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David M. Buss
Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, University of Texas–Austin
Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, University of Texas–Austin
Homicide adaptation theory offers a radical new explanation of why people kill. Murder has been a remarkably beneficial strategy that evolved to solve an astonishing array of adaptive problems, including eliminating poor fitness vehicles, ascending status hierarchies, protecting social reputation, removing cost-inflicting competitors, destroying a rival's reproductive resources, and freeing up resources for future reproduction. Being killed is extremely costly for victims, so as soon as murder evolved as a strategy, selection immediately favored anti-homicide defenses, favoring refined homicidal strategies to evade victims' defenses, in a perpetual co-evolutionary arms race. A study of 375 murderers and victims provides empirical support for facets of the theory, explaining many otherwise inexplicable design features of murder, and parsimoniously accounting for paradoxical phenomena such as why women falsely believe rapists will murder them despite low conditional probability, and why people fear strangers more than familiar others despite most murderers knowing their victims.
David Buss is Professor of Psychology at University of Texas-Austin where he teaches courses in evolutionary psychology and the psychology of human mating. He is an award-winning lecturer who has also taught at Harvard and University of Michigan. His books include The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (2003); Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of Mind (1999), which won the Robert W. Hamilton Book Award in 2000; and The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex (2000). He served as editor for The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005). His talk draws from his newest book, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill (2005), which focuses on mating and murder. Buss's primary research interests include human sexuality, mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, the psychology of status and reputation, homicide, stalking and sexual victimization.