Breggin’s scare tactics succeeded. A Washington newspaper aimed at Afro-Americans typified the hysteria in a headline: PLOT TO SEDATE BLACK YOUTH. The Congressional Black Caucus was incensed to learn that government funds were underwriting bogus scholarship aimed at legitimatizing racist programs. The controversy became so inflamed that the N.I.H. had little choice but to withdraw the conference’s grant. Wasserman’s denials of Breggin’s characterizations, plus angry counteraccusations of academic censorship, found little support in the academic community and the conference was canceled.
There was considerable irony in the Breggin camp’s victory in that the conference would have included many powerful opponents to biological and genetic explanations of crime. So weighted was the guest list with militant antigenes types that the meetings might well have squelched, at least for a while, the notion of biological links to crime. By killing off the conference, Breggin had probably killed off a prestigious endorsement of his view that crime resulted from adverse social conditions, nothing more. In a conversation I had a year and a half later with Harvard’s Jonathan Beckwith, a leading behavioral genetics skeptic, he expressed his regret that the conference had been canceled; he saw it as an opportunity to air the fallacies and pitfalls of efforts to link crime and genes.
In thinking over this drama, I felt that the conference had been precipitous. I didn’t think there had been enough research on this one behavioral aspect. In addition, the entire subject of crime was so unwieldy, its terms hard to define. “Crime,” “criminal,” and “violence” are concepts that vary from period to period, from country to country, from neighborhood to neighborhood. Attempting a scientific analysis from the behavioral genetics perspective would be, to me, like shooting at not one moving target but several, all passing in different directions, with one bullet, genetic theory, to hit them all.
I also saw Wasserman’s project as typifying a lamentable pattern in the history of genetic approaches to human nature. Each time advances have been made in understanding of the biological links with behavior, ideologues with extreme positions appear, cheer the new findings, then twist them to their own political agendas. As a result they stigmatize the field and succeed in nothing more than driving the line of investigation back into the no-man’s-land of intellectual disrepute. A crime and violence conference at this point in the unfolding science of behavioral genetics might appear another replay of this counterproductive scenario.
MANY IN THE FIELD disagreed. Shortly after the collapse of the Maryland conference, I was walking across a snowy University of Minnesota campus with Thomas Bouchard and David Lykken, on the way to lunch. I asked what they thought about the conference controversy, hoping that they would share my opinion that it had been premature. They didn’t. Without answering me, Bouchard turned to Lykken and said, “You know, David, it’s time for that conference. We should think about holding it here.” Lykken nodded a thoughtful assent.
I knew that neither Bouchard or Lykken harbored the sinister political motives that Breggin and the other critics imputed to the Maryland organizers. Behind the two men’s desire for a crime conference, I suspected, was an eagerness to link their behavioral genetics discoveries to issues of broad national concern. A high-visibility conference would be a way to establish with the public the relevance of their science to the nation’s life. But they could not expunge the political taint to the subject, and I did not believe the data were yet strong enough to guarantee safe passage through a p.c. minefield.
Yet I was a newcomer to behavioral genetics, and I was talking to two of its most respected and knowledgeable practitioners as well as two veterans of the wars between science and ideology. As I listened to them discuss a revived crime conference, I felt like a hound dog watching helplessly as two admired humans waded into quicksand. The most I could muster as a warning yelp was to ask Bouchard if he thought a crime conference was wise in light of Maryland’s collapse.
He looked at me blankly. “Why shouldn’t we hold it? We don’t get any government money.”
I was stunned. Bouchard was surely aware of the press attacks on the Maryland conference, the ad hominen invective from the Peter Breggin types, the denunciations from the black caucus in Congress. Yet he was brushing this aside to focus on only one factor: funding. He was either very brave or very reckless. Or better informed than I. After a few hours on the university’s database, I learned that there was more research than I realized on the genes-crime connection. Apart from animal breeders who for centuries had been breeding hyper-aggressiveness into bulls, attack dogs, and fighting cocks, neurologists and clinical psychologists had long known about biological links with various forms of rage and violence.
In experiments headed by M. Glusman, a small section of the hypothalamus of cats was removed, rendering the animals permanently savage. Certain humans who had suffered head injuries and brain insults would be plagued for the remainder of their lives with uncontrollable fits of violent rage. The brain-chemistry-violence nexus had been well demonstrated in prisons by the effectiveness of lithium and beta blockers in reducing violent aggression in troublesome inmates. Experiments with violent children had shown similar pharmaceutical interventions to be highly effective. In sum, the strong links between brain chemistry and violence had for years been a commonplace among psychiatrists and neurologists, even though sociologists were having none of it. The genetic contribution to criminality was less well established.
But even here evidence existed. A meta-analysis of twin studies based on fraternal-identical comparisons showed that in eight studies of aggression, identical twins were concordant on an average of 49 percent of the time, versus 29 percent for fraternals. On measures of impulsiveness, thirty-one studies averaged 51 percent concordance for MZs, 20 percent for DZs. The Minnesota reared-apart twin study also found a significant genetic component to aggression and “self-control.” Aggressiveness and impulsiveness were clearly influenced by genes, but while such broad traits might be conducive to violent crime, their presence, whether from genes or the environment, was hardly, well, incriminating.
The most impressive study actually linking crime to genetic makeup was conducted in 1983 by Sarnoff Mednick, who organized a team to examine 14,427 convicted Danish criminals. All of those studied had been adopted between 1927 and 1947. Because of the exhaustive records kept by the Danes, Mednick was able to compare the criminal histories of his sample with those of their biological parents. The study established a clear genetic involvement with property crimes like burglary and embezzlement, but none for violent crimes.
This was surprising because of the more pronounced, definable nature of violence and because of the accumulated data on the biological mechanisms that produce it. Widely reported findings on the relationship between violence and the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin had weakened scientific resistance to the notion of biochemical links to hyperaggressiveness. Violence appeared to be a trait ripe enough to drop in the behavioral geneticists’ laps. Why Mednick’s study failed to establish a gene-violence connection and so many other studies have done so is an enigma that no one, as far as I know, has explained. Perhaps science would get boring if the evidence always pointed in the same direction.
FRANK ELLIOTT IS a retired professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from South Africa, Elliott is a soft-spoken man, now in his eighties, who has spent much of his career observing and treating brain disorders in the criminally violent. Like many familiar with the physiological contributions to violent crime, Elliott has watched in dismay as criminologists examined only the social and psychological causes. Years of clinical experience had convinced him that two forces were involved—one environmental, one physiological—both with much to tell the other. Most troublesome to him was the way one of these camps, the social sciences, resolutely ignored the other. When I met with Elliott, he told me of his great satisfaction in having witnessed, in the past few years, a gradual acceptance among criminologists of biolog
ical and genetic influences on at least some manifestations of criminal violence.
In a 1990 paper Elliott wrote: “Clinical experience with violent individuals of all social levels suggests that it might be more useful if such violence were to be regarded not solely as a product of psychological disturbances or social adversity or physiological deviance, but as a net behavioral result from the confluence and interaction at any given moment of multiple biological and environmental variables, some excitatory and some inhibitory.”
Reinforcing the scientific data and pointing doggedly to a some-are-born-that-way approach to criminality was the statistic about adolescent male violence that Frederick Goodwin so often cited: 79 percent of repeated violent offenses were committed by 7 percent of the youth. Seen from another angle, about one-eighth of the population commits about one-half of the crime. These and similarly evocative statistics hovered over all of the discussions, and would hover as well over the violence conference, to serve as pesky reminders that for all the talk about poverty, racism, oppression, and hopelessness, within the segment of the population exposed to these negative forces, only a small percentage suffering these social ills turned to violent crime. Nonenvironmental causes also appeared to be involved.
Bouchard and Lykken’s hopes for a reborn violence conference were shared, it turned out, by the beleaguered David Wasserman. Despite the pummeling he received in the press, he was convinced of his project’s timeliness and that not holding the conference could be seen as a tacit admission of the conference’s underlying racist motives. (You found us out. The game’s over.) Because his plans for a resurrected conference were well advanced, he spared Lykken and Bouchard the trouble of staging their own.
That the conference was finally coming off was a tribute not only to Wasserman’s determination but also to the spreading acceptance of a genes-behavior connection within the scientific community during the two years since the prior cancellation. Increasing numbers of socially concerned people believed that society’s most acute behavioral problems—like crime—might be better understood if the new genetic information were factored in with known environmental causes—poverty and racism, in the case of crime. As I found a seat in the lecture hall at the Aspen Institute’s Wye Center, I thought that the next two days would tell if the idea were premature or not.
THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER was Irving Gottesman. Because of his reputation as a founder of behavioral genetics, this choice in itself suggested a hospitable attitude toward genes-crime theories. In fact, the list of those in attendance showed that the participants were not preponderantly opponents, as in the first conference. Also telling, the best-known critics of behavioral genetics were absent. I later learned that both Lewontin and Breggin had accepted, then canceled, perhaps when they sensed a tilt from their antigenes view. Beckwith was not present, nor was Kamin or Hubbard. The only two names I recognized of the Cambridge antibehavioral genetics group were Diane Paul and Evan Balaban, the latter having established his hostility to the conference’s subject by telling Natalie Angier of the New York Times a few days earlier that he had “a strong opinion that biology doesn’t have anything to contribute to public policy discussions about crime in society.”
As advocates for their side, they were outranked by some behavioral genetics stars. In addition to Gottesman, we would be hearing from Gregory Carey of the University of Colorado; Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California; and Martin Daly, the coauthor of Homicide, the landmark book on the evolutionary underpinnings of murder. There were several neurologists and psychologists who worked with problem children and two black academics, a fair representation although Wasserman had tried hard to lure more into participating.
In his talk, Gottesman stressed that genetic effects are usually intricate interactions with environmental factors and that for complex behaviors like crime, genetic involvement, when present, is even more complex than for other traits, probably involving many genes. He strongly disavowed the notion of “a crime gene,” calling the phrase nonsense. A genetic link to crime might be nothing more, he said, than a neucleotide predisposition in some people to behavioral tendencies such as impulsiveness that under certain conditions make the probability of criminality higher than it is in most people. He also said that two prisoners may be in jail for the same crime, but one was impelled by schizophrenia while the other was reacting to an oppressive environment.
Gottesman pointed out that some violence results from genes common to all members of the species, implying that since we are not all violent all of the time, in those instances the inducements had to be entirely environmental (retaliation, self-defense, and others). He stressed, too, that genes are dynamic, not static, that they turn on and turn off continually throughout life. With all his disclaimers, however, Gottesman emphasized that in trying to understand causes of crime, genetic factors must be addressed. He cited reared-apart twin studies that showed a genetically significant concordance in criminal behavior, noting specific instances of highly similar arrest records between twins.
After dinner Friday we listened to three speakers, two of whom spent most of their time proclaiming their sensitivities to the dangers of applying genetic information to crime. They all saw crime as mostly a social issue, not biological. The only one who put in a forceful “Yes, but …” was a criminologist from the Department of Justice, Diana Fishbein, who began her talk by stressing that her opinions on the conference’s topic were her own and in no way reflected official Justice policy.
Fishbein said that in twenty years of attending criminology conferences, she heard the same people air the same ideas with no reference to possible physiological causes. In spite of compelling data in recent years, biology was still omitted from the criminologists’ equations. These crime experts, she said, remained resolutely uncurious about the reasons all people exposed to the same environmental circumstances don’t react in the same way. They left this inconvenient question to the psychologists and others who were engaged in behavioral genetics research. Although criminologists were the best positioned to pursue the biological line of inquiry, they stubbornly resisted even considering the data others were producing. She felt that this was a serious mistake.
Her main point was that in spite of the dangers, enough was now known of the biochemical basis of some types of criminality for pharmaceutical interventions to be considered as public policy in high-risk cases. Fishbein didn’t stop there. In dealing with repeated perpetrators of violence, she believed drug therapy should be mandatory. She was talking about mild stabilizers like lithium and Prozac. Although the latter was then being consumed voluntarily by six million Americans, to many of the audience, such talk was the first step in the government’s suspected agenda to drug inner-city youth into a manageable passivity.
I later spoke with Fishbein and complimented her on being the only one of the evening’s speakers who came out and spoke candidly about the auspicious potential of the new behavioral genetics information. The few similar remarks made by others had been lost in a morass of caution and social awareness. Fishbein was grateful and told me that she had doubted if participating in the conference would be worth the effort, so certain was she that her recommendations would meet strong resistance. Her obvious expertise and her conviction won the respect, if not the agreement, of the mostly skeptical audience.
OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I was impressed by the scientific acumen and eminence of the participants. I was also impressed by the high level of civility among people with diametrically opposing views. Counterattacks were couched in terms like “I think you overlook …” or “perhaps you are unaware …” Mercifully, there were no slurs about racists and Nazis; I don’t even recall a single “naive” being lobbed across a panel.
Defining fundamental terms proved a nagging problem. Even on the last day, speakers were still arguing over the meaning of “heritability.” About half of the speakers pointed out the vagueness of concepts like “crime” and “criminality,” saying they were vag
ue social constructs not conducive to scientific study. Frank Zimring, of the University of California Law School, amused the crowd by saying that sodomy is a crime in many places but that large segments of the population “think it’s terrific.” Gambling was another example Zimring offered of a crime enjoying widespread popularity; he cited heresy as a crime that had had its day. Other speakers were persuasive in establishing that for an inner-city male youth, criminal behavior was not pathological but rather normal reaction to dire circumstances.
One speaker said that the turf wars of South Central Los Angeles were no different, in terms of evolved human behavior, than territorial disputes between nations such as the Gulf War. This was one of those generalizations that cried out for dismissal as too broad. But a quick brain scan for the illogicality or incongruence, with me at least, turned up no handy rebuttal, and the parallel stood, serene and radiant, as a one-sentence denigration of the entire concept of war.
On the progenes side, a few speakers made the point that until we understand the genetic factors involved in criminality, we cannot pinpoint the most important environmental factors. Another argument that seemed to slow the critical momentum was that when high-risk individuals in high-risk environments are found, scarce government resources for recreation, job training, drug therapy, and counseling can be targeted on these people rather than spread throughout a large population, most of whom are in no danger of becoming criminals. (While reasonable, this idea raised the cloud of a different brand of injustice: the bad guys receiving all the governmental goodies.)
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