Funny, Freud suggested something very similar in _Totem and Taboo_, and faced a lot of ridicule for it. Would be interesting if he were finally vindicated to some extent.
He's been vindicated time and time again, his theories are the most influential of any one writer in psychology. I took a great books course and had to struggle through MULTIPLE made up case studies, and pretend these are "great" when it's just BS. Still, thousands reading his works every year and universities vindicating his theories doesn't mean he didn't fabricate data, espouse cocaine use, and all of the other negatives people bring up time and again.
Freud is far from 'vindicated'. At least over here (The Netherlands, and probably most of Western Europe/US), Freud is seen as an important figure historically, but (most of?) his work is not considered valid.
EDIT: I mean in academia; I suppose his ideas are still quite popular culturally.
Common sense would tell you there's some truth to it. For centuries we killed murderers and rapists and thus removed them from the gene pool. Data shows testosterone levels, which are correlated with violence, have dropped massively over the last few decades, whether that is genetic or environmental and to what extent for each is up for debate
WWI and WII basically selected to kill off Europe's bravest and most nationalistic men, those who immediately signed up to fight and were thrown in the meat grinder.
I'm partly convinced that's why America is so different from Europe, we managed to avoid most of the carnage of those wars
Don't forget that immigrants to America were probably skewed toward certain personality types. And, of course, all personality traits are heritable to some degree.
There is a neat paper I can't find which runs the numbers. So from memory:
For about 1000 years, we know that west-european states executed about 1% of each generation. Assume it's the most violent 1%, and that violence is 50% heritable. Plugging these into standard formulas for animal breeding, and I believe the answer is that this explains about half the decline in the murder rate over this period.
Obviously there are some giant caveats here. But it's super-interesting that a back-of-the-envelope calculation gets you the right order of magnitude.
I'm dubious though of wars doing much. The big 20th C meat-grinder was largely conscripts. And anyway I'm not sure how correlated with blood-thirst most recruiting was. Whereas getting yourself hanged for murder in peacetime was pretty tightly correlated.
I assume sshine was talking about Freud's conjectures on evolutionary biology and the evolutionary conservatism of archaic structures in the brain.
Much of that work is on its surface unremarkable today, though not at the time. But as it wasn't really central to his most influential work, it also hasn't been (IMHO) particularly influential
It really is. In modern context "evolution" doesn't mean "any type of evolution e.g. Lamarckian evolution, evolution from natural selection or Pokemon evolution from leveling up". It really just means "evolution from natural selection" which is not only a novel idea proposed by Darwin, but Darwin also pioneered to research on this idea (i.e. going around the world and collecting specimens that could potentially falsify his hypothesis but instead support it).
That Plato thought your mind transfers from your previous souls and this is called "evolution" is simply an accident of language.