Testosterone, Marriage, & Crime: A Selection from Nicholas A. Christakis’s Blueprint (2020)

“I once had a conversation with an eminent social scientist who denied that biology played any role whatsoever in social affairs. When I asked whether he believed that genetics might have some role in criminality, he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ And when I gently pointed out that 93 percent of incarcerated criminals were men and that scientists have a lot of evidence, for example, regarding the role of testosterone in aggression in nonhuman primates (for instance, among chimpanzees, 92 percent of attackers and 73 percent of victims are male), he seemed befuddled. . . . Monogamy provides a kind of societal-level testosterone-suppression program. In normatively monogamous societies, testosterone falls in men when they marry and again when they interact face-to-face with their children . . . . monogamy is associated with reductions in violence and crime, perhaps in part because of this decline in testosterone.”—Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (2020)