The ape in some of us: criminal anthropology
Atavism and criminality
In Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last great novel (1899), the assistant prosecutor, an unfeeling modernist, rises to condemn a prostitute falsely accused of murder:
The assistant prosecutor spoke at great length.… All the latest catch-phrases then in vogue in his set, everything that then was and still is accepted as the last word in scientific wisdom was included in his speech—heredity and congenital criminality, Lombroso and Tarde, evolution and the struggle for existence.… “Running away with himself, isn’t he?” said the presiding judge with a smile, bending towards the austere member of the court. “A fearful dunderhead!” said the austere member.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Professor Van Helsing urges Mina Harker to describe the evil Count: “Tell us … dry men of science what you see with those so bright eyes.” She responds: “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.”*
Maria Montessori expressed an embattled optimism when she wrote in 1913 (p. 8): “The phenomenon of criminality spreads without check or succor, and up to yesterday it aroused in us nothing but repulsion and loathing. But now that science has laid its finger upon this moral fester, it demands the cooperation of all mankind to combat it.”
The common subject of these disparate assessments is Cesare Lombroso’s theory of l’uomo delinquente—the criminal man—probably the most influential doctrine ever to emerge from the anthropometric tradition. Lombroso, an Italian physician, described the insight that led to his theory of innate criminality and to the profession he established—criminal anthropology. He had, in 1870, been trying to discover anatomical differences between criminals and insane men “without succeeding very well.” Then, “the morning of a gloomy day in December,” he examined the skull of the famous brigand Vihella, and had that flash of joyous insight that marks both brilliant discovery and crackpot invention. For he saw in that skull a series of atavistic features recalling an apish past rather than a human present:
This was not merely an idea, but a flash of inspiration. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood (in Taylor et al., 1973, p. 41).
Lombroso’s theory was not just a vague proclamation that crime is hereditary—such claims were common enough in his time—but a specific evolutionary theory based upon anthropometric data. Criminals are evolutionary throwbacks in our midst. Germs of an ancestral past lie dormant in our heredity. In some unfortunate individuals, the past comes to life again. These people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or savage would, but such behavior is deemed criminal in our civilized society. Fortunately, we may identify born criminals because they bear anatomical signs of their apishness. Their atavism is both physical and mental, but the physical signs, or stigmata as Lombroso called them, are decisive. Criminal behavior can also arise in normal men, but we know the “born criminal” by his anatomy. Anatomy, indeed, is destiny, and born criminals cannot escape their inherited taint: “We are governed by silent laws which never cease to operate and which rule society with more authority than the laws inscribed on our statute books. Crime … appears to be a natural phenomenon” (Lombroso, 1887, p. 667).
Animals and savages as born criminals
The identification of apish atavism in criminals did not clinch Lombroso’s argument, for physical apishness can explain a man’s barbaric behavior only if the natural inclinations of savages and lower animals are criminal. If some men look like apes, but apes be kind, then the argument fails. Thus, Lombroso devoted the first part of his major work (Criminal Man, first published in 1876) to what must be the most ludicrous excursion into anthropomorphism ever published—an analysis of the criminal behavior of animals. He cites, for example, an ant driven by rage to kill and dismember an aphid; an adulterous stork who, with her lover, murdered her husband; a criminal association of beavers who ganged up to murder a solitary compatriot; a male ant, without access to female reproductives, who violated a (female) worker with atrophied sexual organs, causing her great pain and death; he even refers to the insect eating of certain plants as an “equivalent of crime” (Lombroso, 1887, pp. 1–18).
Lombroso then proceeded to the next logical step: comparison of criminals with “inferior” groups. “I would compare,” wrote a French supporter, “the criminal to a savage appearing, by atavism, in modern society; we may think that he was born a criminal because he was born a savage” (Bordier, 1879, p. 284). Lombroso ventured into ethnology to identify criminality as normal behavior among inferior people. He wrote a small treatise (Lombroso, 1896) on the Dinka of the Upper Nile. In it, he spoke of their heavy tattooing and high threshold for pain—at puberty they break their incisors with a hammer. They display apish stigmata as normal parts of their anatomy: “their nose … is not only flattened, but trilobed, resembling that of monkeys.” His colleague G. Tarde wrote that some criminals “would have been the ornament and the moral aristocracy of a tribe of Red Indians” (in Ellis, 1910, p. 254). Havelock Ellis made much of a claim that criminals and inferior people often do not blush. “Inability to blush has always been considered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness. Blushing is also very rare among idiots and savages. The Spaniards used to say of the South American Indians: ‘How can one trust men who do not know how to blush’” (1910, p. 138). And how far did the Incas get by trusting Pizarro?
Lombroso constructed virtually all his arguments in a manner that precluded their defeat, thus making them scientifically vacuous. He cited copious numerical data to lend an air of objectivity to his work, but it remained so vulnerable that even most of Broca’s school turned against the theory of atavism. Whenever Lombroso encountered a contrary fact, he performed some mental gymnastics to incorporate it within his system. This posture is clearly expressed in his statements on the depravity of inferior peoples, for again and again he encountered stories of courage and accomplishment among those he wished to denigrate. Yet he twisted all these stories into his system. If, for example, he had to admit a favorable trait, he joined it with others he could despise. Citing the somewhat dated authority of Tacitus for his conclusion, he wrote: “Even when honor, chastity, and pity are found among savages, impulsiveness and laziness are never wanting. Savages have a horror of continuous work, so that for them the passage to active and methodical labor lies by the road of selection or of slavery only” (1911, p. 367). Or consider his one begrudging word of praise for the inferior and criminal race of gypsies:
They are vain, like all delinquents, but they have no fear or shame. Everything they earn they spend for drink and ornaments. They may be seen barefooted, but with bright-colored or lace-bedecked clothing; without stockings, but with yellow shoes. They have the improvidence of the savage and that of the criminal as well.… They devour half-putrified carrion. They are given to orgies, love a noise, and make a great outcry in the markets. They murder in cold blood in order to rob, and were formerly suspected of cannibalism.… It is to be noted that this race, so low morally and so incapable of cultural and intellectual development, a race that can never carry on any industry, and which in poetry has not got beyond the poorest lyrics, has created in Hungary a marvelous musical art—a new proof of the genius that, mixed with atavism, is to be found in the criminal (1911, p. 40).
Their [criminals’] physical insensibility well recalls that of savage peoples who can bear in rites of puberty, tortures that a white man could never endure. All travellers know the indifference of Negroes and American savages to pain: the former cut their hands and laugh in order to avoid work; the latter, tied to the torture post, gaily sing the praises of their tribe while they are slowly burnt (1887, p. 319).
We recognize in this comparison of atavistic criminals with animals, savages, and people of lower races the basic argument of recapitulation discussed in the previous section. To complete the chain, Lombroso needed only to proclaim the child as inherently criminal—for the child is an ancestral adult, a living primitive. Lombroso did not shrink from this necessary implication, and he branded as criminal the traditional innocent of literature: “One of the most important discoveries of my school is that in the child up to a certain age are manifested the saddest tendencies of the criminal man. The germs of delinquency and of criminality are found normally even in the first periods of human life” (1895, p. 53). Our impression of the child’s innocence is a class bias; we comfortable folks suppress the natural inclinations of our children: “One who lives among the upper classes has no idea of the passion babies have for alcoholic liquor, but among the lower classes it is only too common a thing to see even suckling babes drink wine and liquors with wonderful delight (1895, p. 56).*
The stigmata: anatomical, physiological, and social
Lombroso’s anatomical stigmata (Fig. 4.1) were, for the most part, neither pathologies nor discontinuous variations, but extreme values on a normal curve that approach average measures for the same trait in great apes. (In modern terms, this is a fundamental source of Lombroso’s error. Arm length varies among humans, and some people must have longer arms than others. The average chimp has a longer arm than the average human, but this doesn’t mean that a relatively long-armed human is genetically similar to apes. Normal variation within a population is a different biological phenomenon from differences in average values between populations. This error occurs again and again. It is the basis of Arthur Jensen’s fallacy in asserting that average differences in IQ between American whites and blacks are largely inherited—see pp. 186–187. A true atavism is a discontinuous, genetically based, ancestral trait—the occasional horse born with functional side toes, for example.) Among his apish stigmata, Lombroso listed (1887, pp. 660—661): greater skull thickness, simplicity of cranial sutures, large jaws, preeminence of the face over the cranium, relatively long arms, precocious wrinkles, low and narrow forehead, large ears, absence of baldness, darker skin, greater visual acuity, diminished sensitivity to pain, and absence of vascular reaction (blushing). At the 1886 International Congress on Criminal Anthropology, he even argued (see Fig. 4.2) that the feet of prostitutes are often prehensile as in apes (big toe widely separated from others).
4.1 A panoply of criminal faces. The frontispiece to the atlas of Lombroso’s Criminal Man. Group E are German murderers; Group I are burglars (Lombroso tells us that the man without a nose managed to escape justice for many years by wearing the false nose depicted in the figure on the left, wearing a derby); “H” are purse snatchers; “A” are shoplifters; “B,” “C,” “D,” and ‘F” are swindlers; while the distinguished gentlemen of the bottom row declared themselves bankrupt fraudulently.
For other stigmata, Lombroso descended from the apes to seek similarity with more distant, and even more “primitive,” creatures: he compared prominent canine teeth and a flattened palate with the anatomy of lemurs and rodents, an oddly shaped occipital condyle (area for articulation of skull and vertebral column) with the normal condyles of cattle and pigs (1896, p. 188), and an abnormal heart with the usual conformation in sirenians (a group of rare marine mammals). He even postulated a meaningful similarity between the facial asymmetry of some criminals and flatfishes with both eyes on the upper surface of their bodies (1911, p. 373)!
4.2 The feet of prostitutes. This figure was presented by L. Jullien to the 4th International Congress on Criminal Anthropology in 1896. Commenting upon it, Lombroso said: “These observations show admirably that the morphology of the prostitute is more abnormal even than that of the criminal, especially for atavistic anomalies, because the prehensile foot is atavistic.”
Lombroso bolstered his study of specific defects with a general anthropometric survey of the criminal head and body—a sample of 383 crania from dead criminals, plus general proportions measured for 3,839 among the living. As an indication of Lombroso’s style, consider the numerical basis of his most important claim—that criminals generally have smaller brains than normal people, even though a few criminals have very large brains (see p.126).* Lombroso (1911, p. 365) and his disciples (Ferri, 1897, p. 8, for example) repeated this claim continually. Yet Lombroso’s data show no such thing. Fig. 4.3 presents the frequency distributions for cranial capacity measured by Lombroso in 121 male criminals and 328 upright men. You don’t need fancy statistics to see that the two distributions differ very little—despite Lombroso’s conclusion that, in criminals, “the small capacities dominate and the very great are rare” (1887, P. 144). I have reconstructed the original data from Lombroso’s tables of percentages within classes and calculate average values of 1,450 cc for criminal heads and 1,484 cc for law-abiding heads. The standard deviations of the two distributions (a general measure of spread about the average) do not differ significantly. This means that the larger range of variation in the law-abiding sample—an important point for Lombroso since it extended the maximum capacity for decent folk to 100 cc above the maximum for criminals—may simply be an artifact of larger sample size for law-abiding men (the larger the sample, the greater the chance of including extreme values).
4.3 The cranial capacities of normal men (in black) compared with criminals (hatched) The y-axis is in percentages rather than actual numbers.
Lombroso’s stigmata also included a set of social traits. He emphasized particularly: 1) The argot of criminals, a language of their own with high levels of onomatopoeia, much like the speech of children and savages: “Atavism contributes to it more than anything else. They speak differently because they feel differently; they speak as savages because they are true savages in the midst of our brilliant European civilization” (1887, p. 476); 2) Tattooing, reflecting both the insensitivity of criminals to pain and their atavistic love of adornment (Fig. 4.4). Lombroso made a quantitative study of content in criminal tattoos and found them, in general, lawless (“vengeance”) or excusing (“born under an unlucky star,” “out of luck”), though he encountered one that read: “Long live France and french fried potatoes.”
Lombroso never attributed all criminal acts to people with atavistic stigmata. He concluded that about 40 percent of criminals followed hereditary compulsion; others acted from passion, rage, or desperation. At first glance, this distinction of occasional from born criminals has the appearance of a compromise or retreat, but Lombroso used it in an opposite way—as a claim that rendered his system immune to disproof. No longer could men be characterized by their acts. Murder might be a deed of the lowest ape in a human body or of the most upright cuckold overcome by justified rage. All criminal acts are covered: a man with stigmata performs them by innate nature, a man without stigmata by force of circumstances. By classifying exceptions within his system, Lombroso excluded all potential falsification.
Lombroso’s retreat
Lombroso’s theory of atavism caused a great stir and aroused one of the most heated scientific debates of the nineteenth century. Lombroso, though he peppered his work with volumes of numbers, had not made the usual obeisances to cold objectivity. Even those great a priorists, the disciples of Paul Broca, chided Lombroso
for his lawyerly, rather than scientific, approach. Paul Topinard said of him (1887, p. 676): “He did not say: here is a fact which suggests an induction to me, let’s see if I am mistaken, let’s proceed rigorously, let us collect and add other facts.… The conclusion is fashioned in advance; he seeks proof, he defends his thesis like an advocate who ends up by persuading himself.… [Lombroso] is too convinced.”
4.4 Lombroso regarded tattooing as a sign of innate criminality. The arm of this reprobate, depicted in Lombroso’s Criminal Man, is inscribed: “A man of misfortune.” On his penis we read, entra tutto—it all goes in. In his caption, Lombroso tells us that tattoos of shaking hands are found very frequently in pederasts.
Lombroso slowly retreated under the barrage. But he retreated like a military master. Not for a moment did he compromise or abandon his leading idea that crime is biological. He merely enlarged the range of innate causes. His original theory had the virtue of simplicity and striking originality—criminals are apes in our midst, marked by the anatomical stigmata of atavism. Later versions became more diffuse, but also more inclusive. Atavism remained as a primary biological cause of criminal behavior, but Lombroso added several categories of congenital illness and degeneration: “We see in the criminal,” he wrote (1887, p. 651), “a savage man and, at the same time, a sick man.” In later years, Lombroso awarded special prominence to epilepsy as a mark of criminality; he finally stated that almost every “born criminal” suffers from epilepsy to some degree. The added burden imposed by Lombroso’s theory upon thousands of epileptics cannot be calculated; they became a major target of eugenical schemes in part because Lombroso had explicated their illness as a mark of moral degeneracy.
The Mismeasure of Man Page 16