What's the flip side of the coin? What is it that could condition a person into becoming a killer? Critics like David Brooks say that humans are too complicated and adaptive for evolutionary psychology to hold much meaning. They point to how quickly the mind has evolved since our prehistoric days - the brain is much faster than the popular presentation of evolutionary psychology can justify. But at our core, we are all killers.Ĭritics of evolutionary psychology say that our minds aren't as hardwired as these psychologists suggest.
They acknowledge that a person's circumstances will influence him or her as well. Many proponents of evolutionary psychology, including Buss and Dunley, don't deny that other factors play a role in turning someone into a killer. From a high-level perspective, you could say that based on this hypothesis we are all capable of killing. The other set helped humans inflict greater harm on competitors.Īccording to this hypothesis, people became more adept at both avoiding and inflicting harm over generations. One set helped people survive aggression. As a result, humans who survived developed parallel sets of skills. Sometimes this competition became violent. People had to compete with one another for resources. Dunley hypothesize that aggression is a trait inherent in humans that dates back to the prehistoric era. In their chapter on evolutionary psychology as it relates to homicide in the book "Evolutionary Psychology and Violence," David M. Wilson points out there are many other approaches to explaining human behavior from an evolutionary point of view. In addition, he's also critical of the scope of their theory, saying that they didn't take into account variation across populations and the brain's rapid evolution over a relatively short time. Wilson believes Cosmides and Tooby oversimplify elements of the human experience with their theory that there are two basic human natures - one for men and one for women. As a result, Wilson said, Tooby and Cosmides say the human mind developed many pieces designed to solve particular problems encountered in those environments.
#What makes a serial killer articles series
Among his complaints with their work include the way he says Cosmides and Tooby limited the environment of evolutionary adaptedness as a series of environments in which people lived over the course of their evolutionary process. Wilson states this view of evolutionary psychology is narrow and misleading. According to David Sloan Wilson, part of the reason there's such controversy around the subject is because of an early popular theory posed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. There's a lack of consensus about evolutionary psychology even among its proponents. The approach falls under the umbrella of evolutionary psychology.
According to this science, humans evolved with certain behavioral traits that they passed down to subsequent generations.
There's a somewhat controversial approach to psychology that says some, if not many, of our behaviors are hardwired into us.
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