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Notes -
The Traveller Question
In rural England, two girls are raped by a group of 13 and 14 year old boys. Eventually arrested and charged, a judge sentences them to community service, because he wants to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily”. An outrage ensues, even the Prime Minister calls the sentence a disgrace. Little reported on: these youths were neither migrants nor the traditional native underclass of Albion. They belong to an unusual population called Irish Travellers with which few non-British or Irish are particularly familiar.
A year or two after I first moved to London, I witnessed a commotion outside Harrods. A large group of white teenagers was arguing with the store’s security. White teenagers are not particularly rare in London, but an entire group that is white and mostly blonde and blue eyed is. They were also dressed in an unusual way, the boys in an exaggerated version of the ‘Deano’ style of the time with some designer accoutrements - Prada caps, Gucci cross body bags; the girls in tight dresses or shorts and push-up bras, full faces of heavy makeup, much costume jewelry. Dressing like this is a working class English pastime, but in most English towns and cities it’s the preserve of college aged adults. These were children, maybe 12, 13, 14. Of interest, too, was that many were couples - 13 year old girls and boys holding hands, that kind of thing. Rare in secular society. There was no parental supervision that I could see, either. These gatherings happen regularly outside Harrods; occasionally someone is stabbed (the last time this happened in that exact location was a few weeks ago).
They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies, a highly clannish, poor and violent population who live itinerant lives across the British Isles, bane of farmers and publicans, fond of suing anyone who crosses them under anti-discrimination laws they lobbied for (in both the Irish republic and United Kingdom) that grant them special status as an ethnic minority. In Ireland, they are 0.7% of the population yet 12-15% of prison inmates, an astonishing level of overrepresentation that even many much-maligned other minority groups on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to match.
But here’s the unusual thing about Irish Travelers: they’re Irish. Genetically, they are indistinguishable from the ethnic Irish population. There is no marker that convincingly separates them from the settled ethnic Irish population. Historically, divergence was at most 300 years ago as a modern Irish state slowly emerged under British rule in the aftermath of the wars of the 17th century, which is too soon for the kind of extreme selection effects that produced some other minority groups to emerge. What genetic studies have been done claim to show difference only in terms of higher levels of inbreeding over the fewer than 12 generations for which they’ve existed (discrediting earlier theories that they had some ancient or Romani ancestry, which they do not).
The Irish Travellers are younger as a people than the Amish, for example. They are younger, depending on how you look at things, than the Ultra Orthodox Jews, who arguably first emerged at a similar or earlier time in the mid-18th century. HBD cannot really explain the Irish Traveller. They also have a very interesting culture. Despite the girls dressing very immodestly, they place a very high emphasis on both sexual purity and very early marriage, for example, sometimes as early as 14-16, for both boys and girls. They have a total fertility rate of somewhere around 3, higher than even many fecund minority groups and perhaps double the (rest of the) native population.
Beyond the occasional London gathering (which at times involves these people racing their horse-drawn buggies - chariots really - through the city) Irish travelers mainly live in the country, where they are widely hated by rural residents for (perceived or real) squatting on their land, theft of property and livestock, domestic burglary, petty crime, and welfare abuse. One of the most famous cases in British criminal law history involved a farmer who had been burgled by some traveller youths, and who then decided to wait for them, lights off, at the top of his staircase with a shotgun. He killed one, with the judge ruling that this was clearly a trap rather than self defense (he had bragged about it, which was unfortunate) and initially went to jail for life before being reduced to 3 years after a public outcry. There was another famous case recently in which a local cop was brutally killed by some Travellers driving away from a crime scene, dragged behind a car for a mile which killed him, they didn’t stop; this resulted in another major outcry, which led to sentences for cop killers being increased. Beyond this, the English state is, as it is in so many cases, broadly incapable of doing anything, forced assimilation is impossible even for settled populations, let alone itinerant ones.
But there is a large slice of the English countryside where the greatest ire is reserved today not for migrants or any other foreign population, but for these Irish Travelers. There is even a (flawed) case sometimes made that much historic prejudice against Irish migrants was more about these people than the rest of the Irish (although, as mentioned, this is wrong at least until very recently). Over time, their birth rates mean they will be an ever larger proportion of the population.
In his book The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark does just that. He looks at both the Irish and the English travellers, who I'd previously thought were the same people.
They are stupid and dysfunctional for the same reason that Ashkenazim and Arab Christians are smart, evaporative cooling. If the most intelligent members of the caravan-dwelling class leave their communities and buy houses/get jobs/marry non-gypsies for a few generations, then the Travellers are what you get at the end of it.
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.
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 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.
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