Are psychopaths born or made?
Jun 1st, 2005 by Ashley
There’s this interesting article on the Economist: Original sinners? claiming evidence that psychopaths are born that way instead of being shaped into beings without empathy or remourse.
We accept that most behavioural traits are the result of an interaction between the two,still the scientists have brought the evidence that gene plays a crucial part here.
The result was carefully calculated thru statistic method. Therefore, there might be some hidden factors which lead to a wrong conclusion. However, you can’t actually do any experiment but observe. Afterall, we’re human beings.
The last paragraph of the article is quite intriguing though.
Though the genes in question have yet to be identified, this result suggests they are too abundant to be there by chance—in other words they are being kept in the population by natural selection because psychopathic behaviour confers a selective advantage. If it does, such an advantage probably pertains only when psychopaths are in the minority (a state of affairs known to biologists as a balanced polymorphism). But it does mean that far from being an aberrant behaviour, psychopathy may be disturbingly normal.