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Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far. The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... bu

Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far. The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful. I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations. If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't. EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Horror-Monologue-By-Marlon-Brando-218225354 https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it. EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.

castle-bravo 9y ago
I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this matter, but here's how I see it: Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They lack certain abilities that enable them to integrate well into human groups and would not survive well in the paleolithic. With increasing population densities in the neolithic and in the modern age, it became possible for psychopaths to survive and pass on their genes. I think that psychopaths are still rare for a few reasons: the mutation may be recessive, or high population density is too recent for the mutation to have spread widely, or psychopaths may be more likely to die by violence, or they may invest too few resources in their children. In any case, I think increasing numbers of psychopaths would pose a long-term existental threat to human civilization. As far as productive uses for psychopaths go (if we can identify them before maturity), I have no suggestions; it is not wise to put guns into the hands of heartless people who would turn them on us if they perceived any advantage in doing so; one need only look at the example of Mexican cartels founded by special forces to see this.
- warent 9y ago
  > Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They're not literally parasites or any more/less mutated than the next person whose genes are different from their ancestors. Hyperbole like this is really destructive and close-minded. Consider if you lived in a world of psychopaths and you were the rare empathetic one. If the greater population openly regarded you as a mutant parasite, would this alienation inspire you to behave in a pro-social way or an anti-social way?
- sterlind 9y ago
  Excellent, open access genome-wide association study here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045086#pone.0045086.s004 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... No SNP was significant, nor any single gene. MAO-A (the "warrior gene") is ruled out. However, many genes showed strong association with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, with multiple alleles working together. My read is that these behavior patterns emerge in certain brain phenotypes, combinations of which were advantageous in antiquity. But much of that genetic information was stored as allele distribution, and we've lost a lot of that data with generations of assortative mating.
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Why would psychopaths not do well in the paleolithic? The family raise a child who is a psychopath. The child then does what psychopaths do, and the family are in an abusive relationship with the child. The child can be charming to outsiders etc and can find partners to procreate with. Can't spot why they would not survive well in the paleolithic.
  - robotbikes 9y ago
    If you are referring to hunters and gatherers, they rarely lived in nuclear families but instead extended family groups. They also socially impose the norm of egalitarianism and are in constant contact with each other. I suspect the original author saw these in direct conflict with sociopathy.
rdlecler1 9y ago
In evolutionary nomenclature they call this frequency dependent selection. Some trait can have a selective advantage and low frequency but the selective advantage is lost as the frequency of the trait increases in the population. Also, I think you analysis is spot on. This trait is preserves at low frequencies because it has been benefited from positive selection in the past.
zxcmx 9y ago
Not sure about psychopaths (I imagine they fit in there somewhere) but as a less extreme version the complainers and confronters and grudge holders of this world do those of us who are less confrontational some service at times. I tend to think of "social enforcement" as a sort of commons good. It often doesn't benefit the person doing it that much but overall it helps keep everything balanced. Someone cuts in line? I'm the kind of person who would usually let it go because well, maybe they're having a bad day. And is it actually worth getting worked up about? Say it's an older lady and maybe she's rude but is it worse to get in an argument with her? There are some people in this world who will really not let that stuff go. I am glad I'm not one of those people but in many ways I am also glad that those people exist, even if I find myself on their bad side once in a while. I suppose there are some people who would simply call this assertiveness and describe it as an unmitigated positive. But it's really quite exhausting to do on a continuous basis unless you have the personality for it. I think of it as a boundless capacity to "sweat the small stuff" and I am actually glad that some people have it.
- colanderman 9y ago
  I am one of those people. It comes from my mother being a union leader, my dad being a complainer with a short temper, and being unpopular in school, teaching me to not care what others think of me. It doesn't bother me one bit to stick my neck out at the workplace and (productively) call out BS, or to make some Comcast customer service representative's life hell until they rescind some BS charge on a friend's account. I wouldn't call it "assertiveness" - I don't consider myself very assertive - but more a very low tolerance for BS and "injustice". This means that I've spent most of my adult life learning not to sweat the small stuff (especially since moving to a major city), but rather focus my energy where either it will actually benefit others, or against someone who is actively taking advantage of me in a harmful way. I have to consciously remind myself that to do otherwise - to confront every line-cutter and litter-dropper - will at best drain me of energy for fights that matter, and at worst, invite trouble I'm not able to handle. Relevant to the article, I credit this same ability with having helped me escape two emotionally abusive, back-to-back, relationships (both made possible thanks to my otherwise lack of assertiveness in social areas). I don't think I'd call myself a psychopath, though I share some traits (e.g. low - but not absent - empathy). If my parents hadn't instilled in me a strong sense of morality maybe I would be.
vanderZwan 9y ago
> EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho... https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it. Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario. It is in fact a polar opposite of it: in this context, doing horrible things is motivated by belief in a greater good. That is also the problem with Milgram's famous shock experiments: in his own explanation he completely ignored the part where the people willing to apply possibly lethal shocks to people where those goaded into believing it was for the greater good of mankind (that is, they were told the experiment was necessary for a better scientific understanding of the human mind). I suspect you have very secular Western view of the world. You may want to have a look into Scott Atran's work, who dives deeper into this. This RSA lecture[0] is a fine place to start. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878
- nwatson 9y ago
  >>> Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario ... yeah, that's why I said "So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths".
aje403 9y ago
This is a really horrible way to put things -"psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort". It's indulging itself in grandiosity and dumbing down a richer picture than that with more gray area. Referring to someone as a psychopath is quite similar to people calling you a hacker because you majored in computer science then asking you to fix their computer. Outside of the dramatics, it is true that leaders tend to exhibit typical psychopathic qualities. Things like diminished empathy, cutthroat competitivity, predatorial cleverness, selfish rationality at the cost of emotion, and the ability to project the right mask at the right time are usually needed in high business and politics. At the same time, you can't lump Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates into a group with the high school shooter kids. It's not really an adaptation considering humans evolved into empathy - psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics being formed as an individual progresses through life. Of course, it seems like individuals who go through traumatic events or extended drug use often develop at least a subset of these behaviors separately. I'm not a psychologist so I'll stop myself. Either way, it is a much broader picture than you're painting - the humans and the "evolved" psychopaths.
- nwatson 9y ago
  The grandparent to your post here, the one referring to "author of ZeroMQ", links to an interesting article by that "author of ZeroMQ" ... and that article is a "layman's rejection" of the notion that you lay out, that "psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics [of non-empathy, etc.] being formed as an individual progresses through life". I was playing along with that contention, seems to make sense to me, that perhaps some people just inherit traits or predispositions to lack-of-empathy. I also don't know the psychology or neuroscience, and I imagine there's still some debate -- "is it a neurological disorder, or is it an adaptation?"
  - aje403 9y ago
    Didn't read - I've had enough run ins with people that I don't need any help spotting them. Maybe will glance over if its short. Part of what I was trying to argue, if I didn't word it well - is that if you're we can't distinctly tie the list of characteristics we've contrived as being psychopathy to something like a malformed amygdala, and we instead refer to it nebulously as this genetic aberration, we might as well go back to calling people witches as well (which, I suppose our species tends to enjoy looking for).

castle-bravo 9y ago

I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this matter, but here's how I see it: Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They lack certain abilities that enable them to integrate well into human groups and would not survive well in the paleolithic. With increasing population densities in the neolithic and in the modern age, it became possible for psychopaths to survive and pass on their genes. I think that psychopaths are still rare for a few reasons: the mutation may be recessive, or high population density is too recent for the mutation to have spread widely, or psychopaths may be more likely to die by violence, or they may invest too few resources in their children. In any case, I think increasing numbers of psychopaths would pose a long-term existental threat to human civilization. As far as productive uses for psychopaths go (if we can identify them before maturity), I have no suggestions; it is not wise to put guns into the hands of heartless people who would turn them on us if they perceived any advantage in doing so; one need only look at the example of Mexican cartels founded by special forces to see this.

warent 9y ago
> Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They're not literally parasites or any more/less mutated than the next person whose genes are different from their ancestors. Hyperbole like this is really destructive and close-minded. Consider if you lived in a world of psychopaths and you were the rare empathetic one. If the greater population openly regarded you as a mutant parasite, would this alienation inspire you to behave in a pro-social way or an anti-social way?
sterlind 9y ago
Excellent, open access genome-wide association study here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0045086#pone.0045086.s004 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... No SNP was significant, nor any single gene. MAO-A (the "warrior gene") is ruled out. However, many genes showed strong association with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, with multiple alleles working together. My read is that these behavior patterns emerge in certain brain phenotypes, combinations of which were advantageous in antiquity. But much of that genetic information was stored as allele distribution, and we've lost a lot of that data with generations of assortative mating.
willvarfar 9y ago
Why would psychopaths not do well in the paleolithic? The family raise a child who is a psychopath. The child then does what psychopaths do, and the family are in an abusive relationship with the child. The child can be charming to outsiders etc and can find partners to procreate with. Can't spot why they would not survive well in the paleolithic.
- robotbikes 9y ago
  If you are referring to hunters and gatherers, they rarely lived in nuclear families but instead extended family groups. They also socially impose the norm of egalitarianism and are in constant contact with each other. I suspect the original author saw these in direct conflict with sociopathy.

rdlecler1 9y ago

In evolutionary nomenclature they call this frequency dependent selection. Some trait can have a selective advantage and low frequency but the selective advantage is lost as the frequency of the trait increases in the population. Also, I think you analysis is spot on. This trait is preserves at low frequencies because it has been benefited from positive selection in the past.

zxcmx 9y ago

Not sure about psychopaths (I imagine they fit in there somewhere) but as a less extreme version the complainers and confronters and grudge holders of this world do those of us who are less confrontational some service at times. I tend to think of "social enforcement" as a sort of commons good. It often doesn't benefit the person doing it that much but overall it helps keep everything balanced. Someone cuts in line? I'm the kind of person who would usually let it go because well, maybe they're having a bad day. And is it actually worth getting worked up about? Say it's an older lady and maybe she's rude but is it worse to get in an argument with her? There are some people in this world who will really not let that stuff go. I am glad I'm not one of those people but in many ways I am also glad that those people exist, even if I find myself on their bad side once in a while. I suppose there are some people who would simply call this assertiveness and describe it as an unmitigated positive. But it's really quite exhausting to do on a continuous basis unless you have the personality for it. I think of it as a boundless capacity to "sweat the small stuff" and I am actually glad that some people have it.

colanderman 9y ago
I am one of those people. It comes from my mother being a union leader, my dad being a complainer with a short temper, and being unpopular in school, teaching me to not care what others think of me. It doesn't bother me one bit to stick my neck out at the workplace and (productively) call out BS, or to make some Comcast customer service representative's life hell until they rescind some BS charge on a friend's account. I wouldn't call it "assertiveness" - I don't consider myself very assertive - but more a very low tolerance for BS and "injustice". This means that I've spent most of my adult life learning not to sweat the small stuff (especially since moving to a major city), but rather focus my energy where either it will actually benefit others, or against someone who is actively taking advantage of me in a harmful way. I have to consciously remind myself that to do otherwise - to confront every line-cutter and litter-dropper - will at best drain me of energy for fights that matter, and at worst, invite trouble I'm not able to handle. Relevant to the article, I credit this same ability with having helped me escape two emotionally abusive, back-to-back, relationships (both made possible thanks to my otherwise lack of assertiveness in social areas). I don't think I'd call myself a psychopath, though I share some traits (e.g. low - but not absent - empathy). If my parents hadn't instilled in me a strong sense of morality maybe I would be.

vanderZwan 9y ago

> EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho... https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it. Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario. It is in fact a polar opposite of it: in this context, doing horrible things is motivated by belief in a greater good. That is also the problem with Milgram's famous shock experiments: in his own explanation he completely ignored the part where the people willing to apply possibly lethal shocks to people where those goaded into believing it was for the greater good of mankind (that is, they were told the experiment was necessary for a better scientific understanding of the human mind). I suspect you have very secular Western view of the world. You may want to have a look into Scott Atran's work, who dives deeper into this. This RSA lecture[0] is a fine place to start. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijmBd69878

nwatson 9y ago
>>> Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario ... yeah, that's why I said "So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths".

aje403 9y ago

This is a really horrible way to put things -"psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort". It's indulging itself in grandiosity and dumbing down a richer picture than that with more gray area. Referring to someone as a psychopath is quite similar to people calling you a hacker because you majored in computer science then asking you to fix their computer. Outside of the dramatics, it is true that leaders tend to exhibit typical psychopathic qualities. Things like diminished empathy, cutthroat competitivity, predatorial cleverness, selfish rationality at the cost of emotion, and the ability to project the right mask at the right time are usually needed in high business and politics. At the same time, you can't lump Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates into a group with the high school shooter kids. It's not really an adaptation considering humans evolved into empathy - psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics being formed as an individual progresses through life. Of course, it seems like individuals who go through traumatic events or extended drug use often develop at least a subset of these behaviors separately. I'm not a psychologist so I'll stop myself. Either way, it is a much broader picture than you're painting - the humans and the "evolved" psychopaths.

nwatson 9y ago
The grandparent to your post here, the one referring to "author of ZeroMQ", links to an interesting article by that "author of ZeroMQ" ... and that article is a "layman's rejection" of the notion that you lay out, that "psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics [of non-empathy, etc.] being formed as an individual progresses through life". I was playing along with that contention, seems to make sense to me, that perhaps some people just inherit traits or predispositions to lack-of-empathy. I also don't know the psychology or neuroscience, and I imagine there's still some debate -- "is it a neurological disorder, or is it an adaptation?"
- aje403 9y ago
  Didn't read - I've had enough run ins with people that I don't need any help spotting them. Maybe will glance over if its short. Part of what I was trying to argue, if I didn't word it well - is that if you're we can't distinctly tie the list of characteristics we've contrived as being psychopathy to something like a malformed amygdala, and we instead refer to it nebulously as this genetic aberration, we might as well go back to calling people witches as well (which, I suppose our species tends to enjoy looking for).