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Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.
Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.
You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.
There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?
Ok, but it's partly not heritable. A majority non-heritable, if my google-fu isn't too bad. But also, heritability is kind of a tricky metric to interpret. If you reduce the effect of environment on criminality (e.g. raising the standard of living so that most people don't need crime to survive) then heritability of crime goes up, even if the relationship between genes and criminality hasn't really changed.
In any event, this seems like an extremely weak reason to start executing lots of people. High punishment and high crime are almost certainly positively correlated across time and space, because e.g. severe punishment is a natural-seeming response to high crime rates and low clearance rates, and because both reflect the level of violence in the society.
Do you have any numbers that would indicate how long it would take to see a substantial reduction in crime due to the effect of such a mass execution?
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