A big ol' steaming pile of horseshyt as always from these types.
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Code rage: The "warrior gene" makes me mad! (Whether I have it or not) - Scientific American Blog Network
Race, inevitably, reared its head. In 2007 Rod Lea and Geoffrey Chambers, researchers at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, reported that
MAOA-L occurs in 56 percent of Maori men. "It is well recognized," the researchers commented in
The New Zealand Medical Journal, "that historically Maori were fearless warriors." The researchers' racial profiling was based on a study of 46 men, who needed to have only one Maori parent to be defined as Maori. Lea and Chambers reported that
MAOA-L was less common among Caucasians (34 percent) and Hispanics (29 percent) but even more common among Africans (59 percent) and Chinese (77 percent).
In 2009 Kevin Beaver, a criminologist at Florida State University, claimed that males with
MAOA-L are more likely to report being gang members (
pdf). But his study also showed that the vast majority of MAOA-L carriers are not gang members; moreover, about 40 percent of the gang members were not
MAOA-L carriers. Like McDermott, Beaver was featured on the
National Geographic show "Born to Rage?"
The 2009 study by McDermott and four colleagues, "
Monoamine Oxidase A Gene (MAOA) Predicts Behavioral Aggression Following Provocation," which triggered much of the recent publicity given to the warrior gene, was published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (
PNAS). The article claimed that
MAOA-L carriers were more likely than noncarriers to respond with "behavioral aggression" toward someone they thought had cheated them out of money they had earned in a laboratory test. "Behavioral aggression" was defined as making the putative cheater consume hot sauce.
Even disregarding the issue of whether giving someone hot sauce counts as "physical aggression," McDermott's study provides little to no evidence for the warrior gene, because the difference between carriers and noncarriers was minuscule. McDermott et al. examined 70 subjects, half of whom carried the warrior gene. The researchers found that 75 percent of the warrior gene carriers "meted out aggression" when cheated—but so did 62 percent of the noncarriers. Moreover, when subjects were cheated out of smaller amounts of money, "there was no difference" between the two groups.
Obviously, the warrior gene cannot possibly live up to its name. If it did, the whole world—and China in particular, if the racial statistics cited above are remotely accurate—would be wracked by violence. The warrior gene resembles other pseudo-discoveries to emerge from behavioral genetics, like the gay gene, the God gene, the high-IQ gene, the alcoholism gene, the gambling gene and the liberal gene. (See my previous columns on the
liberal gene and
gay gene.)
The abysmal record of behavioral genetics stems from two factors. First, the quest for correlations between thousands of genes and thousands of traits and disorders is prone to false positives, especially when traits are as squishy as "aggression" and "childhood trauma" (the variable that helps some researchers link
MAOA-L to violent behavior). Second, the media—including respected scientific journals like
Science and
PNAS as well as shows like
Dr. Phil—are prone to hyping "discoveries" that will attract attention.
The media's fascination with the warrior gene recalls the lurid claims made decades ago concerning "XYY syndrome," in which men are born with two Y chromosomes instead of one; the syndrome affects about one in a thousand men. In the 1960s British researchers identified nine men who had an extra Y chromosome and had a record of violent outbursts. This correlation was not surprising, because the men were all incarcerated in a mental hospital for violent patients. Other researchers, also focusing on institutionalized patients and criminals, quickly claimed to have found evidence that XYY men were hyperaggressive "supermales" at risk of becoming violent criminals.
The XYY-supermale claim was propagated by
The New York Times and other mainstream media, enshrined in biology and social science textbooks, and even written into plots for films, novels and television shows (as
Wikipedia's excellent entry on XYY syndrome documents). Meanwhile, follow-up studies of noninstitutionalized XYY men failed to corroborate the initial claims. In a 1993 report "
Understanding and Preventing Violence" the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there is no correlation between the XYY syndrome and violent behavior. In 2007
CSI: Miami nonetheless broadcast a show, titled "
Born to Kill," which featured a serial killer with an extra Y chromosome.
Unlike, say,
multiverse theories, unsubstantiated claims about human genetics can have real-world consequences. Racists
have seized on warrior gene research as evidence that blacks are innately more violent than whites. In 2010 defense attorneys for Bradley Waldroup, a Tennessee man who in a drunken rage hacked and shot a woman to death, urged a jury to show him mercy because he carried the warrior gene.
According to National Public Radio, the jury bought this "scientific" argument, convicting Waldroup of manslaughter rather than murder. A prosecutor called the "warrior gene" testimony "smoke and mirrors." He was right.