I had a discussion with somebody not too long ago. He made the claim that some individuals aren’t born with a conscience – psychopaths, sociopaths. I disagreed. I realize that some experts want to make this claim to explain away the evil that some people do. My next post will be a re-blog and sharing of two posts. In the sharing post which has some additional thoughts on the re-blogged post, the point is made about how people’s consciences still work on them.
The attitude by many in the psychological/psychiatric world tends to be people aren’t evil unless they have a deep seated mental illness condition or are born without a conscience. I don’t believe anyone is born without a conscience. If you suppress your conscience, it’s still there and still eating away at the evil things you do.
The flip side of accepting people can be born without a conscience or are born with evil DNA – how can you hold someone accountable if they were born without a conscience? There is a growing movement in the DNA field that is pushing everything we ever did, are doing now, or will do is dictated by our DNA. Unfortunately, I can see a point where such a viewpoint will hopefully only temporarily gain ground. No doubt a handful of genes, SNPs, or other DNA markers will be determined to be serial killer, child molester, or criminal identifiers. If the “experts” become well-known enough, anyone daring to challenge them will be treated like a pariah.
However, I am confident at some point, the pariahs will prove many who don’t have these markers are serial killers, child molesters, or criminals. The pushback will be by the experts falling back to “We missed some markers” instead of admitting that people choose to do evil.
We already see this push by DNA experts who claim that rare medical conditions frequently only have a handful of DNA markers that cause the conditions. Worse, companies like 23andMe generally only use a fraction of those markers when identifying if you are at risk for a particular condition. The rarer a condition, it’s more likely that more SNPs, genes, and other DNA markers are responsible.
3,400th post!
Ups Downs Family History 