Summary: The Homicide Adaptation Theory

In the article “Homicide Adaptations” by Joshua Duntley and David Buss (2011), they discuss the Homicide Adaptation Theory as a new interpretation of why individuals kill. They also investigate homicide prevalence, previous evolutionary theories, and other confounding variables such as gender, psychological adaptations, and the context in which people kill.

Many evolutionary theorists proposed varying perspectives that range from perceiving killing as a culturally imposed behaviour, to a Darwinian psychological perspective that uses evolutionary ideas to hypothesize the cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms and tactics of killing (2011). However, Duntley and Buss feel as though these theories represent a trivial number of the

They present the idea that humans have evolved mechanisms, sensitive to the context of a situation, to decide whether they will commit homicide. According to Homicide Adaptation Theory, they have found majority of the killings are intentional murders and therefore feel it is reasonable to consider that killing has fallen subject to evolution by natural selection. In principle they believe there would have been many benefits of perpetrating a killing over evolutionary history, and these benefits vary depending on the nature of the victim, their relationships to one another, as well as social contexts they share. However, due to the sophisticated adaptations humans have developed to prevent being killed, it is correct to believe killing to be a dangerous and costly strategy for the perpetrator. The evidence of increased anti-homicide defences over history proves that murder was a recurrent hazard throughout history as well. Duntley and Buss (2011) then note that there is a co-evolution of homicide and anti-homicide, and found that the evolution of defences against deathly aggression would have created new selection pressure on killer adaptations and vice versa, both influencing one another in a cyclic