Word: herrnsteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...purporting to show that criminals have smaller brains than law-abiding citizens. Few criminology textbooks go to print without elaborate coverage of Lombroso's folly, a reminder to students that nurture, not nature, is responsible for criminal behavior. Now, however, two prominent Harvard professors, James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, argue that Lombroso was on the right track: no one is born a criminal, but many are born with "constitutional factors" that predispose them to serious crime. "There is mounting evidence," the professors write in their new book Crime and Human Nature (Simon & Schuster; $22.95), "that on the average, offenders...
Wilson is a professor of government and author of Thinking About Crime (1975). Herrnstein, a psychologist, has been a controversial figure since his 1971 article in the Atlantic stressing the role of genetic factors in producing differences in IQ scores. The two professors have jointly taught a course on crime at Harvard since 1977. Says Wilson: "There is overwhelming evidence first that crime runs in families and second that early childhood precursors of crime seem clear." One study of adoptions in Denmark from 1924 to 1947 found that chronically criminal biological parents were three times as likely to produce...
...caught more often than their smarter colleagues. But for the authors, the important finding is that low IQ is associated with a particular kind of crime: impulsive acts with an immediate payoff, such as rapes and muggings. Though this finding may be interpreted in many ways, Wilson and Herrnstein suggest that the inability to think or plan past "short time horizons" may predispose a person toward crime...
Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist who has long opposed Herrnstein in the IQ debate, thinks the Wilson-Herrnstein material is based on unsound studies. "Fashions change in the social sciences," he says. "Sometimes the environmentalists are in the saddle, so they will look at fatally flawed data and say, 'Look, these suggest an environmental interpretation,' and other times the hereditarians are in the saddle and say, 'Look, these suggest a genetic interpretation.' The data are fundamentally ambiguous, and, in fact, scientists have no basis to come to any conclusions with data of this sort...
...entire Faculty will likely approve the new requirements if the Faculty Council passes the reforms, Herrnstein said, adding that the Faculty usually agrees with the Council's recommendations...