A 19th-century Italian physician, who believed that there is a gene that predisposes its possessors to criminal or aberrant behavior. He claimed to have identified features that characterize criminals: “the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears.” He maintained that these characteristics were shared by criminals, savages and apes, which led them to exhibit “insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idle¬ ness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.”
Lombroso thus distinguished between criminal behavior by normal people and the behavior of born criminals, people who had evolved with characteristics that predisposed them to criminality. It is a variation of the familiar Nature-Nurture Debate: All humans have the capacity, presumably small, to behave criminally (nature), and whether or not they do so depends on their circumstances (nurture); but there is a distinct group who have evolved differently with a much larger criminal nature, and this latter group can be easily recognized by their ape-like features. Its members are a throwback to our common ancestry with the apes.