The five factor trait of conscientiousnessis a supertrait, denoting on one hand a pattern of excessive labor, rigidity, orderliness and compulsivity,and on the other hand a pattern of strict rectitude, scrupulosity, dutifulness and morality. In both respects the obsessive-compulsive personality is conscientious; indeed, it has been labeled a disorder of extreme conscientiousness (Widiger et al., 2009). Antisocial personality disorder, in the present paper, is described as occupying the opposite end of the conscientiousness continuum. The antisocial is impulsive rather than compulsive, illicit rather than licit, and furtive rather than forthright.After clinically comparing the obsessive and antisocial personalities, the present paper invokes evolutionary theory to explain their resultant behavioral, ideological, political and demographic differences.
The obsessive-compulsive personality pattern of orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy was first described and explained by Sigmund Freud. Freud's description was sound, but his explanation was flawed. Further still, no extant etiology, psychoanalytic or otherwise, convincingly accounts for the existence, and intergenerational perpetuation, of obsessive character. Thus, herein is presented a new etiology; an evolutionary etiology that describes obsessive personality, not as a disorder, but as an extreme strategy whose imbalance is a product of post-dispersal evolution. Migration into northerly latitudes brought about a relative release from biotic selective pressures, such as conflict and conspecific competition, and a corresponding increase in abiotic selective pressures, such as cold and seasonal scarcity. Features such as (1) future-oriented thought, (2) parsimoniousness, and (3) compulsive conscientiousness become both viable and intelligible as a temperamental consequence of struggling more exclusively with the elements. After using comparative animal data to demonstrate their biogeographical distribution, the human distribution of these three traits is also shown to be concentrated within northerly latitudes.
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A considerable number of publications have examined the effect of various geographical, life history, social, economic and political factors on homicide. However, few studies were interested in examining the effect of these forces in an integrated social biogeography of homicide. This study collected data for 172 nation-states from various publications and databases. Standardized Studentized residuals were extracted from a multilevel model examining the effects of geographical adjacency upon homicide rates. A general linear model was used, with the residuals, to observe the effects of physical, community, social, cultural, and cognitive ecology upon homicide. Two sequential canonical analyses (SEQCA) were conducted to determine the mediating effects among the ecological indicators with respect to homicide. In the SEQCA, we hypothesized physical ecology would lead to communal ecology, in turn leading to social ecology, subsequently leading to cognitive ecology, and ultimately to homicide. A parsimony test concluded that economic growth and inequality fully mediated the relationship between cognitive ecology and homicide residuals. Similarly, the effects of life history upon homicide were fully mediated by social ecology. This study suggests several social ecology factors appear to directly affect homicide; however, other aspects of ecology indirectly affected homicide through influences on social ecology. The effect of indicators of social ecology such as income inequality and the operational sex ratio indicate competition for resources is a significant force generating differences in homicide rates across populations. In conclusion, a suite of evolutionary pressures seems to influence homicide rates, but mainly in a sequential nature rather than simultaneously.
We report successful diachronic replication of two major sets of prior findings in the social biogeography of human life history (LH) strategy: (1) the constructive replication of the diachronic changes in the latent hierarchical structure of intelligence in Britannic populations, but as presently applied to the latent hierarchical structure of human LH strategy, now cross-validated in both Britannic and Gallic populations; and (2) the diachronic replication in both Britannic and Gallic populations of the structural relations found synchronically among human LH strategy, between-group competition, and economic productivity in cross-sectional data on contemporary samples of both national and subnational polities. In addition, a supplementary methodological objective was: (3) the convergent validation of diachronic lexicographic measures of LH strategy with respect to more traditional non-lexicographic indicators of LH strategy, such as infant mortality rates, total fertility rates, and life expectancies. We obtained complete configural invariance across Britannic and Gallic biocultural groups, meaning that the same model predictors were statistically significant, but incomplete metric invariance, meaning that most but not all model parameter estimates were statistically equivalent in magnitude and direction. All new results obtained from diachronic data in Britannic populations were replicated almost perfectly in Gallic populations.
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