thedissent
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I think that in all likelihood it's a combination of both nature and nurture. I know that in my case life events are at the root of the illness. That said, it is also possible that someone else would not have reacted in the same way as I did to the same life events. Which would be where nature came in.
I agree too that if LM was abused by older men, that could have played a role. It was in the video link I posted earlier where there were interviews with a forensic psychologist and LM's ex (the transexual writer). The latter mentioned that he kept on sleeping with older men (altho for money), kind of replicating it.
I suspect both genetic and environmental play a role in psychopathy.
That is, people are genetically predisposed to psychopathy, but it must be triggered by certain environmental / "nurture" factors. Moreover, the predisposition would be recessive.
There has been a lot of interesting work by evolutionary psychologists, who have explored how such a genetic predisposition may have survived with the broader human gene pool.
Psychopaths are rule breakers and cheaters, and they often derive success and excitement from pushing the boundaries on social conventions or breaking laws; they also are sexually promiscuous. So long as psychopaths remain a minority-- hence it is a recessive trait-- rule breaking can have certain survival benefits within a community. Also, sexual promiscuity means that their genes are spread more widely.
Psychopathy would not survive as a dominant trait, however, as the larger population would respond to pervasive rule breaking by targeting psychopaths. Arguably, our laws and institutions today-- which root out "dangerous offenders"-- target psychopaths. If there is indeed a genetic pre-disposition, over time, we may thus see fewer and fewer psychopaths.