Serial Killers: Evolution’s Rogue Protocol

by John-Michael Kuczynski

For a time, I was intensely interested in serial killers—like many people, fascinated by the seemingly inhuman nature of their crimes. That interest has since shifted. These days, I find myself more absorbed by financial crime: the kinds of transgressions that live closer to home. Still, serial killerdom (to coin a term) lingers in the background—not just as a macabre curiosity, but as a deeply revealing glitch in the human operating system.

Some claim that serial murder is a product of modernity—that Jack the Ripper was the first of his kind, made possible by the anonymity of urban life, the rise of mass media, and the centralization of police databases. There’s some truth to this. But only some.

Not a New Behavior—Just a New Category

If you step outside the modernist lens, you’ll find that serial murder, in all but name, has long existed. Think Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Báthory, or the methodical slaughtering priests of certain empires. What’s new isn’t the behavior—it’s the recognition of it as a distinct category. The concept of a “serial killer” is a product of the modern bureaucratic state: one with the tools to track, name, and mythologize recurring patterns of predatory violence.

Still, that doesn’t settle the matter. What remains unsettling—what keeps the phenomenon from fading into true-crime trivia—is the specificity and repeatability of it.

Serial Killerdom as a Syndrome

Serial murder is not random violence. It’s not a bar fight that went too far. It is premeditated, patterned, and highly stylized. Serial killers tend to have victim types. They often fantasize for years before acting. They ritualize. They repeat.

And crucially, the types of serial killers are relatively limited in number. Criminologists consistently identify recurring patterns: organized vs. disorganized, visionary vs. hedonistic, power-oriented vs. mission-driven. This taxonomic stability strongly suggests that serial killerdom isn’t just a psychological smear of generic trauma responses—it’s a specific cognitive-behavioral protocol.

That implies something chilling: biological basis. Or, more precisely, evolutionary basis.

Trauma as Trigger, Not Cause

It’s well known that many serial killers had disturbing upbringings. John Wayne Gacy. Henry Lee Lucas. Others endured abuse or neglect that could plausibly catalyze deep pathology. But “trauma = serial killer” doesn’t track. If it did, the world would be overrun. Most abuse victims don’t become serial murderers. And some of the most notorious killers—Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy—did not experience abuse that exceeds the ordinary dysfunction of a turbulent household. Their biographies do not suffice.

Which means we’re not looking at trauma as a cause. We’re looking at trauma as a trigger—a spark that ignites a very particular, pre-existing architecture. This is how it works with many cognitive anomalies: you don’t “develop” synesthesia or savant syndrome out of nothing; the neural structure is latent. Conditions activate it.

So it is with serial killers. There is something pre-installed. Something waiting.

The Evolutionary Question

If this behavior is so specific, so structured, and so eerily reproducible, then we have to ask: Where did it come from?

Evolution does not design behaviors from scratch every time. It repurposes. It mutates. It experiments with hyper-specialists. And some of these experiments fail catastrophically in modern contexts.

So perhaps serial killerdom is:

• A spandrel: an accidental byproduct of otherwise adaptive features (like predator focus, social camouflage, or narrative imagination);

• A vestigial adaptation: once useful, now dangerous;

• Or an extreme failure mode of modules that serve critical social functions in the rest of us—like the ability to compartmentalize, to ritualize, to abstract people into symbols.

This doesn’t mean evolution selected for serial killing. But it might mean that, in certain ancestral contexts, its component traits—ruthlessness, emotional detachment, deception, pattern-driven aggression—were selectively advantageous. In warfare. In territorial conflict. In covert enforcement.

In that light, serial killerdom isn’t alien. It’s disturbingly human.

Predators in the Social Jungle

What sets serial killers apart isn’t the violence. It’s the method. They don’t rage. They stalk. They hunt. They blend in. They often mimic normal social behavior with chilling precision.

This isn’t just moral deformity. It’s an overactivation of predator mode, made grotesque by misfiring reward circuits and unregulated internal narratives. Many killers have vivid fantasy lives that precede their crimes by years. They rehearse. They refine. The ritual precedes the act.

In some evolutionary register, this capacity for internal rehearsal and abstraction is the very thing that made humans the apex species. Serial killers are not broken animals. They are overclocked machines.

Final Thought

The serial killer is not simply “evil.” Nor merely “traumatized.” He is the carrier of a protocol that should not be active—but is. A latent behavior complex, shaped by evolutionary detours and triggered by environmental instability, that reproduces itself with terrifying fidelity. Serial killerdom is not just a social problem. It’s a cognitive mutation. And it tells us something deep, and uncomfortable, about who we are.