THE BIOLOGICAL THEORY OF ATAVISM:
A HISTORY AND EVALUATION

Jerry Bergman

(Investigator 46, 1996 January)

Introduction

...illustrates the enormous influence of evolutionary theory in fields far removed from its biological core. Even the most abstract scientists are not free agents. Major ideas have remarkably subtle and far-reaching extensions.

... Man's social organization has developed as a result of his biological evolution — hence, social evolution is subsequent to but essentially parallel with, and presumably a product of, biological evolution. Individual human characteristics and behavior are therefore to be understood as reflections of this common organic and biological inheritance, not free and intelligently self-determined, but biologically determined.

...criminals are a form of evolutionary throwback to a more primitive human type. The criminal, it seemed, was a "being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained [the characteristics] found in criminals, savages, and apes: insensitivity to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood." (Robertson, 1981, p. 183)

His thoughts revolutionized our opinions, provoked a salutary feeling everywhere, and happy emulation [of his techniques occurred] in research of all kinds. For 20 years, his thoughts fed discussions; the Italian master was the order of the day in all debates; his thoughts appeared as events (Gould, 1981, p. 135).

Dallemagne was recording facts, not just playing diplomat. Criminal anthropology was not just an academician's debate, however lively. It was the subject of discussion in legal and penal circles for years. It provoked numerous "reforms" and was, until World War I, the subject of an international conference held every four years for judges, jurists, and government officials as well as for scientists.

Background

Atavism, A Definition

...tests to measure the physical characteristics of prison inmates, [and therefrom] Lombroso identified certain features typically found in the criminal population. Among these characteristics ... were shifty eyes, receding hairlines, red hair, strong jaws, wispy beards, and the like. Lombroso came to the conclusion that criminals are a form of evolutionary throwback to a more primitive human type. (Robertson, 1981, p. 183)

atavism, which means the reappearance in an individual of a character belonging to [one's] remote ancestors. It is an interesting phenomena ... if we had really descended from ape-like creatures, we might expect to find some of the characteristics of these ancestors appearing now and then among human beings... This 'proof' reminds us that within the last few years a scientist solemnly suggested that the present jazz craze was an evolutionary [atavism, causing a mimicking] of the rhythmic movements of the jelly fish. (Pettit, 1942)

Lombroso's theory was not just a vague proclamation that crime is hereditary — such claims were common enough in his time — but a specific evolutionary theory based upon anthropometric data. Criminals are evolutionary throwbacks in our midst. Germs of an ancestral past lie dormant in our heredity. In some unfortunate individuals, the past comes to life again. These people are innately driven to act as a normal ape or savage would, but such behavior is deemed criminal in our civilized society. Fortunately, we may identify born criminals because they bear anatomical signs of their apishness. Their atavism is both physical and mental, but the physical signs, or stigmata as Lombroso called them, are decisive. Criminal behavior can also arise in normal men, but we know the "born criminal" by his anatomy. Anatomy, indeed, is destiny, and born criminals cannot escape their inherited taint: "We are governed by silent laws which never cease to operate and which rule society with more authority than the laws inscribed on our statute books. [In conclusion] crime ... appears to be a natural phenomenon" (Lombroso, 1887, p. 667).

Types of Atavisms

The Historical Importance of Atavism
as Evidence For Evolution

That this unknown factor is a reversion to a former state of existence may be admitted as in the highest degree probable.... [excepting that] man is descended from some ape-like creature, no valid reason can be assigned why certain muscles should not suddenly reappear after an interval of many thousands of generations in the same manner as with horses, asses, and mules, dark colored stripes suddenly reappear on the legs and shoulders, after an interval of hundreds, or more probably thousands of generations.

These various cases of reversion are so closely related to those of rudimentary organs given in the first chapter [of his book] ... some parts which are rudimentary in man, as the os coccyx in both sexes, and the mammae in the male sex are always present; whilst others, such as the supracondyloid foramin, only occasionally appear, and therefore might have been introduced under the head of reversion. These several reversionary structures, as well as the strictly rudimentary ones, reveal the descent of man from some lower form in an unmistakable manner.

The occasional appearance of some extraordinary mental powers may be attributed to atavism; but there must have been a beginning to the series of such rare and anomalous events. If, in conformity to the law of progression, we believe mankind to have risen slowly from a rude and humble starting point, such leaps may have successively introduced not only higher and higher forms or grades of intellect, but at a much remoter period may have cleared at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason manifested by Man.

H. Kaulitz-jarlow, a corresponding member of the Institution Ethnographique, has provided a "scientific" description of Krao at age six. It was the heyday of the controversy over Charles Darwin's theory that man was descended from apelike creatures … and his followers were constantly hoping to turn up a creature intermediate between man and the apes. To some, Krao appeared to be just what they were looking for.

In his description, Kaulitz-Jarlow highlighted those features of Krao that he considered particularly simian. 'Thick, jet-black smooth hair covers her head and reaches far down her back,’ he said. 'It forms a virtual mane on the back of the neck. Her eyes are shadowed by wide, silky, shiny eyebrows. Her pupils are sparkling and dark black.’ Hair, he observed, covered her body from the top of her head to her feet. He went on to point out in detail how closely her facial structure resembled that of the gorilla.

Little Krao's character ... was amiable; she had an easily satisfied, cheerful disposition. She liked to play and was grateful when attention was paid to her. 'If she is annoyed,’ he said, 'her wild nature at once comes to the fore; she throws herself to the ground, screams, kicks, and gives vent to her anger by pulling her hair in a very peculiar way.’ Presumably these were also supposed to be apelike characteristics.

Human Atavistic Tails

traditions of tailed men are old and widespread, and tailed races were supposed to reside in almost every country…. Struys, a Dutch traveler in Formosa in the seventeenth century, describes a wild man caught and tried for execution who had a tail more than a foot long, which was covered with red hair like that of a cow.

… I was called to attend a lady in the country during her accouchement, and seeing that she was likely to have a tedious labor, was very careful in eliciting her history prior to this trying ordeal. She stated she had not felt well for several months—ever since she had worried about some favorite young pigs that were being abused in the yard. Going out she carried the pigs into the house, lifting them fondly by the tail; and that occurrence bore on her mind ... after labor was completed, the fond son also was blessed with a tail—a nice, well-formed … a five-inch tail … the father, who was chagrined at so unusual an anomaly, requested its immediate amputation, which we reluctantly performed; after which he exclaimed: "Now, mine pig-boy does better." The mother, like most women in whom I have found this tendency to "spot" their young, was a very frail and nervous temperament, and more than all was ignorant. But, in conclusion, I am convinced that such mothers can, and do often, transmit their mental impressions to the child in utero, thus developing the many so called mother's marks. I could relate several similar instances (Berry, 1894, p. 105).

In the Philippine Islands, in 1910, a native was brought to me for inspection. He possessed a blunt bony tail-stump two and one-half inches long.

Obviously, it was projection of the coccyx, which, instead of being bent under as usual, continued in a direct line with the spine. A local photographer had retouched and extended the projection in a photograph to a pointed spike six or eight inches long, and sold the pictures to tourists like hotcakes. For years afterward they kept appearing in my mail as indisputable evidence of a "tribe" of people with tails.

Children are occasionally born with tails, and these sometimes have nerves, blood vessels, and muscles—in some cases even cartilage or bone. This type of human tail, is, however, scarce and is generally, at most, an inch long projection. 'Soft tails' are more frequently found, and they run to a length of ten inches or more.

The reason that human tails are never described in medical books of pathology is because they do not exist. What is referred to as tails by some physicians are not true tails but congenital anomalies. In embryonic life, the area that undergoes the most profound growth changes is the nervous system. Because of these changes anomalies frequently result. The fingerlike projections, which are found in many areas on the surface of the body, and very commonly in the lumbar gluteal areas, are congenital lipomas. The congenital dermal sinus is frequently found in the lumbosacral area. Its attachment may be directly under the opening of the skin or may go several centimeters deep and be attached to the spinal canal. Frequently these contain hermangiomas or lipomas.

Other Atavistic Organs

… the supernumerary or accessory nipple, … found in pairs or singly, are usually seen on the chest wall beneath the true breast or in the upper abdominal region. Most accessory nipples are in a line with the normal nipples but in a minority of cases they are located on the breast itself or in or near the armpit. Extra nipples occur just as often in males as they do in females. As puberty progresses, the accessory nipple may enlarge somewhat. Sometimes, there is breast tissue beneath the accessory nipple but more often true breast tissue is lacking.

Accessory nipples in a child can be removed easily if their presence disturbs the parents, or if a mature individual with this anomaly finds them unsightly. Simple surgical excision results in a small, transverse, linear scar measuring about 1 inch in length. It can be accomplished readily in infancy, childhood, or in adulthood.

Atavistic Body Organs

Atavism and Race

...unknown to most people today the supposed link between degeneracy and racial ranking has left us at least one legacy—the designation of "Mongolian idiocy" or, more blandly, "mongolism" for the chromosomal disorder properly known as "Down's syndrome.” Down argued that many congenital "idiots" (a quasi-technical term in his day, not just an epithet) explained anatomical features, absent in their parents but present as defining features of lower races. He found idiots of the "Ethiopian variety"—"white Negroes, although of European descent" (1886, p. 260)—others of the Malay type, and "analogues of the people with shortened foreheads, prominent cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly apish nose, originally inhabited the American continent" (p. 260). Others approached "the great Mongolian family." "A very large number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols" (p. 260). He then proceeded to describe, accurately, the features of Down's syndrome in a boy under his charge … ("obliquely placed" eyes and slightly yellowish skin)  ... he concluded (1866, p. 261): "The boy's aspect is such that it is difficult to realize that he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt that these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.” Down even used his ethnic insight to explain the behavior of afflicted children: "they excel at imitation”—the trait most frequently cited as typically Mongolian in conventional racist classifications of Down's time.

Objections to the Atavism Theory

are such as to make their owner more conspicuous and doubtless expose him to dangers from which the more obscure animal would be immune. Hence, [the continuance of some atavisms] is opposed to the principle of natural selection, as the results are a handicap and not an aid in the struggle for existence.

Atavism and Social Policy;
the Major Tragedy of This View

Lombroso was a physician trained in psychiatry and biology, and he was aware of the ... recent works of Charles Darwin, who connected modern humans with a nonhuman past through his theory of evolution. Lombroso had been involved for some time in the study of physical differences between criminals and normals, but his notion of atavism as a cause of crime emerged as a bolt from the blue during his autopsy of an infamous robber, whom Lombroso found to have skull depressions characteristic of lower primates.

his importance in spurring research on the criminal is undeniable... Lombroso's most important book was L'Uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man), first published in Italy in 1876. Here he presented his doctrine of evolutionary atavism. Criminals were seen as distinct types of humans who could be distinguished from noncriminals by certain physical traits ... to identify persons who were out of step with the evolutionary scheme. Such persons were considered to be closer to apes or to early primitive humans than were most modern individuals; they were throwbacks (atavists) to an earlier stage in human development.

This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight that [criminal] 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 reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood. (Quoted in McCaghy, 1976, p. 14)

Lombroso invoked biology to argue that punishment must fit the criminal, not, as Gilbert's Mikado would have it, the crime. A normal man might murder in a moment of jealous rage. What purpose would execution or a life in prison serve? He needs no reform, for his nature is good; society needs no protection from him, for he will not transgress again. A born criminal might be in the dock for some petty crime. What good will a short sentence serve: since he cannot be rehabilitated, a short sentence only reduces the time to his next, perhaps more serious, offense… The original Lombrosians advocated harsh treatment for 'born criminals’. This misapplication of anthropometry and evolution theory is all the more tragic because Lombroso's biological model was so utterly invalid and because it shifted so much attention from the social basis of crime to fallacious ideas about the innate propensity of criminals.

The Fall of the Atavistic Criminal Theory

Lombroso slowly retreated under the barrage [of the criticism of his theory]. But he retreated like a military master. Not for a moment did he compromise or abandon his leading idea that crime is biological. He merely enlarged the range of innate causes. His original theory had the virtue of simplicity and striking originality—criminals are apes in our midst, marked by the anatomical stigmata of atavism. Later versions became more diffuse, but also more inclusive. Atavism remained as a primary biological cause of criminal behavior, but Lombroso added several categories of congenital illness and degeneration: "We see in the criminal,” he wrote (1887, p. 651), "a savage man and, at the same time, a sick man.” In later years, Lombroso awarded special prominence to epilepsy as a mark of criminality; he finally stated that almost every "born criminal" suffers from epilepsy to some degree. The added burden imposed by Lombroso's theory upon thousands of epileptics cannot be calculated; they became a major target of eugenical schemes in part because Lombroso had explicated their illness as a mark of moral degeneracy.

He did not say: here is a fact which suggests an induction to me, let's see if I am mistaken, let's proceed rigorously, let us collect and add other facts ... [rather his] conclusion is fashioned in advance; he seeks proof, he defends his thesis like an advocate who ends up by persuading himself ... [Lombroso] is too convinced.

The immediate attention attracted by L'uomo delinquente was no doubt due to a number of factors in the intellectual life of the times which caused the acceptance of Lombrosianism [the theories of Atavism expounded by the famous criminologist Cesaro Lombroso] as a logical development of already existing tendencies in the social sciences. Chief among these was the spread of Darwinism. After the publication … of Darwin's Origin of the Species, Darwinian concepts not only swept through the biological sciences, but were also applied in a wholesale manner in the social sciences—in anthropology, political sciences and sociology. The ideas of Lombroso, although they were by no means new, were stated in an extreme form which attracted the attention of those who were preoccupied with Darwinism and its application to other fields of thought. In the same year that the Origin of the Species appeared, an anthropological society was founded in Paris and the next debate witnessed considerable development of interest in this field... In general, it may be said that an increased prestige of the natural sciences and especially biology led the beginning of a series of importations from one or the other of these fields into the realm of the social sciences.

From a sociological viewpoint, the advent of Lombroso represents a retrogression or an interlude in the progress of criminology rather than a step in advance. The eclipse of the earlier work may perhaps best be explained as a result of shifting prestige values associated with the importation of social Darwinism into the social sciences, with a growing popularity, in the latter part of the 19th century, of psychiatric and other individualistic or biological theories, and with the isolation of American criminology from earlier European developments.

the preoccupation of Lombrosians with anatomy and with Darwinian concepts and their assumption that the causes of crime were to be found in the nature of the criminal taken 'individually' rather than in relation to others led them to fail entirely to appreciate the importance of the type of historical research done by Ave-Lalemnant and others. What Lombroso did was to reverse the method of explanation that had been current since the time of Guerry and Quetelet and, instead of maintaining that institutions and traditions determined the nature of the criminal, he held that the nature of the criminal determined the character of institutions and traditions.

Lombroso's theory of atavism caused a great stir and aroused one of the most heated scientific debates of the nineteenth century. Lombroso, though he peppered his work with volumes of numbers, had not made the usual obeisances to cold objectivity. Even those great a priorists, the disciples of Paul Broca, chided Lombroso for his lawyerly, rather than scientific, approach.

The Concept of Atavism Today

Chinese scientists now have two theories about these strange creatures. Some believe that the wild men are atavisms—genetic throwbacks to an earlier form of the human species, resulting from chance combinations of ancestral genes. Others say the creatures are actually direct descendants of man's distant ancestor, the great ape, Gigantopithecus.

horses have never lost the genetic information for producing side toes even though their ancestors settled on a single toe several million years ago. What else might their genetic system maintain, normally unexpressed, but able to serve, if activated, as a possible focus for major and rapid evolutionary change? Atavisms reflect the enormous, latent capacity of genetic systems, not primarily the constraints and limitations imposed by an organism's past.

I only wish that Lombroso's ideas were passe; on the contrary, his atavistic criminal is ever with us. Check the Sunday comics: the conventional comic burglar is bald ... has a jutting lower jaw, broken nose, low forehead, and isn't bright. During my days as a police officer I searched in vain to root out this criminal, but I discovered that his image was alive and well in the minds of law enforcers.

In 1977, while I was a police training officer (and a graduate student in anthropology), investigators from the Tucson, Arizona, office of the Internal Revenue Service invited a few of us ... to view a new videotape on conducting interviews and interrogations.... My reaction to the tape—not shared by my companions—went from interest to disbelief as I watched the Army investigator explain how one can identify criminal types by the structure of the cheek bones, distance between the eyes, degree of eyebrow growth, composition of the nose and so on, all illustrated by large charts depicting typical criminal faces. I recall that eyebrows that do not separate but represent a more or less hairy continuum from one eye socket to the next indicated nefarious propensities. (My own eyebrows, I am ashamed to say, are connected.) ... And the reactions of my companions, who had never heard of Lombroso? My boss was impressed. The detective commander wanted a copy of the tape. And the I.R.S. and the Army—I shudder.

Summary

We do know that Lombroso's stigmata became important criteria for judgment in many criminal trials. Again we cannot know how many men were condemned unjustly because they were extensively tattooed, failed to blush, or had unusually large jaws and arms. E. Ferri, Lombroso's chief lieutenant, wrote (Ferri, 1897, pp. 166-167):

'A study of the anthropological factors of crime provides the guardians and administrators of the law with a new and more certain method in the detection of the guilty ... [physical traits] will frequently suffice to give police agents ... scientific guidance in their inquiries, which now depend entirely on their individual acuteness and mental sagacity. And when we remember the enormous number of crimes and offenses which are not punished for lack of inadequacy of evidence, and the frequency of trials, which are based solely on circumstantial hints, it is easy to see the practical utility of the primary connection between criminal sociology and penal procedure.'

Lombroso detailed some of his experiences as an expert witness. Called upon to help decide which of two stepsons had killed a woman, Lombroso declared (1911, p. 436) that one 'was, in fact, the most perfect type of the born criminal; enormous jaws, frontal sinuses, and zygomata [etc.] ... He was convicted.'

In another case, based on evidence that even he could not depict as better than highly vague and circumstantial, Lombroso argued for the conviction of a certain Fazio, accused of robbing and murdering a rich farmer. One girl testified that she had seen Fazio sleeping near the murdered man; the next morning he hid as the gendarmes approached. No other evidence of his guilt was offered: 'Upon examination I found that this man had ... a physiognomy approaching the criminal type… In every way, then, biology furnished in this case indications which, joined with the other evidence, would have been enough to convict him in a country less tender toward criminals. Not withstanding this he was acquitted (Lombroso, 1911, p. 437).'

References