wow. I was not following the thread for some time, and then I come back and see this discussion between a supposed link between race and crime.
That is just too "19th-centurish" to be discussed wholly in a single post, but I should at least mention that there have been a few advancements in science since then, and things like phrenology or that ideas that someone with a nose like Darwin's cannot endure a long trip on a ship. For example, complex issues such as crime hardly can be attributed to genetic/biological roots so easily, since humans have only about 30 000 genes and that's too few to make our body and determine our behaviour so specifically.
It's not like the profession you have (or lack thereof) was genetically determined and is just like some ritualized, "robotic", mating behavior of a bird that can't help but collect blue pieces many things and put them on display nearly some other structure that was likewise instinctively constructed.
I also do not blame only a so general, "shared" environment, like simple "poverty" as being the cause of behavior or criminality, I rather think that more specific environments and the individual life course of persons is more determinant. I personally think that rates of crimes between classes probably do not change so much between social classes, but mostly the sorts of crimes for many reasons, and that the deviation from an equal proportion of crimes between classes, is not a so direct effect of poverty, but has a culture of crime as a more proximal cause. A culture of crime, however, may find in poverty a fertile terrain to prosper, since, for example, poor neighbourhoods, along with more likely having people with more needs unsatisfied by their economic condition, would less likely have a long history of effective program of crime prevention of some sort, by absence police and/or lack other policies.
In that places, the formation of gangs - which are social endeavours of people rather than some sort of genetic/behavioural result of group selection - is less inhibited, and gangs then can have more influence over the lifes of people living there. Not only that, I would go as far as to think that things like some rap music (or any other style that pass the same sort of content), ideas spread by media, have their effect, even the "environment is the cause" argument, and racist arguments. With these things, socially accepted excuses for otherwise socially unaccepted behavior are readily given to people, and also there is pygmalion effect.
With more specific environments (i.e., including the local development of an specific culture), and taking in account the individual history and psychological development of individuals I think we have a more realistic explanations for behaviour pattern of groups and its deviations usually pointed as refutations of a more simplistic environmental causation, usually followed by the conclusion of the false bifurcation of "gross environment vs genes".
At the same time, I'm not trying to refute the need for some race-specific medications or racial/populational considerations in medical care. As I've said earlier in this thread, there's no reason to suppose that all gene frequencies of diseases are the same between all populations, even though, as pointed by many, there are more genetic variation within than between populations. Also, the populational consideration in medical care do not need to be relied upon the assumption that the biological issues being dealt have inate, racial roots, but instead it can be in some cases something with cultural roots also, like the chosen diet and other possible cultural variations in lifestyle with effects on health. That would make it even lessa race-specific, but rather race-incidental, but is likely to be so is even if the cause is confirmedly genetic, as there are more shared genes than race-specific. Maybe race-specific is a bit of a sloppy misnomer.
Complex human behaviors, in the other hand, cannot be put in the same bag of other bodily conditions, because of what I've said earlier. Brains are organs that essentially make our behavior flexible in relation to the environment, rather than rigid, ritualized responses of lower animals. They can carry on much more information than genes, not to mention the modern means of transmission of the information, what can make this information evolve much faster than genes could evolve. Genes are already filled with information needed to the development of our bodies, which would be "prioritized" by natural selection, whose power to make anything evolve is limited, that makes very hard to explain huma behavioral patterns genetically.
I might have said it earlier in this same topic, even dog breeds, which have been much more intensely selected - more effectively than what natural or even sexual selection could do - for specific behaviors, do not behave in a clear pattern as if each breed has its own script. Instead, even with dogs,
which possess much more limited brains, the individual development plays a big if not bigger role in the development of individual behavior.
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An article on Scientific American about this:
race in a bottle
Excerpt:
A close inspection of BiDil’s history, however, shows that the drug is ethnic in name only. First, BiDil is not a new medicine—it is merely a combination into a single pill of two generic drugs, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate, both of which have been used for more than a decade to treat heart failure in people of all races. Second, BiDil is not a pharmacogenomic drug. Although studies have shown that the hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate (H/I) combination can delay hospitalization and death for patients suffering from heart failure, the underlying mechanism for the drug’s efficacy is not fully understood and has not been directly connected to any specific genes. Third, and most important, no firm evidence exists that BiDil actually works better or differently in African-Americans than in anyone else. The FDA’s approval of BiDil was based primarily on a clinical trial that enrolled only self-identified African-Americans and did not compare their health outcomes with those of other ethnic or racial groups.
