When I first saw this article, "Math formula may explain why serial killers kill," on foxnews.com earlier today, I was more than skeptical. The article describes research on the spacing between murders of a 1980s serial killer. "The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law." The article also says that "The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill."
Now, lots of natural and human-oriented things and processes have been empirically linked to a power law: wealth, city population, the occurrence of earthquakes, etc. In a power law, the frequency of something varies according to some characteristic of that thing.
The power law is so prevalent, in fact, that one wonders whether there might be some yet-unknown law or factor that causes its emergence naturally and frequently.
What concerned me in the first two paragraphs of the above article was the reference that the power law finding might represent an "explanation" for serial killing. An empirical finding that data follows a power law can be interesting - but how could it be explanatory without understanding the natural forces, if any, that might lead to frequent emergence of the power law?
Nevertheless, I admit - I found the rest of the article highly interesting and compelling...
- Rick
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