Genetics & Violence

Genetics & Violence

This is a really fascinating article from July 14, 2008 Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three genes may play a strong role in determining why some young men raised in rough neighborhoods or deprived families become violent criminals, while others do not, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

One gene called MAOA that played an especially strong role has been shown in other studies to affect antisocial behavior -- and it was disturbingly common, the team at the University of North Carolina reported.
People with a particular variation of the MAOA gene called 2R were very prone to criminal and delinquent behavior, said sociology professor Guang Guo, who led the study.
"I don't want to say it is a crime gene, but 1 percent of people have it and scored very high in violence and delinquency," Guo said in a telephone interview.
His team, which studied only boys, used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a U.S. nationally representative sample of about 20,000 adolescents in grades 7 to 12. The young men in the study are interviewed in person regularly, and some give blood samples.

An encouraging aspect of the study, however, is this apparently protective behavior:

The effect of repeating a grade depended on whether a boy had a certain mutation in MAOA called a 2 repeat, they found.
And a certain mutation in DRD2 seemed to set off a young man if he did not have regular meals with his family.
"But if people with the same gene have a parent who has regular meals with them, then the risk is gone," Guo said.
"Having a family meal is probably a proxy for parental involvement," he added. "It suggests that parenting is very important."
He said vulnerable children might benefit from having surrogates of some sort if their parents are unavailable.

Parenting is really important--more so for some boys than others, apparently.