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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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If one was to take 50 Irish Traveller babies and have them raised by, say, Utah Mormons (who are closely genetically related given they are largely British and also a high competence population) with no contact or knowledge of their ancestry, do you believe they would be 20x overrepresented as violent criminals (this would be a large multiple of the oft-repeated 13-52 stat)? I just want to be clear about this assertion. Irish Traveller outmarriage was also historically too rare for this to viably explain this outcome.

Some overrepresentation would be inevitable for immediate hereditary reasons. But 20x? This is what reversion to the population mean would imply.

They would probably end up with a higher proportion of IEPs than average, and possibly unemployment and welfare, though that can be hidden by mormons giving each other jobs at below market skill level.

?

I mean mormon nepotism is well known. But why would we assume a higher percentage of IEP's? The mormon advantage isn't all HBD, lots of it is culture.

Because IEPs are to mitigate genetic disadvantages, which they probably have, since their birth parents came from a worse off group. Even if the genetics are similar (though they probably have some issues there as well), if they gave them up for adoption to strangers their parents must have been unusually dysfunctional, and probably have some degree of fetal alcohol syndrome or some such issues.

Perhaps they're like a dog breed. Genetically, they're quite difficult to distinguish from other dog breeds, but phenotypically very distinct due to small genetic differences having an outsized influence. Intense selection pressures over short time periods can have interesting consequences.

Dogs are obviously distinguishable phenotypically. It would be very interesting if every dog breed looked the same but varied hugely in capability.

Phenotype includes behaviors. Dams are a phenotype (or extended phenotype) of beavers, but I would presume aggressive selection could produce a breed of beaver that looked very much the same but did not build dams (or perhaps only built very weak and ineffective dams) in a few generations.

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.

Siberian huskies are immediately distinguishable from wolves- for one thing they're half the size- and most other northern spitzes are also easy to tell apart. They also interact with humans very differently(I had a cousin with pet wolves growing up, and a different one who had Alaskan malamutes), even aside from aggression. These are very different things and it is not difficult to tell them apart, despite some superficial similarities.