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Published online 30 January 2008 | Nature 451, 512-515 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451512a
News Feature
Human behaviour: Killer instincts
What can evolution say about why humans kill - and about why we do so less than we used to? Dan Jones reports.
"It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors … that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature … [and] that humans have a 'violent brain'."
These are the ringing words of the 'Seville Statement on Violence', fashioned by 20 leading natural and social scientists in 1986 as part of the United Nations International Year of Peace, and later adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
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“In places such as Sweden where every cabbie drives a Mercedes,� says Daly, “people don't bother to kill so often.� This perpetuates a groundless myth about Sweden: this country actually has a relatively high homicide rate (per 100 000 inhabitants): 2.39 compared to 1.23 in Italy or 0.79 in Denmark (2005). The reliability of these numbers is notoriously variable, but everybody who is familiar with the situation Sweden would never describe this country as having a low level of violence. And cabbies in Sweden are mostly from the immigrant community, living in impoverished satellite cities. This remark by Daly is symptomatic for the wishful thinking so characteristic for evolutionary psychology.
A most interesting article. I would also like to refer readers to the text "Human Paleopsychology: Application to aggression and Pathological Processes" (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1987) by Profesor Emeritus Kent G. Bailey at the dept. of psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Va. His P-R-P (phylogenetic regression-progression) theory, which is based on 50 years of research by Paul D. MacLean at the NIH labs, USA goes a long way to exlain why humans can be devils as well as angels: Our brains are the result of an evolution that incorporates both the instinctive behavior of 200 million years ago with the emotional mammalian addition approx. 100 million years ago and the cognitive capacity that first developed in the neocortex of the great apes approx. 5 million years ago. Depending on our genetic and epigenetic (environmental) makeup, we tend to regress towards our ancient brain or progress to our modern brain. In most cases the direction is under our control.