EDITOR'S NOTE

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12062
• Author: ROSEMARY GARTNER,ERIC BAUMER,D. WAYNE OSGOOD
• Date: 01 February 2015
• Published date: 01 February 2015

EXCHANGE AND COMMENTARIES

ON HERITABILITY STUDIES IN CRIMINOLOGY

EDITOR’S NOTE

D. WAYNE OSGOOD, ERIC BAUMER,

and ROSEMARY GARTNER

Co-Editors of Criminology

Interest in biosocial research on crime has grown markedly over the past decade. Bioso-

cial articles now regularly appear in our main journals, many criminology/criminal justice

programs offer courses on the topic, and many members of the American Society of Crim-

inology consider the topic one of their areas of interest. At the same time, we suspect that

most of our readers have relatively little background in biosocial research and that as a

result they are uncertain about the potential of such studies, the assumptions on which

they are based, and how to judge the quality of the work. In that light, we have been

pleased to present a series of articles exchanging views about the merits of one prominent

form of biosocial research: twin studies of heritability. The remaining four brief articles

in this issue of Criminology complete this series.

The exchange began with an article by Burt and Simons in our May 2014 issue. They

challenged the worth of twin studies of heritability of crime, both in terms of the validity

of the statistical assumptions of the method and the conceptual merit of attempting to

separate the contributions of genes and environment. They also advocated for other vari-

eties of biosocial research they found more consistent with their view of the interplay of

genes and environment. We expected that scholars who conduct twin studies of heritabil-

ity would be unlikely to agree with this assessment by Burt and Simons, and we believed

that it would be helpful for our readers to learn those views. Thus, we were pleased to

receive a response defending the validity of that approach from Barnes and colleagues.

Feeling that it would be most useful to our field to provide an extended discussion of

these issues, we offered Barnes and colleagues an equal amount of space for their article

defending twin studies of heritability. The reviewers of their article judged it appropriate

for publication, and it appeared in the November 2014 issue of Criminology.

We also invited both sets of authors to write brief rejoinders, which appear on the fol-

lowing pages of this issue. These rejoinders provide both sets of authors the opportunity

to make clear the core themes of their positions and the essence of their responses to the

other position. To ensure that the exchange is as complete as feasible, each group was

able to revise its rejoinder in light of the others’.

To provide a broader perspective on this exchange, we also solicited commentaries

from two exceptionally well-qualified scholars, Terrie Moffitt and Douglas Massey, which

are published in this issue. We considered Moffitt an obvious choice for the task because

she is a leading criminologist who has long featured biosocial themes in her approach

to the study of crime and delinquency. The Psychological Review article presenting her

developmental taxonomy of crime (Moffitt, 1993) is one of our field’s most influential

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12062

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 1 101–102 2015 101