Thirstin Howl III : a Crooklyn Tale by the Lo-Life General
From the perspective of the Hypothesis, there are two important points to note. First, much of what we call interpersonal crime today, such as murder, assault, robbery, and theft, were probably routine means of intrasexual male competition in the ancestral environment. This is how men likely competed for resources and mating opportunities for much of human evolutionary history. They beat up and killed each other, and they stole from each other if they could get away with it.
We may infer this from the fact that behavior that would be classified as criminal if engaged in by humans, like murder, rape, assault, and theft, are quite common among other species. The criminologist Lee Ellis documented many instances of these “criminal behavior” among different species with photographs in 1998. The primatologist Frans de Waal and his colleagues have documented brutal murders, assaults, and other interpersonal violence among chimpanzees, bonobos, and capuchin monkeys.
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From the evolutionary psychological perspective, reproductive success is the end, and everything men do (be it crime or scientific research) is but a means to this ultimate end. From this perspective, the question of why marriage depresses crime and scientific productivity misses the whole point. Does it make sense for men to continue employing the means even after they have achieved the ends they were trying to attain with the means? This is why married men are less likely to engage in a whole range of risk-taking behavior, like driving fast, which are designed indirectly and unconsciously to attract women. Indeed, automobile insurance statistics clearly show that married men have fewer car accidents.
Fluctuating levels of testosterone may provide the biochemical microfoundation for the desistance effect of marriage and parenthood on men, be they criminals or scientists. One longitudinal study shows that men's levels of testosterone go down when they get married, and go up when they get divorced. Another study demonstrates that expectant fathers' testosterone levels fall precipitously immediately after the birth of their child. If high levels of testosterone predispose men to be more competitive and aggressive, then the sudden drop in testosterone after their marriage and the birth of their child may provide the biochemical reason why men's psychological mechanisms to commit crime and produce scientific work “turn off” when they get married and become fathers.
It turns out that a single evolutionary psychological theory may be able to explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course. According to this theory, both crime and genius are expressions of young men’s competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.
As I explain in an earlier post, there are reproductive benefits of intense competitiveness to men. In the physical competition for mates, those who are competitive may act violently toward their male rivals. Their violence serves the dual function of protecting their status and honor, and discouraging or altogether eliminating their rivals from future competition. Their competitiveness also inclines them to accumulate resources to attract mates by stealing from others, and the same psychological mechanism can probably induce men who cannot gain legitimate access to women to do so illegitimately through forcible rape. Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities in order to attract mates.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1354131781566550016
This is not the whole story, however. There are also costs associated with competition. Acts of violence can easily result in the man’s own death or injury, and acts of resource appropriation can trigger retaliation from the rightful owners of the resources. A man’s reproductive success is obviously compromised if the competitive acts result in his death or even injury. Before men start reproducing (before their first child), there are few costs of competition. True, being competitive might result in their death or injury, and they might therefore lose in the reproductive game if they are too competitive. However, they also lose by not competing. As I explain in a previous post, if they do not compete for mates in a polygynous society, which all human societies are, they will be left out of the game and end up losing as a result In other words, young men might lose if they are competitive, but given polygyny, they will definitely lose if they are not. So there is little cost of being competitive, even at the risk of death and injury; the alternative -- being a total reproductive loser -- is worse in reproductive terms, which once again is the reason the death penalty cannot deter young men.
These calculations have been performed by natural and sexual selection, so to speak, which then equips male brains with a psychological mechanism to incline them to be increasingly competitive immediately after puberty and to make them less competitive right after the birth of the first child. Men themselves do not necessarily make these calculations consciously. They simply do not feel like acting violently, stealing, or conducting additional scientific experiments, or they just want to settle down after the birth of the child, but they do not know why. The intriguing suggestion here is that a single psychological mechanism may be responsible for much of what men do, whether they are criminals or scientists.
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1395807843207495681
The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex: there are no women in their relationships to say "no." Sexually active straight men, on average, have had 16.5 sex partners since age 18; gay men have had 42.8.
In reality, however, women do often say no to men. (In my experience, they always do.) This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software, in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. There would be no civilization, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice. Men have built (and destroyed) civilizations in order to impress women so that they might say yes. Women are the reason men do everything.
Once again, my personal hero Bill Maher captures the essence of female choice perfectly when he quips, "For a man to walk into a bar and have his choice of any woman he wants, he would have to be the ruler of the world. For a woman to have the same power over men, she’d have to do her hair.” In other words, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power as does the (male) ruler of the world.
Put differently, every woman has the power to predict the future, while very few men do. If a man wakes up in the morning and says to himself, “Tonight I will get laid,” the prediction will fail a vast majority of the times, unless he’s incredibly handsome. (Most young men, in fact, do make this prediction every morning and go to bed alone and disappointed every night.) If a woman—any woman—wakes up in the morning and says to herself, “Tonight I will get laid,” the prediction will always come true every time. Such is the power of female choice.
The social control explanation for the effect of marriage on desistance from crime makes perfect sense, until one realizes that marriage has the same desistance effect on perfectly legal, conventional activities, such as science. A comparison of the “age-genius curve” among scientists who were married at some point in their lives with the same curve among those who never married shows the strong desistance effect of marriage on scientific productivity. Half as many (50.0%) unmarried scientists make their greatest contributions to science in their late 50s as they do in their late 20s. The corresponding percentage among the married scientists is 4.2%. The mean age of peak productivity among the unmarried scientists (39.9) is significantly later than the mean peak age among married scientists (33.9).
Given that the Nobel Prize for scientific achievement didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, the evolved psychological mechanisms of men appear to be rather precisely tuned to marriage as a cue to desistance. Nearly a quarter (23.4%) of all married scientists make their greatest scientific contribution in their career and then desist within five years after their marriage. The mean delay (the difference between their marriage and their peak productivity) is a mere 2.6 years; the median is 3.0 years. It therefore appears that scientists rather quickly desist after marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to do important scientific work. When you remember that great scientific discoveries usually require many years of cumulative and continued research, the near coincidence of the male scientists’ marriages and their desistance (after which they cease to make any greater scientific discoveries) is remarkable. Another study by the sociologists Lowell L. Hargens, James C. McCann, and Barbara F. Reskin also demonstrates that childless research chemists are more productive than their colleagues with children.
You may think that unmarried scientists continue to make scientific contributions much later in their lives because they have more time to devote to their careers. Unmarried and therefore childless scientists do not have to spend time taking care of their children, driving them back and forth between soccer practices and ballet lessons, or doing half the household chores, and that is why unmarried scientists can continue making great contributions to science while married scientists must desist to devote their time to their families. This is precisely Hargens et al.’s interpretation of the negative association between parenthood and productivity among research chemists.
However, I would point out that almost all the scientists in my data on scientific biographies lived in the 18th and 19th centuries, when married men made very little contribution in the domestic sphere and their wives did not have their own careers. Hargens et al.’s data come from 1969-1970, when this was probably still true to a large extent. If anything, married scientists probably had more (rather than less) time to devote to science, because they had someone to take care of their domestic needs at all time.
As I explain in my last post, from an evolutionary psychological perspective, marriage and reproductive success are the ultimate goals, and everything men do are the means to the goal. All of the headlines above assume that there is something inherently good about scientific genius or creativity, and marriage and children somehow get in their way. There is absolutely nothing good about scientific genius or creativity except as a means toward reproductive success. Even though they may not be aware of it consciously, men do everything they do in order to get laid, and scientific research is no exception.
https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Criminology-Towards-Comprehensive-Explanation/dp/0123979374
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/09/Evolutionary-psychology-and-crime.pdf
Criminal behaviors such as robbery, assault, rape, and murder comprise a subset of human behavior. They occur at non-trivial rates in all known cultures in predictable patterns. For example, in every culture, criminal behavior such as sexual assault, non-lethal violence, and homicide shows cross-culturally predictable age and sex distribution (Daly & Wilson, 1988). These forms of criminal behavior are perpetrated many times more by males than by females. They increase dramatically when males enter reproductive competition. And they decline with age such that male rates approach female rates in older age. These forms of criminal conduct also occur at predictably higher rates among unmarried men compared to married men, and among men lacking resources more than among women lacking resources.
It is noteworthy, for example, that although women are more likely than men to suffer from being financially impoverished, poor men are far more likely than poor women to commit crimes such as robbery and mugging to procure resources. These are all key findings about which evolutionary psychology can shed causal light. Consider these findings generated by evolutionary psychology: (1) Women worldwide place a greater premium on resources in potential mates than do men (Buss, 1989); (2) Men consequently are known to engage in greater competition for access to the resources that women want (Buss, 2003); (3) Men lacking resources have greater difficulty than men with resources in attracting mates; (4) Engaging in crimes such as theft and robbery to acquire resources is likely to be a male-dominated activity in all cultures. Without knowledge of sex differences in mate preferences, which in turn produce sex differences in the battlefields of same-sex competition for mates, the finding that poor women are far less likely than poor men to commit crimes of purloining the resources of others would remain inexplicable.
Since criminal behavior forms a predictable subset of human behavior; and all human behavior requires psychological mechanisms for its production; and all psychological mechanisms, at some level of description, owe their existence to evolution by selection; then evolved psychological mechanisms necessarily play a key causal role in the production of criminal behavior.
Exploitative Resource Acquisition Strategies
At a highly general level of description, humans and other organisms have three fundamental strategies for acquiring resources that are critical to survival and reproduction (Buss & Duntley, 2008). The first is individual or solo resource acquisition. A woman gathering fruits or nuts, a man engaged in solo hunting, or either sex sowing seeds for a summer harvest are examples of individual resource acquisition strategies. A second is cooperative resource acquisition strategies. Two or more individuals form cooperative alliances or coalitions that often result in acquiring more collective resources than any individual could have acquired alone. A coalitional hunting party, for example, has a far better chance of taking down a large game animal than any individual alone, and doing so with far less risk.
A third class of resource acquisition strategies, one that cross-cuts the first two, is best described as exploitative resource acquisition (Buss & Duntley, 2008). Exploitative resource acquisition entails procuring resources by taking them from other people through tactics of threat, coercion, force, terrorism, deception, manipulation, violence, or murder. Exploitative resource acquisition tactics can be performed either by individuals, cooperative dyads, or coalitions (e.g., gangs; war parties), and hence crosscut individual and cooperative resource acquisition strategies.
Most criminal behavior falls within the domain of exploitative resource acquisition strategies. If adaptations for exploitation have evolved in humans, as Buss and Duntley (2008) propose, then evolutionary psychology has the potential to make important contributions to the causal understanding of criminal behavior, as well as for individual and societal strategies for dealing with it.
Evolutionary Theory and Criminology
Begin reading on page 521 (p. 6 of 27).
Microsoft Word - Ellis Review 1-23-06-tks.doc
The-role-of-evolutionary-explanations-in-criminology.pdf
Strain theories
One of the fundamental underlying premises of the various forms of strain theory is the idea that adherence to social norms that preclude criminal and antisocial behavior can be taken for granted and thus it is norm violations in the form of criminal offending that needs to be explained. For classic strain theorists, such as Merton (1938) and Cohen (1955), it is the failure to achieve monetary success and social status that ultimately leads to crime as offenders seek culturally valued goals through illegitimate means. More recently, Messner and Rosenfeld (2007) have emphasized the particular nature of American culture that elevates the importance of monetary success, and thus creates incentives for crime in individuals who are – for social-structural reasons – “locked out”
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of this American dream. Although clearly strains impact on individuals, classic strain theory can be best viewed as a “macro-level” theoretical perspective that focuses on the role of social-structural (society level) and cultural-historical (i.e., American cultural values) factors. Agnew’s (2005, 2006) general strain theory also incorporates macro level factors but significantly broadens the scope of strains that might lead to crime and, importantly, pays particular attention to the psychological impact of strains and their particular developmental contexts, thus integrating macro and micro level variables. There is now an extensive empirical and theoretical literature on strain theory, and our discussion has clearly brushed over some important nuances, but essentially what unites various forms of strain theory is the idea that individuals may respond to a failure to achieve legitimate and valued goals through criminal and antisocial behavior.
The notion of social status provides a good starting place for understanding points of connection between strain theory and evolutionary approaches to crime and antisocial behavior. As Walsh (2009a, p. 136) notes, “Anomie/strain theory shares its deep interest in status striving with evolutionary psychology and views status concerns as fundamental motivating factors behind much of human behavior, both deviant and conforming”. For evolutionary psychologists, as Walsh (2009a) points out, the motivations underlying status striving can be understood in terms of their evolutionary function. A large body of literature has, for instance, demonstrated that in most social species status or social rank is positively correlated with reproductive success (Barkow, 1989; Ellis, 1995). The same outcome also appears to hold in human populations (Barkow, 1989; Hopcroft, 2006). The importance of status striving, however, differs for males and females in predictable ways. Because of fundamental differences in parental investment, males of most mammalian species can increase their reproductive success through sexual access to multiple females; the reproductive success of females, however, is more closely tied to their capacity to raise viable offspring. Thus, so the argument goes, although social status is still important for females, there has been stronger selection on status striving in males because they can increase their reproductive success by obtaining higher status
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and dominance over other males (Buss, 2008; Puts, 2010). It follows that males who are thwarted (for whatever reason) from obtaining social status may be particularly motivated to engage in criminal behavior if that is the only route available to them. We may also expect that young males are particularly motivated to seek status as competition between men is heightened during late adolescence and early adulthood (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Puts, 2010). This evolutionary account provides a plausible distal explanation (in terms of evolutionary function and history) for the criminological phenomenon that is of particular interest to strain theorists: the high rates of offending among socially (and financially) disadvantaged young men.
The picture is, however, somewhat more complex than this. Importantly, status in human societies can be cashed out in different ways. Consistent with classic strain theories and the recent work of Messner and Rosenfeld (2007), particular cultural norms and values may translate what counts as social status in particular social environments and cultural-historical contexts. Indeed, as Henrich and Gil-White (2001) argue, although status in humans is partly related to social dominance, consistent with most mammalian species, it is also linked with the prestige that can be obtained through the development of particular skills or expertise (see also Cheng, Tracy & Henrich, 2010). This more inclusive evolutionary conception of status provides interesting points of connection with the criminological literature that highlights how, for some individuals, criminal offending may provide opportunities for autonomy, respect, (e.g., Bourgois, 1995) and a sense of mastery in the display of criminal expertise (Ward & Maruna, 2007). In other words, fundamental motivations underlying status may, in particular social and cultural environments that provide limited opportunities for legitimate outlets, result in increased risk for offending as offenders seek universal human goals through means that society deems to be inappropriate (i.e., criminal offending).
Control theories
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Control theories form a second important traditional approach in theoretical criminology. Conventionally, two main forms of control dominate the theoretical literature: social control and self-control. For social control theorists, crime and antisocial behavior become more likely when “an individual’s bond to society is weak or broken” (Hirschi, 1969, p. 16). Thus individuals who internalize pro-social norms and values and who form strong and enduring attachments to others are less likely to engage in criminal offending. Sampson’s (Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997) notion of “collective efficacy” places the importance of social bonds within a broader community context by noting that communities which demonstrate high levels of social cohesion and willingness to enforce social norms experience lower levels of crime and antisocial behavior. Within a developmental context, Sampson and Laub (2005) also highlight the importance of social bonds and how they can explain patterns of offending over particular life-history trajectories. For self-control theorists the important source of control can be found not with an individual’s social bonds, but within the individual themselves and their capacity to regulate or control their behavior (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). For Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) this capacity for self-control lies at the heart of criminal offending: individuals who are better able to control the temptations afforded by criminal opportunities are simply less likely to offend. Recent formulations of self-control theory also provide linkages with social control theories by highlighting how the capacity for self-control is partly determined by the relative costs of offending which are in turn influenced by individuals’ social bonds with others (Gottfredson, 2011; Hirschi, 2004). Control theories are best viewed as proximate explanations for offending, although they also include important developmental components. Self-control theories focus on the psychological level of analysis while social-control theories typically focus on the role of immediate social groups (e.g., the family), neighborhood or community factors, and the wider society.
From an evolutionary perspective, all organisms are motivated to pursue reproductively relevant resources such as food and mates and there is good evidence to
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suggest that the neurobiological underpinnings of reward-seeking behavior are relatively similar across a wide variety of species (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2008). However, organisms also need to regulate the pursuit of rewards with reference to specific environmental contexts. The desire to assuage hunger, for instance, needs to be restrained if a predator is present and the pursuit of sexually receptive females may need to be checked in the presence of socially dominant conspecifics (i.e., other males). Although the capacity for self-control, broadly construed, is common among different animal species, it may be especially important for humans (Eastwick, 2009). Because humans are a long-lived, highly social species that relies heavily on culture (Baumeister, 2005) and has the ability to consider a diverse range of relevant goals (including abstract and symbolic ones) even though they may be located far into the future (Leary & Buttermore, 2003), the capacity for effortful self-regulation may be especially important. In short, the capacity for self-control or self-regulation can be considered an evolutionary adaptation, perhaps emerging in its modern form as recently as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago (Eastwick, 2009). It is not surprising from this perspective that self control is one of the more important proximate predictor of crime and antisocial behavior as it has evolved, in part, to regulate those behaviors that, although strongly motivated, also can result in adverse future consequences including the risk of social sanctions. Consistent with sex differences in parental investment, discussed above, we should also expect important gender differences to emerge in the capacity for self-regulation as, on average, men have more to gain in reproductive terms from the pursuit of immediate rewards. A recent meta-analysis of gender differences in impulsivity suggests that, consistent with this view, males demonstrate greater reward-seeking, less capacity for effortful control, and less sensitivity to punishment (Cross, Copping and Campbell, 2011). Within the context of human evolution, the relationship between self-control and social control are also important. If one of the important functions of self-control is to regulate behavior in a way that conforms to local norms and values we should expect that attachment to pro-social institutions and environments in which social norms are more robustly enforced (i.e. those the demonstrate high rates of collective efficacy) should
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result in greater capacity for self-regulation and therefore less antisocial and criminal behavior. Criminologists typically appreciate that there is a fundamental tension between strain and control theories of criminal offending. The former assumes that crime and antisocial behavior are departures from “normal” behavior brought on by various strains; the latter are predicated on the idea that humans are “naturally” selfish and thus it is the avoidance of crime and antisocial behavior that need to be explained (in terms of various forms of self and social control). An evolutionary perspective provides a potential rapprochement to these two, seemingly opposing, viewpoints: survival and reproductive success in humans as a long-lived, highly social, pair-bonding (yet polygnous) species whose offspring are profoundly dependent has favored a complex suite of motivations and self-regulatory mechanisms that manifest as both the selfish striving for reproductively relevant resources and the need for self-constraint and adherence to group norms. To put this point crudely, criminal behavior is both normal and to be expected (as control theorists would argue), but so, too, is the disinclination to engage in norm violating behavior. Understanding how these various factors play out depends on a range of factors including the particular developmental context that individuals find themselves in.
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/ST2000.pdf
SCROLL TO PAGE 439 (EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGICAL MALE THEORY OF CRIMINALITY) AND BEGIN READING!
https://mobile.twitter.com/datepsych/status/1590036554948677637
As I explain in a previous post, humans throughout their evolutionary history were effectively polygynous, and many married men had multiple wives. In a polygynous society, some males monopolize reproductive access to all females while other males are left out; in such a society, some males do not get to reproduce at all, while almost all females do. In other words, there is a vast sex difference in fitness variance; the difference between “winners” and “losers” in the reproductive game is much greater among men than among women. This large sex difference in fitness variance makes males highly competitive in their effort not to be left out of the reproductive game altogether. This competition among men leads to a high level of violence (murder, assault, and battery) among them. The large number of homicides between men (compared to the number of homicides between women, or between the sexes) is a direct consequence of this male competition for mates.
We can extend to property crimes the same evolutionary logic of male intrasexual competition in the context of polygyny and greater male fitness variance. If women prefer to mate with men with more resources, then men can increase their reproductive prospects by acquiring material resources. Resources in traditional societies, however, tend to be concentrated in the hands of older men; younger men are often excluded from attaining them through legitimate means and must therefore resort to illegitimate means to acquire them. One method of doing so is to appropriate someone else’s resources by stealing them. So the same psychological mechanism that motivates violent interpersonal crimes of murder, assault, and rape can also motivate property crimes of robbery and theft.
