Present-day discourse about "the myth of the peaceful savage" is, clearly, an extension of the old Hobbes-Rousseau controversy, but it is not so clear when the argument that nonstate, hunter-gatherer societies tend to be peaceful, and that their battles are like rituals or games, was first figured in the social sciences as a myth. 1 The developmental typology informing anthropology may have made the rise of the Rousseauian argument inevitable: by definition, an evolution-
Buss postulates that the human mind has developed adaptations for killing (killing or homicide modules), that murder is qualitatively different from all other forms of violence, and that homicidal ideation (fantasies) almost invariably precedes carried-out kills, and he claims that Daly & Wilson’s slip-up argument fails because premeditated mate (spouse, partner) killing cannot result from the mere slip-ups central to the by-product (of ever more desperate strategies of mate guarding) hypothesis. In this review a number of alternative interpretations are presented: Normal distribution and coincidental status striving theory, special taxon of substrate dysfunctions, phylogenetic regression theory, and overcontrol theory. Finally, the problematic mate-killing module (as allegedly “superior” to the by-product theory) and the obscure role of homicidal ideation are critically assessed.
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