Jul 11, 2016 07:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 11, 2016 07:51 PM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/linking-crime-and...f-eugenics
EXCERPT: You would think that after all these misbegotten studies scientists would have given up on their efforts to find a biological basis for crime. But no: in recent years there’s been a renewal of the science, most recently in the studies of an apparent ‘warrior gene’ that makes some men (it’s always men) inherently violent. The reader might be forgiven for asking: when will all this junk science end?
That was my thinking when I began an enquiry into the biosocial studies of crime. As the author of a book on the origins of criminology, I was prepared to see a repetition of the patterns I’d seen with those 19th-century scientists: premature conclusions, racist assumptions, and classifying offenders as ‘other’. But I found something else.
[...] Contrary to what you might see in the media, not every study is the newly delivered truth from Mt Sinai or a step on to the slippery slope of eugenics. Scientific research rarely involves earth-shaking revelations. It’s the accumulation of information that eventually might lead to a new and more accurate way of viewing things. Studies suggesting links between genetics, brain structure and crime are merely pieces of evidence that add to an evolving understanding of something quite complicated.
Minus the clutter, if you look at the totality of peer-reviewed studies of the past several years, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that biology plays some role in criminal behaviour, impossible to quantify. The new science of epigenetics proposes an interaction between environment and heredity, in which environmental factors (such as childhood abuse) can affect the expression of genes. In other words, the nature-nurture division that scientists have been arguing about for more than a century is narrowing, and might someday disappear. Genes and brain structure do not represent a simple on-off switch that determines a person’s behaviour but, as some studies show, they can indicate a vulnerability. A temperamentally-impulsive young man who lives in deprivation and has been handed a gun is more likely to make a bad decision than an equally impulsive guy from a nice neighbourhood holding a tennis racket....
EXCERPT: You would think that after all these misbegotten studies scientists would have given up on their efforts to find a biological basis for crime. But no: in recent years there’s been a renewal of the science, most recently in the studies of an apparent ‘warrior gene’ that makes some men (it’s always men) inherently violent. The reader might be forgiven for asking: when will all this junk science end?
That was my thinking when I began an enquiry into the biosocial studies of crime. As the author of a book on the origins of criminology, I was prepared to see a repetition of the patterns I’d seen with those 19th-century scientists: premature conclusions, racist assumptions, and classifying offenders as ‘other’. But I found something else.
[...] Contrary to what you might see in the media, not every study is the newly delivered truth from Mt Sinai or a step on to the slippery slope of eugenics. Scientific research rarely involves earth-shaking revelations. It’s the accumulation of information that eventually might lead to a new and more accurate way of viewing things. Studies suggesting links between genetics, brain structure and crime are merely pieces of evidence that add to an evolving understanding of something quite complicated.
Minus the clutter, if you look at the totality of peer-reviewed studies of the past several years, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that biology plays some role in criminal behaviour, impossible to quantify. The new science of epigenetics proposes an interaction between environment and heredity, in which environmental factors (such as childhood abuse) can affect the expression of genes. In other words, the nature-nurture division that scientists have been arguing about for more than a century is narrowing, and might someday disappear. Genes and brain structure do not represent a simple on-off switch that determines a person’s behaviour but, as some studies show, they can indicate a vulnerability. A temperamentally-impulsive young man who lives in deprivation and has been handed a gun is more likely to make a bad decision than an equally impulsive guy from a nice neighbourhood holding a tennis racket....