‘Evil Genes’ a guide to the subtly — and not so subtly — sinister

Bad seed. Bad to the bone. Born evil.

Is wickedness a built-in characteristic like red hair or green eyes or being tall? Is malignant behavior a choice or a symptom? Are psychopaths born or made?

Most of us know someone, perhaps a childhood playmate or a ne’er do well cousin, who seemed to churn a tornado of destruction almost from toddlerhood. He set fires. She mistreated pets or toys. This one pitted mom against dad with an artfulness Machiavelli would have envied. That one was highly popular — and at 16 or 17 already had a resume of victims, friends or family who had gotten in the way or came too close to figuring them out, or simply became boring to have around. Sometimes the carnage includes their parents’ marriage.

"Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend" is one woman’s effort to understand what causes a child from a seemingly normal family, with loving parents and model citizen brothers and sisters, to become that old psychological type known as hell on wheels.

Barbara Oakley is an associate professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan. She has a doctorate in systems engineering. She has worked as a translator on Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea, as a radio operator in Antarctica, and rose to the rank of captain in the U.S. Army. Her father was a veterinarian. She’s anybody’s idea of an overachiever.

And then there was her sister.

Carolyn — beautiful, intelligent, charismatic, survivor of childhood polio, collector of broken relationships, user, master manipulator — today, she might be diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. As it was, she suffered emotionally, even as she damaged others — Carolyn’s torturer was her own malfunctioning brain.

In another life, she might have ruled a country.

Oakley’s effort to understand her sister takes her on a scientific and historical journey, because, as mankind has become all too painfully aware, being psychopathic is an excellent prerequisite for the job of dictator. It helps to not care terribly much about the people one is torturing, murdering and otherwise grinding under one’s heel, and to be an expert at self-justification. So the list of the ruthless and bloody-minded who manage to rise is long, and growing: Milosevic, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, some present day politicians.

Call him or her what you will — borderline, Machiavellian, sinister, psychopathic, student council president, drama queen or your ‘‘ex,’’ this complex personality has long be a subject of fascination and dread, and a prime target for study of one kind or another. So Oakley reviews some of the large body of research into brain physiology and chemistry. Sure enough, brains are different, and abnormalities in some regions are reflected in behaviors.

If we are fortunate in life, we will never have to live under the brutal hand of dictatorship. God willing, we won’t be faced with a crazed person trying to kill us. But, as Oakley points out, chances are the Machiavellian type you or I will encounter will be the handsome, eloquent candidate asking for your vote, or the marriage partner denying — again — that he or she said that and insisting that you must be imagining it. (That’s called gaslighting, by the way, in honor of a movie in which a husband set out to make his wife think she was crazy.)

You might meet your Machiavelli in the shape of a supervisor or the president of the financial firm handling your retirement. That’s because a dash, let’s say, of charm, ruthlessness and drive is often seen as management material.

So if one is being played, it’s always nice to recognize it, and "Evil Genes" is eye-opening, to say the least.