Heredity – How crime is related to the heredity

In some states of America, the authorities have recourse to sterilization in dealing with habitual criminals. Laws making this possible were passed s the result of agitation on the part of those who were impressed by the fact that criminals often come from morally unstable families. But since children are highly impressionable to their surroundings and since their characters are formed in the first years of life, criminally may be merely the outcome of a bad moral environment. There are however, some indications that heredity also is involved. Investigations of the twins of a criminal have shown that identical twins have a tendency to commit the same kind of crime more often that fraternal twins. But the way in which criminally is transmitted is very far from clear. To steal bread is an action which may arise either from necessity or from a mental instability which leads the person to steal. To take an extreme example of such instability, Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago boy murderess, sons of wealthy parents, planned and executed a murder for the pleasure it gave them. Instability of this nature, while it may be cured in the person concerned, may nevertheless be handed on to appear perhaps in some other form of criminality or delinquency. As yet, then, from the scientific standpoint, no decisive pronouncement can be made on the subject of sterilization. The contribution which eugenists have to make to the study of racial problems is much more definite. The population of the world consists of five main races, easily distinguishable one from the other, the white, the black, the yellow, the Malayan, and the Red Indian. Though they differ in many respects, they can be mated successfully, and the children of such unions are usually intermediate for the genes of their parents such genes as color, height. If the same kind of hybrids, marry, very varying combinations result an evidence of the fact that most of the characters are determined by a number of genes. Some single genes, nevertheless, can be isolated. Of these, one is ocanthus, which gives the slit like formation to the Mongolian eyes.