This paper addresses two questions: (1) why do some individuals commit a great deal more crime than others and (2) what is the relation between the behavior of human beings and the organized aggregates in which they live? The questions are addressed by using the recent literature on chronic offending and revisiting the evolutionary-ecological model for understanding criminal behavior and focusing on biological, developmental, and ecological factors associated with criminal strategic styles. A unique feature of an evolutionary-ecological approach to crime is that it clearly prescribes a balanced mix of protection/avoidance, deterrence, and nurturing strategies for the control of crime. The model provides a flexible and useful framework for integrating information from a variety of fields and bridges the gap between understanding crime at the individual level and crime at the aggregate level. It provides a natural utilitarian framework for organizing what we already know with reasonable confidence about the causes of criminal behavior; it allows for the viewing of crime as a cultural trait, whose frequency and type evolve over time as a result of dynamic interactions between individual and group behavior in a physical environment. References