Biology and Criminology

The Biosocial Synthesis

Anthony Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135965945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Numerous criminologists have noted their dissatisfaction with the state of criminology. The need for a new paradigm for the 21st century is clear. However, many distrust biology as a factor in studies of criminal behavior, whether because of limited exposure or because the orientation of criminology in general has a propensity to see it as racist, classist, or at least illiberal. This innovative new book by noted criminologist Anthony Walsh dispels such fears, examining how information from the biological sciences strengthens criminology work and both complements and improves upon traditional theories of criminal behavior. With its reasoned case for biological science as a fundamental tool of the criminologist, Walsh's groundbreaking work will be required reading for all students and faculty within the field of criminology.

1 Why Criminology Needs Biology

Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati, describes himself as a proud member of the sociological criminology paradigm. He has contributed numerous books and countless articles to this paradigm and is a tireless worker for criminal rehabilitation and social justice. Notwithstanding all this effort over his long and distinguished career, he is a true scientist who follows the data to wherever it leads him and is thus “persuaded that sociological criminology has exhausted itself as a guide for the future study on the origins of crime. It is a paradigm for the previous century, not the current one” (2009:xvi).

Cullen believes the paradigm that will take the place of sociology as the guiding paradigm for 21st-century criminology will be biosocial; “a broader and more powerful paradigm,” but he adds that biosocial criminologists must educate their sociological colleagues by “introducing biosocial science in ways that are accessible and understandable” (2009:xvii). This may be the easiest task for biosocial criminologists to accomplish; more difficult will be getting their sociological colleagues interested enough to listen. The sociological tradition in criminology has become so strong that Pierre van den Berghe (1990: 177) characterizes sociologists (and most criminologists by extension) as not only oblivious to biology; but “militantly and proudly ignorant.” This is a pity, because as Matt Robinson (also a sociologically trained criminologist) has opined: “the biological sciences have made more progress in advancing our understanding about behavior in the last 10 years than sociology has made in the past 50 years” (2004:x). But neither Robinson nor I suppose that there could be such a creature as a biological theory of criminal behavior. Criminal behavior, indeed all behavior, is always the result of a blend of the biological and the social, nature and nurture, genes and environment. A purely biological approach would be just as limited as a purely environmental approach; thus this book is about biosocial criminology.

There are three broad biosocial approaches to the study of criminal behavior: genetic, evolutionary, and neurobiological. While they employ different theories and methods and work with different levels of analysis, their principles are conceptually consistent across all three levels. Furthermore, all three approaches are so environmentally friendly that they may be called “biologically informed environmental approaches,” although “biosocial approaches” slides easier across the tongue.

Why should criminologists concern themselves with what biology has to offer? After all, biology as applied to human behavior is still associated with illiberal politics by many social scientists. The long answer is provided throughout the book; the short answer is that a review of the behavior genetic literature led the reviewer to remark that behavior genetics studies often reach the same conclusions about environmental solutions to social problems that “left-leaning sociologists” do (Herbert, 1997: 80). If this is so, why should we burden ourselves by becoming familiar with another body of literature telling us the same thing? The short answer is again supplied by Herbert when he points out that the conclusions arrived at by behavior geneticists were arrived at using “infinitely more sophisticated tools.” These “infinitely more sophisticated tools” (theories, models, concepts, instruments, methodologies) developed by behavior geneticists (as well as molecular geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists) can be brought to bear on the concepts and assumptions of traditional criminological theories as quality control devices functioning to separate the wheat from the chaff.

There is a lot of chaff in traditional criminological theories, but there is also a lot of wheat; criminology’s problem is that it is blind to the difference. Much of the discipline’s inability to move forward and ally itself with more robust sciences lies in the ideological barriers it has constructed which prevent those hiding behind them from acknowledging that biology can help to illuminate criminology (Wright et al., 2009). Moir and Jessel (1995: 10) put it well when they wrote: “the evidence that biology is a central factor in crime, interacting with cultural, social, and economic factors, is so strong … that to ignore it is perverse.” Yet it is all too often ignored, and few criminologists consider themselves perverse for doing so.

SOCIOLOGY CONTRA BIOLOGY

The origin of criminology’s historical reluctance to embrace biology is probably its heritage as a child of sociology, which has long been openly hostile to biology. This attitude has led to the current sad state of sociology. The decade of the 1990s saw an increasing number of social scientists commenting on sociology’s decline and on its stubborn refusal to consider what the biological sciences can tell us about human behavior (e.g., Crippen 1994; Ellis 1996; Horowitz 1993; Lopreato and Crippen 1999; Nielsen 1994; Udry 1995; Walsh 1995a). Tooby and Cosmides (1992: 23) offer one of the most stinging of these criticisms:

After more than a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babble of incommensurate technical lexicons. This is accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the single largest trend is toward rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans.

The assault continued into the new millennium with an edited book (Cole 2001) containing articles from some of the brightest stars in sociology such as Howard Becker, Peter Berger, Randall Collins, Richard Felson, and Seymour Lipset, who collectively bemoan the state of their discipline for almost 400 pages. Common themes were that sociology is saturated with left-wing ideology, the mundane nature of its studies, its methodological faddism, and its lack of scientific rigor.

These and many other critics urge the social sciences to vertically integrate with biology. Having observed the natural sciences develop coherent and florescent theories from which have flowed a cascade of testable propositions and hypotheses resulting in robust explanations of biological phenomena, these critics see no reason why the social sciences cannot follow suit. To do this, social science must make itself consistent with what is known in the natural sciences so that there is a harmonious interlocking of causal explanations running from biology to psychology to sociology. There is no defensible scientific reason why sociology should not be continuous with biology in the same way that biology is continuous with chemistry, and chemistry with physics.

The schism between biology and sociology can be traced to the work of Lester Ward, the first president of the American Sociological Society (wisely changed to the American Sociological Association after acronyms became trendy). Ward, a biologist turned sociologist, saw sociology as a guide to creating a better society. He was vehemently opposed to the misuse of Darwinism by social Darwinists to justify exploitation and other social ills. Ward’s reformist campaigns set the stage for sociology to become the self-appointed conscience of science, ever on the lookout to expose and oppose any idea or theory that it believed threatened to promote insidious social policies.

This is a noble and valuable mission, and sociology is to be applauded for staking out science’s moral high ground, but advocacy must not be confused with science. Sociology’s agenda has led to it becoming “so enmeshed in the politics of advocacy and the ideology of self-righteousness that it is simply unaware of, much less able to respond to, new conditions in the scientific as well as social environments in which it finds itself” (Horowitz 1993: 5). The scientific ignorance and ideological blinders Horowitz refers to often lead to misidentifying the causes of the problems sociologists seek to meliorate. This misidentification leads to interventions that do not work, which eventually leads policymakers and scientists in other disciplines to mistrust and discount anything further these well-meaning reformers may have to say. Ward himself persisted in his belief in Lamarckism despite its categorical rejection by biologists for no other reason than he felt that the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was more optimistic and progressive than Darwinian natural selection (Degler 1991: 22).

For much of the 20th century sociology seemed to have achieved its goal of becoming a respected and autonomous science. Although there were always sociologists who yearned to link their discipline to biology, sociology’s view of human nature as socially constructed had become more or less the view accepted by the liberal democracies of the Western world following their clash with the racist dogmas of Nazism. A major challenge to sociology’s autonomy emerged with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), a 697-page book which, with the exception of the “infamous” Chapter 27, dealt with the social behavior of nonhuman animals. The opening paragraph of the chapter, entitled “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology,” seemed to relegate sociology to a minor branch of biology:

Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the research protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology together constitute the sociobiology of a single species. (1975: 547)

Such a bold statement was guaranteed to raise the hackles of sociologists already hostile to “biologizing.” There followed numerous attacks on sociobiology as well as on Wilson by such groups as Science for the People (1978), which saw sociobiology as “biological determinism” legitimizing all the alleged evils of the status quo. Yet Stephen Jay Gould, a leading figure in Science for the People, later argued that it is wrong to view sociobiology as motivated by a political agenda, and stated that if social scientists find the theory wanting: “They must find and use a more adequate evolutionary biology, not reject proffered aid and genuine partnership” (1990: 51).

Reductionism

As the story has it, Sir Isaac Newton’s explanation of rainbows in cold scientific terms supposedly prompted the poet William Wordsworth to pen his objections in the form of his famous poem The Tables Turned. In it he lamented the reduction of the rainbow’s mysterious beauty to cold science thusly:

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things

We murder to dissect.

Applying biological science to the sociological rainbow is likewise sure to be met with similar but less eloquent objections, for reductionism is one of sociology’s favorite boo words. Wordsworth eventually came to realize that rainbows are no less beautiful when understood as refracted light, and that reductionism is nothing more sinister than the process of examining a complex phenomena at a more basic level, and in doing so adding to its “beauteous form” in ways previously unimagined.

Most sociologists, however, still apparently think we murder to dissect. The typical sociological objection to reductionism is exemplified by James Coleman’s assertion that when two or more individuals interact, “the essential requirement is that the explanatory focus be on the system as a unit, not on the individuals or other components which make it up” (in Wilson 1998: 187). While it is true that the interaction of elements (whether they be chemicals, people, or whatever) often produce effects not predictable a priori from their respective constituent parts, the claim that it is essential to focus explanatory efforts only on the whole unit to the exclusion of the parts is unnecessarily constraining. Wilson (1998: 187) pointed out in response that biology “would have remained stuck around 1850 with such a flat perspective” if it had taken seriously the claim that “the essential requirement is that the explanatory focus be on the organism as a unit, not on the cell or molecules which make it up.” Holistic explanations may be more useful than reductionist explanations in some circumstances, but reductionism has been the “royal road,” though not the only road, to progress in science. Thomas Nagel, the doyen of the philosophy of science, claims that non-reductionist accounts simply describe phenomena while reductionist accounts explain them (in Rose 1999: 915).

Social scientists who study broad categories of people do not typically turn their attention toward lower levels of analysis when they have identified categories associated with the problem with which they are concerned. How often have we seen demographic variables such as race, gender, and age implicitly invoked as causes in phrases such as “Gender explains X%, age Y%, and race Z% of the variance”? These variables are descriptors and predictors not explanations, and they beg a multitude of questions. If any attempt at explanation is ventured beyond identifying the associated demographics, it commonly involves invoking higher level constructs such as racism, poverty, or discrimination. Dennett (1995: 82) likens this kind of science to a “yearning for skyhooks,” by which he means begging for a sort of deus ex machina that will lift us miraculously out of scientific difficulty. Invoking higher level variables such as these that are more often assumed than measured is reminiscent of the 19th-century physicists’ use of ether for the same purpose. Racism, poverty, and discrimination do exist, of course, but they are too readily invoked as blanket explanations that relieve researchers of their obligation to explore further.

Dennett (1995) contrasts skyhooks with cranes. Unlike skyhooks suspended on nothing, cranes are solidly grounded devices that also serve to lift us out of difficulty with solid, non-question-begging science. There is no excuse for yearning for skyhooks when we have perfectly good cranes available. Invoking higher level categories (or at least not invoking lower level ones) may be true to Durkheim’s dictum that only social facts should be used to explain other social facts, but it is poor science. As Lubinski and Humphreys (1997: 177) suggest: “Whatever the causes of group differences in social phenomena are, measures of individual differences typically reflect those causes more effectively than does membership in demographic groups.” Lubinski and Humphreys (1997) and Walsh (1997) provide several examples of the superiority of lower level measures with reference to demographic variables such as gender, race, age, and SES.

There are certainly times when non-reductionist explanations are more coherent and satisfying than reductionist ones, and we must be careful that we do not lose meaning as an essential component to understanding behavior by an overemphasis on mechanistic accounts. Phenomena may be explained by lower level mechanisms but they find their significance in more holistic regions. Propositions about biological entities such as genes, hormones, and neurons do not contain terms that define the human condition at its most meaningful level. How do we reduce the likes of love, justice, morality, and honor to such terms? We do not, for these things are properties of the whole being, not any one part. We must never confuse a part, however well we understand it, for the whole.

However, understanding the role of neurotransmitters, genes, and hormones certainly can assist us in our attempts to understand the behaviors and traits of interest to us as long as we resist the allure of biological essentialism. I would condemn Dennett’s (1995: 82) “greedy reductionist” (a person who skips over several layers of higher complexity in a rush to fasten everything securely to a supposedly solid foundation) just as surely as I would a naive antireductionist. Nonetheless, science has made its greatest strides when it has picked apart wholes to examine the parts to gain a better understanding of the wholes they constitute. As Matt Ridley (2003: 163), the heavyweight champion of nature via nurture, has opined: “Reductionism takes nothing from the whole; it adds new layers of wonder to the experience.”

The history of science shows consistently that higher level theories of many phenomena existed long before their underlying mechanisms were discovered. Higher level theories are not necessarily abandoned when lower level theories come along; physicists and engineers still find classical physics quite useful despite relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Unlike social scientists, natural scientists have long recognized the complementarity of reductionist and holistic explanations, and useful observations and hypotheses now go in both reductionist and emergent directions in those sciences. Cell biologists know that at bottom they are dealing with atomic particles and seek to understand their properties. They also know, however, that there are properties of the cell that cannot be deduced from those particles a priori, that they require functional explanations of the whole cell, and how that cell fits into a network of other cells to form a larger whole (the organism). This is why we will always need social science regardless of how sophisticated we become about the genetic and neurohormonal bases of human behavior. Science is eclectic by nature, and can pose questions and offer explanation at several levels of understanding.

Part of the fear of reductionism has always been the intellectual threat the more fundamental sciences are perceived as posing to the autonomy of the more immature sciences. Edward O. Wilson (1990) coined the term antidiscipline to describe the relationship between a young science and an adjacent older science. Initially there is tension between the two disciplines, although it is felt most acutely by the younger one, since the “upstart” science poses little threat to the autonomy or the reputation of the established science. As the younger science gains confidence, it feels less threatened, and it begins to experiment with how the ideas and theories of the mature science can be of use to it. After a period of creative interplay, the younger science became fully complementary with its erstwhile antidiscipline. With complementarity accomplished, the younger science begins to realize great gains in theoretical and methodological sophistication. The younger discipline prospers from the thrust provided by the more mature science in ways it could never have done had it not shaken itself free of those more interested in their discipline’s autonomy and ideology than in its progress.

CRIMINOLOGY AND BIOLOGY

Criminologists have not been friendly to individual differences as causes of crime. Lawrence Cohen (1987: 204) pointed out over 20 years ago that sociology is “the only branch of social science that has … failed to recognize openly the possible influence of nature on human behavior, and nowhere is it more evident than in our studies of crime.” Ellis and Hoffman ...