Myoldnamebroke on 24/9/2006 at 12:41
Even if our responses to things were totally determined genetically, that doesn't advance the argument of personal responsibility at all.
1) Even if how I react is genetically controlled, that has no impact on the circumstances I find myself in and so the things I am reacting to.
2) If it's all genes, that hardly helps you make the leap to the 'individual' being responsible for their actions - they're as much an external factor as the circumstances of your upbringing or the influence of your government's criminal justice system on your temperment.
All this does is highlight the absurdities you get into when you start to to neatly divide long-term factors in 'why you did x event' for the purposes of apportioning blame.
Convict on 24/9/2006 at 12:57
Quote Posted by Strontium Dog
I checked the first one; without the time or the inclination to humour you any further, I imagine they're all in a similar vein. As I understand it, these studies were pretty controversial, and a similar one was (
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3760923a11,00.html) refuted in quite strong terms by Nobel Prize winning biologist Paul Nurse.
Hang on what? You stated, and I quote, "I'd like to see that study please, do you have a link? Without examining it, I can't tell whether you're misinterpreting the results or merely oversimplifying them". This implies you were going to critique the studies, not merely quote someone scoffing at a completely different study that I didn't quote. If you aren't competent to critically appraise literature then don't ask for someone to provide you with the literature to appraise. :nono: Even if you did take Sir Paul Nurse's comment and apply it to the studies I posted, he "said a single gene was unlikely to be responsible for behaviour" which does not rule out a single gene being part of the reason for someone's behaviour.
So go on, you called someone out, now back yourself up and critically appraise the literature.
Quote Posted by Myoldnamebroke
2) If it's all genes, that hardly helps you make the leap to the 'individual' being responsible for their actions - they're as much an external factor as the circumstances of your upbringing or the influence of your government's criminal justice system on your temperment.
What they were saying is that it appears to be partly responsible (risk taking, alcoholism, etc).
SD on 24/9/2006 at 14:54
Quote Posted by Convict
So go on, you called someone out, now back yourself up and critically appraise the literature.
Stop getting your knickers in a twist. I asked
ercles for a link to the study he mentioned. What I didn't ask was for
you to post about a dozen links to studies that may or may not be related to the one he mentioned. In fact, you didn't come into the equation at all.
Please, your yapping dog routine is getting very tiresome now.
Convict on 24/9/2006 at 14:58
Don't be a coward now StD. My search strategy is in my above post. Please either critique the literature (and my search strategy) or admit that the role of low monoamine oxidase in violent behaviour!
SD on 24/9/2006 at 15:05
Quote Posted by Convict
I went to all this trouble to try and score what I think are points off you! Don't let me down now!
Two things:
(i) I don't recall questioning the role of monoamine oxidase in violent behaviour. In fact, I think that's the first time I've said or written the words
monoamine oxidase in my life! For me to "admit" its role in violent behaviour, surely I would have had to have denied it in the first place?
(ii) You're not impressing anyone.
Convict on 24/9/2006 at 16:01
Ercles said "Also in the whole nature vs nurture argument, there is increasing evidence on the nature side of things..." to which you replied that "I'd like to see that study please, do you have a link? Without examining it, I can't tell whether you're misinterpreting the results or merely oversimplifying them". I then provided data showing a genetic basis ("nature" if you will) that some people have for being more violent (or other characteristics as well). Sure this is probably the first time you heard of monoamine oxidase but the debate was on monoamine oxidase's role in violent ("aggressive" to quote Ercles) behaviour.
To conclude, do you deny a role of monoamine oxidase in violent behaviour StD?
Thief13x on 24/9/2006 at 16:13
Quote Posted by Strontium Dog
Well okay, let's look at it this way. The authorities have this guy in custody already; why do
they have to kill
him?
I don't really see how this is related to my post. We all have our own veiws on capital punishment. If you want to discuss them, why don't you visit any of the 3*10^30 posts on that subject instead of trying to ignight a flamefest in my thread.:)
Quote Posted by Strontium Dog
Inhumanity comes in many different forms, but if your government behaves in an inhuman way, then it's not providing a very good example for its citizens.
I can't help but almost barf everytime I hear somone say this. Again, I'm not going to drag another topic into this thread because I have wanted to post this thread for a long time and don't care for it to turn into a political flamegame.
I won't pretend to know the anwser as to whether crimes are commited because of genetics, upbringing, or a combination of both, but I would tend to lean heavily towards most crimes being a result of upbringing or I guess (nurture?).
Either way, I am not so much interested in why people commit crimes as in how a crime turns from rape into first degree murder. I don't know how much effort authorities put into finding out whether these murders were premeditated or if they were spontaneous, but I somehow think that if they knew this it would help in some way. Personally, i'm just desperatly curious.
Quote Posted by littlek
It's not the sex it's all about power and control from a person who feels they do not have power and control over their lives. Killing is just part of their power trip.
Thats a very interesting way of looking at it. I always thought that the rape/murder thing began as the guy intending to rape her and nothing more, and the murder thing was a spontaneous thing after he realised what he had done. Still, if that were the case, it would be a horrible lack of judgement on the murderers part and it happens so often that I don't see how that could be the case.
SD on 24/9/2006 at 17:18
Quote Posted by Thief13x
I don't really see how this is related to my post.
It's a perfectly valid point for me to make. Both deaths are, in their own way, entirely unnecessary. If you live in a society that is willing to put its own citizens to death, can you really cast any stones if those citizens do the same? The most effective societies operate from a moral high ground. Like I say, if you're wanting to know why citizens behave in a certain way, the first place you ought to be looking is at the people who set the country's moral standards.
Oh, and I wasn't attempting to turn your thread into a flamefest; merely to elevate it from the gutter level that these SHOCK HORROR EVIL CRIME threads (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94952) typically occupy :)
Quote Posted by Thief13x
Either way, I am not so much interested in why people commit crimes as in how a crime turns from rape into first degree murder
You can't look at one without the other.
Starrfall on 24/9/2006 at 19:34
England doesn't have the death penalty, right?
Cause in 2000 it had like the highest (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$3G0FU5MCAIUF1QFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2002/12/01/ncrime01.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/12/01/ixhome.html&secureRefresh=true) crime rates of the big economic countries.
It's about 11.5 times higher than the crime rate in Singapore (ff you believe wiki), which is pretty notorious for it's use of the death penalty.
I mean we could try it for only murder rates only but we'd probably have to argue over how many non-murder violent crimes you have to have before it's "worse" than a smaller number of murders or something
I think at best you might be able to show
some correlation between death penalty/crime rate, but I think it'd be horrendously overshadowed by the correlation between population density and crime, which as I recall is one of the strongest predictors.
