ABSTRACT
With the advent of scientific methods and Charles Darwin's influential study of the evolution of species in the early 1800s, scholars studying crime and criminals began to rely on such positivistic methods as measurement, comparison, diagnosis, prediction, and treatment. The original basic assumption of this theoretical approach is that people who break laws are different from those who do not; that criminals differ in significant ways from noncriminals. Individualized attention to the specific criminal, rather than to the crime, on the assumption that criminal offenders are different from members of the general population, and different from each other, eventually led to variations in how offenders were treated and in how the courts sentenced them. Anthropologists were the first scientists to take advantage of these new strategies through an examination of criminals' physiology. As scientific techniques advanced, so did the range of differences found between criminals and noncriminals, including differences in genes, chromosomes, brain chemistry, brain development, hormones, and diet.
