What compelled a 20-year-old Irish youth last month to murder his two younger brothers after finding out he was adopted? Did his biological father, perhaps being some violent drunkard, pass down awful genes? Was it a genetic flaw from a grandparent? Are his adoptive parents to blame? What if one day all criminal behaviour can be genetically explained? Will our prisons empty? Will there be no such thing as guilt and culpability? Yeah, and palm trees will grow in the Antarctic.
There's a registered organisation in the United States formed by adoptive parents of Native Americans. Not to share backwoods tales, or celebrate their adoptive kids' original heritage. They got together after finding out, as people do, there is a common thread between indigenous Americans and their genetic propensity to alcoholism and committing serious crimes. Not to say alcoholics are criminally prone. But a booze-addled brain can compel a young adult to do stupid things. If you are genetically hard-wired to be an alcoholic, no matter who raises you, more than just Native Americans are in trouble.
Nature v nurture: way back in 1880, when one Aby Warburg of a Hamburg banking family made a deal with his 12-year-old brother Max to - I quote the International New York Times article - "cede his stake in the family bank in exchange for all the books he wanted for the rest of his life".
What makes a 13-year-old do this? That obsession became one of the world's greatest book collections known as the Warburg Institute now housed at the University of London. How can he have seen his future at such a young age? Or did he make his own future? Was it a fluke because he had access to money? Born of an act originally a cop-out?