Richard Wrangham on two types of aggression; Noah Smith on the San Francisco scene; Harry Lambert on Bari Weiss; Rob Henderson on masculinity that isn't toxic
"It seems to me that reducing reactive aggression in humans would require biological evolution. We would need to select against people who cannot control their rage."
This is precisely what happened, and continued to happen right up until about 40-50 years ago, but it wasn't natural in the sense that we had no hand in the process. The reactively violent and the proactively violent (when we could identify them) were selectively culled ASAP. We no longer do this very well, and are getting increasingly bad at it.
This is a common argument from the pro-capital punishment faction on the right, but there's not a lot of support for it. In England and the US, although felonies carried the death penalty until somewhat recently, it was not that hard for first time offenders to get clemency. The number of executions just never rose to the level that could have had the kind of effect you are describing in either country. In the US for most of its history, less than 100 people were executed per year in the whole country until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In most regions, homicide rates were much higher than they were in the 20th century in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
I'm pro capital punishment for other reasons and I don't think the theory of evolution is well supported by the contemporary evidence, but even if you believe in the theory of evolution, there just weren't enough executions to have that kind of selection impact. It's a theory that sounds dope and feels right but is completely unsupported by the evidence.
I wasn't just talking about fully documented legal executions or executions exclusively, Ice Pick- I strongly suspect you are being misled by propaganda by the anti-capital punishment establishment that tries to minimize the actual numbers prior to the mid 20th century. If you add in the vigilante versions, the numbers over history are a magnitude higher. When such actions were forbidden, we did a much better job of simply locking away such people well past their procreation windows.
For the record, I am not pro-capital punishment- I am actually against it, but I also don't buy into the arguments that it is unconsitutional. I just happen to believe that murderers deserve some clemency through life-without parole.
How? I have de Maistre's view on capital punishment.
> tries to minimize the actual numbers prior to the mid 20th century.
The numbers are really small because they are really small. You also have to be careful to not conflate vigilantism with legally valid deputization also. Yes, through the 19th century, a lot of "law enforcement actions" looked like rounding up a posse of unstable teenagers and then killing a bunch of people for operating an illegal liquor still or whatever. That's still not capital punishment, and conflating the categories doesn't clarify anything. Even if you add all of those together, you still do not get enough to support a "we culled the bad man genes from the gene pool" thesis.
>we did a much better job of simply locking away such people well past their procreation windows
This isn't true, either. Incarceration was not possible at a large scale because of the lack of sanitation. There's a good reason why people were instead sentenced to indenture or to hard labor until relatively recent times: it wasn't feasible to keep them around in Bentham-boxes. The basic idea of a modern prison isn't really possible without plumbing.
The nature of criminality itself was also different in earlier time periods. Before the early modern era, common criminals looked a lot more like bandits, who could mostly be killed extrajudicially. These bio-arguments are just-so stories that aren't supported by the data that we have. By contrast, the symbolic and religious argument for capital punishment is much easier to support. There are too many missing pieces for the bio-argument (no data, no proof on "bad man genes," operates on too short a time period to create the cited change, etc.).
What makes you think I was talking about only the last 200-300 years? Most of the hard work was done over the previous 10,000 years. Even is all your data is correct, it only means we are no longer doing the work to cull out the violent, and haven't been doing so for even longer than I believe.
Quite possibly, but we don't know much about humans and their violent tendencies before about written/oral history. I would guess the hard work was done once humans began building settlements and doing agriculture.
"It seems to me that reducing reactive aggression in humans would require biological evolution. We would need to select against people who cannot control their rage."
According to Wrangham's 2019 The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, that's exactly what happened. As an example, if someone was too disruptive, five people would go out hunting and only four would come back and no one would ask any questions. It was basically capital punishment for assholes.
"It seems to me that reducing reactive aggression in humans would require biological evolution. We would need to select against people who cannot control their rage."
This is precisely what happened, and continued to happen right up until about 40-50 years ago, but it wasn't natural in the sense that we had no hand in the process. The reactively violent and the proactively violent (when we could identify them) were selectively culled ASAP. We no longer do this very well, and are getting increasingly bad at it.
This is a common argument from the pro-capital punishment faction on the right, but there's not a lot of support for it. In England and the US, although felonies carried the death penalty until somewhat recently, it was not that hard for first time offenders to get clemency. The number of executions just never rose to the level that could have had the kind of effect you are describing in either country. In the US for most of its history, less than 100 people were executed per year in the whole country until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In most regions, homicide rates were much higher than they were in the 20th century in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
I'm pro capital punishment for other reasons and I don't think the theory of evolution is well supported by the contemporary evidence, but even if you believe in the theory of evolution, there just weren't enough executions to have that kind of selection impact. It's a theory that sounds dope and feels right but is completely unsupported by the evidence.
I wasn't just talking about fully documented legal executions or executions exclusively, Ice Pick- I strongly suspect you are being misled by propaganda by the anti-capital punishment establishment that tries to minimize the actual numbers prior to the mid 20th century. If you add in the vigilante versions, the numbers over history are a magnitude higher. When such actions were forbidden, we did a much better job of simply locking away such people well past their procreation windows.
For the record, I am not pro-capital punishment- I am actually against it, but I also don't buy into the arguments that it is unconsitutional. I just happen to believe that murderers deserve some clemency through life-without parole.
How? I have de Maistre's view on capital punishment.
> tries to minimize the actual numbers prior to the mid 20th century.
The numbers are really small because they are really small. You also have to be careful to not conflate vigilantism with legally valid deputization also. Yes, through the 19th century, a lot of "law enforcement actions" looked like rounding up a posse of unstable teenagers and then killing a bunch of people for operating an illegal liquor still or whatever. That's still not capital punishment, and conflating the categories doesn't clarify anything. Even if you add all of those together, you still do not get enough to support a "we culled the bad man genes from the gene pool" thesis.
>we did a much better job of simply locking away such people well past their procreation windows
This isn't true, either. Incarceration was not possible at a large scale because of the lack of sanitation. There's a good reason why people were instead sentenced to indenture or to hard labor until relatively recent times: it wasn't feasible to keep them around in Bentham-boxes. The basic idea of a modern prison isn't really possible without plumbing.
The nature of criminality itself was also different in earlier time periods. Before the early modern era, common criminals looked a lot more like bandits, who could mostly be killed extrajudicially. These bio-arguments are just-so stories that aren't supported by the data that we have. By contrast, the symbolic and religious argument for capital punishment is much easier to support. There are too many missing pieces for the bio-argument (no data, no proof on "bad man genes," operates on too short a time period to create the cited change, etc.).
What makes you think I was talking about only the last 200-300 years? Most of the hard work was done over the previous 10,000 years. Even is all your data is correct, it only means we are no longer doing the work to cull out the violent, and haven't been doing so for even longer than I believe.
Wrangham would say that "Most of the hard" work was done well before the last 10,000 years.
Quite possibly, but we don't know much about humans and their violent tendencies before about written/oral history. I would guess the hard work was done once humans began building settlements and doing agriculture.
"It seems to me that reducing reactive aggression in humans would require biological evolution. We would need to select against people who cannot control their rage."
According to Wrangham's 2019 The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, that's exactly what happened. As an example, if someone was too disruptive, five people would go out hunting and only four would come back and no one would ask any questions. It was basically capital punishment for assholes.