Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  49. Wilkinson-Ryan and Westen, “Identity Disturbance,” citing S. Akhtar, Broken Structures: Severe Personality Disorders and Their Treatment (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1992).

  50. Putnam and Silk, “Emotion Dysregulation.”

  51. Douglas A. Granger, Nancy A. Dreschel, and Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff, “Developmental Psychoneuroimmunology: The Role of Cytokine Network Activation in the Epigenesis of Developmental Psychopathology,” in Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms in Psychopathology, ed. Dante Cicchetti and Elaine Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 293–323; M. Marcenaro et al., “Rheumatoid Arthritis, Personality, Stress Response Style, and Coping with Illness. A Preliminary Survey,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 876 (1999): 419–25.

  52. N. Kopeloff, L. M. Kopeloff, and M. E. Raney, “The Nervous System and Antibody Production,” Psychiatry Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1933): 84–106.

  53. M. Zimmerman and J. I. Mattia, “Axis I Diagnostic Comorbidity and Borderline Personality Disorder,” Comprehensive Psychiatry 40 (1999): 245–52.

  54. I. Goethals et al., “Brain Perfusion SPECT in Impulsivity-Related Personality Disorders,” Behavioural Brain Research 157, no. 1 (2005): 187–92.

  55. McCloskey, Phan, and Coccaro, “Neuroimaging.”

  CHAPTER 9: THE PERFECT “BORDERPATH”: CHAIRMAN MAO

  1. K. S. Lo, “Introduction,” in Selected Works of Contemporary Yixing Potters, ed. Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong: Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1994), p. 9. In one of those twists that makes collecting interesting, revolution teapots are still expensive, despite their pedestrian artistry, because the zisha being mined during that period allows for a roughness that results in an exceptionally beautiful patina upon use.

  2. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 96.

  3. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, 1st ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp. 537, 566.

  4. R. J. Rummel, “Getting My Reestimate of Mao's Democide Out,” Democratic Peace, 2005, http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/11/getting-my-reestimate-of-maos-democide.html (accessed December 16, 2005).

  5. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 9.

  6. Lucian W. Pye, “Rethinking the Man in the Leader,” China Journal 35 (1996): 107–12. See also Ross Terrill, “Mao in History,” National Interest 52 (1998): 54–63.

  7. Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 16.

  8. Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 6, 7.

  9. Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy, pp. 14, 29.

  10. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 85, 86.

  11. Philip Short, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), p. 69.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., pp. 144, 145.

  14. Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 51–65.

  15. Short, Mao, p. 226; Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong (New York: Lipper/Viking, 1999), p. 80.

  16. William Cardasis, Jamie A. Hochman, and Kenneth R. Silk, “Transitional Objects and Borderline Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 154, no. 2 (1997): 250–55; Mason and Kreger, Eggshells, p. 44; Lawrence A. Labbate and David M. Benedek, “Bedside Stuffed Animals and Borderline Personality,” Psychological Reports 79 (1996); T. A. Stern and R. L. Glick, “Significance of Stuffed Animals at the Bedside and What They Can Reveal about Patients,” Psychosomatics 34 (1993). Borderline patients will frequently bring teddy bears and other such “transitional objects” with them for hospital stays. This is sometimes used by doctors to intuit problematic patients. For example, one study found that 61% of psychiatric inpatients with stuffed animals in their rooms had a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, as opposed to only 17% having borderline personality disorder in the overall psychiatric unit during the same period of time. Be careful if you decide to bring Binky to the psychiatric hospital with you.

  17. Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 89, 90.

  18. Ibid., pp. 631–32; Zhisui Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 382–84.

  19. Li, Private Life, p. 63.

  20. Spence, Mao Zedong, p. 98.

  21. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 69.

  22. Ibid., p. 98.

  23. Li, Private Life, p. 81.

  24. Ibid., p. 505.

  25. Ibid., p. 363.

  26. Ibid., p. 121.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid., p. 125.

  29. Ibid., p. 338.

  30. Li, Private Life, pp. 382–84.

  31. Hazlett et al., “Reduced Anterior.”

  32. Spence, Mao Zedong, p. 144.

  33. Ibid., p. 124.

  34. Kreisman and Straus, Crazy, p. 50.

  35. Li, Private Life, p. 180.

  36. Andrew J. Nathan, foreword to Li, Private Life, p. viii.

  37. Short, Mao, pp. 69, 70.

  38. Ibid., p. 71.

  39. Leland M. Heller, Life at the Border: Understanding and Recovering from the Borderline Personality Disorder (Okeechobee, FL: Dyslimbia Press, 2000), p. 17.

  40. Koenigsberg et al., “Interpersonal.”

  41. Stuart R. Schram, “Mao Tse-tung and Theory of Permanent Revolution,” China Quarterly 46 (1971): 221–44.

  42. Short, Mao, p. 384.

  43. R. J. Waldinger, “The Role of Psychodynamic Concepts in the Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1 (1993): 158–67.

  44. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 35.

  45. Bohus, Schmahl, and Lieb, “New Developments.” See also H. W. Koenigsberg et al., “Characterizing Affective Instability in Borderline Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 159, no. 5 (2002): 784–88.

  46. Li, Private Life, p. 107.

  47. T. Ebisawa, “Circadian Rhythms in the CNS and Peripheral Clock Disorders: Human Sleep Disorders and Clock Genes,” Journal of Pharmacological Sciences 103, no. 2 (2007): 150–54; R. Grant Steen, The Evolving Brain: The Known and the Unknown (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), p. 66.

  48. Li, Private Life, p. 364.

  49. Ibid., p. 359.

  50. William A. Henkin and Patrick J. Carnes, “Is Sex Addiction a Myth?” in Clashing Views on Abnormal Psychology, ed. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997), pp. 196–215.

  51. J. Bancroft and Z. Vukadinovic, “Sexual Addiction, Sexual Compulsivity, Sexual Impulsivity, or What? Toward a Theoretical Model,” Journal of Sex Research 41, no. 3 (2004): 225–34.

  52. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 346.

  53. Short, Mao, pp. 475, 586.

  54. Ibid., p. 505.

  55. Li, Private Life, pp. 339, 340.

  56. Ibid., p. 387.

  57. Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 32.

  58. C. C. Dickey et al., “A MRI Study of Fusiform Gyrus in Schizotypal Personality Disorder,” Schizophrenia Research 64, no. 1 (2003): 35–39.

  59. Spence, Mao Zedong, p. 51.

  60. Short, Mao, p. 103.

  61. Terrill, Mao, p. 18.

  62. Li, Private Life, p. 84.

  63. Ibid., p. xix.

  64. Terrill, Mao, p. 18.

  65. Li, Private Life, p. 351.

  66. Ibid., p. 120.

  67. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 95.

  68. Short, Mao, p. 467.

  69. Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 437, 438.

  70. Li, Private Life, p. 106.

  71. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 569.

  72. Ibid., p. 546.

  73. Meloy, Violence, p. 20.

  74. Jay R. Kaplan et al., “Central Nervous System Monoamine Correlates of Social Dominance in Cynomolgus Monkeys (Macaca fascicularis),” Neuropsychopharmacology 26, no. 4 (2002): 431–43; Jeffrey Rogers et al., “Genetics of Monoamine Metabolites in Baboons,” Biological Psychiatry 55, no. 7 (2004)
: 739–45.

  75. Gary Marcus, Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 170.

  76. Short, Mao, p. 471.

  77. Chang and Halliday, p. 544.

  78. Ibid., p. 42.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Spence, Mao Zedong, p. 100.

  81. Li, Private Life, p. 125.

  82. Chang and Halliday, Mao, pp. 144, 199.

  83. Albert Mohler, “Chairman Mao's Reign of Terror—Finally the Truth Comes Out,” www.AlbertMohler.com, October 20, 2005, http://www.albertmohler.com/commentary_print.php?cdate=2005-10-20 (accessed November 1, 2005).

  84. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 332.

  85. Li, Private Life, pp. 115, 124.

  86. Spence, Mao Zedong, p. 101.

  87. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 262.

  88. Short, Mao, p. 550.

  89. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 13.

  90. See also Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams, “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy,” Journal of Research in Personality 36, no. 6 (2002): 556–63.

  91. W. John Livesley et al., “Genetic and Environmental Contributions of Dimensions of Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150, no. 12 (1993): 1826–31.

  92. Carl Vogel, “A Field Guide to Narcissism,” Psychology Today, January/February 2006, pp. 68–74.

  93. A. Benvenuti et al., “Psychotic Features in Borderline Patients: Is There a Connection to Mood Dysregulation?” Bipolar Disorders 7 (2005): 338–43; D. Pizzagalli et al., “Brain Electric Correlates of Strong Belief in Paranormal Phenomena: Intracerebral EEG Source and Regional Omega Complexity Analyses,” Psychiatry Research 100, no. 3 (2000): 139–54; A. Sbrana et al., “The Psychotic Spectrum: Validity and Reliability of the Structured Clinical Interview for the Psychotic Spectrum,” Schizophrenia Research 75, no. 2 (2005): 375–89.

  94. Li, Private Life, p. 233.

  95. Ibid., p. 443.

  96. Meloy, Violence, pp. 30–31.

  97. Short, Mao, p. 590.

  98. Ibid., p. 594.

  99. Ibid., p. 600.

  100. Jerrold Post, “Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology,” Political Psychology 14, no. 1 (1993): 99–121; Vamik Volkan, “Narcissistic Personality Organization and Reparative Leadership,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 30 (1980): 131–52.

  101. Post, “Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality.”

  102. Li, Private Life, p. 9.

  103. Stephen Sherrill, “Acquired Situational Narcissism,” New York Times, December 9, 2001.

  104. Terrill, Mao, p. 19.

  105. Ibid.

  106. Tim Healy and David Hsieh, “Mao Now,” Asiaweek, September 6, 1996, http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/96/0906/cs1.html (accessed October 30, 2005).

  CHAPTER 10: EVOLUTION AND MACHIAVELLIANISM

  1. Linda Mealey, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 523–99; Skeem et al., “Psychopathic Personality or Personalities?”

  2. Mealey, “Sociobiology.” See also an earlier reference: Adrian Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime: Crime Behavior as a Clinical Disorder (San Diego: Academic Press, 1993). There is also the much more comprehensive recent treatment of antisocial and moral behavior from both a neurological and evolutionary perspective: Raine and Yang, “Neural Foundations.”

  3. Michelle Caruso, “Laci's Ex-Beau Shot His Girl Friend,” National Enquirer, July 8, 2003.

  4. Paulhus and Williams, “Dark Triad of Personality.”

  5. Hariri et al., “A Susceptibility Gene.”

  6. L. Mealey, “Primary Sociopathy (Psychopathy Is a Type, Secondary Is Not),” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, no. 3 (1995): 579–87.

  7. Renshon, Presidential Candidates, p. 69.

  8. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 39–45.

  9. Randolph Nesse, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1, no. 3 (1990): 261–89.

  10. Raine and Yang, “Neural Foundations.”

  11. R. W. Byrne and A. Whiten, Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1988); Andrew Whiten and Richard W. Byrne, Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  12. L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptions for Social Exchange,” in The Adapted Mind, ed. J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and John Toland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 163–228; L. Cosmides et al., “Detecting Cheaters,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 11 (2005): 505–506; Hauser, Moral Minds, p. 287. But see Buller, Adapting Minds; David J. Buller, Jerry A. Fodor, and Tessa L. Crume, “The Emperor Is Still Under-Dressed,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 11 (2005): 508–10. The battle of the reseach titans wages!

  13. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 278, citing Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

  14. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 117–18.

  15. Elin McCoy, The Emperor of Wine (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 7, 123, 275.

  16. P. D. Evans et al., “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” Science 309, no. 5741 (2005): 1717–20; N. Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens,” Science 309, no. 5741 (2005): 1720–22. M. Balter, “Evolution: Are Human Brains Still Evolving?” Science 309, no. 5741 (2005): 1662–63.

  17. Buller, Adapting Minds, p. 108.

  18. John S. Mattick and Igor V. Makunin, “Non-coding RNA,” Human Molecular Genetics 15, no. 1 (2006): R17–R29.

  19. G. Bloom and P. W. Sherman, “Dairying Barriers and the Distribution of Lactose Malabsorption,” Evolution and Human Behavior 26 (2005): 301–12.

  20. Deacon, Symbolic Species, pp. 321–75, citing Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

  21. Wade, Before the Dawn, p. 177.

  22. J. M. Murphy, “Psychiatric Labeling in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Science 141 (1976): 1019–28.

  23. David J. Cooke and Christine Michie, “Psychopathy across Cultures: North America and Scotland Compared,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108, no. 1 (1999): 58–68.

  24. Wade, Before the Dawn, p. 128.

  25. Ibid., p. 129. The quote is from Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew. I'd like to acknowledge a debt here to Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn—if you are interested in the development of humanity in the last 150,000 or so years, you couldn't do better than to read it.

  26. Steve Sailer, “Genes of History's Greatest Lover Found?” iSteve.com, 2003, http://www.isteve.com/2003_Genes_of_History_Greatest_Lover_Found.htm (accessed June 5, 2006).

  27. Ibid.

  28. Wade, Before the Dawn, pp. 236–37.

  29. “The First American to Be Able to Claim Descent from Genghis Khan Has Been Discovered,” History News Network, June 6, 2006, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/26356.html (accessed June 7, 2006).

  30. Dorothy Einon, “How Many Children Can One Man Have?” Ethology and Sociobiology 19, no. 6 (1998): 413–27.

  31. Laura L. Betzig, Despotism and Differential Reproduction (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1986), pp. 88, 89.

  32. Christie and Geis, Studies in Machiavellianism; Mealey, “Primary Sociopathy.”

  33. Betzig, Despotism, pp. 1, 2.

  34. Ibid., p. 88.

  35. Hauser, Moral Minds, pp. 283–84.

&
nbsp; 36. Betzig, Despotism, p. 81.

  37. Ibid., p. 77.

  38. Sigal G. Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion in Groups,” Yale SOM Working Paper, no. OB-01, 2000, http://ssrn.com/abstract=250894 (accessed May 28, 2006); Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  39. Harris, No Two Alike, p. 195.

  40. Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceauşescus (New York: Villard, 1991), p. 277.

  41. Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem: The World behind the Veil (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), p. 116.

  42. Ibid., p. 115.

  43. Galina Yermolenko, “Roxolana: The Greatest Empresse of the East,” Muslim World 95, no. 2 (2005): 231–48.

  44. Jerry Oppenheimer, House of Hilton: From Conrad to Paris (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 82.

  45. Ibid., p. 96.

  46. Ibid., p. 34.

  47. Ibid., p. 14.

  48. Ibid., pp. 9, 10.

  49. Croutier, Harem, p. 119.

  50. John Freely, Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 249.

  51. The many valuable footnotes by Bill Thayer in this excerpt have been eliminated for the sake of clarity. “Historia Augusta,” Loeb Classical Library, 1921, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Commodus*.html (accessed February 17, 2007).

  52. Stanley Bing, Rome, Inc. The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 62–63, 180.

  53. Peter J. Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 258.

  54. Kreisman and Straus, Crazy, pp. 2, 49. Even as gifted a biographer as Tina Brown was clearly dazzled by Princess Diana's charisma. In Brown's telling, for example, Diana's mood swings were a result of her Prince Charles–induced bulimia, rather than the bulimia being a symptom, along with the mood swings, of a sub-clinical personality disorder that flowered in the stress of palace life. Brown alludes to heredity in only desultory fashion, casually pointing out, for example, that “[b]ody abuse was second nature to the women in Diana's family—like writing thank-you letters.” Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 151–52.