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Evolutionary Perspectives on Crime

Although evolutionary theory was developed by biologists, social scientists since the last quarter of the twentieth century have been applying its principles to the study of human culture (anthropology) and the human mind (psychology). This fusion has been called sociobiology (Wilson 1975). Recently, criminologists interested in biosocial theory have begun to apply an evolutionary understanding to the study of the causes of crime. This development promises to expand the reach of criminological theory.

The Modern Synthesis

Modern evolutionary theory began with the early nineteenth-century effort by theologians to enlist the assistance of naturalists and philosophers in proving the existence of God. In an argument originating with Thomas Aquinas, the perfection of the design of the natural world was said to demonstrate the existence of a divine creator. In 1859, in The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin provided a convincing argument that the design of living organisms can be explained by the process of evolution by natural selection. Because individual members of a species encounter slightly different obstacles to survival (one seed lands in fertile soil, another in dry soil), some survive and others do not, particularly as environments change. A species is composed of descendants of ancestors whose traits enabled them to survive long enough to reproduce. Darwin's theory hypothesized that living organisms are subject to physical processes and natural laws, just as the rest of the natural world is. In some cases, Darwin's supporters understood his theory as little as his critics did; the social Darwinists, most prominently the philosopher Herbert Spencer, emphasized phrases such as “the struggle for survival” and “the survival of the fittest” in order to argue that the superiority of British culture justified its rule over its far-flung empire.

Darwin's theory, however, lacked a mechanism whereby living things can inherit traits from their ancestors. In 1866, an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel published a paper describing his theory of inheritance by genes, but this paper did not become widely known until its rediscovery in 1900 by plant biologists interested in hybridization. Geneticists then proposed that the evolution of species was the result of genetic mutations rather than of natural selection. The dispute was not settled until 1937, when Theodosius Dobzhansky set forth the modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics in Genetics and the Origin of Species. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule, which is the building block of the gene.

The Paradox of Individual Fitness and Altruistic Behavior

The modern synthesis marked the beginning of modern evolutionary thinking. However, a number of major problems remained to be solved. Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw,” but biologists were aware of examples of apparent altruism, where one animal sacrifices itself for the sake of the group. How could a gene for altruism confer an adaptive advantage such that the gene would spread throughout a population? William Hamilton (1970) developed the concept of inclusive fitness to explain the concepts of altruism and selfishness. Inclusive fitness is the sum of an individual's own fitness plus the sum of the effects it causes to the fitness of all its relatives. The stinging bee dies to save its hive because it shares a high percentage of its genes with the members of the hive. In the human realm, work by economists and game theorists with a simulation known as the Prisoner's Dilemma had also given rise to concerns about explaining altruism. In 1971, Robert Trivers developed the concept of reciprocal altruism, in which one person helps another today in return for future help. Not only humans but also animals such as bottle-nosed dolphins and vampire bats display reciprocal altruism, a trait requiring a relatively large brain to discriminate between cooperators and cheaters.

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