ABANDON TWIN RESEARCH? EMBRACE EPIGENETIC RESEARCH? PREMATURE ADVICE FOR CRIMINOLOGISTS

• Date: 01 February 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12061
• Published date: 01 February 2015
• Author: AMBER BECKLEY,TERRIE E. MOFFITT

ABANDON TWIN RESEARCH? EMBRACE

EPIGENETIC RESEARCH? PREMATURE ADVICE FOR

CRIMINOLOGISTS∗

TERRIE E. MOFFITT1and AMBER BECKLEY2

1Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Department of Psychiatry

and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University and Institute of Psychiatry and Social,

Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King’s College London

2Department of Criminology, Stockholm University

KEYWORDS: behavior genetics, discordant twins, epigenetics

In their original article, Burt and Simons (2014) argued that heritability studies should

be abandoned because twin and adoption research is a fatally flawed paradigm. They

pointed optimistically to epigenetics research as the way forward. In our view, both rec-

ommendations are hasty. This commentary will put forward two contrarian opinions.

First, twin and adoption studies still have a lot to offer criminologists who seek the social

causes of crime. Second, epigenetics research has very little to offer yet for criminologists

who seek the social causes of crime.

WHAT CAN TWIN AND ADOPTION RESEARCH OFFER

CRIMINOLOGISTS?

Twin and adoption studies are informative about environmental crime causation. In

2005, Terrie E. Moffitt reviewed the contribution of twin and adoption research to the

study of antisocial behavior in a paper titled, “The New Look of Behavioral Genetics,”

which subsequently became the basis of a lecture for the Stockholm Criminology Prize

(Moffitt, 2005a; see also Moffitt, 2005b). The message was that the most remarkable con-

tribution of behavioral genetic studies to science is the robust and compelling evidence

base documenting environmental causes of behavior, especially social causes of antisocial

and criminal behaviors. Quantitative twin studies have documented that environmental

causes generate at least half of population variation in antisocial behaviors and crime.

Twin and adoption studies also have shown that the influence of numerous specific risk

factors on crime is environmentally mediated. These unprecedented contributions have

gone virtually unnoticed by many criminologists.

The 2005 review included a 20-page description of publications that have applied

twin and adoption designs to make rigorous (and successful) tests of the environmental

causation of antisocial and criminal outcomes (Moffitt, 2005a). The end of that article

(p. 548) made this prediction: “Twin and adoption designs are likely to prove very useful

∗Direct correspondence to Terrie E. Moffitt, Suite 201 Grey House, 2020 W. Main St., Box 104410,

Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 (e-mail: terrie.moffitt@duke.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12061

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 1 121–126 2015 121