Is "Killing" Genetically Programmed?

THE KILLING FIELDS

The judicial process of the Khmer Rouge regime, for minor or political crimes, began with a warning from the Angkar, the government of Cambodia under the regime. People receiving more than two warnings were sent for "re-education", which meant near-certain death. People were often encouraged to confess to Angkar their "pre-revolutionary lifestyles and crimes" (which usually included some kind of free-market activity; having had contact with a foreign source, such as a U.S. missionary, international relief or government agency; or contact with any foreigner or with the outside world at all), being told that Angkar would forgive them and "wipe the slate clean." They were then taken away to a place such as Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek for torture and/or execution.

The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of Chankiri trees, and then were thrown into the pits alongside their parents. The rationale was "to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents' deaths."

Some victims were required to dig their own graves; their weakness often meant that they were unable to dig very deep. The soldiers who carried out the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families.

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE VIOLENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETIES?

• Violence is a By-Product of Urges ?
• Daly and Wilson argued that "murderous actions are usually the by-product of urges towards some other goal." 
• The purpose of the sometimes violent competition that goes with human urges for higher status and greater reproductive success is not to kill, any more than the purpose of its stylized quintessence boxing is. But sometimes people die.

• Homicide is an Evolutionary Adaptation ? 
• David Buss, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Duntley, of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, have developed a controversial "homicide adaptation theory". 
• The theory proposes that, over evolutionary history, humans have repeatedly encountered a wide range of situations in which the benefits of killing another person outweighed the costs — particularly when the assessed costs of murder are low, success is likely and other non-lethal options have been closed off.
•  "Homicide can be such a beneficial solution to adaptive problems in certain, specific contexts that it would be surprising if selection had not fashioned mechanisms to produce lethal aggression," 
• Jose Maria Gomez, Homo sapiens are part of an especially violent lineage that goes back millions of years.
• Across the mammal spectrum, the rate of lethal violence against a member of the same species is about 0.30 percent, or a 1 in 300 chance of being killed by one of your own kind. For the ancestor of great apes (including us), it was 1.8 percent. And for humans at the origin point of our species, the rate bumps up to 2 percent, or a 1 in 50 chance of being murdered.
• Our species is, in other words, at the high point (such as it is) of a steady increase in intraspecies lethal violence that has been going on for about 100 million years.
• Evolution of "society" 
• the more social and territorial a species was, the more prevalent lethal member-against-member violence.
•  if you’re living with other members in a social group, there are simply more opportunities to get in a bloody tiff. 
• (and) if you’ve got limited resources, or you’re bent on protecting or expanding your neck of the woods, you’ve got more motive to enact violence on a competitor

The lighter the color, the less prevalent and lethal the intra-species violence

• Is Violence Inevitable  
• Humans got particularly bloody around 1,000 BC but, in the last 500 years or so, we have reduced the levels of violence
• The spike in carnage, at the start of the Iron Age, corresponds to a period when a sizable chunk of our species quit the hunter-gatherer game or left small settlements for comparatively larger urban areas.
• organizing states increased the competition for territory. 
•  the decrease in lethal violence that started around 500 years ago has accelerated. 
• In societies today with legal systems and law enforcement (“two separate yet equally important groups…”)
• a culture that rejects violence, murder rates are less than 1 in 10,000.
• Are we physically evolved for violence?
• Physical indicators, such as those studied by Carrier, can be viewed as evidence that selection for violence-enabling features has taken place. 
• Carrier sees “signs of design for aggression” everywhere on the human body: In a recent paper, co-authored with biologist Christopher Cunningham from Swansea University, he suggests that our foot posture is an adaptation for fighting performance. He has even proposed, as part of his fist-fighting hypothesis, that the more robust facial features of men (as opposed to women) evolved to withstand a punch.
• (article link)

• Gender: More MEN kill ?
• Evolutionary psychologists say that this is because men have evolved to compete more intensively than women in the race for status, material wealth and sexual partners. 
• In terms of the by-product theory, men are more likely to suffer the consequences when competition gets out of hand. This competitive kindling is at its most combustible in men of low socioeconomic status in regions of high social inequality, suffused with a sense of everything to gain and little to lose.
•  for women, the costs of such escalation have historically been higher: a woman risking death is a greater impact to the fate of children according to evolutionary biology
• men and women don't differ much in their experience of anger, the primary accelerator of aggression. 
• Anne Campbell, an evolutionary psychologist at Durham University, UK, suggests that the differences in aggressive behavior thus reflect differences in the strength of the factors controlling the behavioral expression of that anger.
• Developmental studies show that girls generally score higher on empathy measures, are more fearful and are better at controlling their behavior.(Campbell)

• Neuro-biology of Homicide?
•  Richard Davidson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that dysfunction in the brain circuits that normally inhibit emotional impulses — those associated with the prefrontal cortex — is a crucial prelude to violent outbursts
• Research:
• Among the brains of 41 murderers pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, they found lower activity (as measured by glucose metabolism) in the prefrontal cortex, and greater activity in structures in the limbic system, thought to drive aggression, than they found in non-murderous brains.
• Raine: the difference in the average volume of the orbitofrontal cortex between men and women accounts for about half of the variation in antisocial behavior between the sexes.
• Is there a link between homicidal behavior and the capacity to follow moral guidelines?
• Parts of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala that are abnormal in violent individuals and murderers are activated when making moral judgments. Raine and Yang have proposed that these systems serve as the engine that translates moral feelings into behavioral inhibition — an engine that has blown a gasket in the antisocial, violent and murderous 

• Is Violence at the Root of Social Organization?
• The roots of chimpanzee warfare lie in the social organization and behavioral ecology of their societies. 
• Although chimps live in communities of around 150, they are rarely all found together. Instead they typically travel around their territory in parties of up to 20 animals. From time to time, a roaming party from one group will cross paths with a roaming party of another. If they are of equal size, there will be a lot of screaming and charging. When there is an imbalance of power, the larger party will often try to isolate and attack an enemy chimpanzee, sometimes holding their victim down while the frantically excited attackers hail down lethal blows.(Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham)
• By dominating or eliminating neighboring communities, aggressors can expand their range, which means a better food supply, healthier adults and faster reproduction
• Raids on neighboring communities are also common in anthropologists' accounts of small-scale human societies. 
• a small band of men leaves its home ground, sneaks up on the neighbors and tries to kill one or more of them. 
• Data for inter-group human conflicts in numerous subsistence-farmer and hunter–gatherer societies assembled by anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Overall, humans and chimpanzees showed comparable levels of violent death from aggression between groups.

HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

• 'War' is a broad term, "In major international wars people do what they do mainly because it is their duty in the role they occupy; combatants in institutionalized wars do not fight primarily because they are aggressive," says Hinde.
• some of the normal machinery that inhibits violence — the moral engine — might become selectively disengaged in warring armies. 
• Ideology, propaganda and denigration of the out-group can harden the barrier between 'us' and 'them', — As a result, killing comes to feel permissible. Even, sometimes, right.
• What about comparisons of aggression and killing within groups? 
• Chimps often turn on their own, particularly infants and young adults. 
• in-group killing exceeds death from between-group conflict in at least some chimp communities. 
• Humans in small societies, by contrast, die much less frequently from fights within their group than from group battles. 
• Anthropologist Victoria Burbank of the University of Western Australia in Crawley has recorded rates of non-lethal acts of physical aggression in an aboriginal Australian population; chimps display such behavior 200 times more frequently, if not more.
• Prosocial lack of violence looks like a fundamental aspect of human nature — the human ability to generate in-group amity often goes hand in hand with out-group enmity. 
• altruism and war co-evolve, promoting conflict between groups and greater harmony within them
• "Your group was more successful if you cooperated with its members but not with outsiders." (in human evolution)
• And there is evidence that this risk is reducing further in studies of death rates from both inter-group homicide and intra-group warfare, both of which seem to have plummeted over the millennia. (if violence is decreasing...what other factors would make it increase?)
• Criminologist Manuel Eisner at the University of Cambridge has documented a trend of declining homicide rates estimated from historical records left by coroners, royal courts and other official sources spanning Europe from the twelfth century to the modern day. 
• After rising from an average of 32 homicides per 100,000 people per year in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to 41 in the fifteenth, the murder rate has steadily dropped in every subsequent century, to 19, 11, 3.2, 2.6 and finally 1.4 in the twentieth century.
• Eisner rules out better policing and improved medical treatment as causes of the decline for the simple reason that it started before professional police forces appeared and techniques for dealing with wounds became more effective. 
•  A part of the answer that is consistent with an evolutionary approach is a long-term reduction in inequalities of life circumstances and prospects — 
• "In places such as Sweden where every cabbie drives a Mercedes," says Daly, "people don't bother to kill so often."
•  When contested resources are made more plentiful, he says, conflict over resources decreases and homicide rates drop.(Duntley)

MORAL REARMAMENT

• Societal specifics play a part as great as or greater than that of any evolutionary generalities.
• countries with the highest homicide rates are typically plagued by familial feuding and blood revenge
•  The death toll was frequently exacerbated by cultures laying weight on a male strength in arms and a willingness to demonstrate it. 
• violence was particularly prevalent in élites, who would often use it with impunity against their social inferiors. 
• violence as a phenomenon of lower-class youths — the sort of violence Daly and Wilson have studied in Chicago crime statistics — is a recent trend.
• Deescalating Violence: 
• Cultural/social institutions that determine who owns what, and access to civil law courts that help you resolve CONFLICTS, make resorts to violence much less likely — in a modern society, it's actually counterproductive
• Evolution has also furnished us with a moral sense. 
• A drop-off in war could also lead to reductions in other forms of violence. 
• In cultures and societies with a recent history of warfare, children tend to be socialized to tolerate pain and to react aggressively, which prepares them for the possibility of becoming a soldier (arguably something that evolution would favor) or a potentially deadly brawler (probably something it wouldn't). 
• "If we grow up without these experiences, which is the case for most people in modern democracies that could affect how aggressive we are and our moral views of our options," says Wilson.
• Falacy of De-escalating Violence and Development
• the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples is absurd. (John Gray)
• Destroying some of the most refined civilizations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. 
• One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. 
• Unending war in the Congo has been fueled by western demand for the country’s natural resources. 
• If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it.
• the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. 
• The United States is the most advanced society in the world. 
• According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. 
• Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. 
• Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the US.
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MARGARET MEAD AND THE NON-EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

Do Scarce Resources, High Population Density and Economic Division  Make Warfare and Violence Inevitable?

•  "This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities." Stephen LeBlanc (Why We Fight)
•  "No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment," (Malthus)
• The HARF show no clear correlation between scarce resources and degree of warfare and violence
• " the correlation between population pressure and warfare "is either very complex or very weak or both." (Keeley: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage)
• the Semai population is 60 times denser than the Waorani, and they have much less food, because their soil less fertile and game less plentiful. And yet the Semai, the Robarcheks pointed out, "are among the most peaceful people" known to anthropology (even though some Semai helped British colonialists fight communist insurgents in the 1950s). The Waorani, however, are one of the most violent known societies, with casualties from warfare claiming as much as 60 percent of the population. (Robarcheck (s))
• MEAD
• Mead dismissed the notion that war is the inevitable consequence of our "basic, competitive, aggressive, warring human nature." Not all societies wage war. 
• War has never been observed among a Himalayan people called the Lepchas or among the Eskimos. In fact, neither of these groups, when questioned by early ethnographers, was even aware of the concept of war.
• Mead distinguished between individual and group violence. 
• Eskimos were "not a mild and meek people," she noted. They engaged in "fights, theft of wives, murder, cannibalism," often provoked by fear of starvation. "The personality necessary for war, the circumstances necessary to goad men to desperation are present, but there is no war."
• Mead refuted the claim that war springs from "the development of the state, the struggle for land and natural resources of class societies springing, not from the nature of man, but from the nature of history." 
• the theory of "sociological inevitability" is contradicted by simple societies that do fight. Hunter–gatherers on the Andaman Islands "represent an exceedingly low level of society," but they have been observed waging wars, in which "tiny army met tiny army in open battle."
• Australian aborigines, similarly, occasionally interrupted their wanderings "from water hole to water hole over their almost desert country" to battle each other. They seemed to fight not for any of the usual reasons—the "the struggle for lands, struggle for power of one group over another, expansion of population"—but because war was part of their tradition.
• The DANI in dead birds as well! (Cosmological reasons?)
• Warfare is "an invention" 
• Once a society becomes exposed to the "idea" of war, it "will sometimes go to war" under certain circumstances. 
• the Pueblo Indians, fight reluctantly to defend themselves against aggressors; others, such as the Plains Indians, sally forth with enthusiasm, because they have elevated martial skills to the highest of manly virtues; fighting bravely is the best way for a young man to achieve prestige and "win his sweetheart's smile of approval."
• why?
• Robarcheks pointed out that war is in a sense "contagious," because when one group in a region resorts to war, "others must either take it up or be destroyed." 
• Keeley, similarly, noted that war among North American Indians often stemmed from the aggression of just a few extremely warlike tribes, "rotten apples that spoiled their regional barrels." He added, "Less aggressive societies, stimulated by more warlike groups in their vicinity, become more bellicose themselves."
• Societies in a violent region, the political scientist Azar Gat have a strong incentive to carry out preemptive attacks. 
• Societies may "attack the other side in order to eliminate or severely weaken them as a potential enemy. War can thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fear of war breeds war."
• How do we end war? (Mead)
• For an invention to become obsolete, "people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one...to invent new forms of behavior which will make war obsolete, it is a first requirement to believe that such an invention is possible."
• Militarism is deeply embedded in modern culture