Posted on 03/11/2015 5:01:04 AM PDT by ek_hornbeck
Murders are tragic but rare. But what drives some people to kill? Michael Mosley has been looking into research exploring the minds of murderers.
In the 1870s Dr Cesare Lombroso, sometimes called the father of scientific criminology, was studying criminals imprisoned in Turin.
He became convinced that criminals are a step back down the evolutionary ladder, a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man. He decided, after years of study, that you could tell a criminal by the shape of their face and the excessive length of their ape-like arms.
"A criminal's ears," he wrote, "are often of a large size. The nose is frequently upturned or of a flattened character in thieves. In murderers it is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey."
Sadly, spotting potential murderers turned out to be nothing like as simple as Dr Lombroso claimed and his "scientific" findings were soon discredited. But this was the beginning of a search that has continued for more than a century - to find out if criminals, and in particular murderers, have different brains to the rest of us.
The invention of functional brain scanning in the 1980s revolutionised the understanding of what goes on inside our heads. The first scanning study of murderers was carried out in California by British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Raine. He was attracted to the Golden State not by the beaches but by, as he put it, "the large numbers of very violent and homicidal individuals".
Over the course of many years Raine and his team scanned the brains of numerous murderers and nearly all showed similar brain changes. There was reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain which controls emotional impulses, and over activation of the amygdala, ...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
There's often a knee-jerk reaction to these types of studies because they (allegedly) pave the way for the "my genes made me do it" defense in court, but from a legal standpoint, that is no weaker or stronger than the "a bad environment/abusive upbringing made me do it" which has become standard. If anything, studies like this, while acknowledging environmental triggers, focus the blame and responsibility more on the individual criminal than on society.
Doesn't that say environment has a strong influence?
Are people responsible for their actions?
various factors influence attitudes. However, people CHOOSE their actions.
As someone once said, “Evil thoughts are like birds. You cannot stop them flying over your head, but you can stop them from nesting in your hair.”
Thoughts can lead to attitudes which then greatly influence actions.
Or you could say people’s behavior and lifestyle causes changes within the brain.
I think there is a good possibility that killers are born as well. I was reading a story yesterday about a couple whose kid is extremely violent, is obsessed with knives, bleeding and stabbing..Here you can read it.
Well, since no one is a murderer until they murder someone, I’d say there is a strong case for “murderers are made”.
Violent men and women are often easily led.
Just to be clear, nobody is claiming that this gene "causes" psychopathic behavior, just that some people have a genetic predisposition. Most people with the mutant MAOA gene are not violent criminals, and not all violent criminals have the MAOA gene.
On the other hand, it is saying that given the right environmental triggers, those with the mutant MAOA gene are much more likely to become violent criminals. You see the same thing with alcoholics and other drug addicts: environment plays a big role, but some people are naturally more predisposed to it than others.
There could be a strong correlation with measured intelligence and education.
The worst part about finding something like this to be true, is that Liberals will scream that we must stop treating these poor people as criminals and accept them as they are, after all “they were born that way!”
Hell, we already know this to be true in serial killers - the studies have shown that they started with harming, maiming, and then killing small animals, before finally moving on to hurting and killing humans: Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, etc...!
Since they're already screaming that we can't treat them as criminals because they're "victims of poverty" or (in the case of non-white criminals) "victims of racism", I'm not sure it makes any difference.
If I was stuck in a situation where I was forced to live in a crime ridden ghetto I would certainly be packing(legally or not) and it would be up to the cops and the courts to determine if anyone I might kill was murder or self defense.
we name things as well fed people who think we are in a new golden age...
here is a few words from Sultan Knish's Blog:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-ages-of-purim.html
The illusion of history is that every age brings with it the end of history, a new age whose awesome achievements break with the past and usher in a boundless future. And then the walls come crashing down and the new era of history ends up buried under the rubble of time.
History never ends. That is the lesson of the Holocaust, of Purim and of countless other horrifying intrusions of the old into the new. The shining new era that begins with grand public spectacles and displays of the power and might of an empire, ends with corpses and men and women fighting and running for their lives.
In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.
Hungary’s youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/02/cultural_marxism.html
They are born.
The first man born of a woman was a murderer. (Cain)
If I was stuck in a situation where I was forced to live in a crime ridden ghetto I would certainly be packing(legally or not) and it would be up to the cops and the courts to determine if anyone I might kill was murder or self defense
Since most of these ghetto types make a living by preying on people who pose no plausible threat to them, the line isn't nearly as fine as you suggest.
CROWDING INTO THE BEHAVIORAL SINK
Calhoun, J. B. (1962). Population density and social pathology. Scientific American, 206(3), 139-148.
....
Aggression. Normally in the wild, male rats will fight other male rats for dominant positions in the social hierarchy. These fights were observed among the more aggressive rats in this study as well. The difference was that here, unlike in their natural environments, top-ranking males were required to fight frequently in order to maintain their positions and often the fights involved several rats in a general brawl. Nevertheless, the strongest males were observed to be the most normal within the center pens.
However, even those animals would sometimes exhibit “signs of pathology; going berserk; attacking females, juveniles, and less active males; and showing a particular predilection—which rats do not normally display—for biting other rats on the tail” (p. 146).
...
Sexual deviance. These probers also refused to participate in the natural rituals of mating. Normally, a male rat will pursue a female in heat until she escapes into her burrow. Then, the male will wait patiently and even perform a courtship dance directly outside her door. Finally, she emerges from the burrow and the mating takes place. In Calhoun’s study, this ritual was adhered to by most of the
sexually active males except the probers. They completely refused to wait and followed the female right into her burrow. Sometimes the nests inside the burrow contained young that had failed to survive, and it was here that late in the study the probers turned cannibalistic. Another group of male rats was termed the pansexuals because they attempted to mate with any and all other rats indiscriminately. They sexually approached other males, juveniles, and females that were not in heat. This was a submissive group that was often attacked by the more dominant male rats, but did not fight for dominance.
Reproductive abnormalities. Rats have a natural instinct for nest building. In this study, small strips of paper were provided in unlimited quantities as nest material. The females are normally extremely active in the process of building nests as the time for giving birth approaches. They gather the material and pile it up so that it forms a cushion. Then they arrange the nest so that it has a small indentation in the middle to hold the young. However, the females in the behavioral sink gradually lost their ability (or inclination) to build adequate nests. At first they failed to form the indentation in the middle. Then, as time went on, they collected fewer and fewer strips of paper so that eventually the infants were born directly on the sawdust that covered the pen’s floor.
More at http://www.edmondschools.net/Portals/3/docs/Terri_McGill/READ-Crowding.pdf
Related topic, for anyone interested in criminality, Stanton Samenow’s Inside the Criminal Mind. Samenow interviewed convicts in prison and based on what they told him he concluded that criminals commit crime because they want to.
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Criminal-Mind-Revised-Updated-ebook/dp/B006NKMM5C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1426078803&sr=8-2&keywords=inside+the+criminal+mind+revised+and+updated+edition
Don’t know about Lombroso’s work, but over the years I’ve noticed that people who resemble birds make great salesman. Like birds, they literally do not give up.
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