Sir Cryalot#10
" ...not all the interesting insights from evolutionary biology are about learning. In this section we will discuss the characteristics of people who don’t follow the same rules as most of the rest of us—sociopaths and hysterics. We will describe the most clear-cut manifestations of these traits, but we must keep in mind that they are almost certainly quantitative traits and that there are few “pure” cases. Being a sociopath is like being tall: everyone is a little bit tall, and some people are taller than others. Sociopathy and hysteria are also like stature in that most of the differences among individuals seem to be due to gene differences. We will not go over the evidence here, but there is no indication
that any kind of learning is involved in the genesis of these traits, as there is with the traits associated with father absence. However, social systems differ in the extent to which they are congenial to or inimical to the spread of sociopathic individuals in a population.
Psychiatrists have a diagnostic category of sociopathy or antisocial
personality disorder. There is a very big overlap between the psychiatrists’ sociopaths and what police and the courts see as habitual repeat criminals. When one looks carefully at the list of characteristics of sociopaths, it is apparent that criminality is only one of a number of traits that most of these males share. We must make sense of a whole constellation of traits if we are to understand sociopathy. Further, it is not clear that it really is a disorder. The whole idea of disorder or pathology is, of course, bound to the perspective of whoever is doing the evaluation. Sociopathy is certainly a disorder from the viewpoint of the courts and the police, but it may not be a disorder from the perspective of Darwinian fitness."