DinosaurArmor
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User ID: 3972
DinosaurArmor
12d ago
DinosaurArmor
16d ago
Phenotype is not limited to appearance. Siberian huskies look similar to wolves but of course differ greatly in propensity towards violence against humans. Similarly, Nigerian-Americans are indistinguishable compared to Nigerian-Africans in appearance, but are likely to be a bit more intelligent on average than a typical White American simply due to selective immigration. If you cherry-picked the worst White criminals and put them in one place, you would have a nasty, behaviorally distinct group that nonetheless looks identical to other Whites, and whose behavioral differences are largely due to specific genetic differences.
DinosaurArmor
16d ago
Yes, Travellers are “genetically distinct” in the way that every individual and every family is genetically distinct. You can do a DNA test and say “wow, you’re related to a lot of Travellers, you must be a Traveller”. This isn’t evidence of a distinct population.
The standards by which some studies claim to show distinct Traveller genetics can also be used to show that every small village was (or was until very recently) its own distinct genetic subpopulation. This isn’t even wrong, it’s just not useful and is a bad Motte and Bailey type argument here.
It is not a motte and bailey. This is precisely what I meant.
Criminal population isn’t really sufficient or even likely, it’s not a plausible origin story. Even if it were, plenty of Anglo populations including Anglo Americans and Anglo Australians have significant criminal / convict ancestry and yet reverted to their population means in time. It’s extremely implausible, even aside from the actual historical record, that Traveller 20x over representation among criminals in Ireland is explained by a founding population of criminals as if this is some kind of fantasy RPG thieves guild enterprise.
Australia is a good counterexample, and I've always wondered why their crime rate isn't higher. I looked into it very briefly, and there are a few things that explain why. First, the crimes were mostly limited to petty theft. The more serious criminals were simply executed:
Most convicts were transported for petty crimes, particularly theft: thieves comprised 80% of all transportees.[4] More serious crimes, such as rape and murder, became transportable offences in the 1830s, but since they were also punishable by death, comparatively few convicts were transported for such crimes.[5]
whereas many criminal gangs even require you to commit murder as a prerequisite for membership.
Second, Australia was not exclusively founded by convicts. They were diluted significantly by regular free immigration. I couldn't find the number I was hoping for (average % of ancestry from convicts), but there is this stat that 20% of White Australians have at least some convict ancestry, so presumably the overall percentage is quite low, perhaps at around 10%.
Adding these factors along with the regression to the mean effect, and we should expect a negligible difference in the crime rate of modern White Australians, whereas the same would not hold under the criminal association theory I gave for the travelers. I don't have a pulse on your last point on the historical plausibility of this idea; perhaps you could fill us in?
Downthread, someone mentioned evaporative cooling, which would be an even stronger mechanism than what I'm proposing, so adding that in should be sufficient to account for the remaining difference.
DinosaurArmor
16d ago
Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population.
Source? Wikipedia says otherwise: "Genetic analysis has shown Irish Travellers to be of Irish extraction, and that they likely diverged from the settled Irish population in the 1600s, probably during the time of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Centuries of cultural isolation have led Travellers to become genetically distinct from the settled Irish.[13]"
HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller
HBD seems tenable as an explanation. Because group differences are just individual differences, if a large enough group of individuals who deviate from the population average in some trait (such as criminal inclination) gather and stay together, then a distinct group average can emerge. Perhaps the group may have gotten their start as a sort of traveling association of outlaws in an era where an organized state was unable to break up their formation. I would like to see this tested via adoption studies or studies of people of traveler descent growing up entirely outside the traveler culture - do those individuals commit more crime than their non-traveler counterparts?
If you haven't tried it already, you might want to give magnesium a shot. People anecdotally report that it helps with muscle cramps, and most people fail to get enough magnesium in their diet anyways (it has been speculated that this is because soil is fertilized with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, but not magnesium, so that biologically available magnesium in the soil is depleted over time). The main downside is that for some people (myself included), supplementation causes diarrhea even at small doses. Others don't have that issue for whatever reason. I would like to know why.
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