Mister, you look like a crook

Science keeps chipping away at our comforting belief in free will.  At the very least, they say, our free will is circumscribed within limits imposed by our genetic structure.  That makes sense.  We can't decide to be an NBA center if our genes make us only 5'3" tall.

But more subtly, our genes control our minds as well as our bodies.  In 2012, I blogged a review of Richard Ford's Canada.  In that beautifully written novel, a young teenaged boy, Dell Parsons, watched his parents decide, bizarrely, to attempt a bank robbery -- a decision with devastating impact on the young lad.  Decades later, he mused that something in their inherent personalities must have compelled them to act so irrationally.

[B]ecause very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do it are destined for it, no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised. I find it impossible not to think this way, because the sense of tragedy would otherwise be overpowering to me. Though it's an odd thing to believe about your parents -- that all along they've been the kind of people criminals come from. It's like a miracle in reverse.

Dell felt that his parents had committed a crime because it was in their nature.  Because they were criminals, even before committing an overt criminal act. 

They had, if you will, criminal genes.

Several news sources this week reported that Stanford researchers had developed software that, by analyzing a person's face, could determine -- not perfectly, but significantly better than could human observers -- whether that person was gay or straight.  The software had analyzed over 300,000 photographs of men and women, looking for differentiating facial characteristics related to sexual orientation, and had then applied its conclusions to photographs of test cases.

The result of this research creates privacy concerns, of course.  But it also suggests interesting future applications.

Suppose the young man in Canada was correct, and that his parents were "criminal types."  Not all genetic differences are reflected in facial characteristics, of course.  But some are.  We often read in novels that a person "looked like a criminal."  Do some people look like criminals because a lifetime of crime -- or even of criminal desires -- has caused their warped personality to be reflected in their faces?  Or, more interesting, do they look like criminals because -- whether they realize it or not, whether they have done anything wrong or not -- they are criminal types?  Because the genetic makeup that causes them to be criminal types also, at least statistically, causes them to display certain facial characteristics?

Like Dell's parents.  Like Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, natural born bank robbers, even while they were law abiding parents, even before they ever dreamed of robbing a bank.

But with a few tweaks, perhaps the Stanford software could have picked them out.  Could have identified them as inchoate criminals.  Like a conspiracy before an overt unlawful act has been committed -- not yet a crime, but still a conspiracy, still a danger. 

And law enforcement could then do ... what?  Keep an eye on them?  Force them to register as "criminal types"?  Require that they live with other criminal types in some sort of humane institution where they could live relatively normal lives, but live them apart from "normal" citizens?  Or perhaps, beginning in childhood, provide them with special training and education, designed to make it unlikely that -- despite having a tendency toward criminality -- they would ever commit a crime?

Dell Parsons's parents were good citizens and good parents -- until they got into debt.  Maybe if the state had known the danger and had made sure they never got into debt they might have remained law-abiding citizens their entire lives. They would have given Dell the decent upbringing he deserved.

Obviously, as we learn more and more about ourselves, and develop better and better software, the decisions we must make as a society become more and more complex, and the ethical issues become more and more difficult to resolve.

But I guess it's too late to return to the days of the Old West, back when black was black and white was white, when every man invented himself from scratch.  And when we could depend on John Wayne to do justice to all.