From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rms2g@virginia.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 14:54:51 MDT
Charles Hixson wrote:
Or, perhaps criminal behavior isn't contra survival? Certainly some top
executives (once) at Enron must have found that it paid quite well.
### It's useful to remember that "criminal behavior" is a concept which
didn't really exist throughout most of human evolution. Instead,
the genes which currently result in e.g. shoplifting or wife-beating (a very
recent type of crime), might have been involved in adaptive responses to
social interactions within small groups of hunter-gatherers. According to
some researchers, the borderline personality type was an adaptive response
to being born to a mother positioned very low in the social hierarchy. This
was associated with being frequently physically attacked by higher-ranking
adults and increased risk of dying. A young child in this situation might
benefit from having borderline traits - unpredictability, extreme yearning
for attachment, aggression, labile emotional attachments - which propel
him/her to a take-no-prisoners social climbing strategy. Whatever merit
there is to this hypothesis, the general idea that currently maladaptive
behaviors might have had value in the ancestral environment is valid.
Rafal
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