Criminals are Born That Way

It is common to attribute crime to poverty, absent fathers, or poor education. Someone will notice that a lot of prisoners were fatherless, and decude that huge social problems could be solved encouraging fathers or funding school programs. Maybe, but it does not follow.

This essay explains:

The Blank Slate, the idea that differences in human personality and behaviour are entirely the result of that person’s experiences earlier in life, is utterly dominant in swathes of the social sciences, including sociology, criminology, and anthropology. Left-leaning academics adhere to the blank slate because it implies that humans are fully malleable. If a person’s behaviour, good or bad, is entirely the result of how they have been treated, then one can fix all of society’s problems by re-engineering society to give everyone an idyllic upbringing and so produce a utopia. Indeed, the failure to have done that already can only be attributed to the iniquity of the capitalists who thus need to be overthrown and deposed.

We’ve known for decades that this is utterly wrong. By far the biggest influence on a person’s personality and behavioural traits is their genes [1]. Twin studies, corroborated and supported by adoption studies and other types of study, tell us that about 50% of the variation in behavioural traits is attributable to differences in genes. Everything else – including biological randomness in embryonic development, the influences of families, schools and communities, and all the other influences and experiences specific to each person – only adds up to the other 50% [2].

The heritability of criminality is about 40–50%, which means that whether or not a child is likely to grow up to have a criminal record depends primarily on the genes he was born with, and less than that on his upbringing and childhood environment [3]. So why is this totally ignored in most discussions of the causes of crime?

Last month, a fatherless Canadian male transgender dropout shot and killed 6 in a school. It seems obvious that a deranged mom and a missing dad were major causes. Probably so. But we cannot know for sure in an individual case. We can research this by aggregated cases and measuring statistics. When that is done, the genetic causes are apparent, and the others are not.