‘I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti’

Hannibal Lecter, from whom the title quote comes, is the protagonist in the crime thriller “Silence of the Lambs”. He represents the ‘return of the repressed’ in human society. But in the larger Animal Kingdom, cannibalism, once thought to be a rare behavior, is now understood to be common. It is not the issue moral repugnance or repressed desires that animates this discussion by the question of evolutionary biology. Does it make evolutionary sense to eat your own kind? Sharpen your knives.