THE GENETICS OF CRIME: Criminology’s Wonderland: Why (Almost) Everything You Know About Crime is Wrong. [archive] “In a series of conversations (see for example here, [archive] here, [archive] and here [archive]), we’ve deliberately tried to do damage to your conception of what actually influences human behavior, and in particular, about where the biggest influences on crime come from. We’ve only scratched the surface . . . For the new initiate, it is enough to know that you must unlearn much of what you “know” and virtually all of how you feel about where crime comes from. We must start talking much more about genetics, we must talk much less about parental socialization, and we must accept the possibility that the causes of crime that lurk in the ‘non-shared environment’ might be harder to splice apart than we ever imagined. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It’s just hard.”

Earlier: Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask.

Also earlier: “If parenting effects really existed, and you wanted to find them, where would you need to look?”

Related: How criminologists who study biology are shunned by their field. [archive]

A massive study just published in the academic journal Nature Genetics synthesized 50 years worth of behavior genetics research [archive] and settled the issue nicely. I’ll distill the findings down: there is virtually no human trait untouched by genes. . . .

There have also been four separate reviews of the literature examining behavior genetic studies on the topic of criminal and antisocial behavior specifically. The conclusions are precisely the same.