XYY Chromosomes and Crime
| Date | 01 March 1969 |
| Published date | 01 March 1969 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486586900200102 |
| Author | Richard G. Fox |
Xyy
Chromosomes
and
Crime
RICHARD G. FOX*
IN his
continuing
attempts
to
explain
the
occurrence of
crime
and
to
under-
stand
the
criminal,
man
has
always
returned,
at
some
stage
or
another,
to
the
quest
for
asingle all-inclusive
determinant
of
criminality.
The
struggle
between
the
extreme
biological
interpretation
of
criminal
behaviour on
the
one
hand,
and
the
extreme
environmentalist
approach
on
the
other,
has
been
the
source
of one of
the
most
recurrent
controversies
in
the
field of
criminology. However, for
the
last
thirty
years or so,
little
attention
has
been given to
the
role of biological
factors
in
the
aetiology of crime. To a
large
extent
this
has
been a
reaction
against
the
oversimplified
and
exag-
gerated
theories
that
were developed
during
the
late
nineteenth
century
by Lombroso
and
his followers,
but
it
also reflects
the
strong
environ-
mentalist
tradition
of
twentieth
century
criminologists
reared
on a solid
diet
of psychological
and
sociological research. Although
modern
criminology recognizes a
multifactorial
approach
to criminality,
and
is
wedded to eclecticism
in
its
se.arch
for
the
causes of crime,
it
still
tends
to
discount
the
view
that
the
human
body
amounts
to
something
more
than
an
instrument
of
the
psyche or a
mere
storehouse of social
and
cultural
influences.
The
most
significant
contribution
to theories of
criminal
biology
came
from
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
the
Italian
physician
Who, nowadays, is
accepted as
the
father
of
the
constitutional
approach
to crime causation.
Although
other
European
scholars
had
earlier
pointed
to
an
apparent
relationship
between
criminality
and
body
measurements,
Lombroso was
the
first
to
study
this
phenomena
along
anything
approaching
scientific
ltnes.! He was strongly influenced by Darwin's
theory
of
natural
selection
and
considered
that
the
typical
criminal
was
born
to be
criminal
and
attributed
this
to
"atavism"
- a biological reversion to lower
animal
or
savage
life. His thesis was
that
the
born
criminal
could be
identified
by
certain
definite
physical
characteristics
-
"the
stigmata
of
degeneration"
-
which
included,
amongst
many
others,
such
features
as a
slanting
forehead, long earlobes
or
none
at
all, a large
jaw
with
no
chin, asymmetries
of
the
face,
other
abnormalities
of
the
skull, excessive
hairiness
or
an
abnormal
absence of
hair
and
extreme
sensitivity or
non-sensitivity
to
pain. While Lombroso
admitted
that
environmental
factors
were of some
*LL.M. (Melb.), Dip. Crim.,
Barrister
and
Solicitor of
the
Supreme Court of Victoria,
Senior Research Associate, Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. Manuscript
Received 21.1.69
1. Lombroso, C. (1911). Crime:
Its
Causes
and
Remedies. Boston: Little, Brown.
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