Jacob's Strenghts: Found an association between the chromosome and offenders , Links with property crime (Prince and Whatmore), Aggression partly determined by genetics (Adler, et al., 2007), Jacob's Weaknesses: Does not prove cause of violence, Could be due to labelling theory and stereotyping of tall, well-built men , Over-represented in samples from prisoners which overstates importance as a cause of crime , Over-stated in prison because of low intelligence , Very rare so can't explain much crime , Twin Study Strengths : Logical due to MZ twins genetically identical , Higher concordance rate for MZ not DZ (Ishikawa and Raine), Twin Study Weaknesses: Not a 100% concordance rate - half or less, Higher concordance rates might be due to socialisation , MZ might have a higher influence due to societal treatment/nurture, DNA testing did not exist during early studies so harder to determine if genetically identical , Adoption Studies Strengths : Easier to separate genetic and environmental factors , Overcomes socialisation issues as can separate influence of environment from genes, Logical research design , Easy to see the relative importance of nurture vs. nature , Evidence that adoptees more likely to have criminal records if biological parents did , Adoption Studies Weaknesses: These studies show genes have little effect (Gottfredson and Hirschi), Could have a similar upbringing and that might have produced similar behaviour, Early socialisation may be the true cause of criminality due to early periods spent with biological parents,

Evaluating Genetic Theories

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