With Horgan’s presentation, the question of genetic links is still open, but the strong implication is that because of the failures to locate the specific genes, they aren’t there. Horgan manipulated his data to suggest that molecular biologists were chasing phantoms, that the misfires indicated that there are no behavioral genes. Three misfires and you’re out, he seems to be saying. Give up the quest. In reality, all that the early failures proved was that finding causative neucleotide bases among the three billion base pairs is difficult.
I went to see Horgan and confronted him about all these omissions and distortions. A handsome, dark-bearded man in his thirties, Horgan replied, “What’s wrong with writing a polemical article?”
Understandably, the piece caused a furor and prompted more mail than any article in Scientific American’s history. According to Horgan, the letters were split roughly in half, pro and con. While I was in his office, he allowed me to look at the fat letters file. My casual perusal gave an impression that those applauding the article were of the thank-God-somebody’s-halting-all-this-talk-about-genes variety. Many of the letters protesting the article were from scientists and academics, and their tone was one of outrage.
One of the few letters published was signed by Bouchard and fifteen other scientists from eight universities. They cited a number of Horgan’s errors and distortions and protested stunningly false generalizations such as “practically every claim of a genetic basis can be explained as an environmental effect.” The writers of the group letter, after charging that the “small coterie of critics” have never executed any research that would support their environmental positions, say, “For twenty years, [the critics’] main scientific strategy has been one of idle yearning, yearning for the body of findings to be exposed as specious or fraudulent or, increasingly, yearning for the facts to go away.” When addressing Horgan’s impugning of their motives as politically suspect and his allusions to Hitler, they write that such slurs “are merely an attempt to win with scare tactics that which has not been won in the laboratory.”
Many unpublished letters came from scientists who had little connection with behavioral genetic research. Lee Silver, a professor of genetics at Princeton, started his letter with “I am shocked and dismayed that a journal as reputable as Scientific American could stoop to the depths of a mass-market magazine and allow the stand-alone publication of the extremely one-sided and highly biased article by John Horgan.…” Michael Levin, a professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, wrote, “Horgan repeatedly invokes eugenics and, to his eternal shame, the Nazis. Surely it is clear that what Hitler did has no bearing on the causes of observable human differences (nor, for that matter, on the propriety of studying the question).” David Rowe, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, protested many of the article’s points, then concluded, “I hope that Scientific American’s next article on this topic will explore it with greater depth, thoughtfulness and veracity.” In a conversation, Robert Plomin came out and said what many were thinking: “Bouchard told Horgan about scientific papers that spoke to the very points he raised. Horgan ignored them. That is dishonest.”
Perhaps the most impassioned letter came from Berkeley’s fiery anthropologist, Vincent Sarich, who thanked Scientific American for publishing “so concise a collection of muddled, misleading nonsense” to assist his “students in their eternal quest to inform and improve themselves through the mistakes of their elders.” Sarich excoriated Horgan for “the obligatory connection of eugenics … and the Nazis.” He then challenged the inference that knowledge of the gene-behavior connection leads to such excesses or that any one political view has a monopoly on atrocities. “After all,” he writes, “Stalin and Mao, in the name of ‘eumenics,’ systematically murdered far more people than Hitler ever did. Human beings can do nasty things to one another appealing to almost any ideology, but surely the entirety of human evolutionary history tells us that knowledge is preferable to ignorance.”
Bouchard continued to fight back at the Horgan broadside. Unsatisfied with being cosigner of a letter to the editors, he wrote a nine-page paper for circulation within the scientific community refuting only those parts of Horgan’s piece that referred to his work but encouraging others whom he knew to be similarly misrepresented to do likewise. Most of the letter itemized the information Bouchard provided Horgan that put to rest his points and which Horgan did not mention, but Bouchard rarely got more accusatory than “… one must wonder why …” Measured as Bouchard’s rebuttal was, his exasperation and anger surfaced at times, as when he confronted Horgan’s claim that separated twins, excited by the attention their sameness brings them, strive to exaggerate their similarities.
Bouchard responded, “The twins would have to be pretty talented to exaggerate their similarities in I.Q., special mental abilities, reaction time to a variety of tasks they have never seen before, responses to thousands of questions they have never considered, as well as cardiovascular functioning, pulmonary functioning, cavities, etc. This is shoddy journalism with a vengeance.” But of course Horgan gave no hint that such detailed measurements are made in Minnesota; instead, we are left to assume, some self-styled scientists sit around waiting for twins to do something weirdly similar, then call the newspapers.
Anyone familiar with the advances of behavioral genetics of recent years, and with the long-standing arguments against them, had to conclude that the article was shamelessly slanted and deliberately misleading. It confused and debased what could have been an honorable debate with false information and the omission of all data that might have rendered less “dubious” the link between genes and behavior. As disheartening as publication of the article was to the hundreds of men and women who have devoted their lives to this “dubious link,” and to the large numbers of nonprofessionals who believe these scientists are on to a new dimension of human self-knowledge that could eventually be widely beneficial to everyone, all of these people were due for another rude shock. An organization called the National Association of Science Writers, which is based in Huntington, New York, voted Horgan’s piece the best magazine article in 1993.
SEVENTEEN
VIOLENT CRIME IN THE MARYLAND WOODS
THE DRIVE TO THE Wye Conference Center on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on a Friday evening in September 1995 placed me in an inching line of traffic heading to the beach resort Ocean City. The file of cars, city people from Baltimore and Washington eking another weekend from the waning summer, was so unrelated to the surrounding farmland, a sealed train from city to beach, that it added to the sense of rural isolation. I was not bound for the beach but on an errand to learn if behavioral genetics could be applied to one of the nation’s most acute social problems, violent crime.
I turned off the highway and drove a few miles of country road, then found the center’s private road for another mile or two of unspoiled landscape. Suddenly I came upon a car-filled parking lot behind which were a cluster of low, cedar-shingled buildings. After the miles of uninhabited landscape, the rows of cars came as a surprise, like stumbling on a Cosa Nostra meeting in the Adirondacks. This secluded and noiseless spot was the setting for the much debated, much decried, once canceled conference, now reborn with the title “The Meaning and Significance of Research on Genetics and Criminal Behavior.”
The idea that criminals are “born that way” has probably been around since a Neanderthal, sitting with his tribe around a fire, first snatched a juicy hyena bone from one of his rule-abiding pals. The others surely gasped at this breach of caveman etiquette and concluded that the thief must be “different.” What else could they think? The Neanderthals did not have today’s bouquet of alternative explanations such as faulty rearing, lack of socialization, bad neighborhoods, peer-pressure, social stigmatization, racial oppression, and low self-esteem. Shaking their heads sadly, the Neanderthals had no choice but to assume a flaw in the thief’s makeup. Of course, the bone-snatcher might have simply been hungrier than the rest. On such rudim
entary contingencies endless environmental explanations can be built, many of them probably correct.
My Neanderthal parable makes a sad point about behavioral genetics: The further one descends on the scale of education and cultivation, the greater the acceptance of the idea that personality and character traits are innate, “in the blood.” In our time, environmental explanations have been the stuff of learned journals and universities; hereditary ones the stuff of lunch counters and back porches. And to no group do the rocking-chair sages apply this diagnosis more frequently than to the most conspicuous carriers of “bad blood,” criminals.
The effort to give scientific legitimacy to this cornerstone of folk wisdom began in 1870 with Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician interested in the physical characteristics of lawbreakers. Lombroso believed he had stumbled upon an explanation of criminality when he was examining cadavers in the prisons of Pavia, hoping to find a pattern of physical differences between criminals and the insane. He came on the skull of a robber, a single skull, that sparked his insight about criminals.
Because of irregularities in the skull’s shape, Lombroso hypothesized that many criminals were throwbacks to an earlier, morally inferior human. (It is interesting that he, like many, assumed that bad traits were older and more fundamental to human nature; the good traits, such as morality and altruism, came along as a part of our species’ ineffable march toward civilization and virtue.) Lombroso developed his theory of “physical atavism” and published it in an influential book, The Delinquent Man, which emerged in 1873, a time when the entire concept of an earlier human was new.
Like so many spurious scientific ideas, Lombroso’s fell on ears made receptive by visceral feelings, widely held then and now, that there must be some rational explanation for behavior that researchers, safe and untroubled in the middle class, considered perplexingly aberrant. In 1874, shortly after Lombroso found his link between physiognomy and criminality, Robert L. Dugdale traced the histories of 709 members of an Irish family, the Jukes, and found among them 76 criminals, 128 prostitutes, 200 living on public assistance, and 28 keeping brothels. While not denying an environmental role in the Jukeses’ depravity (as did later researchers), Dugdale was convinced that the statistics on this one clan established a genetic basis to crime.
There would be many variations on Lombroso and Dugdale’s ideas, each replacing the last and enjoying its fifteen minutes of acceptance in the scientific sunlight, but more important is that the search for congenital, as well as social, causes for crime had begun in earnest, giving birth to the discipline of criminology. Others prominent among those pursuing the inherited-learnings idea were Englishman Charles Goring and, in the United States, Herbert H. Goddard. The latter achieved notoriety for his study of the Kallikak family, whose generations of retards inspired the eugenics movement.
All the many variations on the genes-crime theme that have burst upon the scientific stage over the past hundred years have eventually slunk off, unproven or discredited, to a chorus of boos from the environmental crowd, those who had been rooting for failure. They invariably saw such theories as a ruse to block social-betterment efforts. They knew their opponents’ stance: What point was there in trying to help the poor and disadvantaged who were driven to crime if they were irrevocably doomed to criminality by their genes?
The environmentalists had other good reasons to fear reckless applications of inheritance theories of crime. From roughly 1905 to 1930, the genetic foundations of criminality remained an important plank in the eugenicists’ platform. Convinced that society’s ills resulted not from economic inequalities but from innate flaws in troublemaking segments of the population, they unabashedly urged the sterilization of criminals—and succeeded. In 1915 thirteen U.S. states had enacted laws permitting sterilization of criminals and the retarded. (Virginia’s notorious Lynchburg Colony was particularly enthusiastic in pursuing this policy.) By 1930 fifteen more states had done the same. These laws were challenged in 1927 in a case that reached the Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, but the government’s right to sterilize those it considered unfit was upheld in a decision supported by such libertarians as Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes (who wrote the famous line, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough”). Sterilization laws, while no longer implemented, astonishingly still exist.
This shameful episode in American history indicates that we do not have to cite Nazi atrocities to indicate the potential horror of hasty public policy based on wobbly science. As for the frequent allusions to the Nazis, Carl Degler points out in his book In Search of Human Nature that Germany joined other European nations in enacting sterilization laws in 1933, before Hitler came to power.
Even after the demise of eugenics as a legitimate approach to social problems, the search for inherited patterns in criminals continued, most notably with William Sheldon’s theories in the 1950s about body types (watch your wallet around mezomorphs!) and the discovery of the double Y chromosome in 1965. Neither of these criminological breakthroughs stood up under scrutiny—a lot of very nice people turned out to have two Ys—but for a time, both laid claim to having discovered the biological underpinnings of criminal behavior.
With Lombroso’s leap to a bogus conclusion, and with subsequent giddy leaps, all equally invalid, we see a mechanism that may help explain such sorry lapses in scientific judgment by otherwise intelligent men and women. Lambroso’s perplexity over behavior he found unthinkable—good grief, stealing—toppled him over the edge of methodological soundness in his determination to explain how members of his own species could behave in ways so far outside his own behavioral range. Traces of such endearing naïveté can still be seen in today’s social scientists who strain to unravel the mystery of behavior they consider “aberrant” only because its social context is so foreign to them.
As I ENTERED the Wye Center’s main building and registered at a table set up in the lobby, I feared that I might be in for a more sophisticated variation of the same fuzzy thinking. A weekend on the Chesapeake discussing the reasons people commit crimes might reveal only that the question was as fatuous as asking Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. (Because my genes made me do it?) With or without valid conclusions, I had to acknowledge that the event’s coming off at all said much about the idea’s unsquelchability, given its history of misfires. For a group of distinguished scholars—scientists, historians, philosophers—to come together to consider the possibility of genetic links to crime and violence, and to do this in 1995, when the subject reeked of political incorrectness, was in itself remarkable. It was testimony not only to the idea’s durability but also to the broadening acceptance of genes as an element in behavior-explaining equations.
The conference’s coming to pass was even more remarkable because of an ill-fated effort by the organizer, David Wasserman, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, to hold it three years earlier. The prior plans had progressed quite far, but a firestorm of controversy caused the event to be abruptly canceled. The title had been “Genetic Factors in Crime: Findings, Uses and Implications.” With its assumption that crime had genetic factors, the title alone provoked angry accusations of a racist agenda and that the meeting was to be an opening ploy in a governmental plot to tranquilize the inner cities into manageable passivity.
Wasserman had crafted a proposal to allay the anticipated fears. As an example of his caution, he said that if genetic markers were found that placed children at high risk of becoming criminals, the markers would probably indicate little about who would and would not actually commit crimes. “Most people with the markers will not become criminals and most criminals will not have the markers.”
As further evidence of evenhandedness and freedom from deterministic thinking, Wasserman and his colleagues had scheduled for their first meeting a review of the most recent failure in the search for a DNA-crime link, the YY chromosome. What subject could better demonstrate the dangers of premature conclusions? The conference’s purpose, the prospectus said,
was simply to examine recent behavioral genetics research on crime, critique it, and determine whether it had any public policy implications. When the proposal had been reviewed and approved by prominent academics in related fields, Wasserman received a National Institutes of Health grant of $78,000 and sent out invitations to all the leading scientists and sociobiologists on both sides of the issue.
Wasserman’s diplomatic prospectus could not overcome disastrous timing. Sensitivities to the crime issue had been exacerbated a year earlier, when the Bush administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, had announced a “violence initiative.” At a time when blacks were responsible for 45 percent of the nation’s violent crime while comprising only 12 percent of the population, a move against violence was seen as a move against blacks. Warning lights flashed, and the politically watchful went on alert for the next manifestation of the government’s racist intentions.
This was provided resoundingly by the Bush administration’s director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, Frederick Goodwin, who in a speech cited recent monkey studies as having relevance to inner-city violence. Goodwin underlined his point by saying he understood why people called “certain areas of certain cities jungles.” His remarks were the official toe out of the racist closet for which the vigilant had been waiting. Because of the resulting press furor, the violence initiative was abandoned and Goodwin was reassigned to a lesser post.
When only a few months later the Maryland violence conference was announced, many saw it, not as an attempt to bring new light to one of the nation’s most critical problems, but as another sneak attack on beleaguered blacks. Leading the counterattack was a psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, known primarily as a dogged opponent of psycho-pharmacology, having fought every antidepressant from lithium to Prozac. Breggin joined a growing number who had learned a shortcut to prominence: making use of the media’s admirable effort to grant equal space to both sides of controversies. As issues become less and less controversial, opponents become difficult to find. As a result the media must return again and again to the diehards, and some pretty marginal “experts” find themselves media stars. By being one of the nation’s few psychiatrists who opposed pill therapies, Breggin was frequently in the papers. Similarly, he had little trouble snagging coverage of his outrage over Goodwin’s monkey gaffe and was quickly the most vocal denouncer of the violence conference’s sinister intentions. In Breggin’s view, Wasserman’s announced aim of a simple examination of genetic findings was a smoke screen for the government’s hidden antiblack agenda.
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