Post updated, 7/23/15. See below! At long last, I reach my 200th blog post. It's been a quite a ride! Blogging on human biodiversity – or simply humanity – has taught me a great deal. Since the start, I hoped that I could offer some meager contribution to mankind with this blog. I will continue... Read More

With the recent spate of mass shootings, (at least four high-profile incidents occurring in the U.S. and Canada in the last two weeks), the issues of guns and violence inevitably come up. Naturally, the politically correct wisdom, which is founded on the blank slate (or at least, a bare slate), wants to blame these events... Read More

So on tonight's (9/16/13) NBC Nightly News, they featured an interview with the chief medical officer of one the D.C. hospitals that received the victims of the Navy Yard shooting. She had this to say: [gigya src=" width="500" height="300" FlashVars="launch=53027300^42093^73230&width=592&height=346" allowscriptaccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage=" Good luck with that honey. Granted, she's a doctor who's... Read More

To compliment HBD Chick's recent post on the topic, here you go. From Wikipedia: Number of guns per capita by country: Countries by rate of intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitants: Just sayin'. See also: HBD Fundamentals: On the evolution of modern advanced civilized peoples Those Who Can See: Whence Afro criminality? (My comment at) HBD... Read More

John Locke: “every man, in the state of nature, has a power to kill a murderer […] such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey (source of picture) The last millennium... Read More

Home sweet home in the Scottish borderlands. This was one of the last regions of Britain to be pacified and brought under State control. People lived in fortified homes where the second floor could be reached only by an external ladder that could be pulled up. The stone walls were up to 3 feet thick.... Read More

Michael Moore recently held a Q & A session on Twitter in response to CurrentTV's showings of his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, which was about mass shootings and gun violence in America. This movie contained the infamous scene where Moore ambushed then NRA president Charlton Heston about the issue of violent crime in America... Read More

In this, his most ambitious book to date, Steven Pinker describes, and attempts to explain, a curious historical phenomenon: the decline in all kinds of violence among human beings, from pre-civilized times to the present. The first thing one wants to ask is: Has there actually been such a decline? Given the tremendous wars and... Read More

In debating the causes of the Montreal Massacre, we must confront the psychological similarities between Marc Lépine and his father. Both seem to have had low thresholds for ideation and expression of violence. Was this quick temper passed down from father to son? Or are the similarities only fortuitous? If these psychological characteristics had passed... Read More

On December 6, 1989, a 25-year-old man walked into Montreal’s École polytechnique and murdered fourteen women. The event is still being debated … twenty years later. We know the immediate cause. The murderer, Marc Lépine, felt that places like the École polytechnique were training women to take jobs that had been mainly held by men... Read More

I was visiting cousins in Collingwood and the subject of conversation turned to a 30-something bachelor who lived down the road. “Maybe he just enjoys being single,� I said. “Oh, no,� came the reply. “He wants to get married. He’s tried everything: dating clubs, church groups. Nothing seems to work.� “Well, maybe he’s ugly or... Read More

There is a thread of thought going back to antiquity and revived by Nietzsche that blames Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire. Christ and his followers are thus held responsible for replacing pagan virtues with ‘slave values’ of submission and pacifism. In reality, and long before the triumph of Christianity, it was pagan... Read More

You’ve probably heard of the Milgram experiment. Assistants are told to give a ‘subject’ progressively stronger electric shocks whenever he or she fails on a learning task. Most of the assistants—the real subjects of the experiment—obediently do as they are told, even when the pseudo-subject is visibly in pain and pleads for cessation of the... Read More

Natural selection has altered at least 7% of our genome over the last 40 thousand years. And it has been doing so at an accelerating rate, particularly after agriculture replaced hunting and gathering less than ten thousand years ago. At that time, the rate of genetic change may have risen over a hundred-fold (Hawks et... Read More

Steven Pinker has an article up on the secular decline in violence (hat tip to Mangan’s): Pinker concludes: “our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on... Read More