A murdered child loses an entire future. The parents may spend the rest of their lives living with the absence. An assault can leave a person disabled, frightened, or in pain long after the court closes its file.
No compensation restores that child. No completed proceeding erases that suffering. Any account of crime that treats these losses as a footnote has started in the wrong place. The purpose of controlling aggression must be to protect people from becoming its next victims. Consider the range: a schoolyard bully, an extortion gang, an invading army, a government organizing mass murder. The scale changes. A recurring opportunity remains: use superior force, intimidation, or a cooperating group to obtain rewards at someone else’s expense. The bully gets the money. The aggressor gets the territory. The ruler gets rid of an opponent. The victim gets the funeral. My argument is that bullying, predatory crime, aggressive war, and democide can draw on overlapping evolved human capacities for aggression, domination, and coalition building. Inherited differences can influence these capacities. Circumstances and institutions determine how they are expressed and what rewards they receive. The biology deserves attention. A 2019 study using teacher ratings of 8,215 twin children estimated the heritability of bullying perpetration at approximately 70% in that sample. A meta-analysis of 41 studies, involving 27,147 participants, attributed approximately half the variation in impulsivity to genetic influences in its best-fitting model, with substantial environmental influence as well. [1,2] These are estimates of variation within studied populations and environments. They are not percentages of an individual’s behavior caused by genes. Genetic influence also does not provide a reliable forecast of a particular person’s conduct. A 2021 study covering 87,485 children found that its genetic scores explained less than 1% of differences in aggression in independent samples. [3] The evidence supports inherited influences on aggression, bullying, and impulsivity. It does not establish an identical genetic cause of a schoolyard assault and a world war. The connection proposed here concerns shared human capacities, individual susceptibility, and recurring incentives. An inherited propensity is not a criminal conviction. A demonstrated history of violent acts is evidence of conduct. These are different things. The evolutionary history reaches back far beyond modern humanity. Our ancestors lived amid Africa’s changing forests, woodlands, and grasslands. Research around Kenya’s Olorgesailie basin documents increasing instability in water and vegetation beginning roughly 400,000 years ago, associated with a period of technological and social change. Unreliable resources may have favored adaptability. That study does not establish that drought created human aggression. [4] Walking upright began much earlier. Ardipithecus ramidus combined climbing with bipedal movement 4.4 million years ago in a substantially wooded habitat. Early Homo sapiens fossils from Morocco date to about 315,000 years ago. The familiar story of ancestors suddenly coming down from disappearing trees onto a Kenyan plain compresses millions of years into one misleading event. [5,6] Nevertheless, the ecological mechanism is plausible. When food, water, or territory becomes scarce, taking another group’s resources may offer an advantage. So may cooperation, migration, trade, or innovation. The successful strategy depends on the circumstances. Selection rewards reproductive success. It does not hold a hearing on good intentions. Chimpanzees provide unusually direct evidence that organized violence can bring advantages to the winning group. At Ngogo in Uganda, researchers documented lethal attacks on neighboring chimpanzees followed by territorial expansion. A 2025 study reported increased female fertility and infant survival after that community’s lethal aggression and territorial gains. The observed benefits support an explanation involving access to resources; they do not demonstrate that every attack benefits its perpetrators. [7,8] A larger 2014 analysis of 18 chimpanzee communities and four bonobo communities found that patterns of lethal aggression were better explained by adaptive strategies than by the measured effects of human disturbance. [9] Coalition killing can arise without a government, an ideology, or a legal profession. The death rates can be substantial. A 2006 analysis calculated a median of 271 violent deaths per 100,000 individuals annually across five chimpanzee populations, combining killings within and between communities. The UN reported a worldwide human intentional-homicide rate of 5.2 per 100,000 in 2023. These are not directly matched categories: chimpanzee territorial killings resemble warfare, while human homicide statistics generally exclude deaths directly attributable to armed conflict. They do not establish a precise species-wide ratio. [10,11] Chimpanzees are living relatives, not our ancestors. Their behavior cannot reconstruct every stage of human prehistory. It can demonstrate that killing competitors sometimes brings a material and reproductive advantage. Evolution also shaped restraint. Research on early hominin canine teeth interpreted their reduced differences between males and females as evidence of comparatively reduced male aggression. That is an inference from anatomy, but it contradicts a simple story of steadily increasing aggressiveness. [12] Our inheritance includes capacities for cooperation, restraint, and attack. Human organization can recruit all three. Richard Wrangham distinguishes reactive aggression, arising in response to provocation or threat, from proactive aggression, planned to achieve a goal. His evolutionary account explains how relatively restrained everyday behavior can coexist with a considerable capacity for calculated violence. [13] An angry schoolyard punch and a planned extortion campaign are different problems. Repeated bullying can be calculated: select someone weaker, enlist an audience, obtain a reward, and discourage resistance. A government killing program can be calculated too. It can involve patient planning, obedient subordinates, transport, records, and concealment. Intelligence can improve the harvest or improve the ambush. Cooperation is essential to both rescue teams and death squads. For the criminal, the reward need not be cash. It can be revenge, excitement, status, sexual gratification, domination, or the removal of a witness. An organization can seek protected markets and recurring revenue. A terrible social bargain can remain an attractive personal bargain. The law faces another problem: people differ in how they respond to it. The rule follower stops because there is a rule. The careful person stops because something might go wrong. The empathic person stops because he does not want another person to suffer. Those restraints can operate before a threatened sentence enters the calculation. The legal system should not claim all that restraint as its own achievement. Greg Pogarsky’s deterrence framework distinguishes people who comply for reasons largely independent of threatened punishment, people responsive to sanctions, and people comparatively unresponsive to them. These are differences in responsiveness, not permanent moral classifications. [14] For an aggressor acting impulsively, the immediate reward may outweigh a distant consequence, or the consequence may receive little thought. In a study of 252 college students surveyed about drinking and driving, Nagin and Pogarsky found that punishment severity had less influence among people more focused on the present. That supports unequal responsiveness to threats, rather than establishing that every impulsive offender is undeterrable. [15] A calculating offender presents another problem: he may understand the rule and expect to escape its consequences. The National Institute of Justice’s research summary emphasizes the likelihood of being caught over simply increasing punishment severity. [16] My criticism is the imbalance when law adds restraint to people already inclined to restrain themselves while failing to interrupt the person doing the harm. If a careful victim fears legal consequences while an aggressor expects little interference, the restraint can fall on the wrong side of the encounter. Effective protection must include recognition of lawful self-defense and intervention against repeated aggression. War can enlarge the bargain from personal domination to national coercion. The potential prizes include territory, mineral deposits, political control, and the destruction of a rival’s power. A leader may hope to strengthen his position at home through conflict abroad. These are possible incentives, not an explanation of every war. Defensive war can be necessary to stop an aggressor. Fear, miscalculation, ideology, and alliances can also drive escalation. But a war need not benefit the population to reward the people directing it. The leader may gain power while soldiers and civilians lose their lives. Contractors may earn revenue while taxpayers assume debt. A benefit warrants investigation; it does not by itself prove responsibility for starting a war. World war requires organization, decisions, and circumstances that allow violence to expand. An aggressive personality alone cannot explain it. The schoolyard question nevertheless survives at the larger scale: who can protect the target, who rewards the aggressor’s followers, and who can stop the aggression? Democide puts the problem inside government itself. R. J. Rummel used “democide” for murder by government, encompassing genocide, political murder, and mass murder. It can include deliberately lethal imprisonment and knowingly imposed deadly conditions. Ordinary battlefield deaths are not automatically democide. [17] A ruler can use murder to eliminate opponents, frighten survivors, seize property, or preserve control. The police, prisons, military, and official records can become instruments of the crime. A victim can report a thief to the police. Where does he report a police force carrying out the ruler’s killing policy? In Syria, UN investigators documented state-policy killings and deliberately life-threatening detention conditions amounting to extermination. In North Korea, a UN commission identified crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, and knowingly causing prolonged starvation. These findings concern organized institutions and policies. [18,19] Sudan supplies a documented connection among armed power, family control, and resources. The U.S. Treasury identified Al Junaid as controlled by RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and his brother Abdul Rahim Dagalo, and described gold mining and exports as important revenue sources for the family and the RSF. Separately, UN investigators documented deliberate civilian attacks, large-scale killings, and starvation by the warring forces, including RSF crimes against humanity. [20,21] Financial gain does not explain every killing. Ethnic persecution, hatred, revenge, ideology, and the pursuit of power can reinforce one another. A family relationship alone establishes neither participation nor guilt. Drought is therefore a possible pressure, not a universal cause. A wealthy ruler can want more wealth. A secure government can manufacture an enemy. Scarcity can be real, exaggerated, or imposed by the people exploiting it. In my judgment, the greatest and most toxic failure of the legal profession is allowing the organizers of mass killing to remain protected and practically beyond reach while their victims remain exposed. The man who gives the order can be safer than the soldier who carries it out, the witness who reports it, or the child who lives under it. Lawyers help draft immunities, argue their scope, and administer the institutions applying them. States and political leaders also create these rules and determine whether judgments are enforced. The responsibility is institutional as well as professional. There are real legal barriers. In its 2002 Arrest Warrant judgment, the International Court of Justice held that an incumbent foreign minister enjoyed immunity before foreign national courts even when accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. The Court distinguished that procedural protection from impunity and identified other possible avenues of prosecution. [22] For victims, a legal avenue that cannot be used in practice may deliver very little protection. Civilian protection is a different rule. A political or administrative official without military status or a command function cannot be attacked merely because of his office. Civilians can lose protection during direct participation in hostilities. Neither a political title nor an accusation alone settles whether force against a particular person is lawful. [23] Protection against attack does not erase criminal responsibility. The Rome Statute rejects official capacity as an exemption from responsibility before the International Criminal Court and provides for responsibility for ordering crimes and, under specified conditions, failures by commanders and civilian superiors to control subordinates. Jurisdiction and enforcement still determine whether those provisions reach a particular person. [24] The profession should answer for the gap between promises of accountability and actual protection of victims. That protection must extend inside prison. “Put him in prison” is an incomplete answer if he continues assaulting prisoners or staff. Confinement can remove an offender from the community while leaving other people exposed to him. The Supreme Court has recognized a duty to protect prisoners from violence by other prisoners. [25] Those potential victims deserve protection too. A prison sentence is not a license for another prisoner to rape, terrorize, or kill the person serving it. A demonstrated record of serious violence is relevant to assessing danger. It is fundamentally different from assigning guilt to innocent people because of ancestry, religion, a diagnosis, or a presumed genetic susceptibility. Where threatened punishment fails, prevention requires actual limits on the offender’s ability to cause harm. The effectiveness of confinement must be judged by the protection it delivers, including to the people inside. Death is permanent incapacitation: an executed person cannot commit another assault. That fact belongs in an honest debate about capital punishment. It does not by itself establish who can lawfully be executed or whether execution is justified in a particular case. Self-defense against an immediate deadly attack and execution of a person already under control are distinct legal questions. Pennsylvania’s self-defense statute turns on immediate necessity and specified threatened harms. A past record can inform an assessment, but does not alone establish that immediate necessity. [26] Debate about punishment should acknowledge the suffering of victims and the irreversibility of execution. Neither side is entitled to erase inconvenient human consequences. The financial accounting must also be honest. At an assumed $100,000 per year, 30 years of custody totals $3 million before inflation or discounting. California’s enacted 2025–26 budget put average annual prison operating costs at approximately $127,800 per person. Its estimated annual savings from removing one person without closing facilities were much lower, approximately $21,500. Average expenditure and money actually saved are different measures. [27] Capital prosecution, defense, appeals, and custody before execution also have costs. Employment and billable hours are expenditures; they do not themselves demonstrate that victims have been protected. But money is only part of the burden. A parent’s agony after a child’s murder, an assault victim’s permanent disability, a prisoner’s terror of another attack, and a staff member’s death must count in any serious assessment. A budget that omits those consequences is not a complete account of the costs. The victim’s suffering does not become less important because it is difficult to price. An evolutionary explanation supplies no excuse. It helps explain why a sermon, a rule, or a remote threat may fail when an aggressor receives an immediate reward. The test belongs at every scale: does the bullying stop, does the victim become safer, does the dangerous offender lose the ability to continue, and does the organizer of mass killing face effective accountability? A legal system should be judged by those results. The child who did no harm to anyone must not become the forgotten person in a sophisticated discussion of the offender. Who gained? Who suffered? Who could have prevented the next attack? Stop being surprised when violence that pays keeps finding customers. Start demanding protection that reaches the people carrying its cost. REFERENCES [1] Veldkamp SAM, et al. Genetic and Environmental Influences on Different Forms of Bullying Perpetration, Bullying Victimization, and Their Co-occurrence. Behavior Genetics. 2019;49:432–443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-019-09968-5 [2] Bezdjian S, Baker LA, Tuvblad C. Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies. Clinical Psychology Review. 2011;31:1209–1223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2011.07.005 [3] Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age. Translational Psychiatry. 2021;11:413. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-021-01480-x [4] Potts R, et al. Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolution. Science Advances. 2020;6:eabc8975. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abc8975 [5] White TD, et al. Ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids. Science. 2009;326:75–86. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19810190/ [6] Hublin JJ, et al. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature. 2017;546:289–292. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336 [7] Mitani JC, Watts DP, Amsler SJ. Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees. Current Biology. 2010;20:R507–R508. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20620900/ [8] Female fertility and infant survivorship increase following lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524502122 [9] Wilson ML, et al. Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts. Nature. 2014;513:414–417. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13727 [10] Wrangham RW, Wilson ML, Muller MN. Comparative rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans. Primates. 2006;47:14–26. See especially Table 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-005-0140-1 [11] United Nations Statistics Division. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025, Goal 16. Global intentional-homicide rate for 2023. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2025/Goal-16/ [12] Suwa G, et al. Canine sexual dimorphism in Ardipithecus ramidus was nearly human-like. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2021;118:e2116630118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116630118 [13] Wrangham RW. Two types of aggression in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2018;115:245–253. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713611115 [14] Pogarsky G. Identifying “deterrable” offenders: Implications for research on deterrence. Justice Quarterly. 2002;19:431–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418820200095301 [15] Nagin DS, Pogarsky G. Integrating celerity, impulsivity, and extralegal sanction threats into a model of general deterrence: Theory and evidence. Criminology. 2001;39:865–892. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00943.x [16] National Institute of Justice. Five Things About Deterrence. June 5, 2016. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence [17] Rummel RJ. Death by Government. Chapter 2: Definition of Democide. https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP2.HTM [18] UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention in the Syrian Arab Republic. A/HRC/31/CRP.1. 2016. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/A-HRC-31-CRP1_en.pdf [19] OHCHR Seoul. Accountability. Summary of the 2014 DPRK Commission of Inquiry and subsequent accountability findings. https://seoul.ohchr.org/en/node/261 [20] U.S. Department of the Treasury. Treasury Sanctions Military-Affiliated Companies Fueling Both Sides of the Conflict in Sudan. June 1, 2023. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1514 [21] UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan. “A war of atrocities”: Sudan civilians deliberately targeted, UN Fact-Finding Mission reports international crimes on large-scale. 2025. https://sudan.un.org/en/301357-%E2%80%9C-war-atrocities%E2%80%9D-sudan-civilians-deliberately-targeted-un-fact-finding-mission-reports [22] International Court of Justice. Arrest Warrant of 11 April 2000 (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Belgium), Judgment, February 14, 2002, especially paragraphs 51 and 58–61. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/121 [23] International Committee of the Red Cross. Frequently Asked Questions: IHL and the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Section: Who and what can be targeted? https://www.icrc.org/en/article/faq-ihl-and-escalating-conflict-middle-east [24] Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, especially Articles 25, 27 and 28. https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2024-05/Rome-Statute-eng.pdf [25] Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 833–834 (1994). Duty to protect prisoners from violence by other prisoners. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511825/usrep511825.pdf [26] Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, Title 18, Section 505: Use of force in self-protection. https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/18/00.005.005.000..HTM [27] California Legislative Analyst’s Office. How Much Does It Cost to Incarcerate a Person? 2025–26 enacted budget; updated September 2025. https://lao.ca.gov/PolicyAreas/CJ/6_cj_inmatecost
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