By Arina Danilova

With the uproar of horrific or even hilarious serial killer shows, such as Dexter or You, we often find ourselves once again questioning ‘what-ifs’, did Dexter grow up the way he did because his dad enabled his murderous behaviour, or was his “dark passenger” with him all along? Was Joe pushed to the edge by the abuse he witnessed surrounding him, and experienced himself, or was his true nature only revealed when he grew up and became obsessive. The question of nature versus nurture has been etched into the minds of not
only criminal investigators and lecturers, but everyday viewers and literature buffs. The phrase nature versus nurture can be decoded in the following: Are wrongdoers born with their fate sealed, with chemical imbalances or neurological disorders causing them to break, or does their environment and social group influence them to become the way they are? ? The concept originated from a theory created by Francis Galton, a statistician from mid-1800’s England, who was writing a paper on his intelligence as it is affected by his surroundings and genetics (Wright, 2022). Some of his alternative findings on a set oftwins experimented on
the conditions of nature versus nurture implied that nature showed greater effects than nurturing on individuals throughout their development. Galton likely hadn’t been thinking of Jack the Ripper when conducting his study, but the concept of nature versus nurture is a practice that can be applied not only to cases of criminals, but to how humans develop in everyday life, scientifically. Anotable instance of this is the experimentation and observation of The Swedish Twin Registry on 194,000 twins born since 1886. Some conclusions within the data collected on the medical history and health changes on these twins showed that heritability of traits was one of the major components at play in an individual’s intelligence, health, and even personality. So, is the question solved, is nature the tell-all reason for how one acts and the decisions they make? Well, no. In reality, the findings in a huge fraction of all of these studies showed that a person’s environment also plays a role in a person’s characteristics, just possibly not as much of a key one. In
the case of the Menendez’ brothers, also now highly engulfed by the media, two brothers were convicted of murdering their parents in 1989 (Stelloh, 2024;Menendez, 2024). It seems black and white at first, the brothers were convicted for life, without the possibility of parole. The issue grows misty and gray when the brothers introduce the ‘nurture’ that might have pushed them over the edge, and cause them to go on a rampage. They discussed, in a tremor, tears, and excruciating detail, the sexual abuse they endured from their father during their lifetime. While this abuse was disputed during the trial, the complexity of the combination of inherited characteristics present in the Menendez brothers might have predisposed them to mental disorders and violence, along with environmental factors in their upbringing, such as parenting style and alleged abuse (Menendez, 2024). This creates a heightened level of difficulty in a trial, where judges have to take into account predisposition to a person’s impulsivity and vulnerability to commit a crime, as well as take at face value the act of the crime. In conclusion, the debate of nature versus nurture has been long standing ever since Galton’s introduction in the early 1860s. This debate evaluates the effects on an individual’s traits based on two factors: internal and inherited factors, and external, environmentally-impacted ones. This interplay is a nuanced one, with an unequal distribution of the debate in every case. Even then, with most criminal cases, especially in the media, one’s predisposition to the act of crime is questioned based on these influences, and this questioning even takes part in the criminal’s, or perhaps even victim’s, sentencing.