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Twin studies have also looked at physical similarities and differences. Identical twins are more similar in their (criminal) behavior than fraternal twins, however, no definitive conclusions can be drawn from twin studies in general. Adoption studies is another promising area of research, but again, strong causal statements are rare in the whole area of heredity-crime linkages.

The XYY chromosone syndrome became popular during the 1960s. People with this condition tend to be tall supermales who often exhibit aggression and violence. Some researchers have found that XYY types are more likely to have a criminal record. Other observers note that the prison populations are filled with fairly short people, a pattern noticed early on by physiognomists, who also took an interest in height.

Galvanic skin response (the rate at which electricity travels across the surface of the skin) also measures mesomorphy to some extent. Many criminals have slower GSR rates, which means they are somewhat more impervious to pain or at least may have a different neuromusculatory system.

anthropology

's difficult to describe a field as vast as anthropology or to even begin listing all the inroads into criminology. When I majored in this as an undergraduate, the choices were either physical or cultural anthropology, and those are about the only choices you get at the undergraduate level, and if you express an interest in crime or criminals, they tend to steer you towards physical anthropology which studies bones (presumably so you'll make a good crime scene investigator). However, the area of cultural or sociocultural anthropology is a much larger field (see Benedict 1934 or Garbarino 1977), and then there's symbolic anthropology (Douglas 1966), the field of social anthropology, and all sorts of hard-to-classify kinds of anthropology like Girard (1979). I'll try to explain two of the most popular contemporary anthropologists.

Mary Douglas' book Purity and Danger is probably one of the top ten most influential books ever written in the last 500 years. It is about the subject of ritual, and rituals are the ways societies and people mark out their boundaries. There are many kinds of rituals: for purification, reconciliation, renewal, purity, passage, and mourning, for example. Douglas is concerned with purity rituals, which relate to the feeling of safety from dangers such as crime. You might understand the idea as the notion that there are "lucky charms" which protect you from danger, and there are plenty of theological examples as well (the Ark of the Covenant; the Holy Grail), etc. Each person also has their "bubble space" for self-protection, which is a kind of purity ritual. The existence of an angry person in one's space is considered dangerous, and everything on the margins (of society; one's environment) is also considered strange or dangerous. When people do wrong things, they are also polluting the purity of the environment, and pollution rules are not as equivocal as moral rules. A pollution rule might call for the immediate execution of a transgressor, for example, while a moral code might give them the benefit of the doubt. Like others (Garfinkel 1967), Douglas is saying that our criminal justice system as well as what we consider rights and wrongs are determined by our underlying, inborn, ritualistic responses. We see criminals as contaminating our world (like dirt). Justice provides no guarantee, but our ritual impulses always come out.

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