Are Murderers Born or Made?

BBC News ^ | 3/10/15 | BBC

[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, ...

[ek_hornbeck]

I never said (nor did the article) that environment and behavior plays no role, just that certain people's brains are wired (from birth) in ways that predispose them to types of behavior. The article clearly states that you need a combination of genetic predisposition and childhood stress to make a violent psychopath.

On the other hand, you seem to adopt the extreme position that heredity plays NO role.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

On the other hand, you seem to adopt the extreme position that heredity plays NO role.

That is correct. When it come to the human brain and the human heart we are made, first by others and then by ourselves.

The making of ourselves is the biggest part and why you have some children who come out of dire circumstances helpful and gentle people and other children who come out of what should have been happy circumstances nasty and brutal.

Each has chosen to be what he wants to be.

People tend not to like this answer because it puts everything on themselves. However, it is the answer that fits the facts as known today.

[ek_hornbeck]

The making of ourselves is the biggest part and why you have some children who come out of dire circumstances helpful and gentle people and other children who come out of what should have been happy circumstances nasty and brutal.

If some come out of poverty and abuse as psychopaths and others come out of poverty and abuse as normal people, it strengthens the view that psychopathy is innate and hereditary, rather than a product of your environment. So what you say undermines your view that we're a blank slate and that genetics has nothing to do with the way people turn out.