concluded that criminals were born not made. Their defining features were throwbacks to our evolutionary ancestors, dehumanized by biological defects. Modern man was civilized and elegant. Criminal man was barbaric, a savage with slanted forehead, jutting jaw, and excessively long arms. Criminal man was more ape-like than human-like. Because the cause of these differences was biological, Lombroso argued that a life of crime was inevitable. Change through rehabilitation was hopeless. To protect society, these natural born criminals had to be taken out of society, either locked up or executed. These ideas formed the basis of several eugenics’ movements, with the aim of weeding out the undesirable, less than human elements of society, be they less intelligent, from a non-Caucasian racial group, or from a culture with different religious beliefs. Lombroso’s theory of criminality was soon rejected as scholars from a variety of different disciplines unearthed its racial stereotypes and shoddy methods, including a failure to include the many people with slanted foreheads, jutting jaws, and long arms who never committed crimes, and those with statuesque anatomy who did. This initiated a general skepticism and even fear of biological explanations, causing a swing in the opposite direction. Criminals were not born but made by corrupt societies. Humans are not born with biologically encoded scripts for behaving with malice or virtue. Rather, we are born with blank slates, waiting for society to inscribe its distinctive signature. So began a pendulous swing from nature to nurture. Though the oscillation continues to this day, there is increasing appreciation, perhaps especially in the arena of criminology, that both nature and nurture make important contributions. This change comes, in part, from a far greater understanding of genetics, combined with long term studies of how humans and other animals develop within environments that are either nurturing or damaging. Consider t