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| Extracts from Cesare Lombroso |
I do not accept but sometimes I self think like Cesare Lombroso, who was accomplished pseudoscientist. Who he was?
The 19th century professor of criminology
Cesare Lombroso (
1835 - 1909) took Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution, and according
Wired, added a horrifying twist that would reverberate for decades.
One time Lombroso discovered a distinct impression at the base of the man’s skull, which he named the median occipital fossa. This was indeed peculiar, similar to the skull of inferior animals, especially rodents.Perhaps, it was one big karmical moment for Lombroso.
He understood argument that criminals in fact express the physical qualities of our ancestors, bringing them closer to the dispositions of an ape than a human.
Or see what good came from the towering whirlwind of racism that accompanied his hypothesis. Or in profiling people with big earlobes, as in the ancient Egyptians, as born criminals.
This was not merely an idea, but a revelation”, later he wrote, “at the sight of that 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 produces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.
Typically for this period also he lacked respect for animals.In fairness, it should be noted, to a degree Lombroso was a product of his time—even in On the Origin of Species, Darwin himself invoked the savagery language.
So, when diagnosing someone as a born to criminal, he wrote, we don’t exactly have the option of opening their heads to find this tell-tale giveaway of their savage nature.
But we have savages all over the world to help us profile the fiends in our midst. Their features, Lombroso argued, are the hard evidence we need to identify their counterpart European delinquents.
Tattoos, according to Lombroso, aligned criminals with savage peoples who also got ink done.
Like the related pseudoscience of physiognomy, which advocated judging your personality based solely on your face, criminal anthropology had a long list of qualities to look out for in hooligans. Here are just a few of the giveaways of being apish, which Lombroso’s daughter summarized in 1911’s Criminal Man, the first English translation of her father’s views:
The projection of the lower face and jaws prognathism found in negroes.
?
Oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic.
We have no longer such name as Mongolism.
and a nose with a tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.
a form which found everywhere.
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Extracts from
Cesare Lombroso |
Aside from biology, the tattoos criminals adorn themselves further harken to the same practice “among primitive peoples.” And their pictographs scrawled on prison walls are also much like the hieroglyphics used by ancient man.
We might also find characteristics the European criminal shares not just with his fellow savage man, but with beasts:
an entirely missing earlobe, or one that “is atrophied till the ear assumes the form like that common to apes.
oh, no.
A hooked nose, which “so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey.
wow! I badly need that!
And in some cases there is a prolongation of the coccyx, which resembles the stump of a tail, sometimes tufted with hair.
Wow, i will see it if one of my girlfriend has some kind of it.
