Well, perhaps I’m just cutting to the chase. The comparison isn’t “middle-class people vs poor people” or “urban dwellers vs rural dwellers”, it’s very specifically “white vs black”.
And I’m hardly “bristling”. In fact, I think I offered a reasonable starting point - if you want to compare crime rates of whites vs blacks, find a set of genetic markers that white tend to have but blacks don’t (or vice versa) and in doing so you’ll at least offer some vaguely reasonable scientific definitions for “white” and “black”, then study possible correlations between those markers and crime rates.
You’d still need to control for environment, though, and that’s quite the undertaking.
And yes, I’d agree that it’s tough to account for all the factors other than race that affect things like crime rates, and control for them to give a true side-by-side comparison: urbanization, poverty, drug use, education levels, single-parent homes, peer influences, policing, etc.
Though this is GD, I’m afraid I feel compelled to call “bullshit” on this, especially if you somehow think my earlier comment supports this rather tenuous observation of yours.
That is interesting, though your cite indicates research is in its early stages and even then, people with the MAO-A variant show antisocial behaviour after they themselves have been subjected to mistreatment or abuse, i.e. there are environmental triggers for it. The legal case cited where MAO-A was part of a nominally successful defense (i.e. a slightly reduced sentence) is also controversial. I’ll have to read more about it to see if it compares to the so-called “Twinkie defense” and the numerous misconceptions that have attached to it over the years.
In any case, “blacks have more MAO-A” and “blacks commit more crimes”, even if both are true (with the assumption that “black” is defined significantly), need to linked in some tangible way i.e. testing of prison populations to see if MAO-A is disproportionately common compared to the general population.
Aaaaaaand, we’re off to the races. As noted, the link you gave has contradictory results, as well as an indication that, if there is any validity to this, that it’s a combination of genes and environment, not just genes.
How about this, though? How about we all chill and let the OP come back in and tell us what he’d like to debate? No one is stopping any of us from starting our own threads on any subject we’d like. But before we hijack this one, let’s let the OP set the parameters.
Sure, it’s a safe assumption that melanin production is genetically linked. Is that your only criterion for sorting people into a “black” category and a “white” category - skin tone? Okay, then are people descended from East Indians considered black or white or neither? Descended from Maori? From Iranians? From Libyans? This is not being facetious - how obviously “black” does someone have to be to count as “black”? Are Barack Obama, Halle Berry and Tiger Woods black? Are their various children black?
I daresay I would want a more rigid sorting scheme than just colour before embarking on a study that I hope will carry some scientific merit. For now, I suppose we could get by with self-reporting, i.e. if someone considers themselves to be black or white or whatever, then that’s how we’ll group them. Forget genetics at that point, though - now you’re studying culture.
Heh, I didn’t catch this until I saw Waldo Pepper’s comment.
No, but I’ll offer that the OP is quoting someone (it’s not clear if he’s quoting himself, but that is a possibility) who gave stats for 2012 and 2013 and who “won’t belabor the point by going farther back”, which is too bad because it might be interesting to go further back and compare stats from when lynching was considered entertainment. Back then, a black person killing a white person was (I suspect) pretty rare, while a bunch of white people killing a black person was, well… occasional rather than rare.
Since it’s only been about 100 years since lynching’s heyday, I don’t expect one could argue for any kind of evolutionary effect.
I’ll withhold further comment until the OP returns.
For the record I am trying to argue against the idea that blacks commit more crimes than whites. My first post was to show that it is that stats can be misused to make a minority seem more violent than they really are.
I was hoping someone could help debunk that dare article linked to.
And way more Chinese people than whites too. Obviously this explains the incredible endless crime-wave by Chinese immigrants and China’s history of waging wars of aggression far from their shores.
The maths for this question are extremely simple: assuming blacks and whites are equally likely to commit murders and are indifferent to the race of their victims, the number of black people murdered by white people and the number of white people murdered by black people should be exactly the same.
If there are 2 murders per 100,000 people and you want to find the expected number of black-on-white murders, you need to multiply by the number of black people (the number of potential murderers) and then multiplied by the number of white people divided by the number of people in the country (the percentage chance that the victim happens to be white). If you want to find the expected number of white-on-black murders, you need to multiply by the number of white people (the number of potential murderers) and then multiplied by the number of black people divided by the number of people in the country (the percentage chance that the victim happens to be black).
Notice that both equations multiply by the same two numbers and divide by the same number.
The fact that the real numbers are not equal means one of two things: that black people are more likely to commit murder than white people, or that white people are harder to murder than black people.