The Antisocial Personalities, David Lykken, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995, 259 pp.
Why is there so much crime? To this simple question, liberalism has offered so many environmental explanations that are patently inadequate—poverty, racism, unemployment, etc.—that it is tempting to dismiss them all. Increasingly clear evidence for the heritability of criminality makes it easy to suspect that criminals are born more than they are made, and that little can be done about them.
David Lykken, author of The Antisocial Personalities, might have been inclined towards an overwhelmingly hereditarian view. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and has worked closely with Thomas Bouchard on the famous series of studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and reared apart. The similarities between these twins were so striking that not even the popular press could ignore them. Genes seemed to trump environment every time........
Prof. Lykken explains that there is a small number of people who are likely to become criminals no matter how carefully they are reared. They suffer from a congenital personality disorder, and Prof. Lykken calls them psychopaths. There is a much larger group of people who, depending on how they are brought up, could become either criminals or productive citizens. Prof. Lykken calls the ones who go bad sociopaths, and their behavior is hard to distinguish from that of psychopaths...........To Read More....
My Take - Scary! Sounds like Margret Sanger and Adolph Hitler and a eugenics program. But what's even scarier, he may be right.
Why is there so much crime? To this simple question, liberalism has offered so many environmental explanations that are patently inadequate—poverty, racism, unemployment, etc.—that it is tempting to dismiss them all. Increasingly clear evidence for the heritability of criminality makes it easy to suspect that criminals are born more than they are made, and that little can be done about them.
David Lykken, author of The Antisocial Personalities, might have been inclined towards an overwhelmingly hereditarian view. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and has worked closely with Thomas Bouchard on the famous series of studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and reared apart. The similarities between these twins were so striking that not even the popular press could ignore them. Genes seemed to trump environment every time........
Prof. Lykken explains that there is a small number of people who are likely to become criminals no matter how carefully they are reared. They suffer from a congenital personality disorder, and Prof. Lykken calls them psychopaths. There is a much larger group of people who, depending on how they are brought up, could become either criminals or productive citizens. Prof. Lykken calls the ones who go bad sociopaths, and their behavior is hard to distinguish from that of psychopaths...........To Read More....
My Take - Scary! Sounds like Margret Sanger and Adolph Hitler and a eugenics program. But what's even scarier, he may be right.
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