ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to biological concepts that should first be understood in order to follow the approach to crime we will develop in the text. We introduce natural selection and then compare the behaviors of humans and other animals. More specifically, we look at the questions of how natural selection or evolution works, how organisms adapt to their environments, and how some traits are selected over others and passed to the next generation. These traits include structural, biochemical, and physiological aspects, but also, and more importantly for our study, behavioral traits, which are equally adaptive. We also look at the nature-versus-nurture argument and show that there is really not a dichotomy but an interaction between these influences; neither works in isolation. We discuss how natural selection occurs and how behavior can be either entirely genetic or a mixture of genetics and the environment, the contribution of each varying with the behavior. At the end of this chapter we introduce the relatively new approach to the biology of crime, the evolutionary behavioral views of researchers such as Ellis and Walsh and the idea that even crime may have been adaptive.
