Born to crime : the genetic causes of criminal behavior / Lawrence Taylor.

  • Taylor, Lawrence, 1942-
Date:
1984
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Born to crime : the genetic causes of criminal behavior / Lawrence Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    28 Born to Crime status differentiation. Yet as Wilson observed, few of these unifying properties can be interpreted as the inevitable outcome of either advanced social life or high intelligence.^^ Then why their universality? The most reasonable explanation appears to be that a common genetic memory is involved. A closer examination of one of these cultural traits will high¬ light the difference between the environmental and the genetic theory for its existence. As reflected in the list, incest taboos are universally found in every culture—most commonly, the taboo against sexual relations between brother and sister. Why this universality? The social scientist explains the taboo as a means of preventing the confusion in family roles that would result. Thus a brother-sister role relationship in a family would be clouded—and the family's structure threatened—by a sexual re¬ lationship such as in the husband-wife roles. The genetic expla¬ nation, however, recognizes the hereditary effects of inbreeding. The practice of inbreeding has been shown to cause hereditary diseases, create a high risk of stillbirth and result in physical or mental defects. As a result, the offspring of incestuous relation¬ ships leave far fewer descendants than the offspring of normal relationships, and so succeeding generations increasingly reflect the genetic predisposition of individuals who avoided incestual relationships. As Wilson put it, natural selection has probably ground away along these lines for thousands of generations, and for that reason human beings intuitively avoid incest through the simple, automatic rule of [the incest taboo]. To put the idea in its starkest form . . . human beings are guided by an instinct based on genes. Thus there appear to be clear indications that behavior pat¬ terns are inherited in human beings just as they are in all other animals. But if this is so, what is the mechanism by which be¬ havior is genetically passed from generation to generation? What are the distant origins of human behavior? Most importantly to our system of criminal justice, arc patterns of antisocial conduct included within these inherited behavioral traits? If so, to what extent—if any—can they be modified by the rehabilitative or deterrent techniques of our present penal system? The answers to at least some of these questions have been suggested by Wilson in his recent book Sociobiology: The New