Why criminals are less intelligent than non-criminals

Satoshi Kanazawa's explanation:

Men with lower intelligence are less likely truly to comprehend evolutionarily novel entities. Some of these evolutionarily novel entities are alternative means to resource acquisition and accumulation they could pursue instead of evolutionarily familiar means which are now classified as criminal in civilized societies. Other evolutionarily novel entities they are less likely truly to comprehend are means that law enforcement agencies employ to detect and capture criminals. The Hypothesis therefore offers one possible explanation for the negative association between intelligence and criminality.

I've argued before that black-white differences in criminality are driven primarily by differences in intelligence -- not testosterone. I've also previously observed that black-white multiples for brawling and raping are low compared to those for crimes like car theft, drug dealing, and mugging, consistent the idea that a lack of intelligence leading to ill-considered efforts at resource acquisition rather than greater innate aggressiveness underlies the difference.

At the same time, the Hypothesis also offers a novel hypothesis with regard to intelligence and criminality. As I mention above, while formal third-party enforcement of norms is evolutionarily novel, second-party enforcement and informal third-party enforcement are evolutionarily familiar. Thus the Hypothesis would predict that the difference in intelligence between criminals and noncriminals will disappear in situations where formal third-party enforcement of norms is weak or absent, and criminal behavior is controlled largely via second-party enforcement, such as situations of prolonged anarchy and statelessness, in fact, any situation that resembles the ancestral environment. Paradoxically, the Hypothesis would predict that less intelligent men will commit fewer crimes if the police disappeared, although more intelligent men may commit more crimes then.

Murders and rapes of whites by blacks in America took off during the 20th century (relative to the reverse). Kanazawa's hypothesis suggests the evaporation of the threat of extrajudicial punishment and increased state protections for blacks may be responsible for this state of affairs. Update: From Crime and Human Nature:

it is possible that differences in sanctions have had an impact on the extent to which members of different races are inclined to handle aggression by resort to assaults and homicide. Suppose that over the generations, law enforcement officials ignored or treated leniently the most common forms of serious black crime (dangerous or fatal assaults on blacks by blacks), reserving the full force of their sanctions for the much rarer cases of assaults by blacks on whites. In 1937 John Dollard wrote of the harmful effects of the double standard of justice then evident in a small southern town and which probably persisted for many decades throughout the South and in some parts of the North: "Negro crime" was less serious than "white crime," a view sometimes defended on grounds of a high-minded indulgence of "Negro ways." As Dollard wrote:

The formal machinery of the law takes care of the Negroes' grievances much less adequately than that of the whites, and to a much higher degree the Negro is compelled to make and enforce his own law with other Negroes. . . . The result is that the individual Negro is, to a considerable degree, outside the protection of the white law, and must shift for himself. This leads to the frontier psychology. . . . [This] condoning of Negro violence . . . may be indulgent in the case of any given Negro, but its effect on the Negro group as a whole is dangerous and destructive.

[pp. 475-476]

According to the thinking of 1930s sociologist Dollard, shifting the burden of law enforcement among blacks more to the state should have lowered their crime rates. Instead, in keeping with Kanazawa's prediction:

the homicide fatality rate among black males nearly doubled between the early 1960s and 1973, increasing from 34.3 to 65.8 per 100,000; the change among whites was much smaller. [. . .] Roger Lane estimates that in Philadelphia the black homicide rate was about three times greater than that of whites during the nineteenth century but had become about twelve times larger by the middle of the twentieth century and nearly twenty times larger by the 1970s. [p. 472]

Belated links

• Peter Frost: Blonde jokes aren't funny.
  
• Dienekes: Population structure in Ireland and Britain; Y chromosome haplogroup I and disease-based selection.
  
• Nature News: "['missing'] heritability may not be missing — it may simply be buried deeper than previously thought, in a multitude of genetic variants that have tiny effects individually."
  

  the new work, rather than considering SNPs one by one, uses a statistical analysis that considers what effect all the SNPs together have on height. "We explained more than half of the genetic variation in height," says Peter Visscher, a quantitative geneticist at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, who led the study. A further analysis suggests that another batch of SNPs, less common than those picked up by GWAS, might explain the rest of the heritability of height.

• Wellcome Trust launches study of 10,000 human genomes in UK.
  
• Daniel MacArthur: Consumer genetics needs more transparency, not excessive regulation; 23andMe research article finally published.
  
• Archaeological excavation at the Fairbanks House (oldest extant timber-frame house in America).

Property and Freedom Society 2010 meeting

Sean Gabb has uploaded videos. Speakers include Richard Lynn, Richard Spencer, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I have not watched them yet, but I'll embed the ones that look interesting below:

Very fine-scale population structure in Europe

Genes predict village of origin in rural Europe:

Using genome-wide scans and individuals with all four grandparents born in the same settlement, we here demonstrate remarkable geographical structure across 8–30 km in three different parts of rural Europe. After excluding close kin and inbreeding, village of origin could still be predicted correctly on the basis of genetic data for 89–100% of individuals. [. . .]

Such fine-scale differentiation is consistent with the highly nonrandom nature of human mate choice over the millennia. The average distance between the birthplaces of spouses in rural parts of Finland, the Po valley in northern Italy and the isles of Scotland in the nineteenth century was B1.5–3 km.10 Such close endogamy was probably the norm in rural Europe due to lack of transport or economic opportunities. The breakdown of these isolates has since dramatically altered the population structure.11

The exquisite structure preserved in the genomes of people with all grandparents from the same settlement demonstrates that very detailed genetic and geographical ancestry information can be obtained by genome-wide SNP analyses. This provides novel opportunities, under certain circumstances, to predict the micro-geographical origin of an individual. Genetic association studies that include rural populations must also model this genetic structure, but it is not a barrier to gene discovery.12 When whole-genome sequences become widely available, the ability to use many more variants, including rarer ones, to identify short shared genomic segments will perhaps allow routine identification of regional ancestries, given a suitably large and carefully collected reference sample.

Osagie K. Obasogie will tell you how to think about race and the human genome

Obasogie, "an Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings", is concerned:

Ten years ago this month, we were definitively told that race is scientifically invalid, supposedly ending centuries of debate over the social versus biological character of racial categories. [. . .] this one seemingly conclusive finding regarding the biological insignificance of race was supposed to have put the final nail in the race-as-biology coffin. Given the remarkable cruelty and injustice linked to the idea that racial differences and disparities reflect inherent biological differences, this finding was highly celebrated among scholars, politicians, and many others. [. . .]

But, there seems to have been a detour on the way to the funeral: rather than moving away from using race to understand human genetic difference, several research projects began mapping social understandings of race onto this less than 1% of human difference. Like Lazarus, race quickly came back from the dead; the very science that was thought to lead to its demise has instead given it new life under the guise of modern genetics. [. . .]

Framing racial differences and disparities in largely genetic terms when the evidence for doing so is less than robust may lead us to miss the social and political practices that can more meaningfully explain the dynamics at play. And when we miss these complexities, we risk simplistically explaining these outcomes as a function of who people inherently "are" rather than the deeper influences connected to how we treat one another.

But Obasogie has the answer:

But what also unites these three developments concerning race and genetics a decade after the tolling of its death knell is the stunning lack of regulation concerning the questionable claims being made. The FDA has no special rules for new drugs seeking race specific labels beyond a narrow focus on safety and efficacy, genetic ancestry tests garner no special attention from regulators, and federal and state law enforcement agencies openly embrace new forensic techniques without much regard for their impact on racial minorities or social understandings of race. Allowing the market to push these issues without more meaningful oversight is no less unwise than allowing banks to regulate themselves.

Obasogie kindly allows that discussion of race and biology "need not be thoroughly killed" -- just heavily regulated lest "new technologies end up resurrecting a ghost from the past that may haunt us well into the next decade and beyond." This is the second type of response I expect to be seeing more of.

The emerging left-/globalist consensus on race

"Just because genomics research threatens to expose our religion of lies, does not mean we need to reassess our basic ideology."

Previously Shirley Tilghman, now The Economist senses the coming shift in the topography of debate and warns the troops to be ready:

Genomics may reveal that humans really are brothers and sisters under the skin. The species is young, so there has been little time for differences to evolve. Politically, that would be good news. It may turn out, however, that some differences both between and within groups are quite marked. If those differences are in sensitive traits like personality or intelligence, real trouble could ensue.

People must be prepared for this possibility, and ready to resist the excesses of racialism, nationalism and eugenics that some are bound to propose in response. That will not be easy. The liberal answer is to respect people as individuals, regardless of the genetic hand that they have been dealt. Genetic knowledge, however awkward, does not change that.

Eye color and perceived dominance

This study ("Eye color predicts but does not directly influence perceived dominance in men") has gotten some attention, having been reported as if the result were universally applicable.

In fact, there's no evidence it applies outside the sampled population (students in Prague). What the researchers actually seem to have "discovered" is the existence of population structure in the Czech Republic that manifests in different frequencies of morphological types among lightly- and heavily-pigmented inhabitants.

The composite photographs from the paper show a somewhat foetalized, Slavic-looking "Alpine" blue-eyed morph and a "Dinaric" brown-eyed morph. Or as the authors put it:

In contrast with blue-eyed males, brown-eyed males have statistically broader and rather massive chins, broader (laterally prolonged) mouths, larger noses, and eyes that are closer together with larger eyebrows. In contrast, blue-eyed males show smaller and sharper chins, mouths that are laterally narrower, noses smaller, and a greater span between the eyes.

According to Coon, "Alpine" and "Dinaric" types differ in frequency between regions of what of what is now the Czech Republic:

While Alpines and Norics are commonest in Bohemia, there is a strong concentration of Dinarics in Moravia, especially among the miners, who seem to form a special group with both racial and occupational peculiarities.

To their credit, the authors advance "genetic linkage" as one potential explanation for their results (noting that this hypothesis could be tested by repeating the experiment in different populations), though this seems to be their least favorite of the three possible explanations they lay out. Unfortunately for them, it's also the most likely to be correct.

Significant intra-European differences at some functional alleles

From an analysis of data from a large Wisconsin medical study:

There is mounting evidence that further population stratifications may be necessary as even within a racial group there can be significant differences among people of different ancestral origin. To investigate this, we stratified our Caucasian population by self reported region of origin to determine if there were differences in allele frequencies between individuals. 11,205 (57%) individuals could be categorized by a region of origin. Using this population, there were 19 [out of 51] polymorphisms that were significantly different (p=0.05) between individuals of different origins (Table 3). Of these 5 (rs231775, rs6280, rs351855, rs601338, and rs429358) were significantly different with a p value of 0.0001 or less. Interestingly, the allele frequencies of some of the ethnic groups fell outside the 95% confidence interval of the total Caucasian MAF particularly the Eastern European ethnicity (Figure 3, Table 3). [. . .]

Because of the low number of minority racial groups in our population we chose to investigate potential substructure within only our Caucasian population. Using self reported region of ancestry, we found that 37% of the tested polymorphisms were significantly different between individuals reporting different regions of ancestry. Recent substructure analysis of Icelandic [23], Swedish[24, 36], and Ashkenazi Jewish populations [22, 37] determined that substructure was present even in these seemingly homogenous populations and that the substructure has implications for disease risk [2-5, 22-24, 36]. This study is one of the largest US studies to stratify a population by region of origin and demonstrates the large heterogeneity of the population even within a single racial group. These differences in allele frequencies may need to be considered when designing association studies in the future. One weakness of our analysis is the inability to categorize almost half (43%) of our Caucasian population into a single region of origin, because of our inability to determine the admixture given the self reported nature of the questionnaire and our limited genotyping. We are currently examining the more than 4000 individuals with whole genome scans completed to determine the ethnicities and regions of origin with greater accuracy.

[Deanna S Cross et al. Population based allele frequencies of disease associated polymorphisms in the Personalized Medicine Research Project. BMC Genetics 2010, 11:51doi:10.1186/1471-2156-11-51 17 June 2010]

And that's looking at only the following four broad, self-reported ancestries. I would expect even larger differences with the inclusion of more distant European populations.

From the mouths of black folks II

The foray into twitter brought to my attention a newly-released book, Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal - America's Racial Obsession, devoted to an issue we've touched on before. Wikipedia informs me the author, Erik Rush (a mulatto neocon, I think), is officially an Uncle Tom. Some excerpts (continue reading):

From the mouths of black folks

Checking the viability of twitter as a filter for interesting links, I find that #DNA consists mostly of repetitive, Portuguese-language spam for some Brazilian musician, and, while better, #genetics is not lacking in (in a few instances amusing) noise:

GinaMichelley I really liked this guy and then last night I found out he had the sickle cell trait and now I don't wanna talk to him anymore. #genetics

twinghost03 #iconfess I have tourettes and A.d.d. With a touch of schizophrenia...so I say and do the most random shit.blame #genetics *oh well fuck it*

#genomics looks comparatively free of unburdenings by urban youths. Other searches of varying utility: #anthropology, #genes, #genome, #evolution, #paleo, #archaeology, #science, #health, #brain, #eugenics, #racism, #history, #genealogy, #ancestry.

The human phenome project

"Olivia Judson on the influence of science and biology on modern life":

In 1884, a man called Francis Galton opened the doors of his “Anthropometric Laboratory.” This was “for the use of those who desire to be accurately measured in many ways, either to obtain timely warning of remediable faults in development, or to learn their powers.” The many ways included height, hand strength, acuity of sight and hearing, lung capacity and the power of a blow with the fist. [. . .]

He was interested in the biology of racial differences. He was the first to describe humans as being the products of the twin forces of “nature and nurture.” [. . .] It is easy to imagine that, if Galton were magicked into the present, he would have been fascinated by the human genome project, and anxious to get himself sequenced. And yet, in some ways, his anthropomorphic laboratory, crude though it was, makes as good a symbol for 21st century biology as a gene sequencer does.

Genes are the easy part. Soon, we will all be able to get our genomes fully sequenced: we will be able to look at our genotypes. We may not know what all the genes do — it will still be some time before we have mastered that. But we will know what they are.

The far harder task is to understand how genes interact with the environment to make an actual organism with particular characteristics — that is, the phenotype. [. . .]

Measuring all this sounds impossible. Yet at least two phenomics initiatives are already underway. One is the U.K.’s Biobank project, the other is the Personal Genome Project, led by the latter-day polymath George Church. The aim of both projects is to collect large quantities of information — genetic, phenotypic and environmental — from large numbers of people, in an attempt to understand how genes and environment interact to produce each of us. Biobank, indeed, measures some of the same traits that Galton measured, including lung capacity and the strength of the hand grip.

Incidentally, I was not surprised to see that the UK Biobank receives funding from the Wellcome Trust, which funds all medical/genetics research in the UK (slight exaggeration). The charity's namesake is an American of New England Puritan stock.

Why do men find blonde women so very attractive?

"Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on everyday life. This week: The allure of blonde women":

Caucasian blondes are usually slightly higher in oestrogen than brunettes and are likely to exhibit other infantile sexually selected traits (indicating low levels of testosterone) that are considered desirable by males, for example finer facial features, smaller nose, smaller jaw, pointed chin, narrow shoulders, smooth skin and less body hair, and infantile behaviour such as higher energy levels and playfulness. [. . .] Blond hair in males does not correlate with oestrogen levels as it does in females

Murders in black neighborhoods cause low black IQ

A commenter alerts Steve Sailer, evidently not in jest, that "breakthrough research" has been published that puts Sailer out of business by establishing "a direct causal relationship that can't be explained away by other factors" between murder rates and IQ. "Curiously", Hispanic IQs remain unaffected by black murders in their neighborhoods. I'm certain that the Sailer commenter's confidence is well-placed and the researcher can't possibly have causality reversed here, but if you care to examine his methods and have access to PNAS, here's a link to the the paper.

Climate-driven evolution

From a book review by Henry Harpending in PLoS Biology:

There are several rather distinct traditions in the contemporary study of human evolution. One is the detailed study of anatomical differences among fossils. A second emphasizes classical ecology with detailed attention to ancient climates and environments and comparative biogeography. A third has a focus on behavioral ecology (i.e., what used to be called sociobiology). [. . .] The behavioral ecology tradition emphasizes mating competition and intergroup struggles as the important drivers of human evolution. With roots in economics, comparative animal behavior, and the new population genetics of interaction started by W.D. Hamilton in the 1960s, social interactions themselves are the prime drivers of human evolution. [. . .]

The Humans Who Went Extinct is firmly in the [. . .] classical ecological tradition. This admirable book is a summary and interpretation of human evolution from the first bipeds several million years ago to the earliest settled agricultural populations after the end of the Pleistocene. The title does not do justice to the scope of the book: there is only a weak focus on the extinction of the Neanderthals. It is an excellent summary of the classical ecological approach to human evolution with a dazzling portrayal of the relevant paleoclimatology, paleoecology, and biogeography.

These traditions ought to be complementary; instead they are rather isolated from each other. The discipline would be enriched if we acknowledged that the narratives that each tells are models and that models should be evaluated and falsified with data. There are numerous situations where models from the ecological and behavioral traditions compete directly, and such situations ought to be exploited for direct tests of the competing models. [. . .]

A staple of my lecture notes on the modern human diaspora is that when the earth is cold the Middle East is ecologically Europe with its Palearctic fauna, while warming means the return of Africa fauna to the Middle East. Several modern looking skulls from the Middle East (Skuhl, Qafzeh) then simply represent a temporary intrusion of African fauna into the Levant ca. 120 kya. Finlayson destroys this understanding of mine, pointing out that the faunal associations of the early moderns in the Levant, and of the slightly later Neanderthals, were much the same.

Another staple of my lectures is that the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe is marked by a new technology called Aurignacian (distinguished by the use of blade tools) brought by the moderns. Finlayson casually destroys this staple too, pointing out that there is no known association between the Aurignacian and modern human remains. The Aurignacian could very well have been made by Neanderthals.

Even worse, I repeat the standard narrative that moderns out-competed Neanderthals and were somehow responsible for their extinction. Not so fast, says Finlayson, suggesting that climate change drove the Neanderthals away and they may never have even encountered the modern human invaders. His candidate for an unequivocal archaeological marker of moderns is the Gravettian cultural tradition with its origin in western Asia, a tradition that was able to exploit open country herd prey on the expanding tundra.

This book is packed with new data, insights, and perspectives, with the dominant theme being about how climate has driven human evolution. The narrative starts with the handful of very early apparent precursors of the Australopithecines and the later appearance of Homo erectus with its larger brain and slightly advanced tool-making technology. The conventional story is that this new version of Homo evolved in Africa and left about one and one half million years ago, but Finlayson points out that there is plenty of room for a hypothesis of an Asian origin of this taxon. [. . .]

As a population geneticist, I must explain why I have not discussed genetics in this review. In the heady times of mitochondrial DNA in the 1980s it seemed that genetics would answer important questions about human evolution. Since then, we seem to know less and less: the mutation rate of mtDNA slows down as larger time intervals are considered, and it has become clear that haploid markers like mtDNA and the Y chromosome are not very reliable markers of origins and ancestry. The most important finding about our genetics from the nuclear genome was the apparent small effective size of our species, on the order of 10,000 individuals. We knew in the 1980s that this was due to some severe bottleneck or bottlenecks in human history, but since then it has become apparent that other demographic phenomena, like waves of advance and selective sweeps of advantages genes and haplotypes, could generate the apparent small effective size. In other words, we know much less today from genetics than we thought we did two decades ago.

Mechanisms of sexual selection in humans

A recent paper from David Puts (pdf):

David A. Puts. Beauty and the beast: mechanisms of sexual selection in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol. 31, No. 3. (May 2010), pp. 157-175.

Literature in evolutionary psychology suggests that mate choice has been the primary mechanism of sexual selection in humans, but this conclusion conforms neither to theoretical predictions nor available evidence. Contests override other mechanisms of sexual selection; that is, when individuals can exclude their competitors by force or threat of force, mate choice, sperm competition, and other mechanisms are impossible. Mates are easier to monopolize in two dimensional mating environments, such as land, than in three-dimensional environments, such as air, water, and trees. Thus, two-dimensional mating environments may tend to favor the evolution of contests. The two-dimensionality of the human mating environment, along with phylogeny, the spatial and temporal clustering of mates and competitors, and anatomical considerations, predict that contest competition should have been the primary mechanism of sexual selection in men. A functional analysis supports this prediction. Men's traits are better designed for contest competition than for other sexual selection mechanisms; size, muscularity, strength, aggression, and the manufacture and use of weapons probably helped ancestral males win contests directly, and deep voices and facial hair signal dominance more effectively than they increase attractiveness. However, male monopolization of females was imperfect, and female mate choice, sperm competition, and sexual coercion also likely shaped men's traits. In contrast, male mate choice was probably central in women's mating competition because ancestral females could not constrain the choices of larger and more aggressive males through force, and attractive women could obtain greater male investment. Neotenous female features and body fat deposition on the breasts and hips appear to have been shaped by male mate choice.

A common refrain from certain non-whites and Southern Europeans is that if a Northern European man looks askance at the pursuit of Northern European women by non-Northern Europeans, it means he is "insecure" or afraid of competing with non-Northern European men. In reality, one competes by competing, and that starts (in a healthy society) with excluding men from other groups from access to women of one's own group.

3.2.2.1. Male coalitions and between-group competition.
The tendency of males to form alliances may have evolved in the common ancestor of humans and our closest living relatives, Pan, as a means of cooperative female capture and defense (Fig. 3), although coalitions may also have evolved independently in these lineages for this purpose (Geary & Flinn, 2001; Wrangham, 1999). Male coalitions are rare among primates but common in humans and Pan, especially common chimpanzees (P. troglodytes), and are strengthened by kinship (Nishida & Hiraiwa- Hasegawa, 1987). The capture of women was a primary objective of early warfare (Darwin, 1871; Hrdy, 1997; Lerner, 1986; Spencer, 1885), and among foragers, groups of men commonly raid other villages and abscond with women (e.g., Chagnon, 1988). Such raids may also function in mate defense by deterring future attacks. These behaviors would tend to favor not only aggression and physical prowess, but also social intelligence for negotiating alliances (e.g., Alexander, 1989; Geary & Flinn, 2002; Mueller & Mazur, 1996; Wrangham, 1999).

Another Jewish genetics paper

This one from Doron Behar and colleagues and published in Nature. At first glance, results appear broadly consistent with those reported in the last paper mentioned here. Dienekes has posted some of the figures. Update: Nicholas Wade NYT article on both studies (via Sailer).

Middle Eastern origin of Jews (Atzmon et al. 2010)

Nature News: "Jews worldwide share genetic ties / But analysis also reveals close links to Palestinians and Italians." Abstract of the AJHG article, "Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry":

For more than a century, Jews and non-Jews alike have tried to define the relatedness of contemporary Jewish people. Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations. However, these and successor studies of monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic markers did not resolve the issues of within and between-group Jewish genetic identity. Here, genome-wide analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi) and comparison with non-Jewish groups demonstrated distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture. Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry. Rapid decay of IBD in Ashkenazi Jewish genomes was consistent with a severe bottleneck followed by large expansion, such as occurred with the so-called demographic miracle of population expansion from 50,000 people at the beginning of the 15th century to 5,000,000 people at the beginning of the 19th century. Thus, this study demonstrates that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD genetic threads.

Note that the Jewish masturbation fantasy version of Ashkenazi origins (in which blonde German shiksas play a significant role), pushed by razib based on miscomprehension of earlier research, again finds no support.