Week Eight - Evolution Flashcards
The most useful way to begin look at particular approaches within biology is to consider criminal behavior from an evolutionary perspective..
As the geneticist Dobzhansky (1973) wrote: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution’
Information about evolution..
Evolution applies to populations of animals (including humans) not to individual animals. You are the product of many generations of evolution, but the pattern of change that evolution produces can be seen only by looking at the whole population that you are a member of.
Individuals differ in their genes and so in their characteristics. Different characterisitcs give you differing chances of surviving and leaving successful offspring. Those offspring will carry their parents’ genes into the next generations.
The more successful descendants a person leaves, the more successful they are in evolutionary terms.
Thus, if you look at the population as a whole over time you will see evolution: an increase in the proportion of the population carrying versions of genes that fit them well to the environment
What are some examples of the evolutionary explanation for criminal behaviour..
The male-age crime curve, ‘The Cinderella Hypothesis’ and a natural history of rape
What does the Male Age-crime Curve show?
The Male Age-crime Curve shows how the number of male offenders per thousand males changes as their age increases.
What are the results of the Male Age-crime Curve?
There are very few offenders up until about 11 years of age (in the UK age of criminal responsibility is 10 years), the curve increases steeply until the proportion who are convicted offenders reaches a peak at about 18 years. From there it drops - steeply at first, but reducing more gently after about 25 years of age
Male Age-crime Curve
Kanazawa (2003) presents a readable account of his hypothesis…
Kanazawa (2003) presents a readable account of his hypothesis that the bulk of offenders are just young men displaying behaviour that evolved as it increased their chances of finding a mate and having children
Male Age-crime Curve
What are the explanations of the Male Age-crime Curve?
We might guess that the ways in which young males differ from young females are more likely to be linked to reproduction. We know that young men are more aggressive, impulsive, novelty-seeking and sexually driven than young women and also less empathetic.
We also know that there are biological changes through puberty and beyond that underlie these differences. One example is the male surge in testosterone levels that begins at about 11 years of age and does not decline until about 30 years of age.
In many situations, women find men who show the physical changes associated with higher levels of testosterone more sexually attractive (Miller, 2001).
Puberty in males begins at about 11 to 13 years of age and usually continues into the late teens.
The biological purpose of puberty is to create a sexually mature person who can find a good mate and have children; males are interested in sex and capable of fertilizing women from early puberty. Kanazawa argues that the initial rise in the Male Age-crime Curve is triggered by puberty; he thinks that the increase in criminal behaviour reflects young males’s increased drive to behave aggressively/impulsively.
Therefore, he proposes that these changes are concerned with finding a good mate.
Recently, it has been claimed that although young women do not prefer risk-taking men, men get higher status among their male peers by taking peers and women prefer men with higher status.
Similarly, you could argue that aggression and competition between young males are to do with establishing their status in their peer group.
Male Age-crime Curve
The curve for crime is similar..
The curve for crime is similar to that for art, music, and sport.
What is the ‘The Cinderella Hypothesis’?
The hypothesis is that step-parents are much more dangerous to children than biological parents and that is because the step-parents do not share genes with the children. Therefore, they have less interest in the children’s survival and may even benefit from their death
‘The Cinderella Hypothesis’
Worldwide stereotypes of stepmothers..
We have a worldwide stereotypes of stepmothers (e.g. in ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’ or ‘Hansel and Gretel’) and stepfathers (e.g. King Claudius in Hamlet) as being cruel to the children from previous relationships.
Although there are many more wicked stepmothers in fiction, in real life it is often stepfathers who are more dangerous. Sociologists look at how people actually behave find high levels of conflict in Western stepfamilies.
‘The Cinderella Hypothesis’
Daly and Wilson…
Daly and Wilson analyzed evidence on crimes against children within the family.
For abuse, the US data showed that in 1976 under-three-year-olds were almost seven times as likely to be recorded as abused if they live with a stepfather rather than two biological parents.
‘The Cinderella Hypothesis’
A sociological perspective..
A sociological perspective would suggest that stepfamilies are under greater stress than first families: there are the effects of whatever led to the break-up of the previous relationship, tensions between step-parent and children due to loyalty to the missing parent, psychological issues such as anger and jealousy, the strain of managing on less income (thinking of the average stepfamily) with the consequential impact on education, housing, diet or recreational opportunity.
And all these factors can increase the risk of criminal behaviour via mediating variables like substance misuse and bad peer group, while reducing the protective elements of a happy family life
A Natural History of Rape?
What is the theory?
The final hypothesis examined is based on a book by Thornhill and Palmer (2000).
The point they are trying to establish is that human rape, is sexually, or reproductively, driven rather than being an act of violence reflecting unbalanced power relations between men and women as Brownmiller (1975) proposed.
A Natural History of Rape?
Thornhill and Palmer defined rape very tightly..
Thornhill and Palmer defined rape very tightly: it must involve vaginal sex as this is the only way that rape could produce a child.
This seems to miss out a sizeable proportion of human rape, for example, rape with objects, anal rape, rape followed by murder - especially in conflicts where rape is widely practised, sometimes as a deliberate weapon of terror - or rape of women past reproductive age or of pre-pubertal girls.
This is necessary because they want to argue that men show adaptations that help them rape women that are encoded in the genes and so can be selected by the environment, but this can happen only if more copies of their genes are passed down the generations because they rape women.
It is certainly true that rape is common, especially when you include date rape and coercion that falls short of legal rape. Rape is found in all cultures and has been so down recorded history. It also seems that males try to push for sex more often than women do. Together this is consistent with some biological factor being important
A Natural History of Rape?
Virtually every aspect of their project has been attacked,
Virtually every aspect of their project has been attacked, from their definition of rape to their interpretation of the statistics, to their suggested advice based on their work, for example, that young women should not wear provocative clothing.
While their hypothesis may be flawed, the idea that there is a biological side to rape is reasonable, even though it does not yet seem to have produced any useful applications
