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.
