Subscribe[...] many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature and instead have embraced three dogmas: The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), The Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and The Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them. (from the publisher's description).There was an interesting interview with the author on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.
According to your book, three things intersect to create a killer: mental illness, neurological damage and child abuse. Are all three always there?So this isn't the first such case heard of.
Two-thirds of murderers have all three factors, and the others have two of the three. It's pretty clear that mental illness is not enough to cause violence because most people who are mentally ill are not violent. It's also evident that neurological damage is not enough to cause violence because the vast majority of people who are neurologically impaired are not violent. And it's clear that the experience of horrendous child abuse is not enough to cause violence because most people who are abused that way are not violent. Yet, most violent people have these three factors, or two of the three. That's an indisputable fact.
The theory that explains it is that abuse sets up an impulse toward violence that a good brain can control. If you get the abuse and the neurological damage and mental illness, then violent impulses are not easy to check. That's why they are expressed under stress or at times of jealousy or anger.
[...] You give the example of Lewis Culpepper, who sexually abused a 5-year-old girl. You explain that the brain damage that made him able to do that was caused by a car accident.
He was sexually abused for the first 15 years of his life; then he lived 15 years as a relatively good citizen, held a stable job as a mechanic and married a woman who had been previously married and had a child. She considered him to be a good husband. He was a responsible father. But all that time he was having fantasies of a pedophilic nature, which he never acted on. Then he was involved in this automobile accident where his frontal lobes were destroyed. He seemed to be completely normal, was discharged from the hospital and was recuperating at home. Shortly after, he began to have a sexual relationship with his 5-year-old girl [his stepdaughter]. That continued for a year until her mother found out. It seemed so clear in that case that the destruction of his frontal lobes had destroyed his capacity to check those pedophilic fantasies and to realize that there were consequences to acting on them.
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Here's a new scientist link that is essentially the same story. I googled for a couple of minutes, but couldn't come up with anything else.
Can anyone else provide any other links on this one?
posted by Irontom at 8:43 AM on October 21, 2002