The Anatomy of Violence (3 page)

There is a third development that is not so much scientific as an undeniable historical fact. The heavy emphasis on an exclusively social approach to crime and violence throughout the last century did nothing to turn the rising tide of this perennial problem. It is widely acknowledged in criminology that as crime went up throughout the 1970s and 1980s our society largely gave up on the
rehabilitation of inmates. Prisons became holding bays for the unrepentant—not retreats for the rehabilitation of lost souls, as the
Pennsylvania Prison Society espoused in the early nineteenth century. That single-minded approach has just not worked.

Thinking of human behavior from a biological perspective is no longer controversial—you can hardly open a newspaper or magazine today without reading about a new breakthrough in how genes and the brain shape our personality and influence the moral and financial decisions we make, or what we buy, or whether we turn out to vote or not. So why would they not also influence whether we commit a crime or not? The pendulum is slowly but surely swinging us back to Lombroso’s dramatic nineteenth-century intuition, and forcing us to revisit the tangled
ethical quandaries and legitimate social fears inherent in applying a neurocriminological approach. But when one considers the myriad ways in which violence plagues us, the stakes are too high, and the potential good is too great, to ignore the compelling scientific evidence we are discovering about the biological roots of crime.

I have three central
objectives in writing this book: First, to inform readers of the intriguing new scientific research that I and other scientists have conducted in recent years, focusing on the biological basis for crime and violence. Second, I want to stress that social
factors are critical both in interacting with biological forces in causing crime, and in directly producing the biological changes that predispose a person to violence. Third, I want to explore with you the practical implications of this emerging neurocriminological knowledge, ranging from
treatment to the legal system to social policy—both today and in the future.

I have written this book for the general reader who has at least a passing interest in crime, as well as for undergraduate and graduate students who want an accessible introduction to a new and exciting
perspective on crime and violence. Anyone with an inquisitive mind, who is curious about what makes the criminal offender tick will, I hope, find something of interest in these pages. In
The Anatomy of Violence
I’m going to reveal the internal mechanisms of violent crime as well as the way external forces interact with them to produce criminals. I will lay out what biological research is revealing on the root causes of crime. These deep roots are now being dug up using neuroscience tools, exposing the biological culprits giving rise to violence. Throughout I have included case studies of a rogues’ gallery of killers to illustrate my points.

More than anything I hope that this book will open your mind not just to how biological research can contribute to our understanding of violence, but also how it may lead to benign and acceptable ways of reducing the suffering violence causes to societies throughout the world. Biology is not destiny. We can unlock the causes of crime with a set of biosocial keys forged from a new generation of integrative interdisciplinary research combined with a
public-health perspective.

But we need to exchange views in an open and honest dialogue in order to ensure sensible use of this new knowledge for the good of everyone, to develop a framework for further research, and to firmly grasp the neuroethical issues surrounding neurocriminology to more effectively apply this new knowledge. We’ll begin our discussion with that pivotal moment when a scientist other than myself stared at the anatomy of a different violent offender, and began the long and precarious journey along the causeway of neurocriminology.

The scientific study of
biological
criminology started on a cold, gray November morning in 1871 on the east coast of Italy. Cesare
Lombroso, a former Italian army medic, was working as a psychiatrist and prison doctor at an asylum for the criminally insane in the town of
Pesaro.
¹
During a routine autopsy he peered into the skull of an infamous Calabrian brigand named Giuseppe
Villella. At that moment he experienced an epiphany that was to radically alter both his life and the course of criminology. He described this pivotal experience in the following way:

What did Lombroso see as he gazed deep into Villella’s skull? He detected an unusual indentation at its base, which he interpreted as reflecting a smaller
cerebellum—or “little
brain”—seated under the two larger hemispheres of the brain. From this singular and almost ghoulish observation, Lombroso went on to become the founding father of criminology, producing an extraordinarily controversial
theory that was to quickly have significant cross-continental influence.

Lombroso’s theory had two pivotal points: that there was a basis to crime originating in the brain, and that criminals were an evolutionary throwback to more primitive species. Criminals, Lombroso believed, could be identified on the basis of “
atavistic stigmata”—
physical characteristics from more primitive stages of human evolution, such as a large jaw, a sloping forehead, and a single palmar crease. Based on his measurements of such traits, Lombroso created an evolutionary hierarchy that placed Jews and Northern Italians at the top and Southern Italians (including
Villella), along with
Bolivians and
Peruvians, at the bottom. Perhaps not coincidentally, at the time there was much higher crime in the poorer, more agricultural south of
Italy, one of the many symptoms of the “southern problem” besetting the recently unified nation.

These beliefs, which were based partly on
Franz Gall’s phrenological theories, flourished throughout Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were discussed in parliaments and throughout public administrations as well as in universities. Contrary to appearances, Lombroso was a famous, well-meaning intellectual, as well as a staunch
supporter of the Italian Socialist Party. He wished to employ his research to serve the public good. He abhorred
retribution and instead placed the emphasis of punishment on the protection of society.
³
He strongly advocated rehabilitation of offenders. Yet at the same time he felt that the “
born criminal” was, to paraphrase
Shakespeare’s Prospero, “a devil, a born devil, upon whose nature nurture can never stick,”
⁴
and consequently favored the death penalty for such offenders.

Perhaps because of these views, Lombroso has become infamous in the annals of criminological history. The theory he spawned turned out to be socially disastrous, feeding the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century and directly influencing the
persecution of the Jewish people. The thinking and vocabulary of
Mussolini’s
racial laws of 1938, which excluded Jews from public schools and ownership, owes a rhetorical debt to Lombroso’s writings and theories, as well as those of the students who followed him into the early twentieth century.
⁵
The major difference in Mussolini’s laws was that
Aryans replaced Jews at the top of the racial hierarchy, and Jews were relegated to the bottom alongside
Africans and below Southern Italians. The dreadful irony in this—a fact carefully avoided in almost all references to Lombroso
in contemporary criminological texts—is that Lombroso himself was Jewish.

Understandably, Lombrosian thinking fell into disrepute in the twentieth century and was replaced by a
sociological perspective on human behavior—including
crime—which still holds sway today. It is not too difficult to see how this
biological-to-social pendulum swing came about. Crime, after all, is a social construction. It is defined by the law, and socio-legal processes hold sway over conviction and punishment. Laws change across time and space, and acts such as
prostitution that are illegal in one country are both legal and condoned in others. So how can there possibly be a biological and
genetic contribution to a social construction? Surely social causation
must
be central to crime? This simple argument has made a compelling case for an almost exclusive sociological and social-psychological perspective on crime, a seemingly sound bedrock on which to build workable principles for social control and treatment.

What do I make of Lombroso’s claims? Of course I reject Lombroso’s evolutionary scale that placed Northern Italians at the top and Southern Italians at the bottom. Not least because I am half Italian, through my mother, who was from Arpino in the southern half of Italy—I’m not an evolutionary throwback to a more
primitive species. And yet, unlike other criminologists, I do believe that Lombroso, stumbling as he did amid his offensive racial stereotyping and fumbling with the hundreds of macabre prisoner skulls he had collected, was on the path toward a sublime truth.

We’ll now see how modern-day sociobiologists have made a far more coherent and compelling argument than Lombroso ever could have that there is, in part, an evolutionary
basis to crime that provides the foundations for a genetic and brain basis to crime—the anatomy of
violence. We’ll explore violence in its many shapes and forms, from
homicide to
infanticide to
rape, and suggest from an anthropological perspective how different ecological niches may have given rise to the ultimate in selfish,
cheating behavior—psychopathy.

So why are people more than a hundred times more likely to be
murdered on the day they are born than to be murdered on an average day
in their life? Why are they fifty times more likely to be
murdered by their stepfather than by their natural father? Why do some men, not content to
rape only strangers, also want to rape their
wives? And why on earth do some
parents kill their kids?

These are among a host of questions that baffle society and that seem impenetrable from a social perspective. But there is an answer: the dark forces of our
evolutionary past. Despite what we may think of our good-naturedness, we are, it could be argued, little more than selfish gene machines that will, when the time and place is ripe, readily use violence and rape to ensure that our genes will be reproduced in the next generation.

In evolutionary terms, the human capacity for antisocial and violent behavior wasn’t a random occurrence. Even as early hominids developed the ability to reason, communicate, and cooperate, brute violence remained a successful
“
cheating” strategy. Most criminal acts can be seen, directly or indirectly, as a way to take resources away from others. The more resources or status a man has, the better able he is to attract young, fertile females. These women in turn are on the lookout for men who can give them the protection and the resources they need to raise their future children.

Many violent crimes may sound mindless, but they are informed by a primitive evolutionary logic. The mugger who kills for $1.79 is not getting much for his efforts, yet the general strategy of
theft can pay off in the long run in terms of acquiring goods. Drive-by shootings may seem senseless, but they help establish
dominance and status in the neighborhood. And while a barroom brawl over who’s next at the pool table may sound to you like fighting over nothing, the real game being played has nothing to do with pool.

From rape to robbery and even to theft, evolution has made violence and antisocial behavior a profitable way of life for a small minority of the population. The ultimate capacity for our antisocial misdeeds can be understood with reference to evolutionary biology. And it is from fundamental evolutionary mechanisms that
genetic differences among us have come into play and shaped the anatomy of violence.

We think of aggression today as
maladaptive
and aberrant. We give heavy legal sentences to violent offenders to deter them and others from committing such crimes, so surely it cannot be viewed as adaptive. But evolutionary psychologists think differently. Aggression is used to grab resources from others, and resources are the name of the evolutionary
game. Resources are needed to live, reproduce, and care for offspring. There is an
evolutionary root to actions that run the gamut from
bullies threatening other kids for candy to men robbing banks for money. And aggression—more specifically
defensive aggression—is also important in warding off others who may wish to steal our precious resources.
Bar fights help establish a pecking order of dominance and power, helping to put down rivals in the eyes of desirable women and other potential competitors. The mating game for males is about developing desirable status in society. Gaining a reputation for aggression not only increases status in one’s social group and allows more access to resources but also deters aggression from others. And that is true whether we are talking about a child in a playground or an inmate in a prison.

From a chubby-faced baby to a crooked-faced criminal, there is a development and unfolding of antisocial behavior predicated on biology and a cheating strategy to living out life. As a tiny kid, you took what you wanted without a care. All that mattered in the world was you and your
selfish desires. You may have forgotten those days, but in that untamed, uncivilized period of your life, you were standing on the threshold of a life of crime.

Of course culture quickly took care of that. You were taught by parents, and maybe your older siblings, the rules of social behavior—“Don’t hit your sister,” “Don’t take your brother’s toys”—and your evolving brain began to slowly learn not just that there were others in the world, but that
selfishness was not always a wise guiding principle on life’s long, arduous journey. You never exactly gave up on looking out for yourself and what was good for you, but at least you began to take into account others’ feelings and to express appropriate concern for others at appropriate moments—at times genuinely, and perhaps at other times disingenuously. But is there more to explaining antisocial behavior than the presence or absence of familial
socializing forces?