Evil Genes

by Barbara Oakley

  55. For an excellent review of the topic, see T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to Cruelty?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 5 (2007): 603–14.

  56. Heather, Rome; Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

  57. Christina Asquith, “Trouble at Texas Southern,” Diverse Issues in Higher Education, December 14, 2006, http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6764.shtml (accessed December 20, 2006).

  58. Ibid.

  59. Ibid. For recent similar tales in academia alone, as monitored by Margaret Soltan of University Diaries (http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/), see David W. Chen and Laura Mansnerus, “Overseer Finds Kickback Plan at University,” New York Times, November 14, 2006; Stefan Milkowski and Amanda Bohman, “Legislator Pursues Impeachment,” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, February 24, 2007, http://newsminer.com/2007/02/24/5479/ (accessed February 24, 2007); “More Bad News for Bishop State,” Birmingham News, February 19, 2007, http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1171880185119050.xml&coll=2 (accessed February 24, 2007).

  60. R. Pally, “The Neurobiology of Borderline Personality Disorder: The Synergy of ‘Nature and Nurture,’” Journal of Psychiatric Practice 8, no. 3 (2002): 133–42.

  61. Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 131.

  CHAPTER 11: SHADES OF GRAY

  1. Gretchen Rubin, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 125.

  2. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (New York: Verso Books, 1995).

  3. Henri Troyat, Catherine the Great, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Plume, 1994); Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown Publishers, 2004).

  4. Livesley, “Behavioral and Molecular Genetic Contributions.”

  5. W. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 32.

  6. Behr, Kiss the Hand, p. 164.

  7. “Turkmenbashi Everywhere,” CBS News, January 4, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/31/60minutes/main590913.shtml (accessed August 1, 2006).

  8. James Shreeve, The Genome War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 27–38.

  9. Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980), p. 124.

  10. Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 159.

  11. Brackman, Delicate Arrangement, p. 34.

  12. Michael Shermer, In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  13. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Penguin, 1970). Watson's appalling mischaracterization of Rosalind Franklin is well described in Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (New York: HarperPerennial, 2003).

  14. Shreeve, Genome War, p. 85.

  15. Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (New York: Macmillan, 2006), p. 126.

  16. Ibid., p. 164.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid., p. 263.

  19. Paul A. Offit, The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 127–28.

  20. Jason Socrates Bardi, The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006).

  21. Candace B. Pert, Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 115.

  22. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, 1st ed. (New York: E. Burlingame Books, 1991).

  23. Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 647.

  24. Raynoma Gordy Singleton, Berry, Me, and Motown: The Untold Story (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), p. 333.

  25. J. Randy Taraborrelli, Madonna: An Intimate Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

  26. Slotten, Heretic, pp. 172–73.

  27. Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), p. 122.

  28. Rubin, Churchill, p. 179.

  29. Ibid., p. 53.

  30. Ibid., p. 32.

  31. Ibid., p. 57.

  32. Jerry Oppenheimer, Martha Stewart—Just Desserts (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), p. 160.

  33. Christopher Byron, Martha, Inc. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), p. 75.

  34. Ibid., pp. 284, 311.

  35. Ibid., pp. 311–12, 318.

  36. Joan Macleod Heminway, ed., Martha Stewart's Legal Troubles (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006).

  37. Byron, Testosterone, Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild, p. 268.

  38. Ibid., pp. 25, 72, 73.

  39. William G. Flanagan, Dirty Rotten CEOs: How Business Leaders Are Fleecing America (New York: Citadel Press, 2003), p. 183.

  40. Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), p. 250.

  41. Ibid., p. 523.

  42. Ibid., p. 172.

  43. Ibid., p. 259.

  44. Marie Brenner, “The Enron Wars,” Vanity Fair, April 2002, pp. 180–210.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Capital News 9 Web Staff, “Former Enron CEO May Have Lost It,” Capital News 9, April 9, 2004.

  47. Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools, pp. 131, 250, 620.

  48. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. xiv, 270.

  49. Ibid., p. 272.

  50. Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 300.

  51. Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 117.

  52. Ellis, His Excellency, pp. 153–54; G. B. Singh, Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), pp. 134–35.

  53. Louis Fischer, Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: New American Library, 1954), p. 29.

  54. Ann Ruth Willner, The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 136.

  55. Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. 84.

  56. Albert H. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: MacMillan, 1970), p. 97.

  57. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000), p. 281.

  58. Nicholas Gage, Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis (New York: Warner Books, 2001), p. 11; Michael Gross, Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 264, 269; Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America (New York: Touchstone, 2003), p. 250; “Not So Saintly Behavior: Kinder, Gentler Ditka Unleashes Tirade at Practice,” Sports Illustrated/CNN, 1998, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/news/1998/08/10/ditka_saints/ (accessed January 28, 2007). Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), pp. 57, 235; John F. Harris, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 53, 483; Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 35; Eugen Weber, “Destiny's General,” New York Times, April 2, 1995; Charles Williams, The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of Charles de Gaulle (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), pp. 62–64; Arianna Huffington, Maria Callas: The Woman behind the Legend (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).

  59. Brookhiser, Founding Father, p. 115.

  60. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 39.


  61. Ellis, His Excellency, p. 246.

  62. Peter Michelmore, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), p. 4.

  63. J. Gilleen and A. S. David, “The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Delusions: From Psychopathology to Neuropsychology and Back Again,” Psychological Medicine 35, no. 1 (2005): 5–12.

  64. David Dunbar et al., “Debunking 9/11 Myths,” Glenn & Helen Show (Podcast), August 15, 2006, http://instapundit.com/archives/031961.php (accessed December 2, 2006).

  65. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965); Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 9; Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 111; Raine and Yang, “Neural Foundations.”

  66. P. G. Zimbardo, C. Maslach, and C. Haney, “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformations, Consequences,” in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, ed. T. Blass, (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), p. 194; Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 32; T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment.” See also the excellent follow-on article that expands on Carnahan and McFarland's findings: S. A. Haslam and S. Reicher, “Beyond the Banality of Evil: Three Dynamics of an Interactionist Social Psychology of Tyranny,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33, no. 5 (2007): 615–22.

  67. Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler, pp. 82–83.

  68. Cohen, “Unravelling the Milosevic Mystery.”

  69. Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. 227.

  70. Norbert Bromberg and Verna Volz Small, Hitler's Psychopathology (New York: International Universities Press, 1983), pp. 167–68.

  71. George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2000), p. 115.

  72. Langer, Mind of Adolf Hitler, p. 95.

  73. Bromberg and Small, Hitler's Psychopathology, p. 300.

  74. “Barry Marshall Interview: Nobel Prize in Medicine,” Academy of Achievement, October 22, 2006, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/mar1int-1 (accessed February 24, 2007); P. H. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Lanham, MD: Regnery Publishing, 1997); Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions; B. Martin, “Dissent and Heresy in Medicine: Models, Methods, and Strategies,” Social Science and Medicine 58, no. 4 (2004): 713–25; J. Moore, “À Duesberg, Adieu!” Nature 380, no. 6572 (1996): 293–94.

  75. Ellis, His Excellency, pp. 180, 158.

  76. Ibid., p. 271.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Martin Meredith, Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), pp. 154, 228.

  79. Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 100.

  80. Montefiore, Stalin, p. 526.

  81. Gene N. Landrum, Profiles of Female Genius: Thirteen Creative Women Who Changed the World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994).

  82. Ibid., p. 339.

  83. Ibid.

  84. Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: Peter Meyer Publishers, 2002), p. 466.

  85. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 1131.

  86. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

  87. Diana Jean Schemo, “Stroessner, Paraguay's Enduring Dictator, Dies,” New York Times, August 16, 2006. For a broad overview of brutal right-wing dictators, see: David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  88. Waite, Psychopathic God, p. 63.

  89. Willner, Spellbinders, p. 146.

  90. Leycester Coltman, The Real Fidel Castro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 9.

  91. Montefiore, Stalin, p. 233.

  92. Ibid., p. 437.

  93. Roland Huntford, Shackleton (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 75.

  94. “Thatcher ‘Cannot Remember Start of Sentence’: Daughter,” Breitbart.com, December 9, 2005, http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/09/051210030244.lpbfxvhd.html (accessed July 30, 2006).

  95. The last fact is pretty obscure—you can find the reference at: Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 112–13.

  96. Landrum, Profiles, p. 338.

  97. Daniel Chirot, Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  98. Waite, Psychopathic God, p. 435.

  99. Matt Drudge with Julia Philips, Drudge Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 2000), p. 140.

  100. Renshon, Presidential Candidates, pp. 304–305.

  101. Transcript: Saddam Hussein Interview, CBS News, February 26, 2003, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/26/60II/main542151.shtml (accessed March 5, 2007).

  102. Jeff Jacoby, “When Mike Met Mahmoud,” Boston Globe, August 16, 2006, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/16/when_mike_met_mahmoud/ (accessed November 25, 2006).

  103. Ibid.

  104. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (New York: Main Street Books, 1996), p. xiii.

  105. Ibid., p. 276, citing L. J. Davis, “Buffett Takes Stock,” New York Times, April 1, 1990.

  106. Warren Buffett, in correspondence with the author, December 15, 2006.

  107. Bill George, “The Master Gives It Back,” U.S. News & World Report, October 30, 2006, pp. 66–68.

  108. Russell Friedman, Helen Smith, and Glenn Reynolds, “Russell Friedman on Moving On,” Glenn & Helen Show (Podcast), September 5, 2006, http://instapundit.com/archives/032358.php (accessed February 25, 2007).

  109. Power, Problem from Hell, pp. 33–34.

  110. Ibid., p. xvii.

  111. s.v. “evil,” Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evil (accessed December 23, 2006).

  112. Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005).

  113. Redlich, Destructive Prophet, p. 27.

  114. Ibid., pp. 22, 323.

  115. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 131–32.

  116. Shankar Vedantam, “If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural,” Washington Post, May 28, 2007.

  117. Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Ecco, 2006); Greg Ross, “The Bookshelf Talks with Marc Hauser,” American Scientist Online, 2006, http://www.americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/52880;jsessionid=baa9 (accessed July 9, 2007).

  CHAPTER 12: THE SUN ALSO SHINES ON THE WICKED

  1. Nete Munk Nielsen et al., “Psychiatric Hospitalizations in a Cohort of Danish Polio Patients,” American Journal of Epidemiology 165, no. 3 (2007): 319–24. See also B. Bandelow et al., “Early Traumatic Life Events, Parental Attitudes, Family History, and Birth Risk Factors in Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and Healthy Controls,” Psychiatry Research 134, no. 2 (2005): 169–79; Bruno, Frick, and Cohen, “Polioencephalitis.”

  2. Bruno and Frick, “Psychology of Polio.”

  3. Bruno et al., “Neuroanatomy of Post-Polio”; Bruno, Frick, and Cohen, “Polioencephalitis.”

  4. Nielsen et al., “Psychiatric Hospitalizations,” referencing Bruno et al., “Neuroanatomy of Post-Polio”; Shigeo Kinomura et al., “Activation by Attention of the Human Reticular Formation and Thalamic Intralaminar Nuclei,” Science 271, no. 5248 (1996): 512–15.

  5. Bruno, Polio Paradox, pp. 47–54.

  6. Ibid., pp. 3
16–17.

  7. D. E. Linden, “How Psychotherapy Changes the Brain—the Contribution of Functional Neuroimaging,” Molecular Psychiatry 11, no. 6 (2006): 528–38; Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007).

  8. M. J. Rietveld et al., “Heritability of Attention Problems in Children: Longitudinal Results from a Study of Twins, Age 3 to 12,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45, no. 3 (2004): 577–88.

  9. Raine, “Psychopathy, Violence, and Brain Imaging,” pp. 50–51.

  10. Peter D. Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005).

  11. K. Schnell and S. C. Herpertz, “Effects of Dialectic-Behavioral-Therapy on the Neural Correlates of Affective Hyperarousal in Borderline Personality Disorder,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 41, no. 10 (2007): 837–47 [Epub ahead of print, October 24, 2006]. Posner et al., “Psychobiology.”

  12. Ian Sample, “The Brain Scan That Can Read People's Intentions,” Guardian Unlimited, February 9, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2009229,00.html (accessed February 10, 2007).

  13. Brent Garland, “Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice,” The American Association for the Advancement of the Science and The Dana Foundation, 2004, http://www.dana.org/pdf/books/booksummary_neurolaw.pdf (accessed February 25, 2007).

  14. Bernard Harcourt, “Institutionalization vs. Imprisonment: Are There Massive Implications for Existing Research?” The Volokh Conspiracy, May 2, 2007, http://volokh.com/posts/1178086065.shtml (accessed July 8, 2007).

  15. Stephen J. Morse, “The Non-problem of Free Will in Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 24 (2006): 1–17.

  16. Redlich, Destructive Prophet, p. 334.

  17. Ann Rule, Dead by Sunset (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).

  18. Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools.

  19. David France, Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).

  20. Adam LeBor, “Complicity with Evil” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

  21. Carnahan and McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment.”

  22. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).