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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2492 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

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As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.

Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)

I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".

*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.

The other explanation could be that proximity of blacks causes white criminality to go up too. Crime is infectious.

Borderers were not a random draft of Scotsmen- they were a specific ethnic group known for violence and outlawry, which was deported to Ireland and then from there to America. This isn’t Australia where the selection was straight up sending criminals(reversion to the mean would take care of that).

Also, the borderers as a group aren't representative of the broader Scottish society.

If Scottish settlers in that part of America we're disproportionately drawn from the borderers they should genetically more represent that than Scottish society in general.

Also, the borderers as a group aren't representative of the broader Scottish society.

That was essentially my point about the selection effect.

You describe individual dysfunction but that is rarely enough to poison an entire society. One might ask themselves why this didn't happen with other source populations elsewhere where presumably the same selection effects existed. The reason is that there was a large and culturally cohesive population of almost unique (in Europe) longterm dysfunction to pull from and transplant.

Generally individual failures didn't make it to America because emigration cost a fair bit of money. Nor did they necessarily procreate in their home country.

modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts

Are guns banned in Massachusetts?

Guns aren't banned in Scotland though either. You just need a license which is fairly easy to get for someone with a clean record. Handguns are banned though (with some exceptions). May not materially impact your point, but just clarifying as lots of people seem to think guns are banned in the UK entirely.

You could of course also look at murder rates among my Ulster-Scots brethren in Northern Ireland as handguns are legal there. Also getting hold of illegal guns is pretty easy. There are other confounding factors of course.

The old joke about Northern Ireland being the best preparation for any Brit moving to the US: guns, flags, religion and armed police on the streets.

They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.

I see. My assumption would be that criminals are much less capable of getting guns in Scotland than in an American state (even one with restrictive laws) and therefore that this points to Scotland's murder rate being abnormally high. A comparison to Scot-descendant groups in Canada would be nice.

Canadian Scots were much less border-inflected in general, so I think the selection effect would be pretty different. Handgun availability is probably more like Massachusetts than Scotland, but nothing like the Southern states.

Scotland itself can be... pretty violent? Knife fights are I think statistically more deadly than handgun wounds...

It would also be interesting comparing rates of e.g. grievous bodily harm between Scotland and Scots-Irish-colonised regions of the US.

This might be confounded by presence of firearms. Getting close enough to someone for GBH is more dangerous if they might have a gun; conversely people might beat their opponent down harder to reduce the risk they draw a firearm when you look away.

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