“What else, then, could explain the gap? I am aware of three possibilities.” …”Which explanation is correct? Based on currently available evidence, it’s hard to say for sure. And of course, the various possibilities are not mutually exclusive.”
This. I’ve seen your posed quandary in many forms during my entire career in academia. The problem is indeed “multi variate”. To continue to look at the “problem” and ask “which *one*?” is fruitless and leads to confusion. The answer is simply, there is no single cause, nor will society addressing any single cause solve the “problem”. This is why society is still confused and stymied to this day wrt the “Black problem”. Every effort to alleviate Black pathology has assumed a single cause to be addressed and therefore (predictably) failed miserably. We as a species just are not equipped to handle/conceive of such multi variate phenomena, much less address such pathology.
Multivariate? Hard? Quandary? We are not equipped? What?
Of the plausible explanations proposed (higher testosterone, higher psychopathology, lower IQ) all are largely genetic and hard to change with cost-effective practical interventions. The real quandary lies with the empathetic, altruistic White person who cannot bring himself to accept this obvious conclusion.
Marvin, you know what the original poster wrote. The three proposed causes cited were Poverty, Family Breakdown, IQ. Of those, IQ might immediately be considered “genetic”. Disingenuous Whites aside, the article is appropriately critiqued. That you have other causes that seem intuitively “obvious” not withstanding.
Have we read the same article? The article first (rightly) dispenses with poverty and family breakdown as explanatory nothing burgers.
Then it proceeds with low IQ as partly explanatory, higher testosterone and psychopathology as partly/potentially explanatory. All of these are largely genetic and hard to change.
If finishes with culture, which is a god-of-the-gaps-level nothing burger (won't expand on this here, the comment would be too long).
I.e. the only plausible explanatory factors are largely genetic.
It's not just the disingenuous Whites. It's also the empathetic and altruistic Whites whose mental programming leads them to genuinely believe nothing burgers or throw their hands up and say "Too hard!".
Yes, we read the same article. Your understanding/interpretation is a bit too literal for what I believe was the author’s intent. He threw out possible causes offered for Black pathology and often cited to illustrate the rationalizations some people have wrt the subject matter. I don’t believe he was promoting any theory in particular, nor really confused on the issue. The statements I quoted I interpreted as basically rhetorical in nature—only to illustrate the conflict of rationalizations liberals have in these matters. My comments were in turn not specifically to promote any particular theory or validity of such, only the essence of the problem I’ve seen in decades of discussion.
My response has nothing to do with disingenuous Whites, nor promotes any particular theory of Black pathology. Your response on the other handle seems to address an issue I’ve not spoken towards. If you’ve got it all figured out, that’s great.
I understood the gist of your original comment as "it's too hard to know what causes Black pathology because it's too multivariate. And thus it's hard to address it (solve it)."
If I got that correctly, I disagree with that take. If one chooses a level of analysis that is too detailed, the problem really might become too multivariate and hard to solve. If one goes a level of abstraction up and poses the problem as "genetic vs environmental" or perhaps "genetic vs cultural vs non-culture environmental", it gets less complicated. All the evidence points to the gap being genetic. We don't necessarily need to know all the contributing traits, or the alleles. "It's genetic" is a good enough practical explanation.
The sword cuts both ways. If you simplify the problem too much, you lose detail and increase error. All the variables mentioned have *both* heredity and environment components. You concentrate on one, and risk missing the other. The other of course being more amenable to change/improvement.
This is precisely the problem mentioned in my original commentary. Folks would look at one, but not the other, explanation for racial pathology. To focus on the “big one” is fine, but risks alienating those who focus on other aspects. Nothing in my original commentary said a multi variate analysis was impossible, nor should or should not be attempted. Only that it is difficult.
It’s bizarre to see otherwise intelligent people cling to this blindspot. It’s not the only topic where this happens but it’s the most egregious. This should be studied against openness and disagreeabilty, and then against conflicts of interest.
People who work in certain sectors would incite unsustainable levels of cognitive dissonance were they to accept the obvious.
'This [i.e. multivariate contributary causes] is why society is still confused and stymied to this day wrt the “Black problem”'
I'm not convinced that the only reason we are still confused and stymied is because the problem doesn't have a single cause. There are surely some social phenomena with multivariate causes that we have made our peace with. Rather, the biggest problem is that none of the many correct contributary causes is acceptable to those who inform the public as to what is true and what isn't.
“I'm not convinced that the only reason we are still confused and stymied is because the problem has a single cause. “
I don’t believe I said that. We have a complex problem with many contributing causes. Yet, as hinted at by the OP, we often seem to attempt to explain/solve such problems as if they were uni-variate. The particular variable (for correction) we focus upon changes over the years when the de jour uni-variate explanation fails to achieve satisfactory results and falls into disfavor.
Yes, the causes of the problem are both multivariate AND every one of those proposed causes is unacceptable to a certain kind of mind. The point I was making is that the latter is more of a problem than the former. For example, we have no problem accepting that the causes of WWI were multivariate so why are the multivariate causes of black crime so hard to understand?
I don’t know. I suspect that the smart folk understand. The not so smart, or perhaps just the “grifters”, focus on a particular “hobby horse” explanation of their own ideological devise. And of course, there are variables which are palatable and acceptable to discuss and then variables which have been unacceptable to discuss historically. (The Overton Window is moving on these however as we speak. We are doing such now.)
For example, we have as a society been trapped in a half century—or more—of “Pathological Egalitarianism”, or “Blank Slatism”which does not allow for innate difference models among the races. ;-) The famous phrase attributed to Galileo Galilei comes to mind here: “E pur si muove” (Italian for “And yet it moves.”)
And so it is here with the OP and our commentary. For further discussion, you’ll need to inquire of someone smarter than I.
If IQ correlates with crime, and only a minority of blacks commit the most heinous crimes, and this minority likely has IQs even lower than the black average (and maybe even higher testosterone), plus the culture that a very low IQ group of fatherless teens would create (a kind of downward spiral), would that get you your answer? Even an “unproven” theory (as per Popper, no evidence can “support” a theory) can still be a very good theory—especially if the alternative theories have been tentatively falsified.
Thanks. I was trying to go where maybe the data isn’t yet available, i.e., the IQ of the most heinous offenders, not just average IQ blacks who, say, steal cars. If the worst offenders are in the 60-75 range with severe sociopathic tendencies, then that is much worse than many low IQ whites.
Isn't the sweetspot for crime around IQ 85? If it is, then having a lower IQ means it's less likely you will commit a crime. If that's correct, then the average black American, not his lower IQ brother, is the most likely to commit a crime.
It just occurred to me that whites with very low IQs are often regarded as retarded; whereas, for blacks, very low IQ is quite “normal” and not a sign of retardation; therefore, perhaps they are more naturally sociopathic/impulsive (unlike retarded whites).
I remember Phil Rushton once saying that while a white person with very low IQ is almost certainly retarded, a black person with a low IQ is more like an 11-year-old child. This, he said, is the correct way to think about low African IQ.
I suppose you could liken it to height. If you get a westerner who is 4'10" tall then something has probably gone wrong but if a pygmy is 4'10" then it's all as it should be.
That's what got Arthur Jensen interested in IQ c. 1965. Elementary school teachers in Berkeley asked him why their white students with low IQ test scores tend to be Funny Looking Kids but their black students with low IQ test scores were mostly normal looking and were treated as normal on the playground by the other kids. Jensen assumed that something was wrong with IQ tests but when he looked into the scholarly research ...
As the Cremieux article you linked as well as Steven Pinker's work has discussed, the formerly high propensity to violence seems to have been bred out of upper class Europeans by the high rate of fatal combat and out of lower classes by the many executions that took place over a period of about a thousand years. The answer to your question may lie in the fact that blacks never went through such a winnowing, at least for long enough to make a difference since the time of lynchings in America only lasted from 1880 through 1930.
I'd guess that the end of elite dueling in Europe is more likely to represent cultural than genetic change.
Elite dueling lasted a long time in Europe.
Vladimir Nabokov's father, the minister of justice in the 1905 liberal government, challenged a libelous newspaper editor to a duel in about 1910. Writing in 1950, Nabokov was very proud of his father for doing that.
Marie Le Pen's father served as a second in a duel in France in 1958.
Those are great anecdotes, particularly the Nabokov one, but the fact is that Caucasian elites are generally unlikely to be murdered nowadays as your statistics show. According to Steven Pinker, 200 years ago and earlier though, it was not good for one's life expectancy to be a nobleman.
I'm checking this explanation against various other cultural/racial groups. It fits in Japan and China; they've had institutional justice systems for a long time. It does *not* fit Mongolia: their homicide rate is only slightly higher than ours despite being poorer, and that was the nation that spawned Genghis Khan. Natives of South America are hopelessly confounded by interbreeding with Spaniards.
Side note: Italy is really low, which given the amount of migrants they have and their history as immigrants in the US, does seem to argue against genetic explanations.
The African continent is a whole offers too many confounding factors, but the culling effects in America might have been measurable had they lasted longer.
Homicide patterns reflect the symbolic content of African cultures. At a civilizational level, African peoples have carried different orientations toward life, death, honour, time, and violence. These manifest consistently, even controlling for material and cognitive factors, because they express symbolic form rather than accidents of circumstance. They are irreducible signatures of a distinct inheritance. That doesn’t absolve responsibility, but it should frame our expectations.
The New Yorker has an article (somewhat exhaustive) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters that relates to this. I think certain people of the early 20th century really put a bad taste in the mouth when talking about genetics, and as a society (for good reason), we decided to dismiss almost all of it. But I think we made a huge overcorrection by putting the idea out there that we have no traits that can be different from one race to another, and it can end up adding to the disadvantages we are trying to prevent. I think whether some people want to admit it or not, we all know deep down that there are subtle psychological or neurological differences that are more or less prominent from one race to another that are not based entirely on current environmental factors like culture or socioeconomic status. But, we also need to learn how to research and teach it in a way so that people understand that just because there are differences, it doesn't mean any race or ethnicity is superior or inferior, but simply different. Speaking purely theoretically, I think from an evolutionary standpoint, we should expect that a group of people who have lived and thrived in a place like the Sahara for thousands of years would adapt different patholgies and psychologies than a group of people who have lived and thrived on the Korean Peninsula or the Scandinavian Mountains. If we can learn to research such differences, we can actually help to make things more equal rather than just expecting everyone to assimilate in ways that may be harder for some.
Yep, but let’s not leave young Black women out of the equation. Women don’t murder as much as men, sure. That a truism for all races. But look at the violence we see daily coming from younger, Black women. The anger and acting out is amazing. Whites are bad too as compared to mid 20th century Whites—but not like I’ve seen wrt Blacks. Sigh….
In 1964, I got a scholarship to Lake Forest College in Chicago. There were lots of scholarship kids. They needed us to do all the menial work the rich kids who paid full tuition would do. Most of the rich white kids were the family losers who couldn't get into a real school like Harvard. Not people you would want to imitate. All the rich black kids were (mostly) admirable people who taught me a lot about how an upper class person was supposed to behave. Never got very good at imitating them but they taught me enough that I was able to pretend to be a middle class guy when I grew up.
Somewhere at the end of the 20th Century, something went terribly wrong in the black community. Not sure what. I used to laugh about putting the Ten Commandments back in the schools but that's sort of the beginning of healing. Teaching "You shouldn't kill" has to be the beginning.
“…at the end of the 20th Century, something went terribly wrong in the black community.”
I’d say the seed was sown in the early sixties with the Civil Rights Act. We had an immediate and complete cessation of discrimination wrt housing and neighborhood “redlining”. This split the Black ghettos. The upper class Blacks (better endowed to strive) got the hell out of the slums while the lessor inclined had to stay. There was no middle class, only those impoverished due to an inability to compete. The follow on was those pockets of poor (but now not without political power) Blacks were preyed upon by grifters of all sorts who told them that the source of their woes was the Whites they lived among and the evil of (White) racism—rather than the truth…lack of ability.
Ironically, one of the greatest writers upon this subject is Thomas Sowell, a Black academic. He wrote several books that touched upon the subject of mixed races fighting among themselves when one race is dominant wrt ability. (I use the term “ability”, Sowell might have simply said “economic success”.) See, “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study.” In this work he discusses for an example how Sri Lanka (once British Ceylon) had a Sinhalese majority and a Tamil minority. The British pulled out and the conflict began as the Tamils were quite industrial in their economic proclivities (IIRC). Similar anecdotes are mentioned in other books written by Sowell.
They sold the school as a Chicago school Also, when I was there, the college president was a speech writer for Mayor Dailey. Yes, Lake Forest is an isolated island of the very rich (a girl in a class asked me to walk her over to friends house. It was the Armour mansion in LF.) island a short train ride away from inner city Chicago.
I'm not surprised, feeding off the notoriety of the University of Chicago.
There are at least two Amour mansions in that area. The one in Lake Forest, known as the Armour House, was on a bluff overlooking the lake. I'm not sure which one you visited, but it was probably the one on the lake if you walked. The Armour Mansion or Estate was fantastic in its time. Located just north of Lake Forest, in Lake Bluff, this estate was vast, consisting of many wooded acres, but it was not situated on the lake, unlike some of the most expensive estates. Sadly, the Terlato Wine Group purchased the mansion, and the vast property was subdivided into five-acre lots; however, the homes are high-class.
I worked 18 years in the black ghettoes of New Jersey as a probation officer and 13 years working in prisons in the American South. Blacks are entertained by murder because they love to gossip about it. Its all about who dissed whom and A is going to murder B. They can talk about murder from dawn to dusk.
The two strongest predictors of criminality at the individual level are impulsivity and psychopathy. IQ is less predictive. A reasonable default is that the black-white crime difference is mostly explained by differences in these two factors.
"it would be rather surprising if the same culture had arisen independently in all these separate places."
Culture can also arise in recent times, such as 1988, and spread by modern means.
In America, the black homicide rate was starting to ease off in the early 1980s. Then along came crack in the later 1980s.
Fortunately, the crack wars were mostly over after 1995.
Unfortunately, a by-product of the crack years, gangsta rap, has endured and spread the crack dealer's code worldwide, especially to young black men.
For example, prominent British drill rappers have an insane violent crime rate, perhaps higher than prominent American rappers despite the gun control in the UK. Some American rappers at least get the joke, but British rappers evidently tend to take the American nonsense seriously.
I think family breakdown matters, but less directly than is commonly assumed. It's not that "growing up without a father" causes the child to later commit crimes. It's that in a culture of high-investment parenting, women prefer employed men to petty criminals, as even Walmart wages are better than the nothing the woman is going to get if the man goes to prison. When you move toward a culture of low-investment parenting, that pressure on men is lessened and perhaps even reversed if men start thinking that women prefer drug dealers to Walmart workers. And while I called it "culture," much of it was created by government incentives, it's no coincidence that births outside of marriage skyrocketed with the Great Society.
The fact that the homicide rate in 2010 was as low as it was in 1960 might seem to contradict this theory, but it makes more sense when you consider that the incarceration rate in 2010 was much higher than it was in 1960. The combination of liberal criminal justice reforms and welfare set off a crime wave that was only tampered down on by significantly more policing and incarceration of the underclass.
Is there some reason these sorts of behavior-difference examinations ignore brain differences between the races? Is it simply lack of awareness of the research?
Established facts --
Blacks exhibit smaller volumes in several prefrontal brain regions compared to whites: Blacks have significantly smaller mean volumes in the caudal middle frontal gyrus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex compared to whites, with p-values of 2e-16 for most regions, indicating a high level of statistical significance.
After controlling for age, sex, and education, blacks exhibit smaller total cerebral volume than whites.
Blacks have larger left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) volumes than whites, but when regional volumes are normalized to total cerebral volume, blacks show greater ratios for the right amygdala and bilaterally for the OFC.
Although prefrontal lobe size is smaller in blacks than whites, specific regional differences and relative proportions are equally important differences between white and black brains.
Research in this field is, as they say these days, a "fraught" area for research and pursuing it is an almost certain way to end your academic career, but research, liberally prefaced and padded with anti-racist nurturism boiler plate does discretely continue. If it could be pursued freely without fear of career suicide, we would probably have solid answers for the behavioral differences we see between various varieties of humans. And none of it would define superior versus inferior but simply _differences_ based on evolutionary pressures in the past.
I can think of a possible interaction among these. Exposure to violence as a child cause some cortisol activating genes to express, and they are hard to shut down. Exposure to violence might do the same for testosterone. A higher incidence of psychopathology could increase the likelihood that the sons, nephews and neighborhood are exposed. That doesn't look like it would explain even a third of the overall increase, but it could plausibly still be 5-15%.
I was thinking entirely in terms of being a victim, with the nervous system activating in the face of danger, as some genes activate in in response to malnutrition. But it is intriguing to think that the sounds and sight of it might also activate what we used to think of as junk DNA. I simply do not know.
Yes. You probably know about The ACE Study. There is little doubt that the more psychological stressors a child has in early life, the likelier it is that he'll be assailed by bad health throughout adulthood and die an early death.
The problem I have with your idea is that it's a sophisticated way of saying that "hurt people hurt people," which has been used for decades in an attempt to give some absolution societally to the antisocial. I am NOT saying that you are wondering along those lines.
The work of young psychologists such as Peter Salerno is at war with this idea. Salerno claims that brain scanning shows striking differences in the neuroconstruction of the malignantly narcissistic. He doesn't believe this gives them haven, however. He thinks they are fully responsible for their depredations.
Thanks for the excellent article, Noah. I don't think it changes your analysis an iota, but allow me one tiny and pedantic sub-footnote on an area I know little about: testosterone’s effects go beyond blood levels, and include receptor type, number, and distribution in the brain. Anyhow, this sadly seems an intractable problem.
“What else, then, could explain the gap? I am aware of three possibilities.” …”Which explanation is correct? Based on currently available evidence, it’s hard to say for sure. And of course, the various possibilities are not mutually exclusive.”
This. I’ve seen your posed quandary in many forms during my entire career in academia. The problem is indeed “multi variate”. To continue to look at the “problem” and ask “which *one*?” is fruitless and leads to confusion. The answer is simply, there is no single cause, nor will society addressing any single cause solve the “problem”. This is why society is still confused and stymied to this day wrt the “Black problem”. Every effort to alleviate Black pathology has assumed a single cause to be addressed and therefore (predictably) failed miserably. We as a species just are not equipped to handle/conceive of such multi variate phenomena, much less address such pathology.
Multivariate? Hard? Quandary? We are not equipped? What?
Of the plausible explanations proposed (higher testosterone, higher psychopathology, lower IQ) all are largely genetic and hard to change with cost-effective practical interventions. The real quandary lies with the empathetic, altruistic White person who cannot bring himself to accept this obvious conclusion.
Marvin, you know what the original poster wrote. The three proposed causes cited were Poverty, Family Breakdown, IQ. Of those, IQ might immediately be considered “genetic”. Disingenuous Whites aside, the article is appropriately critiqued. That you have other causes that seem intuitively “obvious” not withstanding.
Have we read the same article? The article first (rightly) dispenses with poverty and family breakdown as explanatory nothing burgers.
Then it proceeds with low IQ as partly explanatory, higher testosterone and psychopathology as partly/potentially explanatory. All of these are largely genetic and hard to change.
If finishes with culture, which is a god-of-the-gaps-level nothing burger (won't expand on this here, the comment would be too long).
I.e. the only plausible explanatory factors are largely genetic.
It's not just the disingenuous Whites. It's also the empathetic and altruistic Whites whose mental programming leads them to genuinely believe nothing burgers or throw their hands up and say "Too hard!".
Yes, we read the same article. Your understanding/interpretation is a bit too literal for what I believe was the author’s intent. He threw out possible causes offered for Black pathology and often cited to illustrate the rationalizations some people have wrt the subject matter. I don’t believe he was promoting any theory in particular, nor really confused on the issue. The statements I quoted I interpreted as basically rhetorical in nature—only to illustrate the conflict of rationalizations liberals have in these matters. My comments were in turn not specifically to promote any particular theory or validity of such, only the essence of the problem I’ve seen in decades of discussion.
My response has nothing to do with disingenuous Whites, nor promotes any particular theory of Black pathology. Your response on the other handle seems to address an issue I’ve not spoken towards. If you’ve got it all figured out, that’s great.
I understood the gist of your original comment as "it's too hard to know what causes Black pathology because it's too multivariate. And thus it's hard to address it (solve it)."
If I got that correctly, I disagree with that take. If one chooses a level of analysis that is too detailed, the problem really might become too multivariate and hard to solve. If one goes a level of abstraction up and poses the problem as "genetic vs environmental" or perhaps "genetic vs cultural vs non-culture environmental", it gets less complicated. All the evidence points to the gap being genetic. We don't necessarily need to know all the contributing traits, or the alleles. "It's genetic" is a good enough practical explanation.
And solution: accept innate differences.
The sword cuts both ways. If you simplify the problem too much, you lose detail and increase error. All the variables mentioned have *both* heredity and environment components. You concentrate on one, and risk missing the other. The other of course being more amenable to change/improvement.
This is precisely the problem mentioned in my original commentary. Folks would look at one, but not the other, explanation for racial pathology. To focus on the “big one” is fine, but risks alienating those who focus on other aspects. Nothing in my original commentary said a multi variate analysis was impossible, nor should or should not be attempted. Only that it is difficult.
It’s bizarre to see otherwise intelligent people cling to this blindspot. It’s not the only topic where this happens but it’s the most egregious. This should be studied against openness and disagreeabilty, and then against conflicts of interest.
People who work in certain sectors would incite unsustainable levels of cognitive dissonance were they to accept the obvious.
'This [i.e. multivariate contributary causes] is why society is still confused and stymied to this day wrt the “Black problem”'
I'm not convinced that the only reason we are still confused and stymied is because the problem doesn't have a single cause. There are surely some social phenomena with multivariate causes that we have made our peace with. Rather, the biggest problem is that none of the many correct contributary causes is acceptable to those who inform the public as to what is true and what isn't.
“I'm not convinced that the only reason we are still confused and stymied is because the problem has a single cause. “
I don’t believe I said that. We have a complex problem with many contributing causes. Yet, as hinted at by the OP, we often seem to attempt to explain/solve such problems as if they were uni-variate. The particular variable (for correction) we focus upon changes over the years when the de jour uni-variate explanation fails to achieve satisfactory results and falls into disfavor.
Yes, the causes of the problem are both multivariate AND every one of those proposed causes is unacceptable to a certain kind of mind. The point I was making is that the latter is more of a problem than the former. For example, we have no problem accepting that the causes of WWI were multivariate so why are the multivariate causes of black crime so hard to understand?
I don’t know. I suspect that the smart folk understand. The not so smart, or perhaps just the “grifters”, focus on a particular “hobby horse” explanation of their own ideological devise. And of course, there are variables which are palatable and acceptable to discuss and then variables which have been unacceptable to discuss historically. (The Overton Window is moving on these however as we speak. We are doing such now.)
For example, we have as a society been trapped in a half century—or more—of “Pathological Egalitarianism”, or “Blank Slatism”which does not allow for innate difference models among the races. ;-) The famous phrase attributed to Galileo Galilei comes to mind here: “E pur si muove” (Italian for “And yet it moves.”)
And so it is here with the OP and our commentary. For further discussion, you’ll need to inquire of someone smarter than I.
It’s very White to fret about the cause, isn’t it? Whatever the issue is, it hasn’t changed in over a century and is unlikely to.
Yeah. An admonishment well taken. It is a fault we (Whites) all too often have. ;-)
QED
The issue is what affects blacks in an outsized impact.
If IQ correlates with crime, and only a minority of blacks commit the most heinous crimes, and this minority likely has IQs even lower than the black average (and maybe even higher testosterone), plus the culture that a very low IQ group of fatherless teens would create (a kind of downward spiral), would that get you your answer? Even an “unproven” theory (as per Popper, no evidence can “support” a theory) can still be a very good theory—especially if the alternative theories have been tentatively falsified.
Thanks for the comment. I do think that both IQ and family breakdown contribute, but they can't explain the entire gap.
—NC
Thanks. I was trying to go where maybe the data isn’t yet available, i.e., the IQ of the most heinous offenders, not just average IQ blacks who, say, steal cars. If the worst offenders are in the 60-75 range with severe sociopathic tendencies, then that is much worse than many low IQ whites.
Isn't the sweetspot for crime around IQ 85? If it is, then having a lower IQ means it's less likely you will commit a crime. If that's correct, then the average black American, not his lower IQ brother, is the most likely to commit a crime.
Good question/reply. Will ponder. Thanks.
It just occurred to me that whites with very low IQs are often regarded as retarded; whereas, for blacks, very low IQ is quite “normal” and not a sign of retardation; therefore, perhaps they are more naturally sociopathic/impulsive (unlike retarded whites).
I remember Phil Rushton once saying that while a white person with very low IQ is almost certainly retarded, a black person with a low IQ is more like an 11-year-old child. This, he said, is the correct way to think about low African IQ.
I suppose you could liken it to height. If you get a westerner who is 4'10" tall then something has probably gone wrong but if a pygmy is 4'10" then it's all as it should be.
That's what got Arthur Jensen interested in IQ c. 1965. Elementary school teachers in Berkeley asked him why their white students with low IQ test scores tend to be Funny Looking Kids but their black students with low IQ test scores were mostly normal looking and were treated as normal on the playground by the other kids. Jensen assumed that something was wrong with IQ tests but when he looked into the scholarly research ...
As the Cremieux article you linked as well as Steven Pinker's work has discussed, the formerly high propensity to violence seems to have been bred out of upper class Europeans by the high rate of fatal combat and out of lower classes by the many executions that took place over a period of about a thousand years. The answer to your question may lie in the fact that blacks never went through such a winnowing, at least for long enough to make a difference since the time of lynchings in America only lasted from 1880 through 1930.
I'd guess that the end of elite dueling in Europe is more likely to represent cultural than genetic change.
Elite dueling lasted a long time in Europe.
Vladimir Nabokov's father, the minister of justice in the 1905 liberal government, challenged a libelous newspaper editor to a duel in about 1910. Writing in 1950, Nabokov was very proud of his father for doing that.
Marie Le Pen's father served as a second in a duel in France in 1958.
Those are great anecdotes, particularly the Nabokov one, but the fact is that Caucasian elites are generally unlikely to be murdered nowadays as your statistics show. According to Steven Pinker, 200 years ago and earlier though, it was not good for one's life expectancy to be a nobleman.
I'm checking this explanation against various other cultural/racial groups. It fits in Japan and China; they've had institutional justice systems for a long time. It does *not* fit Mongolia: their homicide rate is only slightly higher than ours despite being poorer, and that was the nation that spawned Genghis Khan. Natives of South America are hopelessly confounded by interbreeding with Spaniards.
Side note: Italy is really low, which given the amount of migrants they have and their history as immigrants in the US, does seem to argue against genetic explanations.
It would have had to started in Africa for European-style culling to work.
The African continent is a whole offers too many confounding factors, but the culling effects in America might have been measurable had they lasted longer.
Homicide patterns reflect the symbolic content of African cultures. At a civilizational level, African peoples have carried different orientations toward life, death, honour, time, and violence. These manifest consistently, even controlling for material and cognitive factors, because they express symbolic form rather than accidents of circumstance. They are irreducible signatures of a distinct inheritance. That doesn’t absolve responsibility, but it should frame our expectations.
The New Yorker has an article (somewhat exhaustive) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressives-be-convinced-that-genetics-matters that relates to this. I think certain people of the early 20th century really put a bad taste in the mouth when talking about genetics, and as a society (for good reason), we decided to dismiss almost all of it. But I think we made a huge overcorrection by putting the idea out there that we have no traits that can be different from one race to another, and it can end up adding to the disadvantages we are trying to prevent. I think whether some people want to admit it or not, we all know deep down that there are subtle psychological or neurological differences that are more or less prominent from one race to another that are not based entirely on current environmental factors like culture or socioeconomic status. But, we also need to learn how to research and teach it in a way so that people understand that just because there are differences, it doesn't mean any race or ethnicity is superior or inferior, but simply different. Speaking purely theoretically, I think from an evolutionary standpoint, we should expect that a group of people who have lived and thrived in a place like the Sahara for thousands of years would adapt different patholgies and psychologies than a group of people who have lived and thrived on the Korean Peninsula or the Scandinavian Mountains. If we can learn to research such differences, we can actually help to make things more equal rather than just expecting everyone to assimilate in ways that may be harder for some.
Black Males age 15-35 are 3% of the population
Yep, but let’s not leave young Black women out of the equation. Women don’t murder as much as men, sure. That a truism for all races. But look at the violence we see daily coming from younger, Black women. The anger and acting out is amazing. Whites are bad too as compared to mid 20th century Whites—but not like I’ve seen wrt Blacks. Sigh….
However, black women do commit murder significantly more than white men do
I had to look this up to confirm, but it seems to be true. Well, not "significantly more", but still more. An eye opening fact.
In 1964, I got a scholarship to Lake Forest College in Chicago. There were lots of scholarship kids. They needed us to do all the menial work the rich kids who paid full tuition would do. Most of the rich white kids were the family losers who couldn't get into a real school like Harvard. Not people you would want to imitate. All the rich black kids were (mostly) admirable people who taught me a lot about how an upper class person was supposed to behave. Never got very good at imitating them but they taught me enough that I was able to pretend to be a middle class guy when I grew up.
Somewhere at the end of the 20th Century, something went terribly wrong in the black community. Not sure what. I used to laugh about putting the Ten Commandments back in the schools but that's sort of the beginning of healing. Teaching "You shouldn't kill" has to be the beginning.
Thanks for the comment. As I noted in the article, there has been a large black–white homicide gap since at least the 1920s.
—NC
“…at the end of the 20th Century, something went terribly wrong in the black community.”
I’d say the seed was sown in the early sixties with the Civil Rights Act. We had an immediate and complete cessation of discrimination wrt housing and neighborhood “redlining”. This split the Black ghettos. The upper class Blacks (better endowed to strive) got the hell out of the slums while the lessor inclined had to stay. There was no middle class, only those impoverished due to an inability to compete. The follow on was those pockets of poor (but now not without political power) Blacks were preyed upon by grifters of all sorts who told them that the source of their woes was the Whites they lived among and the evil of (White) racism—rather than the truth…lack of ability.
Ironically, one of the greatest writers upon this subject is Thomas Sowell, a Black academic. He wrote several books that touched upon the subject of mixed races fighting among themselves when one race is dominant wrt ability. (I use the term “ability”, Sowell might have simply said “economic success”.) See, “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study.” In this work he discusses for an example how Sri Lanka (once British Ceylon) had a Sinhalese majority and a Tamil minority. The British pulled out and the conflict began as the Tamils were quite industrial in their economic proclivities (IIRC). Similar anecdotes are mentioned in other books written by Sowell.
"I got a scholarship to Lake Forest College in Chicago."
Point of interest: Lake Forest College is not in Chicago; it is in Lake Forest, IL., about seventeen miles north of Chicago.
They sold the school as a Chicago school Also, when I was there, the college president was a speech writer for Mayor Dailey. Yes, Lake Forest is an isolated island of the very rich (a girl in a class asked me to walk her over to friends house. It was the Armour mansion in LF.) island a short train ride away from inner city Chicago.
"They sold the school as a Chicago school."
I'm not surprised, feeding off the notoriety of the University of Chicago.
There are at least two Amour mansions in that area. The one in Lake Forest, known as the Armour House, was on a bluff overlooking the lake. I'm not sure which one you visited, but it was probably the one on the lake if you walked. The Armour Mansion or Estate was fantastic in its time. Located just north of Lake Forest, in Lake Bluff, this estate was vast, consisting of many wooded acres, but it was not situated on the lake, unlike some of the most expensive estates. Sadly, the Terlato Wine Group purchased the mansion, and the vast property was subdivided into five-acre lots; however, the homes are high-class.
I worked 18 years in the black ghettoes of New Jersey as a probation officer and 13 years working in prisons in the American South. Blacks are entertained by murder because they love to gossip about it. Its all about who dissed whom and A is going to murder B. They can talk about murder from dawn to dusk.
The two strongest predictors of criminality at the individual level are impulsivity and psychopathy. IQ is less predictive. A reasonable default is that the black-white crime difference is mostly explained by differences in these two factors.
"it would be rather surprising if the same culture had arisen independently in all these separate places."
Culture can also arise in recent times, such as 1988, and spread by modern means.
In America, the black homicide rate was starting to ease off in the early 1980s. Then along came crack in the later 1980s.
Fortunately, the crack wars were mostly over after 1995.
Unfortunately, a by-product of the crack years, gangsta rap, has endured and spread the crack dealer's code worldwide, especially to young black men.
For example, prominent British drill rappers have an insane violent crime rate, perhaps higher than prominent American rappers despite the gun control in the UK. Some American rappers at least get the joke, but British rappers evidently tend to take the American nonsense seriously.
The black vs. Hispanic homicide gap is the striking one. Blacks die by homicide about 4.5 times as often per capita as Hispanics.
I think family breakdown matters, but less directly than is commonly assumed. It's not that "growing up without a father" causes the child to later commit crimes. It's that in a culture of high-investment parenting, women prefer employed men to petty criminals, as even Walmart wages are better than the nothing the woman is going to get if the man goes to prison. When you move toward a culture of low-investment parenting, that pressure on men is lessened and perhaps even reversed if men start thinking that women prefer drug dealers to Walmart workers. And while I called it "culture," much of it was created by government incentives, it's no coincidence that births outside of marriage skyrocketed with the Great Society.
The fact that the homicide rate in 2010 was as low as it was in 1960 might seem to contradict this theory, but it makes more sense when you consider that the incarceration rate in 2010 was much higher than it was in 1960. The combination of liberal criminal justice reforms and welfare set off a crime wave that was only tampered down on by significantly more policing and incarceration of the underclass.
Is there some reason these sorts of behavior-difference examinations ignore brain differences between the races? Is it simply lack of awareness of the research?
Established facts --
Blacks exhibit smaller volumes in several prefrontal brain regions compared to whites: Blacks have significantly smaller mean volumes in the caudal middle frontal gyrus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex compared to whites, with p-values of 2e-16 for most regions, indicating a high level of statistical significance.
After controlling for age, sex, and education, blacks exhibit smaller total cerebral volume than whites.
Blacks have larger left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) volumes than whites, but when regional volumes are normalized to total cerebral volume, blacks show greater ratios for the right amygdala and bilaterally for the OFC.
Although prefrontal lobe size is smaller in blacks than whites, specific regional differences and relative proportions are equally important differences between white and black brains.
Research in this field is, as they say these days, a "fraught" area for research and pursuing it is an almost certain way to end your academic career, but research, liberally prefaced and padded with anti-racist nurturism boiler plate does discretely continue. If it could be pursued freely without fear of career suicide, we would probably have solid answers for the behavioral differences we see between various varieties of humans. And none of it would define superior versus inferior but simply _differences_ based on evolutionary pressures in the past.
I agree that IQ can’t explain most of the difference and provided an analysis here that predated La Griffe du Lion’s “Method of Thresholds”: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235281431_A_critique_and_reinterpretation_of_gordon's_IQ-commensurability_property
I can think of a possible interaction among these. Exposure to violence as a child cause some cortisol activating genes to express, and they are hard to shut down. Exposure to violence might do the same for testosterone. A higher incidence of psychopathology could increase the likelihood that the sons, nephews and neighborhood are exposed. That doesn't look like it would explain even a third of the overall increase, but it could plausibly still be 5-15%.
Would "exposure to violence" be limited to the toddler's witnessing it/being aware of it, or would it include his possibly being a victim, also?
I was thinking entirely in terms of being a victim, with the nervous system activating in the face of danger, as some genes activate in in response to malnutrition. But it is intriguing to think that the sounds and sight of it might also activate what we used to think of as junk DNA. I simply do not know.
Yes. You probably know about The ACE Study. There is little doubt that the more psychological stressors a child has in early life, the likelier it is that he'll be assailed by bad health throughout adulthood and die an early death.
The problem I have with your idea is that it's a sophisticated way of saying that "hurt people hurt people," which has been used for decades in an attempt to give some absolution societally to the antisocial. I am NOT saying that you are wondering along those lines.
The work of young psychologists such as Peter Salerno is at war with this idea. Salerno claims that brain scanning shows striking differences in the neuroconstruction of the malignantly narcissistic. He doesn't believe this gives them haven, however. He thinks they are fully responsible for their depredations.
Thanks for the excellent article, Noah. I don't think it changes your analysis an iota, but allow me one tiny and pedantic sub-footnote on an area I know little about: testosterone’s effects go beyond blood levels, and include receptor type, number, and distribution in the brain. Anyhow, this sadly seems an intractable problem.