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Criminologists acted rashly in the 1930s, the authors say, by deciding to ignore low IQ as a significant factor in crime. "For four decades," they write, "large bodies of evidence have consistently shown about a ten-point gap between the average offender and nonoffender in Great Britain and in the U.S." Though the authors make much of this difference, it may mean only that low-IQ criminals tend to get caught more often than their smarter colleagues. But for the authors, the important finding is that low IQ is associated with a particular kind of crime: impulsive acts with an immediate payoff, such as rapes and muggings. Though this finding may be interpreted in many ways, Wilson and Herrnstein suggest that the inability to think or plan past "short time horizons" may predispose a person toward crime.
Another constitutional flaw, they believe, may be at work in remorseless people who lack conscience. If conscience is the product of conditioning, they write, "persons deficient in conscience may turn out to be persons who for various reasons resist classic conditioning--they do not internalize rules as easily as do others."
Leon Kamin, a Princeton psychologist who has long opposed Herrnstein in the IQ debate, thinks the Wilson-Herrnstein material is based on unsound studies. "Fashions change in the social sciences," he says. "Sometimes the environmentalists are in the saddle, so they will look at fatally flawed data and say, 'Look, these suggest an environmental interpretation,' and other times the hereditarians are in the saddle and say, 'Look, these suggest a genetic interpretation.' The data are fundamentally ambiguous, and, in fact, scientists have no basis to come to any conclusions with data of this sort."
Others in the field are more impressed by Wilson and Herrnstein. Dr. Frank Elliott, emeritus professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, though a bit dubious about the conclusions on IQ, says of the authors, "Theirs is the philosophy of this subject which is going to stand. Most of the work done on criminality by sociologists never mentions heredity. For either political or philosophical reasons, they don't like the feeling that your temperament or your personality is in any way influenced by heredity. That's nonsense."
The authors have been careful to discount race as one of the constitutional factors that might affect crime rates. They write that studies show "race is far less important than age, sex, intelligence and the other individual factors that vary within races." That may not be enough to mollify some liberals in the field, who are already beginning to call Crime and Human Nature a right-wing book for a right-wing age. "This has nothing to do with the conservative times," Wilson insists. "Do not put the book in that framework."
The book, in fact, is not overwhelmingly convincing, but it is in tune with the times, and may help restore some balance in its field. Wilson admits that the case for biological factors in crime was jettisoned in the early 1960s partly because of the shifting temper of the country. It may catch on again now because of a different national mood.