Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Seriously Believed Criminals Were Part Ape

Cesare Lombroso, accomplished pseudoscientist.

If you’ve been following this column, you’ve noticed that I while I’m admittedly a tad flippant and snarky, I try to make it clear that in science, being wrong is perfectly OK. Because when someone comes along to prove you incorrect, it’s progress. Edmond Halley hypothesizing that our Earth was hollow, for instance, helped solidify the scientific method as we know it. Even the dazzling cruelty of trying animals for crimes and executing them strangely enough had an upside. You can be wrong and still contribute much to society.

The 19th century professor of criminology Cesare Lombroso was not one of those people. Cesare was a dum-dum.

Lombroso took Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution and added a horrifying twist that would reverberate for decades. You’d be hard-pressed to find an upside to his argument that criminals in fact express the physical qualities of our ancestors, bringing them closer to the dispositions of an ape than a human. Or see what good came from the towering whirlwind of racism that accompanied his hypothesis. Or in profiling people with big earlobes, “as in the ancient Egyptians,” as born criminals.

But you’re welcome to give it a shot.

Around the World in 80 Racial Slurs

Where to begin? Well, first of all, Lombroso’s “revelation.” It was during a post-mortem of a famous brigand that Lombroso discovered a distinct impression at the base of the man’s skull, which he named the median occipital fossa. This was indeed peculiar, similar to the skull of “inferior animals, especially rodents.”

“This was not merely an idea, but a revelation,” Lombroso later wrote. “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who produces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”

Now, when diagnosing someone as a “born criminal,” we don’t exactly have the option of opening their heads to find this tell-tale giveaway of their savage nature. But we have savages all over the world to help us profile the fiends in our midst. How lucky! (In fairness, it should be noted, to a degree Lombroso was a product of his time—even in On the Origin of Species, Darwin himself invoked the “savagery” language.) Their features, Lombroso argued, are the hard evidence we need to identify their counterpart European delinquents.

Tattoos, according to Lombroso, aligned criminals with savage peoples who also got ink done.

Like the related pseudoscience of physiognomy, which advocated judging your personality based solely on your face (a story for another week, perhaps), criminal anthropology had a long list of qualities to look out for in hooligans. Here are just a few of the giveaways of being apish, which Lombroso’s daughter summarized in 1911’s Criminal Man, the first English translation of her father’s views:

• “The projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes.”
• “Oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic.”
• A nose with a “tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.”
• Aside from biology, the tattoos criminals adorn themselves further harken to the same practice “among primitive peoples.” And their pictographs scrawled on prison walls are also much like the hieroglyphics used by ancient man.

We might also find characteristics the European criminal shares not just with his fellow savage man, but with beasts:

• An entirely missing earlobe, or one that “is atrophied till the ear assumes the form like that common to apes.”
• A hooked nose, which “so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey.”
• “And in some cases there is a prolongation of the coccyx, which resembles the stump of a tail, sometimes tufted with hair.” (What, what?)

Indeed, Lombroso thought many animals themselves are criminals, according to Adalbert Albrecht in his 1910 essay “Cesare Lombroso: A Glance at His Life Work.” The bloodshot eyes of the tiger and hyena, for instance, is a sign of their immorality. Birds of prey, in addition to their nasty hooked beaks, have large eye sockets that indicate sexual perversity. Animals in general, he insisted, are exceedingly violent and prone to murder.

Some thieves and, interestingly, an effeminate pyromaniac at lower left known as “The Woman.”

“In view of these facts,” Lombroso wrote, “how can one fail to come to the conclusion that crime in its rudimentary expressions is bound to organic conditions and is one of their direct effects? This is absolutely confirmed when we study crime and prostitution among savages.”

And study he did—at length. While a French psychiatrist named Bénédict Morel already had declared “the criminal to be a form of degeneration or a morbid variation from the normal type of mankind,” Lombroso took those ideas and got a bit … carried away with the whole thing, to the point where “no one can dispute his right to be considered the godfather” of what would become known as criminal anthropology, writes Albrecht.

Smuggling a dagger into prison inside a crucifix is either sacrilegious or genius—or both.

Among the many criminals Lombroso studied, there are a few standouts worth mentioning. Representing the cynicism with which many deviants operate, “one criminal humbly entreated to be allowed to retain his own crucifix while in prison,” Lombroso’s daughter writes. “It was subsequently discovered that the sacred image served as a sheath for his dagger.” Representing impulsiveness was a man who had a habit of killing horses, who “even went to the length of throwing a lady down a well, because she ventured to contradict him.” Still another rather impulsive criminal was sentenced to labor aboard a galley, where he bravely “stole the bands from the masts, nails, and copper plates.” Classy.

Now, the question becomes: What to do with these scoundrels who are fated by their very nature to compulsively commit crimes? One of Lombroso’s colleagues, according to the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, suggested that if “they ravish, steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there is all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that they will always remain orang-utans.” Ouch. And Lombroso himself hinted at such. When it comes to criminals “organically fitted for evil,” we should have no compassion, for the fact that they continue their terrors “steels us against all pity.”

Picking on Epileptics, Because Why Not

There is of course the problem of criminals that don’t bear any of the requisite attributes: the small ears, the general hairiness, the long arms. What to make of them?

Well, not every criminal is born with qualities of earlier humans, Lombroso argued. There is the criminal of passion, which women tend to fall into more than men, and the criminal of opportunity, which, oddly, Lombroso ties to epilepsy. “According to him,” writes Albrecht, “epilepsy is not much else than a highly strung normal function of the nerves, so that some epileptics would appear to be merely highly strung impulsive natures.”

Lombroso believed epileptics, with their impulsive actions, were natural criminals.

Also, there’s the habitual criminal without the brain defects of the born criminal. “In consequence of a neglected upbringing, however,” writes Albrecht, “he does not gain the strength to overcome the naturally bad qualities of the child, developing them perhaps till habit makes him a criminal.” Interestingly enough, for all of the horrible predestination-style theories of Lombroso, this actually touches closer to what we now consider to be the driving factors of criminality.

While much debate still rages about what drives people into the life of crime, it seems clear that both genetic and environmental factors are at work. Men, for instance, may be more prone to aggression, but that doesn’t mean all men are like my crazy uncle, who probably spent 90 percent of his waking hours starting fights. On top of socioeconomic status and education, your upbringing, as Lombroso rightly noted, likely also plays a part. But a less-than-ideal upbringing of course doesn’t necessarily turn you into a criminal. My dad, for instance, is a lamb to his brother’s knife-wielding wolf. (I may be understating my uncle’s aggression. This was a man, after all, who once got in a bar fight and ended up with a pickax embedded in his brain.)

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