There are all kinds of arguments and solid proof for each side of the argument. For instance, I wrote a note on feral children and the way they act animalistic when not given a proper social life growing up. You guys should read that note before reading this one. It's actually a really interesting topic too. It's called "Dodger Logic #7: The Importance of a Social Life / Environmental Adaptation." Anyway, for the purposes of this note, I'm only going to focus on proof of the nature vs. nurture argument that pertains to people with serious problems, such as an addiction to murder.
Allow me to give you a pretty good example. I'm sure you guys have heard of Ted Bundy. He was a serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile, and he is one of the most infamous people in the world. When he was only a small child, when his aunt was sleeping one day, Bundy arranged some very sharp kitchen knives around her head. He laid them right next to her, around her head, the tips pointed inward at her head. Now that is really disturbing. That makes you wonder if Bundy was born crazy and sadistic. However, it is also pretty commonly known that Bundy's grandfather, who he lived with and thought was his father for a long time, was extremely abusive. Bundy's grandfather was known to beat his wife and the family dog, mistreat other neighborhood animals, and push his daughter (Bundy's aunt) down the stairs for oversleeping. So did this abusive household where Bundy was forced to grow up contribute to Bundy's lust for killing, raping, kidnapping, and necrophilia? This abuse is actually really good evidence that the answer to our question is nurture, because lots of convicted murderers, rapists, child molestors, etc. have been known to have been abused as children.
Another serial killer, Ed Gein, had an interesting childhood. If you guys don't know who he was, he was a grave robber who strung body parts together for fun, cut off female sex organs and stuck them to himself to pretend like he was a female, skinned people to make lampshades and "artwork" for his walls, etc. Later on, he grew tired of using body parts he robbed from graves, so he murdered people for the body parts. As for his childhood, he adored his mother in an extremely unhealthy manner. She was very domineering and sheltered her son, as she did not allow him any connections with the outside world, besides school, because she didn't want anyone to influence her son's beliefs. She taught him of all the evils of the world and that all women (herself excluded) were evil and sent to the world by the devil. Gein grew up only having his mother to love, fearing the world, and hating women. Gein's mother read him Bible scriptures - usually scriptures from the Old Testament that were about death, divine retribution, and murder. Many people contend that Gein's mother conditioned him to be a serial killer, without realizing it.
Now, I know you guys have heard of Jeffrey Dahmer. He was a serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, child molestor, necrophile, and cannibal. When he was a child, his parents were constantly in arguments with each other in front of their two sons and later divorced. His father wasn't around much, since he was persuing a degree in chemistry while Dahmer was growing up. His mom was constantly sick, became addicted to pills, and attempted suicide on one occasion. At a young age, Dahmer became intrigued by animals. At first, he collected dead insects but later collected larger carcasses from roadsides. He dismembered these animals and kept their body parts in jars inside the family toolshed. Dahmer said he liked figuring out how these body parts fit together. At one point in time, he impaled a dog head on a stick in his backyard. His facination with animals seemed to begin when his father found a dead animal below their house and pulled it out to get rid of it. He was shocked to find that his son was intrigued by the sound of the rattling bones. Now this innate "weirdness" of Dahmer seems to suggest the answer to our question is nature. To further this point, here's something else interesting about Dahmer. He murdered a 19-year-old man when he was only 18-years-old, and he didn't murder again for another 9 years. His second murder seemed to have happened by accident. Dahmer said he coaxed a young man to come home with him, and that his intentions were to drug him and have sex with his unconscious body. However, they had gotten extremely drunk together, and when Dahmer woke up the next morning, the young man had been beaten to death, and Dahmer had bruised arms. Dahmer said he couldn't believe that had happened, and that he had no recollection of it at all. This makes me think Dahmer's "need" for murder was innate. He committed this particular murder when he was incapacitated, which means this murder was one that he committed without thinking about it; he simply did it. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I've been black out drunk before, but never have I woken up to find that I've killed someone. However, Dahmer grew up in a dysfunctional household, which is proof that nurture may have turned him into what he was.
Plenty of other serial killers that I can think of suffered the same kinds of childhoods. John Gacy dressed up as a clown and murdered young boys and men, and he even admitted to having an orgasm when he killed people. He was physically abused by his father and sexually abused by a family friend as a child. South American serial killer Daniel Camargo raped and killed over 150 victims, mostly virgin girls. He is believed to have been motivated to kill by the abuse he underwent by his step mother when he was a child. Robert Hansen abducted young girls and women and set them free into forests, so that he could hunt them down and kill them. He had a dysfunctional relationship with his father who was a domineering man, and he was constantly bullied in school for his acne and stutter. Carroll Edward Cole admitted to murdering 13 victims who reminded him of schoolboys who teased him about his "girl name" when he was in school and women who reminded him of his abusive mother.
Now all of these serial killers, and all others that I can think of, even fictional ones, have a lot of the same things in common. All of these murderers grew up in a dysfunctional household. They all were abused or were around some kind of trauma growing up. That leads us to believe that maybe the answer to our question is nurture, since their childhoods seemed to facilitate psychoticism.) However, if you think about it, all of these killers grew up in households with family members that were not completely mentally stable themselves. Bundy's grandfather was crazy and abusive, Gein's mother was out of her mind and domineering, and Dahmer's mother was suicidal and argumentative. Could these family members have passed the "crazy gene" on to their son/grandson, who then ended up being a serial killer?
It's kind of, actually, a waste of time to try to make an argument out of this, because anyone can say that these people were innately crazy, and thus, they were a product of nature. On the same token, anyone could argue they were conditioned to be crazy by their horrible childhoods, and that is why they ended up becoming serial killers. However, many people grow up in bad households. Many people have traumatic childhoods. Many people go through all different kinds of abuse from their parents and grandparents when they're children. However, not all these people become serial killers. So what makes these people the way they are, if they go through things that all kinds of people go through? That makes me think the answer to our question might be nature. Maybe something in their brains was messed up and gave them an urge that most people never feel.
Maybe it's a combination of nature and nurture. Maybe something went wrong in their brains and gave them urges to commit all kinds of weird acts of violence. And then maybe the trauma they went through as children caused them to snap and actually turn these fantasies of violence into reality.
I'd like to also point out that studies have been done on this. According to Wikipedia, "the most typical psychological term for functions carried out by the prefrontal cortex area is executive function. Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes.)" So this prefrontal cortex area of the brain controls whether or not we understand the difference between right and wrong, what the consequences might be if we do something wrong, etc. It is that "little voice inside your head," if you will. According to a study done on this, which you can read about on this website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2141160/Born-bad-Rapists-psychopathic-murderers-physically-different-brains-normal-people.html, "the results showed that the psychopaths' brains had significantly less grey matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of the non-psychopathic offenders and non-offenders." This means that these psychopaths actually may have been born with a brain abnormality, which sometimes causes them to not understand the difference between right and wrong and not quite understand the consequences of their actions. We deem people who have these problems as "insane," and instead of going to jail, they go to psychiatric facilities. However, this problem in the prefrontal cortex of the brain may not always cause people to not know the difference between right and wrong; sometimes it simply means they are unable to feel guilt, remorse, embarrassment, fear, and distress. This means the person might understand the difference between right and wrong; he/she just doesn't care. This is pretty damning evidence that the answer to our question is nature, which means some people may be "born to kill," according to the article I mentioned.
I found another article very interesting: http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/14/understanding-the-psychopathic-mind/. There was a study done that showed that some people are sadists, and some people are psychopaths. You should read the article to get the full explanation, but I'll give you a little summary here. When monitoring the brains of sadists and pyschopaths, the sadists were shown to delight in the pain of others, while psychopaths were shown to be indifferent by the pain of others. If a sadist were to hurt you, he/she would recognize that you were in pain, and that would arouse him/her. In contrast, if a psychopath were to hurt you, he/she would be indifferent to that pain and not care at all about it. So there might be different kinds of killers out there - ones who actually delight in killing and ones who simply have no guilt or remorse about killing. Again, that supports the theory that it's all about nature. Something else in this article that I found interesting: "Both those with ASPD [Antisocial Personality Disorder] and psychopathy tend to have experienced maltreatment during childhood, but unlike people with ASPD, psychopaths don’t have symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder as a result. Quite the opposite: psychopaths tend to have little anxiety and virtually no fear." This might mean that psychopaths aren't even bothered by the abuse they might have gone through as a child. This rules out the nurture idea, since they're not bothered by any maltreatment directed toward them.
However, isn't it kind of crazy that, when you study about any serial killer, the guy always seems to have come from a messed up family and seems to have had a horrible childhood? So maybe these people do have a messed up prefrontal cortex in their brains, but maybe that's not all that's needed in order to create a cold-blooded killer. Maybe that, coupled with an abusive, traumatic, and/or violent childhood, is what is needed to create a killer. So maybe our answer is a combination of nature and nurture. Or maybe it's different for every person. Maybe psychopaths come from nature, and sadists come from nurture. Or maybe it's not about what we classify them as. Maybe different people are compelled to do what they do by varying motivators. That sure would make sense, since one person who undergoes abuse as a child may turn out to be a serial killer, while another person with the same background might turn out to be pretty normal. Maybe the experiences that people have sometimes manifest themselves into something good, and other times, in something bad. I mean we do know that a traumatic event might cause one person do act one way, while the same traumatic event might cause someone else to act a completely different way. The way you react to anything at all has to do with your own individual personality, along with other things that may have previously happened to you. So maybe there's really no more science involved in this (besides the science of the prefrontal cortex.) And maybe there is, but it's an untraceable pattern, since no one has had the exact same experiences as another person has (throughout their entire lives.) No one has lived the same exact life, so maybe there's no real way to tell where things go wrong, or what makes people who they are. Therefore, the question of nature vs. nurture will probably continue to be a question in everyone's mind forever. However, I would be willing to bet that anything and everything affects who we are. So I think it's a combination of nature and nurture.
This talk about the prefrontal cortex makes me wonder if someone could, for instance, be a completely normal person, then get into a car accident, damage their prefrontal cortex, and then become a serial killer (or rapist, child molestor, etc.) According to http://voices.yahoo.com/serial-killers-born-made-2972483.html, this is possible and has happened before. "There has also been discussion that serial killers are missing the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system controls human's emotions and motivation. Some scientists have suggested that if the limbic system is missing, it could cause uncontrollable anger and aggression. (Criminology) There is evidence that many serial killers suffered head injuries. Arthur Shawcross (rock fight and near drowning), Bobby Joe Long (motorcycle accident), Earle Nelson (childhood accident), Gary Heidnik (fell from a tree), Randy Kraft (fell down concrete steps), Albert Fish (fell from tree), David Berkowitz (auto accident), Kenneth Bianchi (fell off jungle gym), Raymond Fernandez (steel hatch cover on freighter fell on his head) and Carl Panzram (head infection where he was operated on at home on his kitchen table) are just a few." So brain damage can actually cause people to feel uncotrollable anger and have more aggressive personalities. Maybe it can even be bad enough to cause someone to feel the urge to commit heinous crimes, such as murder. However, I'm not sure of this website's credibility, because it lists several serial killers that I previously mentioned and has some very wrong facts listed for those murderers. Furthermore, I researched the stories of a few of the murderers on the above list, and most of them claimed to have either been abused as a child or had been bullied in school. However, this does not mean that that is what caused their urge to kill, rather than their brain injuries. It could have been either or both that played a role in it. But as for the beliefs of the author of this article, she says that "the best determination at this point may be a genetic component that becomes worse in an abusive family." So there you go. She thinks it's a combination of nature and nurture.
And just for fun, I'm going to throw in here some tell-tale signs of serial killers that can be noticed even from early childhood, so you guys know what to watch out for:
1. Lots of serial killers were bed-wetters even into their teenage years.
2. Many are infatuated with fire and may play with it or commit arseny.
3. As we've seen, many are or have been abused in some way.
4. Many have been subject to bullying in school.
5. Lots of serial killers engage in animal cruelty, as we've seen in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer.
6. Many were very shy, quiet, and unremarkable (yet did fine) in school.
7. Many are characterized as "odd" by people who know them, yet these people usually never suspect they have the potential to be serial killers.
8. Many are emotionally detached.
9. Lots of serial killers are very charming and make good first impressions.
Now, this is a really good argument.
Also a good explanation.
This is great in explaining how nature and nurture must play a role in how a person becomes who they are. However, it might not necessarily be the same in every situation. For instance, in the case of serial killers, the explanation might not be this simple.
A lot of people don't believe in the nature argument, because that gives people a reason to not be held accountable for their actions. However, some people have been found to be "legally insane," meaning that they truly do not know the difference between right and wrong (probably because their prefrontal cortex is so damaged.)
This is interesting. There have been many studies involving twins, siblings, and unrelated people in order to test the nature vs. nurture question. In a study I remember I learned about in my high school sociology class, many traits were presumed to come from nature, while many were environmental. However, in twins, it was astonishing the types of traits that seemed to be natural - traits that each twin had, even though they had been brought up in completely different households in completely different places, never having known each other while growing up.
The bubbles that say "Pfc" show the prefrontal cortex, and you can see the bubble at the bottom that shows the temporal poles.
No comments:
Post a Comment