The Russians are coming!
The study of Siberian scientists was included in a textbook on criminology in the USA
A study by Novosibirsk neuroscientists and geneticists devoted to the problem of propensity to violent crimes in modern society is included in the new, tenth edition of the classic American textbook on criminology "Criminology: Explaining Crime and its Context".
"Over the past two decades, this is the only fully completed scientific work in Russia that has been included in a foreign criminological textbook of this level that has withstood many editions," the press service of Novosibirsk State University said in a statement. The research of Novosibirsk scientists is cited in the textbook along with the works of Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Hobbes and other famous scientists and philosophers.
The university noted that the study itself was carried out at NSU, the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and other institutes of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Novosibirsk scientists published an article about it in the leading international criminological journal Journal of Criminal Justice in 2015 (Cherepkova et al., Genotype and haplotype frequencies of the DRD4 VNTR polymorphism in the men with no history of ADHD, convicted of violent crimes – VM).
One of the co-authors of the article, a neuroscientist at the Department of Physiology at NSU, Peter Menshanov, believes that as a result of the active development of genetics in the West, the hypothesis that the vast majority of crimes are closely related to genes responsible for the development of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has recently become overly popular.
"We have only demonstrated that many brutal and carefully planned crimes that led to murder are in no way related to this syndrome. Such "cold-blooded" intruders do not have impulsive aggression, and they grow up with socially well-off parents. At the same time, these criminals have a well-developed "cold", planned aggressiveness, the presence of which is closely associated with some inactive forms of the dopamine receptor DRD4. Therefore, you can't just take the data of a medical record or genetic analysis, look at the presence of hyperactivity or certain gene alleles in a person and say – guilty! It is categorically impossible to blame on the basis of the genotype," the university quotes the scientist as saying.
Menshanov noted that genes only create the starting ground on which a personality is formed. And what this person will become, what her motives and aspirations will be – first of all, the environment determines. According to the scientist, only a balanced approach based on teaching basic knowledge, the use of new methods of pedagogy and classical school education can form a full-fledged, critically thinking person who will choose non-destructive, useful ways for himself and for society to realize desires.
"This work is a vivid example of interdisciplinary research that would be impossible to perform without each of the branches of science involved in it – criminology, psychology and psychiatry, molecular neurobiology, medical genetics, as well as methods of modern applied statistics. And the fact that the results are included in an American textbook of this level confirms the recognition by the international community and leading foreign specialists of Novosibirsk as a world–class scientific center both in the field of genetics and in the field of modern mathematics," said Mikhail Fedoruk, Rector of NSU.
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