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The Nature of EvilFeatured AudioDavid Buss: How Evolution Made Us Killers
Part One: How the advent of sexual reproduction opened the door for murder. Listen | Read Transcript Part Two: Why men and women kill different people for different reasons. The classic crime of passion, and the murder of Dorothy Stratton. Listen | Read Transcript Part Three: Genghis Khan: successful killer, successful reproducer. Homicidal fantasies around the world. Is murder still adaptive today? Listen | Read Transcript Part Four: Why it’s hard for a man to turn the other cheek. Why a comedian wants to “kill” the audience. The nature of “mental circuits” for killing, and for avoiding being killed. Listen | Read Transcript
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men—and women? In his book The Murderer Next Door, University of Texas psychologist David Buss explores the evolutionary forces that, he argues, have adapted the human mind for murder. Buss deployed some of the same research strategies that made is landmark first book, The Evolution of Desire, so persuasive and disturbing, including an exhaustive cross-cultural study of homicidal fantasies involving more than 5,000 respondents from around the world, and, like that earlier book, much of what he learned was “not very nice.” “The advent of sexual reproduction opened the door to murder,” says Buss. The evolutionary logic of sexual selection explains why men turn murderous over a mere insult, why a jilted lover will sometimes kill the woman he claims to love, why the one category of murder in which women exceed men is infanticide, and even why stand-up comics sometimes speak of a successful appearance as “killing” the audience. In addition to the homicidal fantasy research, Buss drew on previously unstudied FBI databases involving 429,729 homicides, and the “Michigan Murders,” a trove of 375 elaborate case histories from the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor. He also studied situations in which ordinary respondents express a willingness to kill, and he surveyed the criminology and forensic sciences literature to assemble “the first comprehensive scientific taxonomy of motives for murder.” Finally, Buss explored the specialized circumstances in which people sense their lives may be threatened. The mind is “designed to kill,” says Buss, but it is also designed to avoid being killed. |
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