Born to kill

A century and a half ago, a Jewish Italian psychiatrist and prison doctor named Cesare Lombroso stared at the base of a criminal’s skull and had an epiphany.

What if criminality and other primitive human traits could be identified by telltale physical signs, he asked?

He came up with a list of traits he said were indicative of a more primitive human state – a sloping forehead, large jaw, a crease in the palm – creating an evolutionary hierarchy of peoples.

The biological approach to understanding crime quickly gained popularity and the idea was eagerly embraced by Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini adopted Lombroso’s principles in his racial laws of 1938, conveniently tweaking them to place Italians at the top and Jews at the bottom of the ladder. Meanwhile his allies in Germany were using the same ideas to lay foundations for the Holocaust.

No wonder then that the concept of a biological root for the criminal mind remains taboo.

But scientific discoveries in the last decade are wearing down resistance to the concept. Modern brain-imaging techniques and breakthroughs in genetics have transformed our understanding of the role that genes and the brain play in shaping human behaviour. But the picture is far from black and white.

Neurocriminologist-author Adrian Raine, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Criminology, is a case in point.

Research has associated a number of attributes – difficult birth, early childhood vitamin deficiency, low resting heart rate, brain anomalies – with certain types of crime, including murder.

Raine ticks all those attribute boxes, but instead of murdering people, he studies murderers, and is one of the world’s leading biological criminologists.

He confesses to going through a period of delinquency himself.

At the tender age of 10, he brewed his own liquor and sold it to relatives and visitors, using the profits to gamble on horses. But it didn’t take a lot for him to eventually find better ways of focusing his talents.

“For me, I think it was parents, whom I felt loved me,” Raine says in an interview with The Star. “A consistent, safe and secure home environment. Some stability that grounded me.”

In other words, there are multiple factors – both biological and environmental – that make up the bio-social jigsaw puzzle that leads to a life of crime.

We still don’t have all the pieces, or fully understand how they fit together. But research has given us enough to know that there is, at least, much we could do to improve our current strategy of 

relying on incarceration.

Overcrowded prisons and a failure to stem the tide of violent crime are a sign that a fresh perspective is needed, argues Raine, who insists Lombroso was on to something.

And decades of research have given Raine a lot to say about the matter. His new book offers a crash course on killers: what makes them tick, what makes them different from us.

First, he offers a global view.

We are introduced to the !Kung tribe, who live in the sun-baked Kalahari Desert, where harsh conditions force people to work together in order to survive. Not surprisingly, the !Kung (“!K” denotes a clicking sound) place high value on traits such as cooperation and altruism. Carry these prized social traits and you are more likely to find a mate and pass on your genes. 

At the other of the scale are the Yanomamo, whose bountiful Amazon-rainforest surroundings have cultivated a culture of warfare and infighting for social position. Almost half of all Yanomamo men over the age of 25 have killed, earning them higher status and, on average, more wives, and more children, than non-killers.

In other words, certain environmental conditions favour “gentle” and cooperative traits, such as good parenting or monogamy.

Others seem to foster behaviours more aligned with psychopathy – manipulation, fearlessness and fighting.

Such cultural trends seem to dispel the theory that violence is an anomaly in the human condition – indicating instead that crime can pay, from an evolutionary perspective.

 Raine goes on to point out that 98 per cent of all homicides are of people who do not share the killer’s genes.

In other words, when we kill, we kill smart. In the evolutionary game, we ensure that the selfish gene – our genes – prevail.

Raine pushes the argument by citing research indicating genes have a clear role to play.

Anomalies in genes for enzymes and neutrotransmitters involved in the regulation of impulse control, attention and other cognitive functions are often found in individuals who exhibit violence and aggression.

A lower resting heart rate is another biological marker for crime; scientists believe this may lead to a greater sense of fearlessness, resistance to social stressors, and an increase in stimulation-seeking behaviour.

And then there is the brain itself. Raine says that modern tools such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography have shown that criminal brains differ structurally, and in their activity patterns, from the brains of control groups.

The research itself is fascinating, but its implications extend way beyond humanity’s age-old obsession with grisly bloodshed.

Raine advocates a “public health approach to violence”. Many of his proposals focus on early development: encouraging pregnant women not to smoke and drink, and working to ensure that young children get proper nutrition and protection from toxicants – not to mention eating plenty of fish, whose omega-3 fatty acids are good for the brain. He argues, convincingly, that such benign and relatively cheap interventions could have huge social benefits.

He also emphasises that early environment – something as simple as the “love” Raine felt he received from his parents – is vital. Even though 50 per cent of the variation in antisocial behaviour is genetic in origin, the expression of those genes is not fixed.

 

 

 

 

The Anatomy of Violence 

By Adrian Raine

Published by Penguin Books

Available at Asia Books, Bt611

Reviewed by Natalie Heng