The Anatomy Of Violence: The Biological Roots Of Crime (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
To say that I struggled with this book would have been an understatement. I so wanted this to be good and I held out hope all the way to the end. Looking at crime from a purely biological point of view is bad and lazy science. Causation is not correlation and vice versa. This book was also filled with victim blaming myths....if a parent does the best that they can, it is not their fault if their child decides to shoot them in the head. If a man has a tumor and knows that it is wrong to get into bed with a 12-year-old....it does not excuse his active choice to sexually abuse a child. His assumptions in the first chapter about sexual and domestic violence CLEARLY shows that he is absolutely unaware of any of the research done about rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Domestic violence can not be boiled down to "spousal jealousy". Perpetrators do not choose their victims based on their good looks or their assumption of the fertility of their victims, but rather are chosen because of their vulnerability. My broken brain made me do it! That might be one big takeaway from reading Adrian Raine’s recent book on The Anatomy of Violence. But it would be a gross simplification of a compelling, neurobiological case for the root causes of violence and a straw man at best. A leading authority on the biology of crime, violence, and antisocial behavior, Raine rattles the standard sociological paradigm in criminology with a wealth of evidence from behavioral genetics showing that at least half of our aggressive, antisocial behavior is highly heritable. Yes, the social environment still matters in explaining violent crime, he would agree, but it’s mostly influences outside the family, like peer groups, that make the biggest difference in how our lives turn out and not our parents and shared home environment. More or less stressful social environments can also turn on or off genetic propensities for violence across generations through an intriguing causal mechanism known as epigenetics—shades of Lamarckian inheritance? Seeds of Violence Lie in the Brain The bigger message Raine wants to drive home, however, centers on damage to the brain, in particular to the prefrontal cortex: the gray matter (just behind our foreheads) responsible for executive functioning—e.g., planning and anticipating the consequences of our actions—and regulating our aggressive impulses. Prefrontal dysfunction, as he documents extensively, turns out to be a common denominator in the brains of murderers, serial killers and spouse-abusers. Defects in the prefrontal cortex show up in the brains of psychopaths as well, but they lack an emotional conscience, the feeling of what is right or wrong, because of an equally damaged, “cooler” amygdala—the center of our emotional brain. The stereotypical fearlessness of psychopaths turns up in a telling biomarker: a chronically lower, resting heart rate. Such psychopaths and anti-social, violent offenders may just be born with dysfunctional brains.Breaking Young Brains But young brains, as Raine reminds us, can also be broken in lots of other ways. Birth complications (e.g. forceps injuries), maternal neglect, alcohol abuse and smoking during pregnancy, malnutrition, exposure to lead and other heavy metals—all of these social risk factors can interact with biological risk factors, greatly increasing the odds that a child will eventually become an anti-social, violent adult offender. How else do we explain, as in identical twin-adoption studies, why a child from a benign or even advantaged home environment ends up as a violent offender in adolescence? As Raine argues—persuasively in my judgment—when such a child is not exposed to an adverse home background and social forces that normally would predispose him to an antisocial or criminal way of life, genetic and neurobiological factors become the most plausible explanation for his behavior—social scientist claims to the contrary.Illusions of Free Will and Responsibility So are all these bad guys off the hook? Holding criminals accountable for their actions rests on the bedrock assumption that they had a “free choice” about how to behave. But Raine views the idea of free will as “almost a religious belief” with no physical basis in the brain; so he regards it as largely an illusion, a useful one for getting us to behave responsibly, but an illusion nonetheless. Throughout the book he documents dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex in case after case of violent and recidivistic offenders who evidently lack “free will” and the “…moral sense and feeling of what is right or wrong.” Case closed.Legal Retribution and Brain Science Not so fast, says Raine. Society demands “justice” to protect us from violent predators and psychopaths. We want retribution for despicable actions; we want the perps to feel some pain for the pain they inflicted on the victim. That’s our emotional brain speaking to the court. All we usually want to know, legally, is did the offender know what he was doing and could he tell whether what he was doing was right or wrong? If he did, then he had “rational capacity” in the American legal system, as Raine explains, and is therefore accountable for his actions. Yes, perpetrators may know what they’re doing on a cognitive level, but on an emotional level, their dysfunctional frontal cortex (and amygdala) leave them unable to feel what they did was wrong. Shame and remorse are not part of their affective vocabulary. So how do we justify holding them fully accountable in a legal system that is now based on 170-year old brain science, the archaic M’Naghten rule on criminal insanity (1843) and minor variations thereof? For now we will continue to compartmentalizing what we know, neuroscientifically, from the rules of civilized society. As Adrian Raine, David Eagleman, Michael Gazzaniga, Sam Harris and a host of other cognitive neuroscientists have told us, virtually all of our actions are beyond our conscious control. Beliefs in free will and responsibility represent moral values—not scientific constructs, but rather social constructs that exist only as rules of the game, rules that vary over time and across cultures. But we err, rightly, they believe, on the side of protecting society from violent predators despite what we now know about the inescapable determinism of the human brain. But it may not be too long before our neural networks go on trial, transforming the legal system in the process. Stay tuned dinosaurs. Violence as a Public Health Problem Raine paves the way to this neurolaw future by getting us to view violence as a chronic public health problem, and not simply one of law enforcement or worse, medieval notions of senseless “evil” in our society. This should lead the way to more extensive neurobiological assessment, treatment and prevention, especially early on when we can identify many genetic and biosocial risk factors for broken brains. It’s hard to disagree with him here. But Raine veers off the reservation with a visionary, utopian set of solutions for the future, such as: a federal government initiative for a national brain-scanning program in which all males, 18 and over, would be required to register for a brain and DNA scan at a local hospital of their choice [think brain draft], the results of which might result in indefinite detention in a “…center where they can be assessed, treated and perhaps released someday; other high risk detainees could choose to be surgically ‘castrated’.” Evidently, he means it. He also imagines that, because of the ever-spiraling problem of violence in our society [think here of recent mass murders], we will become increasingly receptive to a national screening program to identify high risk kids for “intensive biosocial therapy” in a residential treatment center, beginning with registration of all children at ten years old! Raine is by no means naïve about the civil liberties uproar that would ensue as a consequence of trying to implement his utopian visions, but he’s optimistic it can all be overcome with sufficient scientific evidence of its effectiveness in reducing violence. Dream on, Dr. Raine. The civil liberties reaction would be just part of a much larger political reaction in the Congress and statehouses around the country. Lawyers everywhere would be salivating. Bring it on! He’s in over his head here. It would have been better for Raine to have left the implications of violence as a public health problem to other professionals and neuroethicists. His long suit lies in convincing us that violence or the “seeds of sin,” as he playfully refers to it, is written in the genes and rooted in the brain—aided and abetted by our biosocial environment. That he does well. Not many of us would doubt that the Navy Yard mass murderer Aaron Alexis’ brain was broken, that Newtown killer Adam Alanza’s brain was broken, that the Aurora “massacre soldier” James Eagan Holmes’ brain was broken—just to take some of the most recent episodes of mass violence. Yes, we want to hold all such predators accountable, but 170 year old brain science and outdated social science just won’t do. That and broken gun laws too. The sociological model that has long dominated the field of criminology now faces a vigorous intellectual challenge— a felonious assault, some of its defenders might say— from the likes and allies of Adrian Raine’s emerging neurocriminological paradigm, one that dispels many of our illusions about the causes of violent crime. It's a terrific eye-opener for jaded observers of violent crime, especially in the USA. George Franklin Bishop, Ph.D.Cincinnati, Ohio
What do You think about The Anatomy Of Violence: The Biological Roots Of Crime (2013)?
A great look at why the human species is just evil and downright dangerous.
—stephlou
