The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso makes for an unlikely hero. In the late 1800s, Lombroso proposed that criminals were evolutionary throwbacks who could be identified by primitive features like sloping foreheads and large jaws, and he went on to posit an evolutionary hierarchy of the races, with northern Italians at its apex. Such ideas inspired Mussolini’s racial laws in the 1930s, and are at the core of some of the ugliest social movements of our time.

In his provocative book, “The Anatomy of Violence,” the psychologist Adrian Raine sets out to rehabilitate Lombroso. If you take away the racism and phrenology, Raine argues, you can see he was “on the path toward a sublime truth”: The study of the biological roots of criminal behavior — or “neurocriminology” — will not only yield satisfying insights into human nature, it can incite effective and humane methods for reducing crime.

Much of Raine’s goal here is to persuade the skeptical reader to take biology seriously. Finding biological markers for crime is difficult because one of the sad truths of human development is that misfortune tends to beget misfortune, and cause and correlation become nearly indistinguishable. A child whose parents are violent criminals might be influenced by their genes, but he is also more likely than most to grow up in poverty, suffer abuse, be exposed to toxic substances and so on. Exploring the effect of a single factor requires the use of clever and indirect methods. To study the influence of genes, one can look at adopted children and ask whether their criminality is predicted by the criminality of the biological parents they have never known. To examine the effects of prenatal environment, and specifically the relationship between malnutrition and antisociality, scientists studied children born after the Dutch “Hunger Winter” in 1944-45, when pregnant women went without food during a Nazi blockade.

Not all the research reviewed by Raine is quite this elegant, but on the whole he makes a good case that certain genetic, neurological and physiological factors do predict violent behavior. Some of these findings might be obvious. Few will be shocked to hear that being born a man is linked to later bad behavior — indeed, almost all of the horrific crimes Raine describes are committed by men. Anyone familiar with research in behavioral genetics will be unsurprised to learn that the propensity for violent crime is partly heritable. And it makes sense that certain forms of brain damage, particularly to the parts of the brain that govern impulse control, make people more likely to commit violent acts later in life.