People who commit crimes may be obeying an evolutionary impulse
Thu, 03 Mar 2011 12:35:00 GMT
"…restoring Darwinian evolution to the study of criminal behaviour may explain why crime is committed by young men…"
There is no such thing as a criminal gene and therefore no such thing as a born criminal. However, there is growing evidence that some ‘hard-wired’ behavioural biases, carved out by evolution to solve the ultimate challenges of human survival, may come into play in certain environments and settings where crime occurs.
This is the controversial claim made by a University of Huddersfield lecturer and researcher who has set out to challenge some of the most deeply held beliefs of British social scientists and criminologists. Dr Jason Roach aims to restore Darwinian evolution to the study of criminal behaviour. It can help to explain why, for example, such a preponderance of crime is committed by young men.
But he is well aware of the resistance he will meet and the reasons for it. The importance of evolutionary theory is generally accepted by biological science, says Dr Roach, but in Britain social scientists have been reluctant to do the same.
One reason for this, he argues, is that evolutionary theory has been falsely linked with the pseudo-science of eugenics, which descended to the depths of evil in Hitler's Third Reich. "But what the Nazis tried to do is not evolution at all," says Dr Roach.
"Evolution simply tells us that those organisms and animals that adapt best to their situations are most likely to reproduce and therefore pass on their traits and abilities so that their offspring will be better equipped. This is referred to as all species ‘ultimate goal’, although as a motivation for behaviour it is an unconscious one.
"It’s nothing to do with eugenics and super races. But in Britain, criminologists have been particularly wary of that. If you mention biology and social biology, a lot of British criminologists will claim that it is deterministic, that you are saying that people are born with genes that predispose to them to be criminals. But that it isn’t what it is about at all. Behaviour is the result of complex interactions between biology and environment. Human beings are not drone-like, driven by conditioned responses. We have evolved wonderful brains that allow us to weigh our options up before acting. The purpose of applying the evolutionary approach to crime is to enrich understanding of the origins of criminal behaviour, not to excuse those who commit crime by saying that they could not help it – it was in their genes."
One area in which evolutionary theory can help to explain criminal behaviour is that of murder. In most of the world’s societies, the majority of homicides are committed by young men, killing each other. The conventional criminological explanation revolves around the social circumstances and the upbringing of violent males that deal in the here-and-now or the not too distant past, according to Dr Roach.
He seeks to delve much deeper, aided by evolutionary theory. And this tells him that the reason most crimes are committed by young males is that they are in competition with each other. Criminal behaviour is often the end result of male competition for female attention, sometimes this spills over into inter-male violence.
"The homicide of males is usually competition over reproductive access to females - from the 'you looking at my bird?' scenario on Friday nights to stealing and robbing so you get the trappings and material that will attract members of the opposite sex.
"Young males basically have the same hard wiring that we all have – with added testosterone. Males basically commit crime in order to attract females, and if you look at most societies, most of the power and most of the women are actually not so much controlled by but are attracted to older males. So younger males are actually very much at a disadvantage."
Research has shown, says Dr Roach, that in societies where there are more females than males, competition among men is less fierce. Such societies tend to be more licentious but less violent than those in which there are more males than females. This equation means more competition and more violent confrontation.
Another dimension to young males, says Dr Roach, is that they discount time.
"If you live in a disadvantaged area, maybe there is part of the human psyche that can work out that your prospective longevity isn’t that great. Your life isn’t that great, so what do you do? You make the most of it, you seize the day. Again evolved unconscious processes may be at work here, with criminal behaviour representing only one option from other more legal ones, such as seeing education or business acumen as your ticket out.
"That is possibly why young people take more risks than older people. When you have got kids, then you are moving on to protecting your offspring as opposed to creating them in the first place and you have a completely different set of aims in your life."
But if the evolutionary perspective helps us to understand the deep roots of criminal behaviour, are we helpless to do anything about it? Dr Roach says "emphatically not."
There are some political lessons that could be learned, according to Dr Roach, and they tend to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Greater equality might reduce some of the need for competition. Young males in particular could be shown that they had more of a chance in life, that they didn’t have to seize it all now.
"As human beings we don’t come into this world as a blank sheet of paper; nor do we come in with a predisposition to being a criminal or a psychopath," says Dr Roach.
"There is a complex interaction between nature and nurture and another aspect of the reluctance of British criminologists in general to embrace or even think about the evolutionary perspective is that they see it as totally biological, that it’s all about genes. But it isn’t. It’s about how organisms adapt to their environment and the pressures that puts on people."
