It is very rare for me to be reading an academic journal article and read something that makes me think "What the fuck are these author(s) talking about?" But this has just happened to me when I was reading this paper about biosocial criminology, written by many of its key proponents.
Just a brief recap: biosocial criminology is a stealth and, so far, disturbingly successful attempt to smuggle genetic determinism into the field of criminology, all the while employing the age-old behavior genetic style of "hitting-them-over-the-head" and accusing their critics of having an ideological opposition to any potential role of genetics/biology in human behavior. In reality, of course, genetic determinists, whatever they may want to call themselves, simply ignore obvious facts like the fact that, as Sir Michael Rutter put it, "genes do not, and cannot, code for socially defined behaviors" (quoted in Charney 2008). Crime, of course, is a socially defined behavior, one which is categorized as crime by subjective, socially constructed criteria. Thus, the same behavior (like violence) is considered crime in some contexts, but not in other contexts (like war) (e.g. Rosenfeld 2009).
Anyway, the moment that I thought was really weird in the paper I was just reading (Beaver et al. 2015) is shown below in bold in the quoted passage from this paper (note: all quotes taken from other sources in this post will be in Arial):
"When the biosocial perspective began to emerge, and biosocial criminologists began searching for biosocial samples that could be analyzed, the Add Health was an obvious choice. The reason is because it is genetically informative, as it includes kinship pairs along with specific genetic polymorphisms. As a result, this sample represented the key dataset that was used (and that continues to be used) by biosocial criminologists. Once biosocial criminologists began to use the Add Health on a widespread basis, a criminological witch-hunt ensued. The Add Health was made to seem as though it had fatal flaws, and some journals, such as Crime and Delinquency, created editorial policies barring any more studies using the Add Health from being published in the journal. Other biosocial critics have argued that biosocial criminologists have overused these data and there simply is nothing else that can be offered from them. Such a view by criminologists is, of course, nothing more than dressed-up rhetoric, particularly when considered against the fact that (1) there are more than 10,000 Add Health users (certainly not all of these are biosocial researchers) and (2) that the National Institutes of Health just awarded the Add Health a $22.7 million grant to collect a fifth wave of data on the Add Health participants. Against this backdrop, outside of biosocial critics, it does not appear that experts in other fields view the Add Health as only being used by biosocial researchers, as being dried up, or as being unimportant." [Emphasis mine, needless to say.]
Yeah, I thought the use of the phrase "witch-hunt" by Beaver et al. (2015) was very strange in a peer-reviewed journal. I mean, it's not new for these researchers to label their critics as ideologically motivated-in fact, the very same paper includes quotes like this: "...some reviewers are ideologically opposed to biosocial research and thus, employ virtually any tactic to provide a harsh critique of the submitted manuscript". But that's nothing compared to this quote from the same paper: "Certain journal editors, for instance, view themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge and strategically prevent biosocial studies from being published in their journals. In order to maintain the guise of being fair and impartial scholars, they hide behind the review process as though it obviates them from being biased against certain bodies of research or from stamping out studies submitted for publication by biosocial criminologists."
Where was I? Oh yeah, the "witch hunt" thing. So as I was saying, biosocial criminologists have giant persecution complexes and love to attack their critics as ideologically/politically motivated, but even by this standard, accusing their critics of an organized "witch hunt" against them seemed pretty weird, to put it mildly.
What's the context? They're talking about the Add Health dataset, which they note has been used for non-biosocial criminological research for many years already. Biosocial criminologists tried to use this dataset to assess the role of genetic factors in criminal behaviors, because, as Beaver et al. (2015) (hereafter B15) themselves note, "...it is genetically informative, as it includes kinship pairs along with specific genetic polymorphisms." So what is the pushback they're complaining about? Well, the main criticism of the use of Add Health data for "genetically informed" research in criminology seems to have been made by Burt & Simons (2014), who wrote the following:
"...of the identified 20 criminological twin studies published since 2008, 17 used the Add Health data. We do not argue that the genetic twin sample in the Add Health is deficient; indeed, the quality of the data seems to be extraordinary (Harris et al., 2006). We do believe, however, that reproducing findings of similar heritabilities for various criminal‐related traits on the same set of 289 MZ and 452 DZ twin pairs is problematic. Moreover, this means that most recent heritability estimates in criminology have been based on the same imperfect measures (self‐control, delinquent peers, delinquency, and victimization) that are available in the Add Health data."
That's one component of the criticism of genetic research based on Add Health. There's also this complaint B15 make: "...some journals, such as Crime and Delinquency, created editorial policies barring any more studies using the Add Health from being published in the journal." I found this claim hard to believe, so I searched the archives of Crime & Delinquency for any editorial statement even mentioning Add Health (aka the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, formerly known as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health). I found none, but I did find papers using Add Health data that have been published in this journal in this year (e.g. this one and this one). So clearly, any "policy" such as the one B15 claim existed in C&D does not exist there anymore, assuming that it ever did.
Basically, criticism of one's research, even if it includes attempts to prevent the publication of studies that tell us nothing we do not already know, should not be dismissed as an ideologically motivated "witch hunt". Unless of course you have no stronger, scientifically grounded argument with which to defend yourself.
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