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Criminologists have known for decades that income inequality is the best predictor of the local homicide rate, but why this is so has eluded them. There is a simple, compelling answer: most homicides are the dénouements of competitive interactions between men. Killing the Competition is about this relationship between economic inequality and lethal interpersonal violence. The author applies basic principles of behavioral biology to explain why killers are usually men, not women, and counters the view that attitudes and values prevailing in "cultures of violence" make change impossible.

"Until the depredations of the fearsome rabble known as janjawid began to filter into the international consciousness in 2003, Darfur was one of the least-known places in the world. Poor, remote, landlocked, and sparsely populated, it was obscure even to the rest of the Sudan. Darfur's western borders are as far from the Red Sea as they are from the Atlantic, and the overland journey from Khartoum, the Sudanese capital on the Nile, still takes days across the desert. Darfur has no valuable minerals (although oil drillers live in hope), no famous sons or daughters, no natural wonders or monuments to attract any but the hardiest foreign visitors. When word of the killings began to seep out in 2003, it seemed to a perplexed world to be news from a void"--Provided by publisher

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Homicide and Human Nature -- A brief introduction to "selection thinking" -- Evolutionary psychology -- Self-interest and conflict -- Why homicide? -- What's a homicide? -- 2. Killing Kinfolks -- Who kills whom? Some American data -- Do relatives pose a lesser risk? -- Collaborative killing in 13th-century England -- Some other studies with higher proportions of blood kin -- Fraternal strife -- Kinship and collaborative homicide revisited -- 3. Killing Children: I. Infanticide in the Ethnographic Record -- Desperate decisions -- Women's life histories -- Discriminative parental solicitude -- A cross-cultural review -- Female-selective infanticide -- Other interests -- 4. Killing Children: II. Parental Homicide in the Modern West -- Infanticide and maternal age -- Infanticide and maternal marital status -- A brief history of infanticide in England -- On maternal "bonding" -- When a defective child is born -- The child's changing risk of homicide at parental hands -- Mothers who kill older children -- Fathers who kill -- Substitute parents -- Risks to children living with stepparents -- Stepparents and offspring age -- 5. Parricide: Killing Parents -- The logic of parent-offspring conflict -- Killing parents -- An asymmetry of valuation -- Factors associated with the risk of parricide -- Oedipal conflict and the primal parricide -- Oedipus overextended -- Conflict over what? -- Father-daughter conflict -- Toppling the patriarch -- Intrasexual rivalry or parent-offspring conflict? -- 6. Altercations and Honor -- Friday, September 5, 1980 -- Trivial altercations -- Status, reputation, and the capacity for violence -- A question of variance -- What do men want? -- 7. Why Men and Not Women? -- Sexual selection and "parental investment

In-laws (relatives by marriage) are true kin because the descendants that they have in common make them "vehicles" of one another's inclusive fitness. From this shared interest flows cooperation and mutual valuation: the good side of in-law relationships. But there is also a bad side. Recent theoretical models err when they equate the inclusive fitness value of corresponding pairs of genetic and affinal (marital) relatives-brother and brother-in-law, daughter and daughter-in-law-partly because a genetic relative's reproduction always replicates ego's genes whereas reproduction by an affine may not, and partly because of distinct avenues for nepotism. Close genetic relatives compete, often fiercely, over familial property, but the main issues in conflict among marital relatives are different and diverse: fidelity and paternity, divorce and autonomy, and inclinations to invest in distinct natal kindreds. These conflicts can get ugly, even lethal. We present the results of a pilot study conducted in Bangladesh which suggests that heightened mortality arising from mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflict may be a two-way street, and we urge others to replicate and extend these analyses.