Some remarks about murder: a Darwinian perspective

Abstract

Paleoanthropological remains and historical data show that human beings have a long history of violent aggression. However, killing in group is distinct from killing in a one-to-one interaction, as Darwin found out. Our ability to kill a member of our own species is something we share with many other social carnivorous species. Along with the growth of cooperation and altruism, it developed in small groups of individuals – the Homo Sapiens’ forefathers – characterised by a strong territorial instinct and still subject to predation, so that the attacks from the rival groups were one of the main threats to survival. This particular aggressive ability has kept itself over time in more and more complex human groups, who have shown it – along with such abilities as empathy and social reciprocity, which might be a specific expression of it – mostly towards the members of other groups (rivals). In this contribution we intend to advance an evolutionist hypothesis, the result of almost a decade of work in the field of Darwinian criminology, which sees the homicidal behaviour as a non-unitary phenomenon and as the product (mostly maladaptive) of the development of our ability to kill within a group, but essentially as different from killing (a foe) in a coalitional way. As a matter of fact, within the common phenomenon of murder we can detect only a few potentially adaptive behaviours: killing in selfdefence, infanticide – according to the criteria appropriately established by our penal code to define such a phenomenon - and killing on behalf of an organised (crime) group. We should always bear in mind that, even when behaviour may turn out to be adaptive, this does not mean that it has to be culturally accepted. Research on murder based on the evolutionist theories clearly shows how the homicidal phenomenon is strongly sensitive to factors linked to our peculiar sociality. Far from anchoring the phenomenon to ineluctable and unchangeable genetic characteristics, the evolutionist theories on murder show that much can be done to control the phenomenon mainly through a real understanding of human nature, which is, by definition, malleable and extremely sensitive to the social context.