BBC Focus Magazine

[scott fairbrass]

a bloke at work as told me that scientist can detect potential peadophiles and murders useing there dna! He said he saw a documentary a while bk saying that these 'evil' people have anomalies in there dna that cause them to do these acts! Is this true?

[Shadowwolf]

Without knowing what this docu is we cannot even know if the alleged scientist is genuine or a crank seeing patterns where none exist. It is also considerably likely that the docu is one of the many preposterous fictions making pretenses of reality by assuming the implied authority of a documentary. For instance, A Haunting is billed as a documentary and a bigger pile of bovine patties you will not find..., unless you mention Ancient Aliens or Legend Quest, or...

I tend towards the latter interpretation because whatever about pedophilia, murderers are unlikely to have any peculiar genetic disposition towards killing, especially as so many are crimes of the moment without planning by folks not necessarily known for violence; it all sounds so much like phrenology and not real.

Even were this so, you would not be detecting evil people but sick people who must be treated as opposed to being punished for that accident of genetics which they are apparently beholden to. And what of prejudicing otherwise poor circumstantial cases? Well we have nothing really linking the defendant to the murder beyond an argument that is alleged to have happened but hey, the DNA sez they are disposed towards murder, guilty? We would also have the issue of what could be done, preemptively punish people for what might be, thought crime? Or how would we ever know, subject people to warrantless DNA testing on the basis of maybes or perhaps test at birth? Congratulations you've a beautiful nine pound baby boy, everything looks fine beyond a minor respiratory issue..., oh and they've DNA tested positive for pedophilia, would you like us to fix em now?

[M Paul Lloyd]

I wonder if it is based upon this?

A Vision of the Future
Steven I. Friedland

For example, many jurisdictions permit the utilization of DNA "fingerprinting" at trial, and genetic disorders are increasingly being offered as defenses in criminal cases. Believing that some people are born with criminal tendencies and therefore cannot be rehabilitated, many jurisdictions have adopted a "three strikes, you're out" approach to sentencing.

Full article here
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... ining.html

[Gabriel]

Hi again guys . Without watching that docu, the notion of genetic determinism is vera discussed in contemporary biology nowadays. I personally agree with the conclusion you have reached, but to be fair I decided to present the two tendencies . One is the genetic reductionism, in which everything is explained in terms of genes. As it goes:"we and all other animals are machine created by our genes." (Dawkins 2006). Though Dawkins, the author of the quote, says that, he specified that we humans, despite beeing under the influence of genes, we aren't controlled by them. A contrariu sensu, there are scientist that argue that there's no genetic determinism at all because the strucutural transformation of an organism flows in an epigenetic form (Maturana & Mpodozis, 2000). According to Maturana and Varela (1990), it's the total interactions networks that constitutes and specifies the caracteristics of a particular cell, not one of its component (genes). The mistake is to confuse esential participation with only responsability (in genes).
Literature cited
Dawkins, R.(2006) The Selfish Gene, 3rd ed.:Oxford University Press.
Maturana, H.,Mpodozis, J.(2000) The origIn of species by means of natural drift. Rev.Chil.Hist.Nat.
Maturana, H.,Varela, F.(1990) El árbol del conocimiento. Bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. Ed. Universitaria, Santiago, Chile