(no subject)
I have been reading the comments on news sites, and find it informative but really discouraging. Every crime report brings out cries of "scum"! as though some people (not us, heaven forbid! always "them") are irredeemable. Many people seem to want to believe this for some reason -- probably because it absolves everyone else of responsibility.
Helen Epstein gives a fascinating criticism of claims (like the one in 1992 by the US National Research Council) that there are genetic reasons why blacks are statistically more likely to be involved in violent crime in the US:
...wide fluctuations in murder rates occur much more rapidly than changes in the human genome, which may take thousands of years. Today homicide is more common in America than in Western Europe, but historians estimate that in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, murder rates in London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were just as high as they were in New York at the peak of the US crime wave in 1990. Until the 1960s, murder rates were generally lower in Africa than they were in Europe,so a race-specific 'violence gene,' if one existed, is unlikely to have come from Africa....
("America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" NYRB, June 11, 2009).
Helen Epstein gives a fascinating criticism of claims (like the one in 1992 by the US National Research Council) that there are genetic reasons why blacks are statistically more likely to be involved in violent crime in the US:
...wide fluctuations in murder rates occur much more rapidly than changes in the human genome, which may take thousands of years. Today homicide is more common in America than in Western Europe, but historians estimate that in the fourteenth and fifteen centuries, murder rates in London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm were just as high as they were in New York at the peak of the US crime wave in 1990. Until the 1960s, murder rates were generally lower in Africa than they were in Europe,so a race-specific 'violence gene,' if one existed, is unlikely to have come from Africa....
("America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" NYRB, June 11, 2009).