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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (8620)	10/30/2002 11:51:52 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 89467

Fastow and his Boss...Kenny-Boy.. two peas in a pod Cesare Lombroso Atavism One useful way to approach Lombroso's theory of atavistic criminality is through recalling Francis Galton's thinking on human heredity. Galton assumed that, over successive generations, character and talents would revert towards the an average for the population as a whole. He saw the average as a measure of intellectual and physical mediocrity. Further, Galton sought to understand the workings of human hereditary processes so that they could be manipulated, to increase the frequency of desirable, over undesirable, traits. Lombroso was intrigued by the extremely undesirable qualities that Galton was concerned to eradicate. Drawing on Darwin's theory of natural selection, Lombroso reasoned that, in any population, a small number of individuals were likely to exhibit extremely primitive instincts. They were, in effect, evolutionary throwbacks. In early human societies, individuals with such traits were likely to have been more fitted for survival. A strong desire to kill, for example, would have made them successful hunters and desirable mates. However, in civilized urban Europe, atavism, the reversion to evolutionarily primitive traits, was highly likely to cause criminal behavior. Lombroso further argued that, ideally, in civilized society individuals who exhibited atavism would rarely, if ever, produce offspring. Reproductive failure would restrict the frequency with which socially dangerous primitive instincts were likely to appear. However, Lombroso was greatly concerned that in the remoter parts of the European countryside, and, more importantly, in the growing slums of Europe's urban manufacturing centres, individuals with primitive characteristics appeared to be producing offspring who exhibited the same highly undesirable social qualities. While Criminal Man was probably Lombroso's most influential work, he also wrote at length about women and crime, and wrote many papers which sought to demonstrate how phenomena such as tattooing amongst criminals were indicative of the survival of primeval instincts.