Two Genes May Predict Violent Criminal Behavior, But This Isn't Minority Report
In a perfect world, predicting when crime would happen before it happened would bring peace. Of course, that’s in a perfect world, and as the 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report showed, there’s a very fine line between predicting an inevitable event and predicting someone’s will to act. Although police in the film, and the novel it was adapted from, used oracles known as “precogs” to predict crime, our real-world technology isn’t that far behind. And now, a new study finds that there are two genetic variants that may even predict criminal behavior.
The researchers, from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden analyzed the genomes of 895 people who were found guilty of a total of 1,154 crimes, including murder, manslaughter, and attempted homicide and battery. Each one of these criminals had genetic variants of either the MAOA (monoamine oxidase A) gene or the CDH13 (cadherin 13) gene, with the strongest associations found among those whose crimes were considered “extremely violent behavior.”
Overall, they found that people with these variants were 13 times more likely to have a history of repeated violence. Meanwhile, those in a control population of Finnish residents with no history of violence showed no signs of the variants. Overall, the researchers estimated that five to 10 percent of violent crimes in Finland could be attributed to people with these genes.
“So far, nobody has found any gene associated with severe violent crime,” said lead author of the study Jari Tiihonen, a psychiatrist at the Institutet, according to Bloomberg. “We wanted to try to find it, we found two.”
But just because someone with these genes are present in criminals, that doesn’t make anyone with them a bad person. In fact, these genes have also been linked to risk-taking and aggression. Because of this, it’s illogical to predict a person will commit a crime based on their genome, and just as bad as considering it in sentencing. Doing so could be a slippery slope — though it wouldn’t be as action-packed as Minority Report.
“There are many things which can contribute to a person’s mental capacity,” Tiihonen told the BBC. “The only thing that matters is the mental capacity of the individual to understand the consequences of what he or she is doing, and whether or not the individual can control his or her own behavior.”
Source: Tiihonen J, Rautiainen M-R, Ollila HM, et al. Genetic background of extreme violent behavior. Molecular Psychiatry. 2014.