Wholepot Science
Chains in the Blood
As the great march of scientific progress continues, it can sometimes seem we have ever decreasing liberties. Faye Murray looks to a time when the first home your child knows might be a prison cell.
S
urprisingly, the idea of a possible links between criminality and genes has been around for well over a century. Indeed, the link between genetics and criminality was widely accepted back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a time when the field of eugenics and the concept of social Darwinism were rapidly rising to prominence due to the publication and resultant (hugely varying) interpretations of Darwin’s works. In fact, there was a time when prominent researchers believed that genes were completely responsible for criminal activity
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and that criminals could be identified by their physiological features – a practice known as typology. In some countries this belief was held so strongly that controlled programmes of sterilization took place to rid society of anyone from criminals to the mentally impaired. Of course, evidence quickly began to emerge suggesting that the environment also played a part in determining whether or not someone would end up as a criminal. Thus the classic debate of genetics versus the environment, and nature versus nurture arose, and much experimentation was undertaken
in an attempt to try and quantify the relative importance of both. However, in an unscientific twist, footholds that genetic theories of criminality possessed were quickly discredited after World War II, due to their unsavoury association with eugenics and German ‘criminal biology’ during the Nazi regime. It was only with Watson and Crick’s description of the structure of DNA — and therefore genes — that, slowly, such concepts could even begin to be discussed again. With the sequencing of the human genome there has been a flurry of renewed interest in the contribution
VIVID 3rd Edition May 2008