concluded that criminals were born not made. Their defining features were throwbacks to our evolutionary ancestors, dehumanized by biological defects. Modern man was civilized and elegant. Criminal man was barbaric, a savage with slanted forehead, jutting jaw, and excessively long arms. Criminal man was more ape-like than human-like. Because the cause of these differences was biological, Lombroso argued that a life of crime was inevitable. Change through rehabilitation was hopeless. To protect society, these natural born criminals had to be taken out of society, either locked up or executed. These ideas formed the basis of several eugenics’ movements, with the aim of weeding out the undesirable, less than human elements of society, be they less intelligent, from a non-Caucasian racial group, or from a culture with different religious beliefs.
Lombroso’s theory of criminality was soon rejected as scholars from a variety of different disciplines unearthed its racial stereotypes and shoddy methods, including a failure to include the many people with slanted foreheads, jutting jaws, and long arms who never committed crimes, and those with statuesque anatomy who did. This initiated a general skepticism and even fear of biological explanations, causing a swing in the opposite direction. Criminals were not born but made by corrupt societies. Humans are not born with biologically encoded scripts for behaving with malice or virtue. Rather, we are born with blank slates, waiting for society to inscribe its distinctive signature. So began a pendulous swing from nature to nurture. Though the oscillation continues to this day, there is increasing appreciation, perhaps especially in the arena of criminology, that both nature and nurture make important contributions. This change comes, in part, from a far greater understanding of genetics, combined with long term studies of how humans and other animals develop within environments that are either nurturing or damaging.
Consider the MAOA gene that I mentioned in the last section. This gene produces an enzyme that goes by the same shorthand of MAOA, or MonoAmine Oxidase A. MAOA is evolutionarily ancient, shared with other animals, and has two different forms — /ow and high — that influence the level of serotonin as well as the brain areas involved in social evaluation and emotional regulation. Early evidence for the critical role of this gene in social behavior emerged from a study that knocked it out of operation. Ifyou knock out the MAOA gene in mice, they quickly become hyper-hyper-aggressive. These genetically transformed mice have no capacity to regulate their social behavior. Consequently, all interactions are treated as confrontational and handled by aggressive attacks. These results are consistent with a large body of work in animals showing that heightened aggression and low levels of serotonin go hand in hand. These results are also consistent with work on humans. In, 1993, the Dutch biologist Hans Brunner analyzed the genetics of a large, extended family. Some individuals within this family were born with a defect that silenced the operation of the MAOA gene; they were like the mice who had this gene
silenced. Relative to others in the family, these individuals had a pronounced history of violence,
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