A reader sent me a request to help him debunk an evolutionary psychology paper. It’s easy: it’s evolutionary psychology, which ought to be sufficient, but also it’s by Henry Harpending, notorious white nationalist and spewer of scientific
racism nonsense.
To be fair, I’ll give you a chance to read the paper and judge for yourself: Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification. The premise is that the operation of the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized. Our violent genes have been “pacified”. I tried looking up this concept of “genetic pacification” in the scientific literature — it seems to be a term of art used only by evolutionary psychologists, without any quantifiable definition. This paper claims to try, though.
Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.
You will not be surprised to learn that there is absolutely no data presented anywhere in the paper. The authors cite a purported correlation between historical endorsement of the death penalty and a decline in the homicide rate, while ignoring all the other complex social changes that were going on over the same period of time, a typical reductionist strategem. The paper fails to provide any evidence that criminality is heritable, but just assumes that it is.
What the authors pretend is evidence is a model they have built, but they don’t report any details about how the model works, and report very few quantitative conclusions from it…which are pointless anyway since they don’t explain how they derived them. What the do tell us about the model makes it laughable, though. Here are the assumptions they’re working from, in addition to their assumption that crime is caused by genes:
1.The death penalty was the only selection pressure acting against personal violence;
2.Without the death penalty, condemned men would have each killed only one person on average over a normal lifetime;
and
3.Condemned men had no offspring at the time of execution.
I think we can dismiss their whole model out of hand, based on the obvious falsity of all three of those assumptions.
At least the authors didn’t feel any need to make the implicit conclusion explicit — that white westerners are genetically more civilized than all those other people in the world.
the article said: the death penalty culled out some mysterious genes that gave Western people a propensity for violence, so that nowadays white people are nicer and more civilized.
I want to know what this loon has been smoking. He would be laughable if he weren’t part of a larger destructive cult; ‘nicer and more civilized’? WTF. Just look at the info available at reliable news sites. White people are funding and cheerleading all kinds of abominable violence and uncivilized behavior.
Yes, welcome to the ‘New Dark Ages’
Oh really?
The USA which has been and is mostly white European, has the highest number of people in prisons.
Not what you would expect from a “genetically pacified” group of people.
There have been 741 school shootings so far this year.
The USA is also the leader is pointless mass shootings at malls, churches, schools, and other social gathering places.
Many of us carry guns just in case we are attacked by…other gentically pacified residents.
I don’t think these quacks spent much time collecting data.
I seem to recall that the period 1600-1945 was a particularly peaceful time in Europe.
Not just bad biology but bad history. I’d like to see how he generates the numbers for executions and the efficiency of midieval justice. What a joke. Maybe he googled it.
Because no non-European civilisation has ever had capital punishment, clearly.
Ko-ko the Lord High Executioner of Japan might disagree on that!
John@3- I seem to recall that 1914-18, and 1939-46 were particularly peaceful times in Europe.
As a somewhat history conscious German, I have just one question: What the fuck?
If I had been selected as a peer reviewer on this paper, I think @8 Mordred’s summary would be exactly the correct way to respond.
Sorry, Ko-Ko was only the Lord High Executioner for Titi-Poo, and remarkably ineffective in spite of his ‘little list’. And the Mikado was ‘most humane’.
Women are sweet primroses, right?
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_youngbrit.htm
Another assumption or two
4 only violent people were executed, and no people with “peaceful genes” were executed.
5 those that did commit violent crimes had a propensity for violence rather than a reaction to intollerable circumstances
Oh, and…
6 white people were the ones being executed by the system.
Oh oh. That old mate market trope.
How do we even know what the homicide rate was back then with any reliability? Even with modern data capture it’s a bit vague (eg all the “missing” Indigenous women), but a thousand years ago? The entire paper seems like BS
Given the number of Republican governors who see executing as many people as possible as a selection pressure to get votes plus the number of mass shootings, particularly in conservative states where racism and white supremacy go hand in hand white civilisation is clearly not a product of evolution as he claims.
Implementing state-sanctioned murder makes us less violent?
What “journal” would lower itself to publishing such a dreadful “paper” with zero data, zero methodology, next-to-zero quantitative conclusions, and therefore zero science, plus the added red flag of just so happening to be quite convenient for white supremacists? Let me know so I can get some other alumni together and petition my alma mater to drop its subscription to that dreck, if it even has one …
I know this paper is so egregiously bad that it barely deserves critique, but impressionable people are out there, so this is my contribution. I think DanDare brought us up to objection [6], so…
[7] How does “genetic pacification” explain the ~50% drop in violent crime rate by Black offenders in the US from 1980 – 2019?
[8] Why did this drop in crime occur at a time of historically low execution rate? (You have to go back before the 1850s to get lower numbers — not even accounting for population growth.)
[9] Why is it that the US has one of the highest homicide rates among OECD countries and the highest execution rate? (Homicide rate: 6 US vs 2.6 OECD average per 100,000 people. Executions: US ~ 25 people per year, Japan 0-3 per year, all other OECD countries have abolished the death penalty.)
Have my genes been pacified?
No. But my soul has been psychedelicized.
What chromosome carries this “gene?”
Unless this clown can isolate this gene from all the other kinases, reductases and ligases cluttering up the genome, he has no case.
Murder? They used to hang people for stealing a loaf of bread and half drown bakers for selling undersized loaves. To what effect? I want to see the history on bread related crimes!