In the next section, Lombroso examines the anatomy of criminals and finds the physical signs (stigmata) of their primitive status as throwbacks to our evolutionary past. Since he has already defined the normal behavior of animals as criminal, the actions of these living primitives must arise from their nature. The apish features of born criminals include relatively long arms, prehensile feet with mobile big toes, low and narrow forehead, large ears, thick skull, large and prognathous jaw, copious hair on the male chest, and diminished sensitivity to pain. But the throwbacks do not stop at the primate level. Large canine teeth and a flat palate recall a more distant mammalian past. Lombroso even compares the heightened facial asymmetry of born criminals with the normal condition of flatfishes (both eyes on one side of the head)!
But the stigmata are not only physical. The social behavior of the born criminal also allies him with apes and living human savages. Lombroso placed special emphasis on tattooing, a common practice among primitive tribes and European criminals. He produced voluminous statistics on the content of criminal tattoos and found them lewd, lawless, or exculpating (although one read, he had to admit, Vive la France et les pommes de terres frites—“long live France and french fried potatoes”). In criminal slang, he found a language of its own, markedly similar to the speech of savage tribes in such features as onomatopoeia and personification of inanimate objects: “They speak differently because they feel differently; they speak like savages, because they are true savages in the midst of our brilliant European civilization.”
Lombroso’s theory was no work of abstract science. He founded and actively led an international school of “criminal anthropology” that spearheaded one of the most influential of late-nineteenth-century social movements. Lombroso’s “positive,” or “new,” school campaigned vigorously for changes in law enforcement and penal practices. They regarded their improved criteria for the recognition of born criminals as a primary contribution to law enforcement. Lombroso even suggested a preventive criminology—society need not wait (and suffer) for the act itself, for physical and social stigmata define the potential criminal. He can be identified (in early childhood), watched, and whisked away at the first manifestation of his irrevocable nature (Lombroso, a liberal, favored exile rather than death). Enrico Ferri, Lombroso’s closest colleague, recommended that “tattooing, anthropometry, physiognomy … reflex activity, vasomotor reactions [criminals, he argued, do not blush], and the range of sight” be used as criteria of judgment by magistrates.
Criminal anthropologists also campaigned for a basic reform in penal practice. An antiquated Christian ethic held that criminals should be sentenced for their deeds, but biology declares that they should be judged by their nature. Fit the punishment to the criminal, not to the crime. Criminals of occasion, lacking the stigmata and capable of reform, should be jailed for the term necessary to secure their amendment. But born criminals are condemned by their nature: “Theoretical ethics passes over the diseased brain, as oil does over marble, without penetrating it.” Lombroso recommended irrevocable detention for life (in pleasant, but isolated surroundings) for any recidivist with the telltale stigmata. Some of his colleagues were less generous. An influential jurist wrote to Lombroso:
You have shown us fierce and lubricious orang-utans with human faces. It is evident that as such they cannot act otherwise. If they ravish, steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there is all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that they will always remain orang-utans.
And Lombroso himself did not rule out the “final solution”:
The fact that there exist such beings as born criminals, organically fitted for evil, atavistic reproductions, not simply of savage men but even of the fiercest animals, far from making us more compassionate towards them, as has been maintained, steels us against all pity.
One other social impact of Lombroso’s school should be mentioned. If human savages, like born criminals, retained apish traits, then primitive tribes—“lesser breeds without the law”—could be regarded as essentially criminal. Thus, criminal anthropology provided a powerful argument for racism and imperialism at the height of European colonial expansion. Lombroso, in noting a reduced sensitivity to pain among criminals, wrote:
Their physical insensibility well recalls that of savage peoples who can bear in rites of puberty, tortures that a white man could never endure. All travelers know the indifference of Negroes and American savages to pain: the former cut their hands and laugh in order to avoid work; the latter, tied to the torture post, gaily sing the praises of their tribe while they are slowly burnt. [You can’t beat a racist a priori. Think of how many Western heroes died bravely in excruciating pain—Saint Joan burned, Saint Sebastian transfixed with arrows, other martyrs racked, drawn, and quartered. But when an Indian fails to scream and beg for mercy, it can only mean that he doesn’t feel the pain.]
If Lombroso and his colleagues had been a dedicated group of proto-Nazis, we could dismiss the whole phenomenon as a ploy of conscious demagogues. It would then convey no other message than a plea for vigilance against ideologues who misuse science. But the leaders of criminal anthropology were “enlightened” socialists and social democrats who viewed their theory as the spearhead for a rational, scientific society based on human realities. The genetic determination of criminal action, Lombroso argued, is simply the law of nature and of evolution:
We are governed by silent laws which never cease to operate and which rule society with more authority than the laws inscribed on our statute books. Crime appears to be a natural phenomenon … like birth or death.
In retrospect, Lombroso’s scientific “reality” turned out to be his social prejudice imposed before the fact upon a supposedly objective study. His notions condemned many innocent people to a prejudgment that often worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy. His attempt to understand human behavior by mapping an innate potential displayed in our anatomy served only to work against social reform by placing all blame upon a criminal’s inheritance.
Of course, no one takes the claims of Lombroso seriously today. His statistics were faulty beyond belief; only a blind faith in inevitable conclusions could have led to his fudging and finagling. Besides, no one would look to long arms and jutting jaws today as signs of inferiority; modern determinists seek a more fundamental marker in genes and chromosomes.
Much has happened in the 100 years between L’uomo delinquente and our Bicentennial celebrations. No serious advocate of innate criminality recommends the irrevocable detention or murder of the unfortunately afflicted or even claims that a natural penchant for criminal behavior necessarily leads to criminal action. Still, the spirit of Lombroso is very much with us. When Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago, his defense argued that he couldn’t help it because he bore an extra Y chromosome. (Normal females have two X chromosomes, normal males an X and a Y. A small percentage of males have an extra Y chromosome, XYY.) This revelation inspired a rash of speculation; articles on the “criminal chromosome” inundated our popular magazines. The naïvely determinist argument had little going for it beyond the following: Males tend to be more aggressive than females; this may be genetic. If genetic, it must reside on the Y chromosome; anyone possessing two Y chromosomes has a double dose of aggressiveness and might incline to violence and criminality. But the hastily collected information on XYY males in prisons seems hopelessly ambiguous, and even Speck himself turns out to be an XY male after all. Once again, biological determinism makes a splash, creates a wave of discussion and cocktail party chatter, and then dissipates for want of evidence. Why are we so intrigued by hypotheses about innate disposition? Why do we wish to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes? The hallmark of humanity is not only our mental capacity but also our mental flexibility. We have made our world and we can change it.
8 | The Science and Politics of Human Nature
Part A | Race, Sex and Violence
&
nbsp; 29 | Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View
TAXONOMY IS THE study of classification. We apply rigorous rules of taxonomy to other forms of life, but when we get to the species we should know best, we have particular problems.
We commonly divide our own species into races. Under the rules of taxonomy, all formal subdivisions of species are called subspecies. Human races, therefore, are subspecies of Homo sapiens.
During the past decade, the practice of dividing species into subspecies has been gradually abandoned in many quarters, as the introduction of quantitative techniques suggests different methods for the study of geographic variability within species. The designation of human races cannot and should not be divorced from social and ethical questions pertaining to our species alone. Nonetheless, these new taxonomic procedures add a general and purely biological argument to an old debate.
I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.
The argument against racial classification has been made many times before, notably by eleven authors in The Concept of Race, a book edited by Ashley Montagu in 1964 (republished in 1969 as a Collier-Macmillan paperback). Yet these views did not command general assent because taxonomic practice a decade ago still supported the routine designation of subspecies. In 1962, for example, Theodosius Dobzhansky expressed astonishment that “some authors have talked themselves into denying that the human species has any races at all! … Just as zoologists observe a great diversity of animals, anthropologists are confronted with a diversity of human beings.… Race is the subject of scientific study and analysis simply because it is a fact of nature.” And Grant Bogue, in a debate with Ashley Montagu, recently wrote: “Some misfit academicians have said no, that this is all a mistake … and some have gone so far as to suggest that even the very concept of race is all in our heads.… To this contention there are several answers. One is often voiced: race is self-evident.”
There is a glaring fallacy in these arguments. Geographic variability, not race, is self-evident. No one can deny that Homo sapiens is a strongly differentiated species; few will quarrel with the observation that differences in skin color are the most striking outward sign of this variability. But the fact of variability does not require the designation of races. There are better ways to study human differences.
The category of species has a special status in the taxonomic hierarchy. Under tenets of the “biological species concept,” each species represents a “real” unit in nature. Its definition reflects this status: “a population of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms sharing a common gene pool.” Above the species level, we encounter a certain arbitrariness. One man’s genus may be another man’s family. Nonetheless, there are certain rules that must be followed in the construction of hierarchies. You cannot, for example, place two members of the same taxon (genus, for example) into different taxa of a still higher category (family or order, for example).
Below the species level, we have only the subspecies. In Systematics and the Origin of Species (Columbia University Press, 1942), Ernst Mayr defined this category: “The subspecies, or geographic race, is a geographically localized subdivision of the species, which differs genetically and taxonomically from other subdivisions of the species.” We need to satisfy two criteria: (1) A subspecies must be recognizable by features of its morphology, physiology, or behavior, that is, it must be “taxonomically” (and by inference, genetically) different from other subspecies; and (2) A subspecies must occupy a subdivision of the total geographic range of the species. When we decide to characterize variation within a species by establishing subspecies, we partition a spectrum of variation into discrete packages with distinct geographic borders and recognizable traits.
The subspecies differs from all other taxonomic categories in two fundamental ways: (1) Its boundaries can never be fixed and definite because, by definition, a member of one subspecies can interbreed with members of any other subspecies in its species (a group that cannot breed with other closely related forms must be designated as a full species); (2) The category need not be used. All organisms must belong to a species, each species must belong to a genus, each genus to a family, and so on. But there is no requirement that a species be divided into subspecies. The subspecies is a category of convenience. We use it only when we judge that our understanding of variability will be increased by establishing discrete, geographically bounded packages within a species. Many biologists are now arguing that it is not only inconvenient, but also downright misleading, to impose a formal nomenclature on the dynamic patterns of variability that we observe in nature.
How can we deal with the rich geographic variability that characterizes so many species, including our own? As an example of the old approach, a monograph was published in 1942 on geographic variation in the Hawaiian tree snail Achatinella apexfulva. The author divided this astonishingly variable species into seventy-eight formal subspecies and sixty additional “microgeographic races” (for units a bit too indistinct for subspecific status). Each subdivision received a name and a formal description. The result is a voluminous and almost unreadable tome that buries one of the most interesting phenomena of evolutionary biology under an impenetrable thicket of names and static descriptions.
And yet there are patterns of variation within this species that would fascinate any biologist: correlations of shell form with altitude and rainfall, variation subtly attuned to climatic conditions, routes of migration reflected in the distribution of color markings on the shell. Shall our approach to such variation be that of a cataloger? Shall we artificially partition such a dynamic and continuous pattern into distinct units with formal names? Would it not be better to map this variability objectively without imposing upon it the subjective criteria for formal subdivision that any taxonomist must use in naming subspecies?
I think that most biologists would now answer “yes” to my last question; I also think that they would have given the same answer thirty years ago. Why, then, did they continue to treat geographic variation by establishing subspecies? They did so because objective techniques had not been developed for mapping the continuous variation of a species. They could, to be sure, map the distribution of single characters, for example, body weight. But variation in single traits is a pale shadow of patterns in variation that affect so many features simultaneously. Moreover, the classical problem of “incongruity” arises. Maps constructed for other single traits almost invariably present different distributions: size may be large in cold climates and small in warm, while color may be light in open country and dark in forests.
A satisfactory procedure for objective mapping demands that variation in many characters be treated simultaneously. This simultaneous treatment is called “multivariate analysis.” Statisticians developed the basic theories of multivariate analysis many years ago, but its routine use could not even be contemplated before the invention of large electronic computers. The computations involved are extremely laborious and quite beyond the capacities of desk calculators and human patience; but the computer can perform them in seconds.
During the past decade, studies of geographic variation have been transformed by the use of multivariate analysis. Almost all the proponents of multivariate analysis have declined to name subspecies. You cannot map a continuous distribution if all specimens must first be allocated to discrete subdivisions. Is it not better simply to characterize each local sample by its own morphology and to search for interesting regularities in the maps so produced?
The English sparrow, for example, was introduced into North America in the 1850s. Since then it has spread geographically and differentiated morphologically to a remarkable degree. Previously, this variation was treate
d by naming subspecies. R. F. Johnston and R. K. Selander (in Science, 1964, p. 550) refused to follow this procedure. “We are not convinced,” they argued, “that nomenclatural stasis is desirable for a patently dynamic system.” Instead, they mapped multivariate patterns of variation. I have reproduced one of their maps for a combination of sixteen morphological characters representing general body size. Variation is continuous and orderly. Large sparrows tend to live in northern, inland areas, while small sparrows inhabit southern and coastal areas. The strong relationship between large size and cold winter climates is obvious. But would we have seen it so clearly if variation had been expressed instead by a set of formal Latin names artificially dividing the continuum? Moreover, this pattern of variation reflects the operation of a major principle of animal distribution. Bergmann’s rule states that members of a warm-blooded species tend to be larger in cold climates. The standard explanation for this regularity invokes the relationship between size and relative surface (discussed in the essays of section 6). Large animals have relatively less surface area than smaller ones. Since animals lose heat by radiation through their external surface, a decrease in relative surface area helps the body keep warm. Of course, patterns of geographic variation are not always so orderly. In many species, certain local populations are quite different from immediately adjacent groups. It is still better to map these patterns objectively than to allocate static names.