“Every society has made pottery, but that doesn't mean we have a gene for making pottery” Kohn.A. (1988)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The same could be said about crime; Are we born criminals? or is it something we learn? The effect of biology on crime has been debated over the decades in ongoing nature versus nurture debates. I based this essay primarily on Cesare Lombroso, who first introduced the theory that biology can influence our behaviors. First, I studied how he became known as “the father of criminology,” and how through his legacy we still see progress today. Due to the long history, large amounts of evidence collected, and various theories throughout history, I chose to focus solely on Lombroso to limit my scope of research. There are arguments dating back to 1870 when Cesare Lombroso, an Italian forensic pathologist and prison doctor conceived his theory of the “criminal man”. First published in 1876, and which went through five revised editions during its lifetime. Lombroso became interested in the domain of criminals and the determination of their personality and behavior. Essentially, Lombroso combined his ideas with Darwin's theory of evolution to indicate that offenders were more primitive and therefore not entirely responsible for their criminal actions. For this reason, he is frequently considered the "father of criminology" and the founder of criminal anthropology. This biological determinism is in contradiction with the theory of the classical school of criminology which believes that every human being enjoys rational freedom of choice and action. Lombroso's core beliefs were that some people were born to be criminals and that there were certain characteristics that would determine that individual to be a criminal. a criminal. These features have been identified by the size of the nose, wrinkles, sloping forehead, and wide earlobes, to name a few. These attributes were called atavisms. Lombroso believed that evolution from an earlier stage of humanity had conferred these physical traits on criminals. He introduced the idea that crime was not a matter of sin or free will but rather could be a medical problem that needed to be examined by experts in the field. He did not believe in free will and was much more interested in factors outside of a person's free will that influence behavior. He studied the corpses of people who had committed crimes and conducted experiments on individuals in prison to establish possible correlations. In his later years, he came to believe that social and environmental factors could contribute to crime. Lombroso sometimes considered other factors that might be linked to criminal behavior, influences such as poverty, climate, educational opportunities, alcohol and gangs. He was also among the first to study female criminality, speculating that women were more likely to be criminals out of passion. Although today we view Lombroso as a controversial historical figure and his discoveries as slightly barbaric, in his time he amassed a huge following. Today we can still find roots in his work, there is the idea that there may be physical characteristics that can contribute to criminal behavior.These are still studied and remain active in criminology today. The suggestion that genes and brain structure are linked to criminal behavior has attracted growing interest in recent decades. Today, neurocriminology draws on some of Lombroso's theories to explore the causes of criminal behavior, examining whether brain damage or abnormalities can lead to crime or whether violence is caused by a disorder. Recent studies have shown that there may be a genetic origin for violent crime, and that personality traits, including criminality, can be inferred from facial features. His ideas obviously aroused numerous criticisms after his life. Many believe that he did not conduct his research correctly or critically because he did not use control groups. Although he was able to discover physical trends among his large group of offenders, he did not compare them to a group of “normal” controls. The control groups that Lombroso used for verification were mainly soldiers and detainees, although they were insufficient, given that there were criminals among the soldiers, but also wrongly convicted people among the detainees. Charles Goring disputed this and undertook his own experiments proving that criminals do not exhibit significant differences in their physical characteristics compared to non-criminals. Although researchers are reluctant to associate criminal behavior with a specific gene, due to the emergence of eugenics and "breeding the bad", researchers continue to study the heritability of behavioral traits. Some of the most promising work involves the study of twins and adoptees. How biological siblings act if they are raised in different households, and similarly with a child adopted by a different family, the results were designed to find out if they acted differently from their biological ancestors. “By studying the twins, you can learn a lot about what motivates us, what makes us different, and especially about the role of nature versus nature, that you can't get any other way. » Biological theories have changed greatly with advances in theoretical understanding of human behavior, our technology has improved significantly, allowing us to further research and measure human characteristics. Previous attempts mainly focused on observable characteristics. Today we can study the real composition of a body. The study of biological theories has led to further advances in the study of how sociological and environmental events also correspond to our behaviors toward crime. Ultimately, the goal would be to reach a point where it can be determined that criminal acts have biological roots. Being able to predict behavior would therefore help us to better control it. Biological influences on crime have also begun to make their way into legal proceedings, with evidence of a person's biology frequently used as a mitigating factor, although it is still a new practice and the theory involved has not yet been fully understood. Conclusion Although past atrocities were based on bad science and inhumane ethics, it should be noted that Lombroso had a huge impact on modern criminological and biological theory of crime. Criminology, like all sciences, is continually researched and studied to find the newest and truest hypothesis. The fact that criminology became a science was ?.