Evolutionary Psychology: A New Approach to Understand Crime

Relative new branch of Psychology addresses crime towards a comprehensive explanation of Punishment, Public Policy, and Prevention

Crime is responsible for a significant amount of human suffering in society. The lives of victims and their families can be adversely affected; often in profound ways. Crime can erode social trust in communities and lead to fear amongst the residents. Crime is expensive for police and even more expensive to prosecute and contain. Perpetrators, too, suffer from the effects of their actions as their lives are altered, often permanently, and typically for the worse. It’s important to analyze an evolutionary approach, which will be invaluable for advancing our understanding of why crime occurs and what accounts for the main patterns in offending that we observed.

We need to keep in mind that problematic behaviors can arise as a result of evolved psychological mechanisms operating as they were “designed” by natural and sexual selection. A significant amount of male to male aggression, for instance, reflects selection for intra-sexual competition amongst males because success in such context advances reproductive success. Male to male violence reflects the operation of evolved adaptation working as they were designed to. Problem behaviors can also arise through the operation of conditional adaptations operating as they were designed by natural and sexual selection in response to specific social and ecological environments.



Before we begin considering specific approaches for preventing crime, we think it is useful to recognize three general points regarding an evolutionary approach towards reducing problematic behaviors. First, where it is possible, programs and policies should work with “human nature” rather than against it. Even if we recognize that humans are enormously flexible in their behavioral repertories, there are likely to be certain practices, policies, and social arrangements that work too crudely against the grain of evolved predisposition and proclivities. Hence, this will likely lead to ineffectiveness. A second related point is that it can often be possible to affect “workarounds” that act on the same evolved motivations that lead to problematic behavior, but instead, channeling the behavior along more societally desirable paths is ideal.

Police officers can’t help but think they have a magical effect on the flow of traffic as all they have to do is enter a stream of vehicles in a marked patrol car and the cars around them immediately slow down and become more cautious. Of course there is no magic involved: human behavior is enormously flexible and will change in predictable ways to different features of the situation as they emerge.

There are two interesting strategies (increasing the effort and reducing the rewards of offending) that are fairly explicable from both a rational choice and evolutionary perspective. If a good deal of offending is related to the pursuit of social status, then changing the reward structure of the environment will alter the relative value of criminal actions as a means to increase social standing. Better locks, bars, screens, security measures and so forth. Simple means that offenders find it harder to obtain the rewards of offending.



Efforts to increase the risk of offending such as the implementation of closed-circuit television, improved street lighting, and better opportunity for natural surveillance have shown to be effective in reducing certain types of offending . Strategies to remove excuses for offending such as instructions, signs, notices, and techniques for altering the conscience of individuals have been evaluated less rigorously. However, we suggest that both of these situational crime prevention strategies can be effective for largely the same reasons. Both strategies provide ecological context that enhance prosocial behavior by reinforcing social and moral norms and alerting individuals to the risk of punishment.

There are a large number of different social crime prevention programs that have been developed and are subject to formal evaluations. Most of these programs focus on addressing the known risk factors for offending and there is a good deal of evidence that properly developed and implemented social crime prevention programs that can be effective in reducing offending. From an evolutionary perspective, the importance of developmental focused social crime prevention initiatives cannot be emphasized enough.



Approaches to interventions that largely focus on merely preventing or stopping risky behavior without any consideration of the ‘function’ of that behavior are not likely to be effective. We think that the key contribution of an evolutionary approach is to help us to go beyond our understanding of the developmental risk factors for offending to identify the key causal processes that are most likely to be implicated. For example, prevention programs like education and home visitation provide information about proper prenatal and antenatal care, parenting practices, and health care which create less harsh intrauterine and early childhood environments that, in turn, can promote the development of slower life history strategies.

An evolutionary perspective suggests that the existence of punishment is essential for the viable functioning of any society, small or large. Without the existence of the third-party punishment of individuals who violate important social and moral norms, there will almost certainly be a substantial reduction in cooperation and an increase in unsanctioned punishment. We are not simply suggesting that we should punish norm transgressions because that is how we have evolved to respond to such transgression. Rather, any attempt to abolish punishment is likely to have unintended negative consequences given our evolved predispositions and the evolutionary function of punishment.



Psychological and behavioral adaptations along with cultural practices have evolved in tandem in response to the violation of significant moral norms. One result of this dynamic and evolving interaction of biology and human nature has been a suite of normative systems and institutions specifically designed to prevent, and if necessary, manage serious wrongdoing (crime).
A problem with groups or individuals seeking revenge without the mediation of an impartial agency is that it can lead to a seemingly endless cycle of harmful actions and counteractions that destabilize social networks.

Punishment can be defined loosely as the intentional infliction of sanctions by the state on individuals who have unjustifiably harmed other people. There are numerous normative justifications of punishment including retributivism, consequentialism, and communicative justification.

The focus of the communicative justification of punishment on the well-being of a community means that relationships between moral stakeholders are of critical importance and the role of individual entitlements and duties assumes lesser importance. It is a collectivist approach to resolving disputes between people and arriving towards solutions to ethical problems such as crime. The process of reconciliation involves forgiveness and the willingness of individuals and the state to look beyond the imposition of punishment, or vengeance, to the moral task of repairing damaged relationships between offenders, victims, and the community.

Because humans are cultural species whose behavior is strongly influenced by social and moral norms and the ecological contexts in which they are embedded, changes in these norms can affect significant changes in behavior that can be sustained through cultural and ecological inheritance. Sustained efforts to support and facilitate the development of pro-social norms and change norms that support or facilitate antisocial behavior, are therefore, likely to be one essential component of efforts to reduce the harmful effects of crime. Changes in legal practices have an important role to play in this context. An evolutionary perspective does not provide all the answers. It does offer a coherent, theoretical framework for integrating the basic and applied sciences in a way that can foster the development of a science of intentional change that has implications for our efforts to reduce offending and the various harms that arise from crime and its management.
By: Jaime F. Adriazola
American Graduate University, Washington DC
References:
Evolutionary Criminology, Russil Durrant / Tony Ward
The Psychology of criminal conduct; New Providence NJ, Mathew Bender & Company Inc.
Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for social Scientists, Oxford: University Press
Handbook of evolutionary psychology, D. M. Buss
Why evolution is true; New York: Viking
The evolutionary psychology of violence; Psicothema

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What Did Neanderthals Leave to Modern Humans? Some Surprises

At Vanderbilt University, John Anthony Capra, an evolutionary genomics professor, has been combining high-powered computation and a medical records databank to learn what a Neanderthal heritage — even a fractional one — might mean for people today.
We spoke for two hours when Dr. Capra, 35, recently passed through New York City. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

-Let’s begin with an indiscreet question. How did contemporary people come to have Neanderthal DNA on their genomes?

-He replied: “we hypothesize that roughly 50,000 years ago, when the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia, they encountered Neanderthals. Mating must have occurred then, and later.”

One reason we deduce this is because the descendants of those who remained in Africa — present day Africans — don’t have Neanderthal DNA.

What does that mean for people who have it?
At my lab, we’ve been doing genetic testing on the blood samples of 28,000 patients at Vanderbilt and eight other medical centers across the country. Computers help us pinpoint where on the human genome this Neanderthal DNA is, and we run that against information from the patients’ anonymized medical records. We’re looking for associations.



What we’ve been finding is that Neanderthal DNA has a subtle influence on risk for disease. It affects our immune system and how we respond to different immune challenges. It affects our skin. You’re slightly more prone to a condition where you can get scaly lesions after extreme sun exposure. There’s an increased risk for blood clots and tobacco addiction.

To our surprise, it appears that some Neanderthal DNA can increase the risk for depression; however, there are other Neanderthal bits that decrease the risk. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of one’s risk for depression is determined by Neanderthal DNA. It all depends on where on the genome it’s located.

Was there ever an upside to having Neanderthal DNA?
It probably helped our ancestors survive in prehistoric Europe. When humans migrated into Eurasia, they encountered unfamiliar hazards and pathogens. By mating with Neanderthals, they gave their offspring needed defenses and immunities.



That trait for blood clotting helped wounds close up quickly. In the modern world, however, this trait means greater risk for stroke and pregnancy complications. What helped us then doesn’t necessarily now.

Did you say earlier that Neanderthal DNA increases susceptibility to nicotine addiction? Yes. Neanderthal DNA can mean you’re more likely to get hooked on nicotine, even though there were no tobacco plants in archaic Europe.

We think this might be because there’s a bit of Neanderthal DNA right next to a human gene that’s a neurotransmitter implicated in a generalized risk for addiction. In this case and probably others, we think the Neanderthal bits on the genome may serve as switches that turn human genes on or off.

Aside from the Neanderthals, do we know if our ancestors mated with other hominids? We think they did. Sometimes when we’re examining genomes, we can see the genetic afterimages of hominids, which haven’t even been identified yet.




MORE REPORTING ON HUMAN ORIGINS
A few years ago, the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo received an unusual fossilized bone fragment from Siberia. He extracted the DNA, sequenced it and realized it was neither human nor Neanderthal. What Pääbo found was a previously unknown hominid he named Denisovan, after the cave where it had been discovered. It turned out that Denisovan DNA can be found on the genomes of modern Southeast Asians and New Guineans.

Have you long been interested in genetics?
Growing up, I was very interested in history, but I also loved computers. I ended up majoring in computer science at college and going to graduate school in it; however, during my first year in graduate school, I realized I wasn’t very motivated by the problems that computer scientists worked on.

Fortunately, around that time — the early 2000s — it was becoming clear that people with computational skills could have a big impact in biology and genetics. The human genome had just been mapped. What an accomplishment! We now had the code to what makes you, you, and me, me. I wanted to be part of that kind of work.

So I switched over to biology. And it was there that I heard about a new field where you used computation and genetics research to look back in time — evolutionary genomics.



There may be no written records from prehistory, but genomes are a living record. If we can find ways to read them, we can discover things we couldn’t know any other way.

Not long ago, the two top editors of The New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial questioning “data sharing,” a common practice where scientists recycle raw data other researchers have collected for their own studies. They labeled some of the recycling researchers, “data parasites.” How did you feel when you read that?
I was upset. The data sets we used were not originally collected to specifically study Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. Thousands of patients at Vanderbilt consented to have their blood and their medical records deposited in a “biobank” to find genetic diseases.

Three years ago, when I set up my lab at Vanderbilt, I saw the potential of the biobank for studying both genetic diseases and human evolution. I wrote special computer programs so that we could mine existing data for these purposes.

That’s not being a “parasite.” That’s moving knowledge forward. I suspect that most of the patients who contributed their information are pleased to see it used in a wider way.

What has been the response to your Neanderthal research since you published it last year in the journal Science?

Some of it’s very touching. People are interested in learning about where they came from. Some of it is a little silly. “I have a lot of hair on my legs — is that from Neanderthals?”

But I received racist inquiries, too. I got calls from all over the world from people who thought that since Africans didn’t interbreed with Neanderthals, this somehow justified their ideas of white superiority.

It was illogical. Actually, Neanderthal DNA is mostly bad for us — though that didn’t bother them.

As you do your studies, do you ever wonder about what the lives of the Neanderthals were like?
It’s hard not to. Genetics has taught us a tremendous amount about that, and there’s a lot of evidence that they were much more human than apelike.

They’ve gotten a bad rap. We tend to think of them as dumb and brutish. There’s no reason to believe that. Maybe those of us of European heritage should be thinking, “Let’s improve their standing in the popular imagination. They’re our ancestors, too.’”
Source: Claudia Dreifus

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