The human race spends a disproportionate amount of attention, money, and expertise in solving, trying, and reporting homicides, as compared to other social problems. The public avidly consumes accounts of real-life homicide cases, and murder fiction is more popular still. Nevertheless, we have only the most rudimentary scientific understanding of who is likely to kill whom and why. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson apply contemporary evolutionary theory to analysis of human motives and perceptions of self-interest, considering where and why individual interests conflict, using well-documented murder cases. This book attempts to understand normal social motives in murder as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. They note that the implications for psychology are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparison and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and the phenomenology of the self. This is the first volume of its kind to analyze homicides in the light of a theory of interpersonal conflict. Before this study, no one had compared an observed distribution of victim-killer relationships to "expected" distribution, nor asked about the patterns of killer-victim age disparities in familial killings. This evolutionary psychological approach affords a deeper view and understanding of homicidal violence.
This book is an exercise in "evolutionary psychology": the attempt to understand normal social motives as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. There is simply no question that this is the process that created the human psyche, and yet psychologists seldom ask what implications this fact might have for their discipline. We think that the implications are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparisons and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and that phenomenology of the self.
West Coast food editor Wendy Whitby reluctantly returns to her childhood home in Weewampum, Wis., to await her mother's demise. But cantankerous Seal (Cecilia) refuses to pass into the Great Beyond according to schedule. While Wendy waits for Seal to expire, Wendy begrudgingly helps out her two high school pals, flamboyant Amber Moore and reticent Merribeth Hartwell, who have opened a restaurant in downtown Weewampum. Wendy and her friends soon are embroiled in their hometown's political feuds. Some of the well-heeled citizens, including Merribeth's father, have decided they want to close the town's hospital downtown and move it to a spiffy building along the interstate. But the women feel the downtown will deteriorate even further if the old hospital shuts its doors, so their restaurant, Amberosia's, becomes the headquarters of the Stop the Hospital Move campaign. After Amberosia's burns to the ground, the women are convinced someone set the fire to scare them off because they oppose the hospital move. However, Fire Marshal Warren Caramel suspects the women torched the place to collect the insurance money. The threesome realize they'll have to solve the arson case themselves to avoid spending the best years of their lives in Waysippee State Prison for Women.
A child is one hundred times more likely to be abused or killed by a stepparent than by a genetic parent, say two scientists in this startling book. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson show that the mistreatment of stepchildren, long a staple of folk tales, has a solid basis in fact; Daly and Wilson apply the perspective of evolutionary psychology to investigate why stepparenthood is different from genetic parenthood and why steprelationships succeed or fail.
Mating tactics and mate choice are related to problems associated with mating effort: the former concerns how to spend it and the latter concerns who to spend it on. The solutions will have consequences for reproductive fitness and so will be shaped primarily by sexual selection. In this thesis, I investigate variation in mating tactics and mate choice within humans using sexual selection as a theoretical cornerstone.
For twenty years this award-winning compilation has been the nonpareil benchmark against which all other annual fantasy and horror collections are judged. Directed first by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and for the past four years by Datlow and Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, it consistently presents the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, the most original—in short, the best fantasy and horror. The current collection, marking a score of years, offers more than forty stories and poems from almost as many sources. Summations of the field by the editors are complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint, and Jeff VanderMeer, highlighting the best of the fantastic in, respectively, media, music, and comics, as well as honorable mentions—notable works that didn’t quite make the cut, but are nonetheless worthy of attention. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection is a cornucopia of fantastic delights, an unparalleled resource and indispensable reference that captures the unique excitement and beauty of the fantastic in all its gloriously diverse forms, from the lightest fantasy to the darkest horror.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.