Replies

Well, then, we really have a lot of folks to release from prison. I mean, if it’s genetically compelled, there’s not much we can do but offer counseling to victims and pray for gene therapy needed to free these perps from their compulsion. /sarc

Yes, and those people who have the counselling gene have no choice about it either.

Richard Dawkins' crack pipe has already mused upon this:

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution…An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as “atonement’ for “sin’.
As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it.
Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life.
Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty?…[D]oesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing?
In such a philosophy, without any place for emotions and feelings, the intelligence reigns supreme.

Clarence Darrow, the communist evolutionist, used these kind of arguments to get Leopold and Loeb off the hook.