no proprietary view of their wives’ sexuality, and accept consenting extramarital sex as good, clean fun? The short answer is “No,” although many have sought such a society, and a few have imagined that they found it.” p. 203
Strong correlation between wife's’ infidelity and husband’s engaging in domestic violence p. 208
“If these lethal May-December marriages are beginning to strike you as improbably frequent, you are right: They are. p. 209
“Another possible explanation [for the homicide/age difference correlation] is that the population of couples with unusual age differences, like any population defined by unusual behavior, contains a disproportionate number of eccentrics, losers and misfits” p. 210
[on familicide with suicide] “this sort of case illustrates with particular clarity just why we insist that adaptation must be sought at a more psychological level than that of direct behavioral optimization and fitness maximization. A rational fitness-maximizer would surely let the children live, for even if he doubted their paternity, they might, after all, be his. But fitness is not the man’s most proximal concern.” p. 215
The probability of suicide after homicide is greatly increased if the victim was female. p. 218
“Killing those outside the social contract is likely to be no offense at all. In most human societies throughout history, foreigners have been fair game. And of course war is a socially sanctioned cooperative act in which killing (the right targets) is not culpable at all, but laudable. The trick is that the rules can get changed retrospectively, especially if your side loses.”
“Insanity is the loss of normal perceptions of one’s interests and/or of the inclination to pursue them”
“The human brain/mind is ‘anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake’” Michael Ghiselin 1974
“So excess in revenge is a constant temptation and a not infrequent reality. ‘An eye for an eye’ is not so much the articulation of the revenge motive as it is a m o r a l i n j u n c t i o n to equity - an attempt to c o n t a i n violence. But an attempt by whom, and in whose interest?”
Further reading:
Male sexual jealousy - Daly, Wilson, Weghorst, (1982)
The Adapted Mind - Cosmides, Tooby, Barkow (1992)
No comments:
Post a Comment