What explains racial differences in crime?

As we've seen, not testosterone. A much better candidate for explaining racial differences in criminality: racial differences in intelligence. Robert Gordon demonstrated decades ago that simply controlling for IQ eliminates almost the entire black-white gap in juvenile delinquency, and Murray and Herrnstein similarly find IQ explains most of the black-white difference in incarceration rates:

Sociologist Robert Gordon has analyzed black-white differences in crime and concluded that virtually all of the difference in the prevalence of black and white juvenile delinquents is explained by the IQ difference, independent of the effect of socioeconomic status. The only reliable indicator from the NLSY that lets us compare criminal behavior across ethnic groups is the percentage of young men who were ever interviewed while incarcerated.The figure below shows the standard comparison, before and after controlling for cognitive ability. Among white men, the proportion interviewed in a correctional facility after controlling for age was 2.4 percent; among black men, it was 13.1 percent. This large black-white difference was reduced by almost three-quarters when IQ was taken into account. The relationship of cognitive ability to criminal behavior among whites and blacks appears to be similar. 40 As in the case of other indicators, we are left with a nontrivial black-white difference even after controlling for IQ, but the magnitude of the difference shrinks dramatically.

[The Bell Curve, pp. 338-339; two papers by Robert Gordon are cited:
Gordon, R. A. 1987. SES versus IQ in the race-IQ-delinquency model. International J . of Sociology and Social Policy 7:30-96.
Gordon, R. A. 1976. Prevalence: The rare datum in delinquency measurement and its implications for the theory of delinquency. In The Juvenile Justice System. M. W. Klein (ed.). Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, pp. 201-284.]

A more recent paper by Gordon (Everyday life as an intelligence test: Effects of intelligence and intelligence context. Intelligence, 24, 203-320.) confirms his results for juvenile delinquency and extends them to adult criminality.

Jews and Irish: Latecomers to Modernity

Excerpts from chapter 19 of John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility (continue reading):

Assortative mating by genetic ancestry in admixed populations

Via HBD Books, "Guapa, it's your genetic ancestry I love":

within Mexican populations, people tended to pick partners with similar proportions of Native American and European ancestry, while in Puerto Rican populations couples had paired up based on their shared balance of European and African ancestry. [. . .] presumably people had cued into subtle variations in appearance, behaviour and even odour.

"I think it's fascinating," says Burchard. "People are sizing up their partners, maybe in subconscious ways."

The paper ("Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations") is open access.

Facial Skin Coloration Affects Perceived Health of Human Faces

Attractiveness Based Partly on Skin Color. The paper is open access:

We here investigate the role of overall skin color in determining perceptions of health from faces by allowing participants to manipulate the skin portions of color-calibrated Caucasian face photographs along CIELab color axes. To enhance healthy appearance, participants increased skin redness (a*), providing additional support for previous findings that skin blood color enhances the healthy appearance of faces. Participants also increased skin yellowness (b*) and lightness (L*), suggesting a role for high carotenoid and low melanin coloration in the healthy appearance of faces.

Depressed youth have more sex partners

Amazingly, no one seems to have picked up on this (abstract) proof that women find depression (like the "dark triad") irresistible:

The researchers determined that close to 20% of black women were recently or chronically depressed in adulthood, as were 11.9% of black men, 13% of white women and 8.1% of white men.

For both genders and among blacks and whites, being depressed was associated with a greater likelihood of having multiple sex partners

(In case someone misses the sarcasm.)

Admixture estimates for Haiti and Jamaica

Though this study (The genetic structure of populations from Haiti and Jamaica reflect divergent demographic histories) is based on only 15 autosomal STRs, the results appear reasonable.

a stronger African signal is detected in Haiti than in Jamaica. Although only minimal contributions from non-African sources were observed in Haiti, Jamaica displays genetic input from both European and East Asian sources, an admixture profile similar to other New World collections of African descent analyzed in this report.

Average admixture proportions for Haiti are estimated to be: 95.5% African; 0.3% East Asian; 4.3% European. For Jamaica: 78.3%; 5.7%; 16.0%.

Very objective

A commenter draws my attention to this remarkable passage from a recent article by the macho man Tomislav Sunic:

A Dinaric-Mediterranean Macho Touch?

It is no accident that the ideal type of White male beauty in the West never appears in a single racial type but rather as a combination of all three. Historically, the ideal type of an attractive White male has Nordic stature and skull with dark Dinaric or Mediterranean hair. No wonder that White women in the West are attracted to this combination, as embodied by films stars Antonio Banderas, Sean Connery, etc. Seldom is a pure Nordic male specimen viewed among White women as the epitome of male attractiveness. There are jokes in continental and southern Europe about blond-haired White males being “albinos” or “faggots.” Manliness, with a grain of machismo, has traditionally been associated with the Dinaric and Mediterranean subtypes.

Dark hair is an ancestral trait (of little taxonomic value); no population is exclusively blond. A Northwestern European with dark hair does not have "Dinaric or Mediterranean hair"; he is manifesting part of normal Northwestern European variation.

The data I'm aware of indicate white women prefer blond hair to black hair in men and the proportion of women favoring men with blond hair is higher than the proportion of men with blond hair [1]. The modal hair color preference of both white men and women is brown (probably not coincidentally the modal hair color of Northwestern Europeans).

Brad Pitt was "chosen by Empire as one of the 25 sexiest stars in film history. In addition, he has twice been named the Sexiest Man Alive by People in 1995 and 2000." See also: Robert Redford, Jude Law, Daniel Craig, etc.

As for why blond men are disproportionately cast as villains, Steve Sailer has written:

Exactly why Hollywood hates blond men almost as much as it loves blond women is not clear. Some have suggested complicated combinations of resentment and longing in regard to WASPs and/or Nordics.

I don't think it's complicated or mysterious. It certainly can't be to Tomislav, assuming he possesses the slightest bit of self-awareness.

Relatedly, Tomislav might consider the possibility that jokes about Northern European men by people who look like him are not the best source of objective truth. For the record, Tom, there are jokes in America and northern Europe about southern European males being "greasy" or "faggots" (in addition to serious proposals).

It goes without saying that Northern European men best exemplify manliness as defined by Northern Europeans. Southern European men are typically viewed as lazy, dishonest, cowardly, and effeminate by contrast. I grant that, by southern European standards of manhood, the overwhelming majority of Northern European men are likely deficient in gold chains and body odor.

[1] Feinman and Gill. Sex differences in physical attractiveness preferences. Journal of Social Psychology. Vol 105(1), Jun 1978, pp. 43-52.

Mendacious Moldbug

Moldbug once again holds forth on the history of Bizarro World in the safety of the gnxp comments section:

to succeed [Jews] assimilated the cultural tropes of America's highest status caste - the Boston Brahmins, basically. For every "Punch" Sulzberger, there is an Alger Hiss. No, he was not born "Hissjewsky."

Back on Earth:

Into the 1930s the American Communist Party (CPUSA) had a Yiddish-speaking Jewish section. [. . .]

Jews were also vastly overrepresented in high-profile cases among those invoking the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate oneself, so that public hearings like McCarthy's inevitably highlighted the Jewish role in communism. For example, in 1952, of 124 people questioned by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Weingarten identifies 79 Jews, 32 non-Jews and 13 with unknown ethnicity. All invoked the Fifth.

Even more remarkably, of the 42 people who were dismissed from their positions at the Fort Monmouth Laboratories in New Jersey on suspicion of constituting a spy ring (the same one that Julius Rosenberg belonged to), 39 were Jews and one other was married to a Jewish woman.

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore (not Boston) to a "middle class wholesale grocer" who killed himself when Hiss was two. His family was neither wealthy nor socially prominent. His Supreme Court clerkship indicates little more than that he had the favor of Felix Frankfurter, to whom an aged Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., delegated the choice.

Quotes from actual "Boston Brahmins":

You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply. But an American I was born, and American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American [. . .] I have never had but one allegiance; I cannot divide it now. [. . .] Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolsheviks, and by the men to whom all countries are alike, provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive. (Henry Cabot Lodge)

The social reformers of today seem to me so far to forget that we no more can get something for nothing by legislation than we can by mechanics as to be satisfied if the bill to be paid for their improvements is not presented in a lump sum. [. . .] I believe that the wholesale social regeneration which so many now seem to expect, if it can be helped by conscious, coordinated human effort, cannot be affected appreciably by tinkering with the institution of property, but only by taking in hand life and trying to build a race. That would be my starting point for an ideal for the law. The notion that with socialized property we should have women free and a piano for everybody seems to me an empty humbug. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.)

Yes, clearly, Yiddish-speaking Communist factory workers were guilty only of wanting to assimilate to the norms of "America's highest status caste".

Related: "WASPs", Jews, and McCarthy; New England political thought a century ago; Moldbuggery Redux

Megan Smolenyak on 23andMe's Relative Finder

The famed Al Sharpton and Michelle Obama genealogist explains how discovering that DNA testing confirms the relatedness of a group of people with roots in an isolated, Eastern European peasant village strengthens her belief in the assertion that:

if you go back far enough, we're all cousins. [. . .] "no human being (of any race) can be less closely related to any other human than approximately fiftieth cousin, and most of us (no matter what color our neighbors) are a lot closer."

At an outlet other than Huffington Post, the use of dodgy math to "prove" everyone is genealogically related might seem counterintuitive as a theme around which to base an article on a tool that aims to directly assess genetic relatedness. John Hawks pointed out in 2006 in response to an article containing similar themes:

Geneticists are generally concerned with a subset of this genealogical network. We care not about the number of genealogical ties among people (which must grow indefinitely large very quickly in any population), but about the actual ancestry of genes.

Also see Genealogical vs. genetic ancestors and Blaine Bettinger's post on genealogical and genetic trees. While Relative Finder will uncover the occasional surprising distant relationship, mostly it will find connections between people with similar racial/geographic origins, as it did with Smolenyak's Osturnites.

Zombie DNAPrint says Larry David is 37% Native American

It's back (its shitty test is back, anyway, through a licensing agreement with "DNA Diagnostics Center").

Channel 4's "Race: Science's Last Taboo"

There are download links for the six documentaries that make up this series in this thread.

Based on Alex Kurtagic's review of the "Race and Intelligence" episode, Richard Hoste sees signs of progress for hereditarianism:

In this show, even an opponent of the race-IQ link admit that intelligence is determined to some extent by heredity and that there are general biological race differences. The audience is told that races differ in skull size. Channel 4 even grants the IQ gap, but chalks it up to environment. Gould would’ve called them all Nazis.

Even treating this as a debatable scientific question on television is huge. Lynn and Rushton’s books are shown on national TV. We’ll have to wait and see if there’s a spike in how they’re selling. The obviousness of HBD makes it very dangerous to bring up, even to debunk.

And although the black host is there for PC reasons, his admitted emotional attachment to the issue makes him appear not very credible in his denials.

I agree that as blank-slate/race-does-not-exist propaganda, the series is rather weak, presenting the viewer with a schizophrenic jumble of discordant facts and opinions, ineptly edited together and failing as a rational argument in favor of the positions it was presumably meant to advance. But I'm not sure this gives cause for optimism. Egalitarians never succeeded based on the strength of their reasoning; they succeeded by making moral claims and by imposing personal and professional costs on their enemies. Inconvenient facts are no match for incantations of "racism" or "the Holocaust" -- or so the producers and presenters of this series seem clearly to believe.

Hoste may be right, however, that on net those responsible for the series have scored an own goal. The appeals to racism and The Holocaust seem even more forced than usual, and the motivations of many of the presenters and interviewees are nakedly telegraphed. One example is mentioned above by Hoste. Other examples include an Indian woman with a half-white child hosting the episode that promotes Alon Ziv's theory of mixed-race superiority, or Jonathan Marks stating:

When I read my students Madison Grant, and I read it angrily, my students say, "Why do you take such a personal interest in this?" And I say, well, because it was my grandparents and great-grandparents that he was trying to keep out of the United States.

That's from the "Human Zoos" episode (which explains how ethnographic displays at the 1904 World's Fair led inevitably to The Holocaust).

An admixture estimate for Los Angeles hispanics

From an open-access paper:

overall estimates of 45.5% Native American (NA), 40.1% European (EU), 9.8% Asian (AS), and 4.5% African-American (AA) ancestry. Gradients of increasing NA background (37.3% to 51.7%) and of correspondingly decreasing EU ancestry (45.3% to 29.6%) were observed as a function of birth origin from North to South.

These estimates are based on only 176 SNPs, so I'm sure they contain at minimum a few percentage points of noise (which shouldn't make a big difference here). As one might expect, among L.A. Hispanics, those born in the US have the highest levels of European ancestry. Guatemalans/Salvadorians have the lowest. Mexicans are intermediate.

Genealogical vs. genetic ancestors

An interesting simulation by Luke Jostins:

The probability of having DNA from all of your genealogical ancestors at a particular generation becomes vanishingly small very rapidly; there is a 99.6% chance that you will have DNA from all of your 16 great-great grandparents, only a 54% of sharing DNA with all 32 of your G-G-G grandparents, and a 0.01% chance for your 64 G-G-G-G grandparents. You only have to go back 5 generations for genealogical relatives to start dropping off your DNA tree. [. . .]

The number of genetic ancestors starts off growing exponentially, but eventually flattens out to around 125 (at 10 generations, 120 of your 1024 genealogical ancestors are genetic ancestors).

Another method for inferring population structure

Assessing population genetic structure via the maximisation of genetic distance:

This new method used to infer the hidden structure in a population, based on the maximisation of the genetic distance and not taking into consideration any assumption about Hardy-Weinberg and linkage equilibrium, performs well under different simulated scenarios and with real data. Therefore, it could be a useful tool to determine genetically homogeneous groups, especially in those situations where the number of clusters is high, with complex population structure and where Hardy-Weinberg and/or linkage equilibrium are present.