Is Homicide Adaptive Behavior?

To think of homicide behavior as an adaptive behavior may sound crazy, but when you look into it, it becomes clear that there might be something to that. The ability to kill in the human brain must have been around from the start. We have most likely always killed animals for the food, but how can this change to suddenly kill your own species? It has been proved with comparative psychology that other species engage in killing behavior within their own species.

The HAT (Homicide Adaptation Theory), which I believe is correct, states that; humans have evolved with some psychological adaptation for killing, that humans have been hunting/killing animals to survive for a long time if not since the “start”, and that there is a bigger chance for a human being to kill someone for our own chances of reproductive success.

Since we don’t have documents about psychological behavior from the early stages of Humans, the theory is hard to prove, but there has been studies that show clear evidence that the HAT might be right. The adaptation for homicide on spouses was described like this by Shackelford:

“Many spousal homicides results from evolved male mechanisms specifically designed by natural selection to motivate killing under certain circumstances”

A growing number of psychologists have evidence that to understand the reason for killing, we have to study the human brain, genes and evolution. Some psychologists say that murderous actions are usually the by-product of urges towards other goals, and that the purpose of killing is that humans want to have a higher status and greater reproductive success.

There are also many psychologists that believe that; a key condition for an evolutionary account of homicide is an explanation of the fact that most deadly violence is committed by men. 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. This competitive homicidal behavior 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.