Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 2: Biobehavioral Influences (1994)
Chapter: SOCIOBIOLOGY, EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AND VIOLENCE
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for science fiction than for contemporary science. This raises quandaries about the best direction of future genetic research. Is it better to study the genetics per se of antisocial behavior, or is it preferable to utilize genetics as a control variable so that less equivocal statements can be made about environmental factors? In the area of a child's cognitive growth, several variables hypothesized to be important environmental contributors (e.g., parental educational level) may be more genetic than environmental in origin (Plomin et al., 1985). Although there is an established correlation between several parental traits (e.g., inadequate supervision of offspring) and a child's antisocial behavior, the nature of these correlations is unclear. To what extent is inadequate parenting an environmental contributor to delinquency, and to what extent is it symptomatic of a genetically influenced diathesis that is transmitted to the child? The judicious use of research designs that control for genetics will better elucidate the environmental factors amenable to intervention than will other nonexperimental strategies.
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The findings on adverse home environment and points 3 and 4 above, indicate that a critical—and unstudied—population is the unrelated sibship residing in the same home. Judging from family distributions in the Texas Adoption Project and the Colorado Adoption Project, a significant proportion of adoptive parents either adopt two children or have a natural child of their own. Although considerable effort would be needed to identify a large number of these sibships, such a study should be feasible and results would permit strong inference about environmental etiology.
SOCIOBIOLOGY, EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, AND VIOLENCE
The behavioral genetic approach presented above seeks to identify sources of individual differences. Compared to other areas of social science research, it is strongly empirical but atheoretical. A different perspective on genetics and human antisocial behavior is offered by some ethological and sociobiological research that begins with strong theoretical assumptions and examines how well empirical data agree with the predictions from theory.
Several attempts (e.g., Ellis, 1987) have been made to explain the diverse correlates of human antisocial behavior in terms of individual differences in reproductive strategies, notably the r/K types systematized as a heuristic for categorizing between-species
