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It is important to understand the rational basis of phenomena and intuitions. This is why I like themotte’s style. It forces me to do this and this has led me to research interesting things. What might rationality to do with Rotherham? This is a topic I’m currently interested in, and here is my current hypothesis: (1) Northern Europeans have a high prevalence of the OXTR rs53576 GG allele, which governs empathic behavior and guilt-proneness; (2) this “empathy allele” makes us feel guilty about harming anyone, including strangers, and especially the most vulnerable, and it is also associated with all sorts of prosocial behavior, like low corruption and post-guilt reparative behavior, even within collectivist countries like China; (3) other areas of the world, like Pakistan, have the A or AA allele, which is related to less empathy and guilt, and instead associated with the cultural trait called “collectivism”; (4) the empathy allele people can be easily taken advantage of, because they are genetically disposed to feel pain at the prospect of harming people (“anticipatory guilt-proneness” in the literature), and what causes harm is socialized and can be pretended; (5a) the British were subjects to a propaganda campaign which artificially enhanced the image of immigrants as most deserving of empathy: they were painted as innocent, more moral, and as the most vulnerable and pained member of the community, which induces feelings of guilt and consequent reparative conduct; (5b) in actual fact, they are the least deserving of empathy, and not because of their criminality or anything, but because they are the least likely to feel empathy and guilt themselves, making them morally deficient in relation to the British; (6) as a consequence of the former points, anyone who is dispositionally guilt-prone and a carrier of the GG allele ought to understand that they have a serious disease, a disease which is deadly when you unknowingly exist around those who lack it, yet is of civilizational importance when you are around others who also have the disease; (7) we can, I think, develop tests and cultures which normalize, enforce, and reward guilt-proneness.
I am constitutionally unsuited to quantitative measures in terms of sociology, and thus very likely unsuited to any input here, or anyway any input of the type that might be appreciated on the Motte. I do research but always qualitative, and in my mind much more representative of what me might term truth, at least as regards the measure of Man.
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Do you know how the 1000 genomes project recruited their volunteers? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find their sampling method. If they permitted volunteers to approach them or recruited from students within a science institute, etc, then they would be over-sampling for less GG because it is associated with less autism. (higher proportion of STEM students have autism). If that’s the case then their sample isn’t representative of the population-level allele frequency. Their sample has .4, .4, .19 for GG, GA, AA. Another study shows .55, .37, and .07 but that’s for UK total. I could have sworn I saw something the other day showing Britain having highest GG among European countries, but now I can’t find it.
The gene is one gene among many governing behavior — we may also look at genes associated with intelligence, impulsivity, aggression, and sociopathy. But what’s of most interest in this gene is that it appears to govern social sensitivity, in-group preference, whether you take pleasure in harming the out-group, familial affection, etc. I can imagine, just for the sake of hypothetical, that you can have a population of people who are very socially sensitive and guilt-prone and yet also aggressive and impulsive
Well, you do have the famous Finnish bus stop
You don’t appear to understand that the gene is already associated with aspects of prosociality in a number of studies which compare Europeans to Europeans and Europeans to Asians and Asians to Asians. You should think about it as one important variable in a long equation. It’s not the variable that controls for violent behavior per se, or impulsivity, or default IQ. It seems to control for whether you are sensitive to the feelings of other people, how sensitive, etc. Those are different variables. The reason Pakistan probably has high AA prevalence is because they are a collectivist Asian nation that historically practiced female infanticide and favored males, with each one of these attributes being correlated to AA frequency. In any case I just found a study which looked at a random sample of Pakistani women, and in the random control condition there was a 96% rate of AA.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811915000592
This is enough to explain the behavior of Pakistanis in the UK. AA gene appear to take pleasure in causing other groups pain, and they feel less guilt and feel less empathy. This is never going to be a problem among, say, Chinese Americans selected for intelligence who also have dispositionally low impulsivity, and have been molded by Chinese collectivist values to be nice to everyone. (Although, maybe it is in other ways: spying, hiring decisions….). But it’s going to be a problem with Pakistanis due to a variety of religious and cultural factors: the insane in-group interest that makes them marry cousins, the group dynamics of Islam, and then whatever genetic traits make Pakistanis corrupt in Pakistan
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Well, they've said that autism is our national characteristic, at times. Finland has also had traditionally a high homicide rate compared to (other) Western European countries, though apparently it has gone down markedly in recent decades. OTOH we nevertheless have a high-trust, low-corruption, care-for-the-most-vulnerable society, so I guess one can't explain everything by alleles.
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I prefer the civilization and culture built by people of the GG ellele. Might GG allele civilizations not examine for and seek to reduce / remove foreign A or AA individuals from it's territory?
It’s complicated. There is a native GA and AA presence in Europe, just in a far lesser amount, and historically our culture revolved around notions of guilt/warmth which are of particularly benefit to GGs (religion-priming helps GGs exercise self-control more than others, for instance… my God there are so many studies I’m finding). So the existence of A and AG is clearly of some evolutionary benefit when in a lower amount, similar to left-handed people. It’s improbable that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs were GG, from what we know about Elon he has no empathy, so he has a utility to society provided that he is ultimately subservient to moral authority (not deciding wages, or work conditions, or immigration policy). With the Pakistani community, though I haven’t looked at anything specific to them, I would wager they are supermajority AA (as a community) and have other genes related to in-group preference and impulsivity (OXTR is one of many different genes governing morality). I also know they have the highest rate of cousin marriages and are historically clannish. British Pakistanis iirc have a higher cousin marriage rate than even those back home.
Consider that those with AA are more likely to feel pleasure when administering pain to the “out-group”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25637390/ . This perfectly explains why the most in-group-favoring people you can think of — cousin-marrying clannish insular foreigners in the middle of Northern England — would take pleasure in causing pain to the native British inhabitants. In Pakistan, girls never walk outside, lest they be raped by a foreign clan. You can also notice the weird cultural habit of south Asian Muslims waking in front of their wife — they are likely to lack the empathy that GGs typically possess for marital affection ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30818381/ )
I mean, at a minimum, the genetics of guilt-proneness and empathy clearly throws a wrench in the old progressive worldview, if by wrench we mean a small nuclear warhead. Genetics may tell us that this particular Pakistani community in Britain are complicit in the rapes to the same extent that a family of pitbulls is complicit in a dog attack; that is to say, we understand that their behavior is informed by their genetic destiny and the solution to the problem is to consider the breed in total and not the individual dog.
That still sounds like it would be a net positive to GG civilization to limit / exclude / reduce / remove foreign AA.
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