ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how behavior genetics can complement and expand traditional social science understanding of criminal behavior in the context of anomie/strain theory, a respected and long-lived criminological theory that focuses on cultural and structural causes of crime. It suggests that it is time for mainstream criminology to at least pull back its blinders and peek at what behavior genetics has to offer. The chapter shows how behavior genetics can complement, extend, and add coherence to criminological theory, using one of its most revered and long-lived theories as an illustration. Behavior genetics, a branch of quantitative genetics, is not so much a "biological" discipline as it is a biologically-friendly environmental discipline. In addition to apportioning variance into genetic and environmental components, the methods of behavior genetics yield a further benefit to social science in that they allow researchers to break down environmental variance into shared and nonshared components. Behavior geneticists differentiate between passive, reactive, and active gene/environment correlation.
