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Notes -
How did they lower the rates in Europe?
Are those pressures being applied to violence prone populations today?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300114
The "genetic pacification" hypothesis is such an article of faith among HBD-inclined internet RWers, that I expected it to be, if not accepted by the mainstream, at least a niche topic popular with hereditarian autodidacts, a la Ashkenazi IQ or something like that. So I was surprised to find that it appears to be based solely on this single paper, and that this single paper sucks.
The proposition that there was a huge sea-change in public, ecclesiastical, and official attitudes towards the death penalty in the high middle ages is supported by reference to a single work (La peine de mort by Carbasse), and two or three quotes from prominent theologians. Maybe it's true but the authors haven't done a very good job establishing that.
Later the authors acknowledge that A) they don't know how many of these condemned men procreated before their executions, B) they don't know how many were executed for non-violent offenses, C) they don't know how many murderers escaped detection. They just kind of say 'well our model is imperfect' and keep moving. The authors don't even attempt to quantify any of the aforementioned problems, despite the fact that any one could completely collapse the thesis if the numbers were wrong. Maybe the data for quantification doesn't exist, but in that case the authors shouldn't pretend this papers is anything but idle speculation.
The murder rate dropped all over Western Europe over the time period in question, but the 'execution rate' the authors use of 0.5 - 1% of the male population every generation appears to be based solely on England and Flanders. Was it the same in Germany and France, where the homicide rate also dropped precipitously? The Scandinavian countries? Did they even check? Does the data exist?
The above appears to be a case of "I made it the fuck up," or at least the authors don't cite anything to back it up. Nevertheless, it's the justification for boosting the 0.5 - 1% of violent men removed per generation to 1 - 2%, which naturally is better for their conclusion.
They also assume that the heritability of violence was the same in the Middle Ages as it is today. I doubt it, though there's no way to know since no one was doing heritability estimates in 1300. But again, this is necessary for their argument to go through.
Then there's this bizarre section
The argument seems to be "We think 'bad boys' are cool now, but murder rates haven't exploded! Could this be because the murder genes were bred out of us????" Sure, why not?
All of the above is besides the point, since we have much firmer historical evidence from much more recent times that very high homicide rates among large populations can collapse quickly enough to rule out genetic explanations. The 19th century Mediterranean littoral, in particular, suffered from homicide rates equal to those of the most crime-ridden American cities today. Southern Italy had homicide rates of 30/100k, Corsica about the same, in Greece this was even higher, up to 50-60/100k. Spain had a homicide rate of about 10/100k in the mid-19th century. By the early 1900s, Mediterranean homicide rates had fallen several times over, down to the 1-3/100k range. Anglo-American homicide rates in the American west were also several times higher than those back east, despite the same genetic stock. I don't have the sources on any of these on hand, but I can go find them if anyone wants. The whole idea of 'genetic pacification,' is entirely superfluous, when there is good evidence that environmental factors are sufficient to produce manyfold reductions in murder rates in much shorter periods of time than the entirety of the middle ages.
This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.
*This paper being an exception, where it's so bad it's obvious even to me.
This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.
And yet, the replication crisis is real, so much so that 'every field has bad papers' can very well be that bad papers are norm, and good papers the exception, to the degree that 'the field' is based on the bad and not the good and can be routinely disregarded when appeals to academic authority are made.
I am making an explicit and factual claim that the field of biology has established a very large number of undeniably true and useful complex claims. I'm also claiming that the scientific consensus on the heritability of IQ and other traits is strong enough that it's clearly true. Also that, while the scientific consensus isn't there on racial differences in the heritable parts of IQ, the evidence is strong enough that one should believe it. I think that most of the "HBD Cinematic Universe" as in the things people believe on twitter is shoddy and false, but the core results are independent from that!
As are the core claims, because the core claims as much from what people believe on twitter as in the non-consensus-but-valid research.
Skepticism and not deferring belief is as valid against a non-consensus as it is against the replication-crisis-tainted consensus, as the counter-establishment types are operating in the same fundamental ecosystem, with the same underlying incentives: to over-claim, under-demonstrate, and fail to replicate without selective utilization of data.
When the bad research is the norm, and not the exception, skepticism of anything from the field is warranted and sensible. The issue is not that one of a thousand papers are compromised- it's that upwards to 900+ of the 1000 papers are compromised, and if you can't determine which are which, 'look for the good ones' is meaningless admonishment.
I am confident in the core claim that there is a >=50% genetic component to general competence, or a 'general factor' of intelligence, ie IQ, and that potential caveats (gene environment interactions etc) are unimportant. That's also supported by mainstream science. The only remaining core claim is that various races have, on average, significantly different amounts of that. The science there is less strong, primarily I think because researching that topic head on with the millions of individual datapoints you need is something a big biobank might not want to happen. But nevertheless there is some science there, if you take polygenic scores for individual IQ and compare black and white individuals, the average black score is lower, and ... I struggle to think of alternative explanations for the patterns of racial differences in achievement across the world. Say the black/white gap is systemic racism, there remain many large, persistent, and universal-across-subject gaps with no clear environmental explanation.
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