Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. – PubMed – NCBI ncbi.nlm.nih.gov USUAL SUSPECTS: FROST AND HARPENDING (I get sh-t all the time from newbs, but if you follow me long enough you learn: I WORK FROM THE DATA. I don’t make sh-t up. ) Evol Psychol. 2015 Mar 6;13(1):230-43. Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Frost P1, Harpending HC2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25748943 During that period, 0.5 to 1% of all men were removed from each generation through court-ordered executions and a comparable proportion through extrajudicial executions, i.e., deaths of offenders at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. The total execution rate was thus somewhere between 1 and 2%. These men were permanently removed from the population, as was the heritable component of their propensity for homicide. If we assume a standard normal distribution in the male population, the most violent 1 to 2% should form a right-hand “tail” that begins 2.33–2.05 SD to the right of the mean propensity for homicide. If we eliminate this right-hand tail and leave only the other 98-99% to survive and reproduce, we have a selection differential of 0.027 to 0.049 SD per generation. …The reader can see that this selection differential, which we derived from the execution rate, is at most a little over half the selection differential of 0.08 SD per generation that we derived from the historical decline in the homicide rate.
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