دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی علم در حال ظهور جرم شناسی تکاملی - الزویر 2018

1. Introduction

Ellis (this special edition) has advanced a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the possible cause(s) of ethnic differences in criminal behavior. In this response, we 1) assess the contribution of Ellis' evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory to explaining ethnic differences in criminal behavior; 2) highlight two traits related to lifehistory and ENA theory that are becoming increasingly important in the United States: self-control and general intelligence; 3) document the interplay between individual differences in self-control and general intelligence and cultural and economic changes (specifically, we investigate how self-control and general intelligence are becoming more important to success in modern technologically based societies); and 4) we illustrate how these trends are likely to continue and possibly accelerate. Therefore, understanding these trends has important implications for both scholars and policy makers. Specifically, understanding secular changes in criminal behavior requires possessing a basic outline of social changes that have occurred over the last fifty years and how these changes have intersected with human psychology.

7. Conclusion

In his target article, Ellis laid out an ambitious and parsimonious theory of ethnic differences in criminal behavior. This theory has much to recommend it because it is elegant, simple and has had success in predicting universal sex differences (Ellis, 2011). We used Ellis' theory as a jumping off point to investigate the influence of general intelligence and self-control in society more generally. Specifically, we believe that cultural and economic changes have rewarded those who are high in general intelligence and self-control and punished those who are low on these traits. Those who have reaped benefits from economic and cultural change increasingly live in thriving urban environments where there is a relative dearth of social problems and crime while those who have not benefited from these changes increasingly live in dysfunctional communities with declining social capital, out of wedlock births, divorce, drug use, and criminal behavior. Because the educated elite most often are far removed from such areas and because their life experiences are not representative of the population at large, they may recommend and pursue suboptimal social policy. This is problematic since the educated overwhelmingly dominate the institutions that possess the power to implement policy. We predict that these social trends will increase in the future and that criminal behavior will become more spatially and educationally concentrated and our policies to combat such behavior will be increasingly out of touch with local reality.

Due to space constraints, our description of social trends has been very impressionistic bordering on overly simplistic. We note that there exist very thorough treatments of many of these social trends (e.g., Murray, 2013; Putnam, 2016), and ask that our readers are charitable in interpreting some of the more speculative passages. We are very concerned about these social trends and if this piece is used as a catalyst for scholars to conduct more rigorous, fleshed out research on these topics it will have served a good purpose.