Erik-- with regard to your query below... crowding and violence are really
not correlated with humans.  Unlike rats, humans have culture to mediate the
potentially irritating effects of overcrowding.  Why cities correlate with
crime has to do in large part with opportunity-- if you're a thief, there
are more houses/businesses to burglarize, more cars to steal, more people on
the street; if your a drugdealer, more customers (and so on regarding a wide
variety of crimes).  Urbanism also correlates with age-- with cities having
higher proportions of youths, and youth and crime are strongly correlated.
Measurement is also an issue-- people in rural areas are more likely to
handle "problems" on their own, while city people are more likely to rely on
public institutions (the police, sanitation services, and so on)-- and thus
a higher proportion of committed crimes become publicly recorded. Regarding
the effects of culture, Asian cities are notorious for overcrowding, as well
as for their low rates of violent crime.  Native Americans were cutting each
other to pieces (literally) long before Europeans arrived. In the U.S.,
southern rural counties have high murder rates.

Gregg
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> Date:    Sat, 27 Nov 1999 16:19:21 -0700
> From:    Erik Hill <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: population and violence
>
> I'm not sure if I already posted this, but didn't see it replyed
> to nor did I
> see it get sent back to me (all my other posts do -- I'm set to
> retreive my own
> postings as well) so I'll post it again.
>
> I've done some research on the web which has convinced me that
> the greater a
> population of a city is, the greater the violent crime rate is
> (crimes/100000/year).  I see this also as a paleolithic
> maladaptation - we are
> poorly adapted to being crowded.  Any ideas?
>
> Erik