Cow genetics people are generally refreshingly honest and direct. What human genetics geneticists should be. For instance:
Ring, S. C., Evans, R. D., Cromie, A. R., & Berry, D. P. (2021). Cross-sectional analyses of a national database to determine if superior genetic merit translates to superior dairy cow performance. Journal of Dairy Science, 104(7), 8076-8093.
Meier, S., Kuhn-Sherlock, B., Amer, P. A., Roche, J. R., & Burke, C. R. (2021). Positive genetic merit for fertility traits is associated with superior reproductive performance in pasture-based dairy cows with seasonal calving. Journal of Dairy Science, 104(9), 10382-10398.
Mueller, M. L., & Van Eenennaam, A. L. (2022). Synergistic power of genomic selection, assisted reproductive technologies, and gene editing to drive genetic improvement of cattle. CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, 3(1), 13.
Fair article, I'm glad you tried to remind readers that they shouldn't indiscriminately attribute group differences to the individual level.
I also tested this for Iranian immigrants in the United States and found that they have higher cognitive ability, income, and education than most groups in the United States, yet their crime rates are higher than these variables would predict. It leads me to the conclusion that there was a positive genetic selection for violence in the Middle East as well, Perhaps part of this positive selection for violence was due to higher polygamy in the Middle East and Africa?
This can be partially confirmed by the higher facial masculinity or the higher ability to grow a beard in men in the Middle East than in Europe.
"...you tried to remind readers that they shouldn't indiscriminately attribute group differences to the individual level."
This is the entire understanding that individuals need to make when dealing with other individuals: in each discrete group there are statistical tendencies for various physical/mental attributes, and these tendencies can be reliable shown to differ between the groups compared. So that it's possible for group A to show a significantly greater statistical tendency toward violence than group B.
But in dealing *individually* with a member of group A, that member may very well *not* exhibit these tendencies, and were we to analyze their genetic components, we'd perhaps find that this *individual* has minimal (or no) such genetic components. They therefore run contrary to the general tendency for their group.
What I've found professionally, as a SW engineer before retiring, is that engineers who were of African American heritage (or even African nationals) did not display much in the way of the tendencies toward violence or other marginal social behaviors that their group possessed. It was as if the selection and pursuit of an education in engineering acted as a genetic filter that tended to exclude individuals whose genetic components followed the general trend toward violence for their group.
There are always exceptions of this kind, and living in this cosmopolitan world, what works best for me is this: prior to meeting and coming to understand the values/tendencies of another discrete group, it is justifiable to be a bit on guard against the general tendencies associated with that group, but after what amounts to a "feeling out" period, any such wariness is unjustified if the individual exhibits no indications of the marginal tendencies.
It triages individuals on character rather than on race. It takes time, and if this is not available, it is reasonable to be wary with an untested member of a group strongly associated with a tendency toward violence.
This is very simple, reasonable stuff, which I *believe* that all human groups have practiced since time immemorial when encountering other groups. It is the most common of common sense.
We probably will never see good GWAS studies done on violence and race/ethnicity in the west. It's just too toxic a topic. Non-tenured people won't touch the subject. And how many tenured professors would stick their neck out like this?
One sound reason that it can't be done is that human history is replete with examples of mob mayhem, massacres, "ethnic cleansing", "low-intensity conflicts", and brushfire wars all over the world, on every continent and including just about every "racial population." In Europe, most recently in the 1990s: no sooner did the Berlin Wall fall than the interethnic hostility re-emerged and sparked the same homicidal chaos in the 1990s that had existed in the two years prior to the First World War. But a truly comprehensive and impartial study of the violence wouldn't simply cherry-pick violent incidents from the previous 30 years; the overview would extend back to, say, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years War. Because evolutionary biology indicates that the hereditary biology of the human species cannot have advanced very much over a short span of time as 1000 years, hmm? Read about 1914, and you'll find the most powerful human societies on the planet gripped by popular delusions and crowd madness,, leading to a war with a death toll of nearly 18 million people. And if that wasn't enough, the advanced civilizations of Europe clashed in another war that began only around 21 years after the first one https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years
Most of the claims for the superiority of Western civilization reside in the superiority of material technology, particularly military technology. Inventions credited to a few thousand humans, at most--with the crucial breakthroughs supplied by a handful of outliers, some of them quite eccentric--and then copied down into the time-bound technology of books so that the knowledge could be preserved. That isn't evidence of "racial superiority." It's a situation whereby huge masses of humans benefited from the gifts of a tiny minority of the most talented and industrious (who often also had their own problems.) And the results of those technologies were not entirely positive; they've often led to an array of newer, unprecedented problems as a consequence. I don't know what we're going to do about all the microplastics and nanoplastics in our biosphere, for example. Probably nothing, over the near term of the next 50 years. We're all very lucky that most of the plastics appear to be inert, and slow to decompose into more toxic components. It could easily have been worse. Which is not to say that these petrochemical compounds are harmless; beyond the fact that we know empirically that they haven't poisoned our species outright, and haven't yet led to a massive rise in the incidence of cancers, we don't know what they do. The compounds do appear to have enough xenoestrogenic properties that it's probable that there are at least some consequences for animal species. They also appear to make arteriosclerotic plaques worse, which is a potential problem for a species as long-lived as humans. It also has to be said that the massive increase in plastics in the natural environment is the result of intentional decisions by a relative handful of humans who ordered an increase in the bioavailability of those compounds not only for themselves, and not only for their offspring, but for all of use, and for succeeding generations. And in at least one important case, the decision was made despite the knowledge about the longevity and probable toxicity of the compounds; the class of conmpounds known as halogenated hydrocarbons having already been identified as both resistant to breakdown and quite toxic and mutagenic in exceedingly small amounts. https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story
As for the more common (and thankfully apparently more inert) plastics: recent studies indicate that the human brain is accumulating plastics to such an extent that many of us are carrying around about a credit card's worth of those particles in our brain tissue (and around a sandwich bag's worth in other body tissues, notably the kidneys.) It this outcome evidence supporting the superior intelligence of the White Race (and, presumably, the Chinese), whose chief executives made so many of the initial decisions to ramp up that production? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-wellness/index.html
You rank Indians higher than Europeans in terms of likelihood for violence. However, this seems to contradict the data presented in some of your other articles. For instance, in the article 'Direct Genetic Evidence for Ethnic Differences in Violence' (https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/direct-genetic-evidence-for-ethnic), you reference another article (https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark) which places Indians near the bottom in terms of violent behavior. Additionally, when examining violent crime rates among Indian immigrants across various countries, the data consistently shows that Indians have one of the lowest rates of violent offenses. Given these contradictory findings, I am curious about the rationale behind ranking Indians higher than Europeans for violence? Your articles are severely riddled with confirmation bias.
From what I understand, there is a lot of genetic diversity in Africa compared to Europe and East Asia. We know there is a lot heterogeneity in European crime. Shouldn't there be much higher heterogeneity in African crime depending on where exactly they come from?
This suggests a hypothesis for the repeated 'out of Africa' pulses of emigration from the continent through human evolutionary history -- i.e., it was generally and chronically a bad neighborhood. Huh -- wonder if the repeated sieving of predispositions by emigration was behind the apparently relatively low incidence of human on human violence in European pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer populations.
This would suggest that violence is pretty adaptive then, because those archaic humans who *didn't* wipe out the Neanderthals and Denisovans left no living descendants today.
Whereas the genetic picture of "moderns" as of 50kya is an endless picture of one group's men wiping out and replacing another group's men (between humans), or exterminating others entirely (Neanderthal and Denisovan).
And they're the ones that have populated essentially every people on the earth, as of today. Particularly the steppe nomad / pastoralists among them (Yamnaya, Saracens, Aryans, Mongols, Huns etc).
Nobody suggested only the nonviolent would have left Africa. (Think about what is happening at the US southern border as a modern example of the suggested process.) And, there were/are likely other factors affecting phenotypes and their behavior besides genetic endowment. Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
> Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
Yeah, but it def fits the pattern. Like, it hasn't been rigorously established that we wiped out megafauna all over the world shorty after arriving in new places with megafauna, but every time you look at the fossil records and see humans entering a new area, the megafauna is extinct basically an eyeblink later. It was pretty much the same story with Neanderthals once the "modern cultural package" humans of 50kya radiated out from Africa, whereas before archaic H Sap had lived alongside Neanderthals for something like 100k years.
Denisovans is harder to tell, because we have so little evidence (just a few bone fragments and DNA remnants in Papuans implying that they had a large geographical spread, from Siberia to SE Asia, but that itself could be interpreted as fairly suggestive that they were wiped out of their primary geographies, with their main remnants ending up in isolated islands, ie the Papuans and Oceania populations with much higher Denisovan percentages).
If Africa was letting people to survive with lower intelligence for tens of thousands of years, why is it bad? 'out of Africa' pulses stopped not when Africa became good neighborhood, but when majority of hominid population was living outside Africa, became adapted at mid and high lattitudes.
It was only a suggested hypothesis, something to think about -- not an assertion. I can think, nevertheless, of environments where a propensity for violence would be adaptive and intelligence maladaptive.
Wonderful article. And some of your more caustic comments in the more academic articles you linked to made me laugh.
A general question. I sometimes come across the claim that black people are about 8 times more likely to commit violent crime/homocide in the USA and Britain than white people. I find this totally credible. Yet in this article one source stated that blacks were only 2.5 times more likely to be encarcerated than white and I'm sure I have seen a similar figure quoted by Noah Carl. What's going on?
Most people are not in jail for homicide, the most extreme crime. Generally speaking, when two groups differ in average antisocial behaviorness, the largest ratios will be seen for the most extreme behaviors. Think of it as normal distributions with different means, and with threshold value. The larger the value of the threshold, the greater the ratios of the distributions' density. Same phenomenon as with IQ tails and geniuses.
Nice explanation. Even so, I'm not convinced that it's quite correct, at least not as far as the UK is concerned, since black people only make up 3% of the population whereas in the US the figure os closer to 13%.
This is interesting and it would be of benefit to know if this incarceration rate as compared to total percentage of incarceration differed substantial over time.
E.g., were the rates actually *higher* (or lower) in former times as compared to the present? If we normalize for types of crimes and allowed sentencing guidelines (very hard to do!), if we find that the present rate is notably *lower* than in former times, it would indicate social policy changes are the possible cause of the difference.
In the UK the most recent data shows black incarceration at being roughly 2x that of whites, so the gap is not very large there (and yes this controls for pop size). This could be for various reasons, one of which could be selection factors. However, for the specific crime of homicide blacks in the UK are 4x as likely to offend as whites.
Ah, that fits in with the above comment just made by Emil i.e. that the more extreme the behaviour/crime (in this case homocide), the more extreme the over-representation.
There's genetic study that stumbled over a correlation between CAG repeats, androgen receptivity, and race. When I say stumbled, they were looking at reasons for different prostrate cancer rates between blacks and whites, and collected a data-set that contained race as an independent variable. The finding?
Blacks had a lower CAG repeat frequency than whites within the genome domain correlated with androgen receptivity.
From there, there are several studies that show a strong inverse relationship between CAG repeats and violent criminal behavior (the shorter the CAG repeat sequence, the higher the tendency to violent criminal behavior). What's intriguing about this data set is that independent of race, low CAG repeats correlate with more violent behavior than higher CAG repeats, independent of race.
Now, put those two together.
I understand why more research isn't done on this topic, but this hypothesis is ripe for further investigation.
I'm a lightweight in this discussion, but the finding sounds similar to IQ vs "success" (as defined by various criteria, independent of race. There is a correlation between higher IQ and such success.
In this study we see that, independent of race, a shorter CAG repeat sequences (and I confess to having no clue what this is) correlates with increased violent behavior (whether in frequency, or severity, or both?).
Now laying in race for the IQ finding, if group A has statistically lower IQs, we can expect them to have less success, in general, and as the sampling size increases with no or few exceptions the linkage becomes clearer. Similarly if group A has statistically shorter CAG repeat sequences, we can expect more violent behavior.
Emil, thanks for the in-depth article on violence causation. While the data may not be definitive for genetic causation, more data supports that theory than any other.
How about an article on the current research on embryo selection, genetic enhancement, and psychometrics of positive human traits? Perhaps a comparison of countries involved.
"While the data may not be definitive for genetic causation, more data supports that theory than any other."
Here's what I think is necessary for an individual to survive...
There are various risks in life and some threaten the life and/or well-being of the individual. The individual who wishes to optimize his/her chances for survival and success needs to form a set of "probable outcomes" for each situation and for situations in which the probable outcome has serious consequences if it comes to pass, that individual is justified in pre-emptively reacting in ways that minimizes these serious risks. I'd label this as "caution" simply for convenience.
And the nature of the consequences plays directly to the need for caution. If the consequences of risk A are merely embarrassment or moderate discomfort, there's less need for caution. But if losing one's life/property are the consequences, one is justified in using extreme caution.
In such cases as the latter (serious potential consequences), it's completely acceptable and understandable to form one's own assessment of risk *without* ironclad proofs, but on *possible outcomes*, or even personal perceptions, instead. This is to say that it's one thing to exclude a black member from your tennis club based on general tendencies of their group (minor consequences if you accept them--similar to accepting a WASP with whom you end up quarreling constantly), but another to park your car on the street, at night near the LA Colosseum and walk 12 blocks and back to an event there.
The consequences in the first instance are low and would justify using very solid and proved facts before deciding, whereas in the second instance all you need to do is get a bad feeling (no real evidence) before deciding, the consequences being so negative that little solid proof is needed or desirable.
actually, they don't necessarily follow a pattern as far as determining the number of perpetrators. The same perpetrator (or small group of perpetrators) can be responsible for multiple victims--and the association with serial killers or spree killers is less significant than murders related to home invasions (mostly robberies of drug dealers) or gangland killings (also mostly related to the illicit drugs trade.) The organized crime ("gang") influence pervading many urban neighborhoods in the US also accounts for the low murder clearance rate in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. Snitches are liable to get more than stitches if they take the stand as witnesses in murder trials, or even as anonymous informants whose identity is discovered. The people who grow up in those neighborhoods learn the rules early on.
> Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
Yeah, but it def fits the pattern. Like, it hasn't been rigorously established that we wiped out megafauna all over the world shorty after arriving in new places with megafauna, but every time you look at the fossil records and see humans entering a new area, the megafauna is extinct basically an eyeblink later. It was pretty much the same story with Neanderthals once the "modern cultural package" humans of 50kya radiated out from Africa, whereas before archaic H Sap had lived alongside Neanderthals for something like 100k years.
Denisovans is harder to tell, because we have so little evidence (just a few bone fragments and DNA remnants in Papuans implying that they had a large geographical spread, from Siberia to SE Asia, but that itself could be interpreted as fairly suggestive that they were wiped out of their primary geographies, with their main remnants ending up in isolated islands, ie the Papuans and Oceania populations with much higher Denisovan percentages).
In cattle semen for sale for artificial insemination, you can now find an Expected Progeny Difference for temperament.
Cow genetics people are generally refreshingly honest and direct. What human genetics geneticists should be. For instance:
Ring, S. C., Evans, R. D., Cromie, A. R., & Berry, D. P. (2021). Cross-sectional analyses of a national database to determine if superior genetic merit translates to superior dairy cow performance. Journal of Dairy Science, 104(7), 8076-8093.
Meier, S., Kuhn-Sherlock, B., Amer, P. A., Roche, J. R., & Burke, C. R. (2021). Positive genetic merit for fertility traits is associated with superior reproductive performance in pasture-based dairy cows with seasonal calving. Journal of Dairy Science, 104(9), 10382-10398.
Mueller, M. L., & Van Eenennaam, A. L. (2022). Synergistic power of genomic selection, assisted reproductive technologies, and gene editing to drive genetic improvement of cattle. CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, 3(1), 13.
The Global Bell Curve (Lynn), written 17 years ago, catalogues the global universality of higher relative Black crime rates quite thoroughly.
There's nothing "thorough" about Lynn's methodology.
Thank you for the reference to Richard Lynn’s work. Unfortunately that book seems out of print.
(still easily found online in shady corners of the internet)
Fair article, I'm glad you tried to remind readers that they shouldn't indiscriminately attribute group differences to the individual level.
I also tested this for Iranian immigrants in the United States and found that they have higher cognitive ability, income, and education than most groups in the United States, yet their crime rates are higher than these variables would predict. It leads me to the conclusion that there was a positive genetic selection for violence in the Middle East as well, Perhaps part of this positive selection for violence was due to higher polygamy in the Middle East and Africa?
This can be partially confirmed by the higher facial masculinity or the higher ability to grow a beard in men in the Middle East than in Europe.
Diverging here, please forgive me:
"...you tried to remind readers that they shouldn't indiscriminately attribute group differences to the individual level."
This is the entire understanding that individuals need to make when dealing with other individuals: in each discrete group there are statistical tendencies for various physical/mental attributes, and these tendencies can be reliable shown to differ between the groups compared. So that it's possible for group A to show a significantly greater statistical tendency toward violence than group B.
But in dealing *individually* with a member of group A, that member may very well *not* exhibit these tendencies, and were we to analyze their genetic components, we'd perhaps find that this *individual* has minimal (or no) such genetic components. They therefore run contrary to the general tendency for their group.
What I've found professionally, as a SW engineer before retiring, is that engineers who were of African American heritage (or even African nationals) did not display much in the way of the tendencies toward violence or other marginal social behaviors that their group possessed. It was as if the selection and pursuit of an education in engineering acted as a genetic filter that tended to exclude individuals whose genetic components followed the general trend toward violence for their group.
There are always exceptions of this kind, and living in this cosmopolitan world, what works best for me is this: prior to meeting and coming to understand the values/tendencies of another discrete group, it is justifiable to be a bit on guard against the general tendencies associated with that group, but after what amounts to a "feeling out" period, any such wariness is unjustified if the individual exhibits no indications of the marginal tendencies.
It triages individuals on character rather than on race. It takes time, and if this is not available, it is reasonable to be wary with an untested member of a group strongly associated with a tendency toward violence.
This is very simple, reasonable stuff, which I *believe* that all human groups have practiced since time immemorial when encountering other groups. It is the most common of common sense.
Could you share your test results for Iranian immigrants please?
We probably will never see good GWAS studies done on violence and race/ethnicity in the west. It's just too toxic a topic. Non-tenured people won't touch the subject. And how many tenured professors would stick their neck out like this?
One sound reason that it can't be done is that human history is replete with examples of mob mayhem, massacres, "ethnic cleansing", "low-intensity conflicts", and brushfire wars all over the world, on every continent and including just about every "racial population." In Europe, most recently in the 1990s: no sooner did the Berlin Wall fall than the interethnic hostility re-emerged and sparked the same homicidal chaos in the 1990s that had existed in the two years prior to the First World War. But a truly comprehensive and impartial study of the violence wouldn't simply cherry-pick violent incidents from the previous 30 years; the overview would extend back to, say, the Crusades, and the Hundred Years War. Because evolutionary biology indicates that the hereditary biology of the human species cannot have advanced very much over a short span of time as 1000 years, hmm? Read about 1914, and you'll find the most powerful human societies on the planet gripped by popular delusions and crowd madness,, leading to a war with a death toll of nearly 18 million people. And if that wasn't enough, the advanced civilizations of Europe clashed in another war that began only around 21 years after the first one https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years
Most of the claims for the superiority of Western civilization reside in the superiority of material technology, particularly military technology. Inventions credited to a few thousand humans, at most--with the crucial breakthroughs supplied by a handful of outliers, some of them quite eccentric--and then copied down into the time-bound technology of books so that the knowledge could be preserved. That isn't evidence of "racial superiority." It's a situation whereby huge masses of humans benefited from the gifts of a tiny minority of the most talented and industrious (who often also had their own problems.) And the results of those technologies were not entirely positive; they've often led to an array of newer, unprecedented problems as a consequence. I don't know what we're going to do about all the microplastics and nanoplastics in our biosphere, for example. Probably nothing, over the near term of the next 50 years. We're all very lucky that most of the plastics appear to be inert, and slow to decompose into more toxic components. It could easily have been worse. Which is not to say that these petrochemical compounds are harmless; beyond the fact that we know empirically that they haven't poisoned our species outright, and haven't yet led to a massive rise in the incidence of cancers, we don't know what they do. The compounds do appear to have enough xenoestrogenic properties that it's probable that there are at least some consequences for animal species. They also appear to make arteriosclerotic plaques worse, which is a potential problem for a species as long-lived as humans. It also has to be said that the massive increase in plastics in the natural environment is the result of intentional decisions by a relative handful of humans who ordered an increase in the bioavailability of those compounds not only for themselves, and not only for their offspring, but for all of use, and for succeeding generations. And in at least one important case, the decision was made despite the knowledge about the longevity and probable toxicity of the compounds; the class of conmpounds known as halogenated hydrocarbons having already been identified as both resistant to breakdown and quite toxic and mutagenic in exceedingly small amounts. https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story
As for the more common (and thankfully apparently more inert) plastics: recent studies indicate that the human brain is accumulating plastics to such an extent that many of us are carrying around about a credit card's worth of those particles in our brain tissue (and around a sandwich bag's worth in other body tissues, notably the kidneys.) It this outcome evidence supporting the superior intelligence of the White Race (and, presumably, the Chinese), whose chief executives made so many of the initial decisions to ramp up that production? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/23/health/plastics-in-brain-wellness/index.html
We're all guinea pigs, now.
You rank Indians higher than Europeans in terms of likelihood for violence. However, this seems to contradict the data presented in some of your other articles. For instance, in the article 'Direct Genetic Evidence for Ethnic Differences in Violence' (https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/direct-genetic-evidence-for-ethnic), you reference another article (https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark) which places Indians near the bottom in terms of violent behavior. Additionally, when examining violent crime rates among Indian immigrants across various countries, the data consistently shows that Indians have one of the lowest rates of violent offenses. Given these contradictory findings, I am curious about the rationale behind ranking Indians higher than Europeans for violence? Your articles are severely riddled with confirmation bias.
From what I understand, there is a lot of genetic diversity in Africa compared to Europe and East Asia. We know there is a lot heterogeneity in European crime. Shouldn't there be much higher heterogeneity in African crime depending on where exactly they come from?
>It should be said that this theory is about average differences only
Blink twice if substack is making you say this
This suggests a hypothesis for the repeated 'out of Africa' pulses of emigration from the continent through human evolutionary history -- i.e., it was generally and chronically a bad neighborhood. Huh -- wonder if the repeated sieving of predispositions by emigration was behind the apparently relatively low incidence of human on human violence in European pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer populations.
This would suggest that violence is pretty adaptive then, because those archaic humans who *didn't* wipe out the Neanderthals and Denisovans left no living descendants today.
Whereas the genetic picture of "moderns" as of 50kya is an endless picture of one group's men wiping out and replacing another group's men (between humans), or exterminating others entirely (Neanderthal and Denisovan).
And they're the ones that have populated essentially every people on the earth, as of today. Particularly the steppe nomad / pastoralists among them (Yamnaya, Saracens, Aryans, Mongols, Huns etc).
Nobody suggested only the nonviolent would have left Africa. (Think about what is happening at the US southern border as a modern example of the suggested process.) And, there were/are likely other factors affecting phenotypes and their behavior besides genetic endowment. Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
> Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
Yeah, but it def fits the pattern. Like, it hasn't been rigorously established that we wiped out megafauna all over the world shorty after arriving in new places with megafauna, but every time you look at the fossil records and see humans entering a new area, the megafauna is extinct basically an eyeblink later. It was pretty much the same story with Neanderthals once the "modern cultural package" humans of 50kya radiated out from Africa, whereas before archaic H Sap had lived alongside Neanderthals for something like 100k years.
Denisovans is harder to tell, because we have so little evidence (just a few bone fragments and DNA remnants in Papuans implying that they had a large geographical spread, from Siberia to SE Asia, but that itself could be interpreted as fairly suggestive that they were wiped out of their primary geographies, with their main remnants ending up in isolated islands, ie the Papuans and Oceania populations with much higher Denisovan percentages).
Like. (My "like" button works only for about 10% of the Substacks I read.)
I think you're wrong on this.
If Africa was letting people to survive with lower intelligence for tens of thousands of years, why is it bad? 'out of Africa' pulses stopped not when Africa became good neighborhood, but when majority of hominid population was living outside Africa, became adapted at mid and high lattitudes.
It was only a suggested hypothesis, something to think about -- not an assertion. I can think, nevertheless, of environments where a propensity for violence would be adaptive and intelligence maladaptive.
Wonderful article. And some of your more caustic comments in the more academic articles you linked to made me laugh.
A general question. I sometimes come across the claim that black people are about 8 times more likely to commit violent crime/homocide in the USA and Britain than white people. I find this totally credible. Yet in this article one source stated that blacks were only 2.5 times more likely to be encarcerated than white and I'm sure I have seen a similar figure quoted by Noah Carl. What's going on?
Most people are not in jail for homicide, the most extreme crime. Generally speaking, when two groups differ in average antisocial behaviorness, the largest ratios will be seen for the most extreme behaviors. Think of it as normal distributions with different means, and with threshold value. The larger the value of the threshold, the greater the ratios of the distributions' density. Same phenomenon as with IQ tails and geniuses.
Ah, now I see. Thanks for that.
It's only 2.5 times until you adjust for their lower percentage of the population. EDIT: This is wrong, Emil posted the correct answer.
Nice explanation. Even so, I'm not convinced that it's quite correct, at least not as far as the UK is concerned, since black people only make up 3% of the population whereas in the US the figure os closer to 13%.
This is interesting and it would be of benefit to know if this incarceration rate as compared to total percentage of incarceration differed substantial over time.
E.g., were the rates actually *higher* (or lower) in former times as compared to the present? If we normalize for types of crimes and allowed sentencing guidelines (very hard to do!), if we find that the present rate is notably *lower* than in former times, it would indicate social policy changes are the possible cause of the difference.
In the UK the most recent data shows black incarceration at being roughly 2x that of whites, so the gap is not very large there (and yes this controls for pop size). This could be for various reasons, one of which could be selection factors. However, for the specific crime of homicide blacks in the UK are 4x as likely to offend as whites.
Ah, that fits in with the above comment just made by Emil i.e. that the more extreme the behaviour/crime (in this case homocide), the more extreme the over-representation.
There's genetic study that stumbled over a correlation between CAG repeats, androgen receptivity, and race. When I say stumbled, they were looking at reasons for different prostrate cancer rates between blacks and whites, and collected a data-set that contained race as an independent variable. The finding?
Blacks had a lower CAG repeat frequency than whites within the genome domain correlated with androgen receptivity.
From there, there are several studies that show a strong inverse relationship between CAG repeats and violent criminal behavior (the shorter the CAG repeat sequence, the higher the tendency to violent criminal behavior). What's intriguing about this data set is that independent of race, low CAG repeats correlate with more violent behavior than higher CAG repeats, independent of race.
Now, put those two together.
I understand why more research isn't done on this topic, but this hypothesis is ripe for further investigation.
Can you link to the relevant studies?
CAG repeat frequency with race as an independent variable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12202660/
CAG repeat frequency and violence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030645300500226X
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00414-008-0225-7
I'm a lightweight in this discussion, but the finding sounds similar to IQ vs "success" (as defined by various criteria, independent of race. There is a correlation between higher IQ and such success.
In this study we see that, independent of race, a shorter CAG repeat sequences (and I confess to having no clue what this is) correlates with increased violent behavior (whether in frequency, or severity, or both?).
Now laying in race for the IQ finding, if group A has statistically lower IQs, we can expect them to have less success, in general, and as the sampling size increases with no or few exceptions the linkage becomes clearer. Similarly if group A has statistically shorter CAG repeat sequences, we can expect more violent behavior.
Emil, thanks for the in-depth article on violence causation. While the data may not be definitive for genetic causation, more data supports that theory than any other.
How about an article on the current research on embryo selection, genetic enhancement, and psychometrics of positive human traits? Perhaps a comparison of countries involved.
"While the data may not be definitive for genetic causation, more data supports that theory than any other."
Here's what I think is necessary for an individual to survive...
There are various risks in life and some threaten the life and/or well-being of the individual. The individual who wishes to optimize his/her chances for survival and success needs to form a set of "probable outcomes" for each situation and for situations in which the probable outcome has serious consequences if it comes to pass, that individual is justified in pre-emptively reacting in ways that minimizes these serious risks. I'd label this as "caution" simply for convenience.
And the nature of the consequences plays directly to the need for caution. If the consequences of risk A are merely embarrassment or moderate discomfort, there's less need for caution. But if losing one's life/property are the consequences, one is justified in using extreme caution.
In such cases as the latter (serious potential consequences), it's completely acceptable and understandable to form one's own assessment of risk *without* ironclad proofs, but on *possible outcomes*, or even personal perceptions, instead. This is to say that it's one thing to exclude a black member from your tennis club based on general tendencies of their group (minor consequences if you accept them--similar to accepting a WASP with whom you end up quarreling constantly), but another to park your car on the street, at night near the LA Colosseum and walk 12 blocks and back to an event there.
The consequences in the first instance are low and would justify using very solid and proved facts before deciding, whereas in the second instance all you need to do is get a bad feeling (no real evidence) before deciding, the consequences being so negative that little solid proof is needed or desirable.
There are many decades of observation and anecdotal evidence.
> follow Africans around the glove anywhere they go
Yes, 'v' & 'b' are beside each other on the keyboard.
Hah!
"Depending on the free testosterone concentration in white men, this WMD translates into a racial difference ranging from 2.5 to 4.9%.'
Given that testosterone in males has been measured as declining from its peak at age 20 by around 11% at age 30, and around 40% lower than age 20 at age 40, exactly how significant is that 2.5% to 4.9%, really? https://media.evolvetelemed.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/10004110/chart-of-male-testosterone-decline-with-age.png
> (rates of victimization and perpetuation follow the same pattern)
This should probably read "perpetration".
actually, they don't necessarily follow a pattern as far as determining the number of perpetrators. The same perpetrator (or small group of perpetrators) can be responsible for multiple victims--and the association with serial killers or spree killers is less significant than murders related to home invasions (mostly robberies of drug dealers) or gangland killings (also mostly related to the illicit drugs trade.) The organized crime ("gang") influence pervading many urban neighborhoods in the US also accounts for the low murder clearance rate in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. Snitches are liable to get more than stitches if they take the stand as witnesses in murder trials, or even as anonymous informants whose identity is discovered. The people who grow up in those neighborhoods learn the rules early on.
"Evidence points to genetic causation, but it's not definitive"
Just curious how much more evidence we need before it becomes "definitive"...
> Also, as I understand it, it hasn't been established whether or not the Neanderthals and Denisovans were wiped out by human agents.
Yeah, but it def fits the pattern. Like, it hasn't been rigorously established that we wiped out megafauna all over the world shorty after arriving in new places with megafauna, but every time you look at the fossil records and see humans entering a new area, the megafauna is extinct basically an eyeblink later. It was pretty much the same story with Neanderthals once the "modern cultural package" humans of 50kya radiated out from Africa, whereas before archaic H Sap had lived alongside Neanderthals for something like 100k years.
Denisovans is harder to tell, because we have so little evidence (just a few bone fragments and DNA remnants in Papuans implying that they had a large geographical spread, from Siberia to SE Asia, but that itself could be interpreted as fairly suggestive that they were wiped out of their primary geographies, with their main remnants ending up in isolated islands, ie the Papuans and Oceania populations with much higher Denisovan percentages).