Some Very Politically-Incorrect Truths Relevant To Black Lives Matter, by Paul Tripp.
Many people understand certain ideas better when you think of life as like a sporting contest, because wining and losing on a sporting field provides feedback about reality that is difficult to disguise with ideology:
Imagine for a moment that you’re on a sports team that has never won a championship game, that only rarely wins a game at all, that comes in near or dead last in the rankings season after season after season. And imagine you want to win for once — not just a few games, but a winning season, making it through playoffs and into the finals, and maybe even take home the championship, something your team has never done before. But looking at your team, most of the players aren’t that great, those that are don’t work together well, they fight amongst themselves more than the other teams, each of them tries to steal the glory from the other players only to fail spectacularly when they do.
Your current coach, who’s been coaching the team for decades, tells the players it’s not their fault that they keep losing, the refs are just biased against them, the game is rigged, and everyone deserves an equal number of points regardless of how well they play. When refs make a call against them, they start a fight instead of accepting the call and playing better to overcome the setback. Instead of focusing on improving as players or as a team, they’re taught to complain about the rules of the game itself. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Not going to work, is it? The author dares:
The first step is to acknowledge that the differences in outcomes between white and black Americans have less to do with systemic factors that affect blacks and whites differently and more to do with cultural and genetic differences that cause whites and blacks to behave differently. There are significant genetic differences between different races.
About 5% of the genes that differ between humans are exclusive to particular geographically bounded hereditary groups — what most of us would refer to as races, but what university academics must be careful to differentiate from race with technical mumbo jumbo in order to not have their research defunded by the socialist/progressive/social justice left. …
For example, the MAOA gene affects the development of neurotransmitters in your brain, and one particular variant/allele of that gene (known as the two repeat allele) makes you more prone to impulsive and violent behavior. That allele is recessive and exists on the X chromosome, meaning a woman must have two copies of the allele while men only need one copy for the gene to express itself and result in impulsive and violent behavior, making men more likely to display such behavior than women. About 5% of black men have that particular allele, as compared to 0.1% of white men. …
Another gene, the ADRA gene, affects empathy and emotional memory. The ADRA2b allele is associated with a greater ability to remember emotions and what causes them, affecting your ability to predict other people’s emotions and understand how your actions affect others. That gene appears to be about five times as common in Caucasians as in full blooded Africans, but closer to twice as common in American whites as American blacks, and even more common in certain Asians than in Europeans. The ADRA2b allele may partially explain why Asian and European communities seem to be more cooperative and peaceful on average than African and African American communities.
Just as there are genes that impact our personality traits, there are also genes that impact intelligence. Over 1000 genes have been identified that impact intelligence. Considering that intelligence is estimated to be somewhere between 50-80% genetic, and that there have been significant differences in average IQ between blacks, whites, yellows, reds, browns, and whatever other racial or ethnic groups don’t want to consider themselves part of one of those categories that have remained fairly stable for decades even as environmental, social, and economic factors changed significantly, it’s likely that most of the difference in average intelligence between different racial and ethnic hereditary groups is due to genetic differences. Intelligence has a significant impact on both educational attainment and career success that likely explains a lot more of the difference in attainment between the average member of different races than discrimination. …
On what time scale do the statistical characteristics of a breeding group change? Turns out it’s pretty quick:
How quickly can people adapt? It depends, but one indicator is the fox domestication experiment that took place in Russia. Russian researchers took a species of fox that had never been domesticated and selectively bred them to see how many generations it would take to domesticate them. The first generation behaved largely hostile to the researchers, often reacting with fear and anger and attempting to attack their handlers even when being fed. But some of the foxes were more hostile than others, and some were more passive and showed occasional signs of friendliness. The ones who showed more friendliness and less hostility were selected to breed more while the ones who showed the most hostility to their handlers were not allowed to breed.
It took six generations for the first fox who behaved like a mostly domesticated animal — showing affection to humans, only attacking their handlers when provoked, making noise and movements to attempt to communicate with their handlers — was born. Within 10 generations about 18% behaved like domesticated animals. At 20 generations, over a third did, and by 30 generations about three fourths did. Today, after over 40 generations, nearly all of the foxes born behave like fully domesticated animals. …
40 generations in humans is about 1000 years, which may seem like a long time, but significant shifts in behavior would be seen within just a few generations. American blacks have already been adapting to white society for centuries, and it’s likely the harsh selective pressure of the slavery and Jim Crow eras, as well as the mixing of some European DNA into most American blacks during that time, helped accelerate the process and explains why American blacks are doing so much better than blacks in Africa and places like Haiti where they did not intermix and did not face the same levels of selective pressure from whites. …
No serious evolutionary biologist believes selective pressure would not work to cause significant changes in a population. Of course the tens of thousands of years of evolutionary separation between different racial hereditary groups living in different environments, particularly after the development of organized civilizations which came with their own forms of selective pressure, caused us to develop different traits, and of course we are continuing to evolve and adapt to our ever changing environment. …
Evolutionary pressures on criminality:
Part of the reason why violent crime is higher in black and brown communities than in white communities is likely that in white communities where gun ownership rates are high, violent crime is much more likely to result in the criminal’s death. This creates an environment where criminals (and therefore people who are more crime-prone) are regularly removed from the gene pool, resulting in much lower crime rates in the long run, while in black and brown neighborhoods criminals are much more likely to survive and benefit from their criminality, resulting in the genes that make them crime prone being more likely to be passed on. …
Historically, whites [and north-east Asians] have practiced selective removal of criminals for large portions of their history — the Romans used crucifixion for hundreds of years to remove criminals and anti-social types from the European gene pool, and hangings and public executions of criminals were common for much of later European history, long enough to have a significant impact on their gene pool, while the African populations American blacks are descended from typically did not have organized or codified legal systems that sought to remove bad actors from their populations until after contact with Eurasian peoples.
Much more at the link. It’s a long article with footnotes.
