So I'd like to talk about some of the evolutionary mechanisms that explain family dynamics,

and then I'll talk about some of the parasitic ideas that attack the family unit.

Why, at this in academia, why is there such a... that attack the family unit.

Why, at least in academia,

why is there such hostility toward the family?

So those are the two key themes that I'll be covering.

So how did I first become interested in evolutionary psychology? I read the following book, Homicide, which I highly recommend for everybody in the audience.

It's a book that looks at patterns of criminality from an

evolutionary lens and they are two phenomena that are very relevant to the family. These are

ugly phenomena, bad things that happen in families. Number one, the Cinderella

effect, I don't know if anybody's heard of it, you've all heard of Cinderella, she's the

evil stepmother, well it turns out that the number one predictor of there being child abuse in a home

by a factor of a hundredfold greater than the second variable is if there is a

step-parent in the home.

So simply having biologically intact families

serves as a great protection against child abuse.

Now that doesn't mean that most child, a that parents are evil, but to the extent that we want to try to mitigate child abuse, having biologically intact families helps.

The second phenomenon that I learned in this book many years ago is who's the

number one most dangerous person in a woman's life around the world throughout all

of time period. It's not the guy hiding in the tree trying to attack you. It's usually the husband.

And what is the number one reason that husbands go into homicidal rages, which again is perfectly explained from an

evolutionary perspective, it's because of suspected or realized infidelity.

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