Cultureplaces

Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 49 , March–April 2017, Pages 22–31 It's nature and nurture: Integrating biology and genetics into the social learning theory of criminal behavior Bryanna Fox ,    Show more http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2017.01.003 Get rights and content Highlights • Major advances in genetics and biology show that many human behaviors are impacted by factors other than social influences. • Criminology has not incorporated these genetic and biological influences into any mainstream criminological theories. • This article proposes unifying nature and nurture by integrating biological factors and social learning into a single theory.

Excerpt from the conclusion written by Charles Murray, AEI.2009 We have reviewed overwhelming evidence that genetic and hormonal differences between males and females are major causes of sex differences in 258 THE SCIENCE ON WOMEN AND SCIENCE behavior. These include differences in social behaviors in infants, play behaviors, interests, activities, educational and vocational goals, choices of occupations, patterns of cognitive abilities, and the frequency of extreme giftedness in spatial, mechanical, and mathematical ability. The dominance of female doctoral students in the life and human sciences and of male doctoral students in the inorganic sciences and engineering is consistent with and predictable by sex differences in interests and ability patterns. The greater social interest and ability of females than males is evident in infancy. The differing play activities and interests of boys and girls share similarities with sex differences in the play behaviors of nonhuman primates. Int...

Victor David Hanson nails it again in this podcast

We’ve taken in far too many people and we’re letting them down badly – especially the children Tove Lifvendahl For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence. Fraser Nelson and Ivar Arpi discuss the Swedish model for migration on this week’s Spectator podcast: For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ — making its mark on the world not by fighting wars but by offering shelter to war’s victims. Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers. Ove...

Pol itics, the late Andrew Breitbart remarked, is downstream of culture. In other words, the nature of a society’s culture influences the nature of its politics. So if you care about politics—those communal arrangements that, in Aristotle’s summary, conduce to the good for man—you will also care about culture. W ha t should we think about the state of our culture? Should we be happy about the state of those institutions that we have entrusted to preserve and transmit the cultural aspirations of our society? H um an beings are creatures who exist in perpetual tension between what they are and what they would be. Which means that the answer to that second question will always be No. The imperfection, the longing, that is at the heart of the human condition bequeaths us perpetual dissatisfaction. Still, there are differences to be noted, distinctions to be made, and it is clear that some eras enjoy a healthier, more vibrant cultural life than others. When we look around at the ins...

Gangs and guns represent two key sources of violence in America and around the world. While a considerable amount of research has been devoted to studying each outcome, neither has been extensively studied from a biosocial perspective. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by estimating the genetic and environmental underpinnings to gang membership, carrying a handgun, and the covariance between the two. Analyses of kinship pairs from the NLSY97 data revealed significant genetic influences on all of them. Specifically, genetic factors explained 77% of the variance in gang membership, 27% of the variance in carrying a handgun, and 66% of the covariance between gang membership and carrying a handgun. Just as important, however, is that the shared environment explained none of the variance/covariance across models, with all of the remaining variance being accounted for by nonshared environmental effects (plus error).