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Comment by joonix | Hacker News Reader

This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next.

We'll soon enough try gun control. That won't stop mass killings. Then we'll try increased mental healthcare access. That won't do much because we'll struggle with the Constitutionality of locking people up in mental hospitals when they aren't yet a threat to anyone.

By this point in the future, genetic screening will be ubiquitous and affordable, possibly mandatory. Cultural attitudes will shift with this, and it will be expected for people to study their genome and compare openly when dating. People will pass on mates due to a high risk of major issues occurring should they have children together (this already happens in the Jewish community with Tay Sachs). Eventually people will be a lot more picky and aware of heredity and we could see a lot of hereditary mental illnesses removed from the population.

(I want to make clear I'm not expressing an opinion on or endorsing this, merely trying to make a prediction)

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Is "wanting to kill people" really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, "Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings"? Because in my mind, the line between being "sane" and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine.

One's logic could go like this, "Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I'm not happy no ones gets to be happy. Lock and load assholes." Suddenly you've got another tragedy. I would imagine people that are suicidal sometimes feel like this. Maybe it depends on how introverted or extroverted they are. The introverts disappear quietly in the dead of night, and the extroverts start mowing down pedestrians in the town square and then blow their brains out standing on the Mayor's statue.

If a gene could be isolated for "suicidal tendencies" and also for intro/extro we might be able to reduce future events like this. But just because someone is a suicidal extrovert that hates everyone it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start killing people. Maybe the ones that don't are just pussies and the gene for "guts" or "courage" would also have to be isolated?

I don't know I'm just rambling. I ask myself why I don't kill my neighbors. Is it because I'm "sane"? Well I guess so, if "liking others" and not wanting them to be sad is a characteristic of sane people. But I firmly believe that there's a tiny slice of murderer in all sane people, and I like to think of people like Adam Lanza as having just a bigger slice, because putting them in a different category of "mentally ill" sort of feels like I'm denying a part of my own nature.

Having occasional thought about killing isn't unusual - but the article describes having these thoughts far more often than is normal, and acting on them with much less provocation.

An analogy: Any computer will crash when running buggy software - but a computer with a bad stick of RAM will crash much more often. The symptoms of both those problems will be fairly similar.

Likewise, most humans think about killing from time to time - but some mentally ill people think about it much more often. Unfortunately with humans one can't run memtest86+ or swap the ram out and see if the problem goes away.

I don't think it's so simple as to written off as some genetic issue certainly and, to be honest with no malice intended, the idea there will be no mental illness at some point in this center is the dumbest thing I've heard in awhile, but I also don't think the "line" between being "sane" and "killing everyone in sight" is fine; why would that be the case? It seems if it really were as precarious as you say, we would have a lot more violence. Only a very small percentage of people become these sorts of rampage shooters.

Hmmm maybe fine isn't the right word.

Wasn't there a time not too long ago when tribes of people would go around raping, pillaging, and slaughtering others just for the hell of it? Because it was fun for them? If our world had respawn, I think life would turn into a sort of valhalla-ish existence for a not small percentage of people, and I bet many would learn about a part of themselves they did not know existed, or had supressed.

Maybe rampage shooters are just people born in to the wrong time period, where in another they would fit in perfectly. The line isn't fine, but they aren't as different as we make them out to be.

The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it's called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born "defective" (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of "good" phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those "bad" genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier.

The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.

The benefits that natural selection causes to propagate are those which improve the organism's reproductive opportunities. Those "benefits" aren't necessarily all that great when you've got a civilization. To take it to a ridiculous extreme, if a gene exists which makes you kill all the other men in your village, then impregnate all the women, that gene will be pretty popular in the next generation.

That ridiculous extreme must be quite a popular gene, because it still exists: It's called war and mass war rape. Yet, we are not all warmongers and rapists (I hope). So civilisation is already putting its slow but steady evolutionary pressure onto our genes. Let's hope that it's putting our gene pool onto the right track.

I simply don't share joonix' optimism that genetic screening can eradicate "unbeneficial" traits within next centuries without wrongly removing "beneficial" ones, before we have a better and complete understanding of our biological makeup.

More dangerous than ignorance is half-knowledge.

This is also a bit simplistic I think. I don't think most abortions are because of a physical defect or deformity, or at least, many abortions are not. As well, in many cultures that selected mates for their children, it usually did not exactly involve phenotype checking, but usually other kinds of economic and cultural reasons. Also, the fact that "bad" genes still exist does not mean they confer some benefit, that's a very panglossian view.

Talk this over with a molecular biologist. Its never gonna happen. Some pathologies are (or have components that are) hereditary. Of those things, a handful are specific gene mutations or groups of mutations. These mental illnesses are so poorly understood... None (to my knowledge) have been shown to be genetic. And its not just that we haven't found the underlying genetic reason. There probably isn't an underlying genetic cause! These systems are so complex, and DNA is only one piece of the puzzle. Epigenetics is a field that isn't getting enough public attention. Its probably responsible for much of the more nuanced hereditary pathologies and patterns that people observe.

Mental illnesses are not understood at all, I'll agree with that.

I would be hesitant to assume that they're not genetic, though - I've personally decided not to have children entirely due to the fact that mental illness is so prevalent in my partner's family (about 50% of the current < 30 year olds in the family have either been hospitalized or tried to kill themselves, and I'm not willing to subject a child of mine to those odds). I frankly don't believe that this family has just been randomly unlucky, it seems far more likely that there's something genetic behind it, especially since even the "sane" people in the family tend to be so unhappy that they probably should have been treated for the same things that the "crazy" people have been hospitalized for.

DNA may only be one piece of the puzzle, but I think it's a big enough piece of that puzzle that we need to look into it a bit more. I can't recall the last truly "crazy" person I've interacted with that didn't have something messed up in their family history...

That said, epigenetics definitely could be the issue here, my partner is of Irish stock and that's one of the classic cases of epigenetic poisoning (the famines caused all sorts of epigenetic nastiness, a lot of which has been shown to persist for generations). I totally believe that some lineages have seriously detrimental baggage associated with them, and I believe that hers could be one of them.

In the end though, I don't know that there's much difference - a person's heritage, one way or another, ends up determining their children's susceptibility to mental illness, and if that susceptibility is high, a responsible "parent" should perhaps choose not to have the child.

Just my opinion. And to be fair, if everyone followed it and was a "responsible parent" (i.e. not having kids if your family history is fucking nutters), the woman I love would not have been born, so I don't hold it that dear...

Families have other ways of passing on psychological problems besides genes. Just wanted to mention that. Not saying that genes never play a part, I don't know.

Mmm...I'd hedge my bets a bit. I think a better generalization is that many psychiatric disorders are caused by genetic abnormalities (or clusters of abnormalities, or complemented with epigenetics), but that the potential pool of candidates is vast. It only takes a few rotten eggs in the whole batch to ruin things.

It's like a rocket. You need all the parts of a rocket to work or you won't get off the ground. If you are really unlucky, it may even explode

With psychiatric disorders, it's similar. Break a few choice genes and the whole system goes to shit. But unlike a rocket, it keeps working, just not in the fashion that other brains works. So you get some kind of disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar.

I was involved in a few projects where they were mapping schizophrenia with SNPs. Looking at the data, it's clear that some individuals cluster around certain SNPs...but most of them are scattered everywhere. Lots of things can cause schizophrenia, because it really isn't a single disease but a set of common symptoms.

Right... I agree that psych problems could be based in genetics, its just not my field. But these things can also be environmental, developmental, epigenetic. They can also be mixtures of all of them. I was just saying that we're probably not going to have a genetic test for psych conditions and be able to eliminate them. Sure, maybe one or two combinations of mutations could be screened for, but never most, no matter how far genetics research goes.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea that one day people will try to optimize their genes, even if it's only self-selecting.

Yet:

1) Hereditary factors can only explain a small part of the picture. Eliminating hereditary factors that predispose people to developing mental illnesses would only eliminate a fraction of the problem. Environmental factors play a huge role.

2) The point at which what you describe happens is a long way off (if it ever happens), at least a couple of decades away. In that time, we need a viable solution.

Part of that solution should be better access to mental health care. I don't think there will be any constitutional issues with institutionalized treatment of a child who has threatened to kill someone. AFAIK, a child's parent has considerable legal control over that child and the decision to institutionalize/otherwise treat.

EDIT (reply to below):

> wasn't known to have any violent tendencies >What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

I'm afraid it's simply to early to say these kinds of things. We still do not have a complete picture of Adam Lanza's life. I don't think any of us can say anything about his personality until more facts emerge. A middle class existence is not the end-all be-all of mental stability. There are tons of other factors - family situations, bullying, school environment, the list goes on. And obviously, hereditary factors may very well have played a role in his case.

>Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too?

This is a straw man. Firstly, I was only talking about the case of children/adolescents whose parents have legal powers over them. In the case of an adult (whose parents obviously have no legal control), the problem is that those adults (incl. the guy who threatens another in your case) will get sent to jail and there won't even be an attempt to diagnose/treat a mental illness even once they are in jail. The guy in your example would not get diagnosed with something he doesn't have. He'll just be in jail. Expansion of access to mental health care should include expanded access to inmates.

But the CT shooter was never in trouble with the law and wasn't known to have any violent tendencies. And most people are not like the OP blogger: they aren't going to turn in their child to the authorities.

A schizophrenic may not ever have violent tendencies. Then, one day a voice tells them to kill everyone.

Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too?

What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

>What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Clearly there is something in America's environment that makes us far more prone to this sort of thing than other places, with or without gun control. Identifying what that is will be critical to preventing this from happening again. Gun control can reduce the body count, but even a body count of one (suicide) is not acceptable. The silver lining to this is that these events raise a dramatic warning to us that there is something deeply, seriously wrong with our culture.

Do we actually have statistics showing America to be worse about this than other places? It sounds like the kind of thing that people just assume after hearing about a sensational, attention-grabbing tragedy.

Remember when there were huge epidemics of suicide and Satanic ritual abuse in the 80s? Or rather, people said there were. In reality, suicide rates remained mostly flat, even declining slightly overall, and the evil Satanic cults were a myth. So, be careful about postulating something deeply wrong with our culture, when there may well be another explanation.

>15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. In second place is Finland, with two entries.

That's a bit of a disparity.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...

The United States also has more than 50 times the population of Finland. Normalize!

Clearly you didn't take time to read the aforementioned article at all, or you would've seen the graph that puts the USA at roughly a bit more than triple the assault deaths per 100k vs an eyeball average of the other OECD nations (down from maybe 8-9 times as many in the 80s.)

I pulled the above statistic because of the specific context of mass shootings. But hey, at least you got a pithy retort out of it.

Here is the list http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/20/the-worst-mass-shootings...

It certainly looks like Scandinavia and the UK might have a problem. Europe as a whole still has fewer than the US for a similar population but it is high. None for China, India or Brazil. So it is not just about normalisation...

Apparently, Brazil had its first just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro_school_shooting

Please. 'it is high' in Europe'? Playing it fast and loose with the word 'high' if you ask me.

Of those mentioned in the list; 6 in the past 25 years are in Europe. 3 shootings, on this list alone, happened in the US in the past 6 months! Most European countries probably haven't had any of this type of thing happen in the past 25+ years.

Well, its not very statistically significant anyway, but the number outside the US and Europe at all is very small. There are too many in Europe to say they are non existent... sure nothing like the US. Most European countries are very small which was what this thread was about.

no. just a "honor" murder each week. usually knives though, so does not count.

You are right, knives don't count in comparing the amount of shootings. Also, Europe is not a Turkish mountain village.

The UK did take some action after theirs; after Hungerford, all semi-automatic rifles (centre-ammunition) and shotguns taking four or more rounds were banned, and after Dunblane all cartridge ammunition handguns were banned within Great Britain (except .22 single-shot, which were then banned about 5 years later).

The most recent UK shooting of note, Derrick Bird, used a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun and a .22 (bolt-action) rifle. Would it have been worse if he'd had handguns and semi-automatic rifles? We'll never know, but he did try to acquire another firearm mid-rampage so he clearly felt like he needed more firepower.

From that list, I count 16 events in the US and 4 in the EU. Populations are 501M (EU) and 316M (US) (Wikipedia). So 4:1 incidence rate, 6:1 adjusted for population. Very similar to the overall homicide and gun death rates.

I'd agree that Scandinavia has a bigger problem (EU would be at 2 without Finland). (Norway is not part of the EU, and I also didn't count the US soldier going on a rampage in Afghanistan).

Norway is culturally part of Europe, joining the EU does not really change much.

Gladly!

Firearm related death rate, per 100K of population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...

US: 9.0 Switzerland: 6.4 Finland: 3.64 Germany: 1.1 UK: 0.25

...

Why are we limiting to firearm-related deaths? Within hours of the event in CT, there was another mass attack at a school in China - that one by knife, wounding twenty or so.

While guns may have increased the severity of the damage, the lack of a gun did little to stop a similar event from taking place. People that want to do harm to others will find a way, and while there's something to be said for trying to lessen how much damage they can do, that seems to be a poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Put another way: let's look at the overall violent crime rates by country instead. Here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... US ranks at 4.2/100k

I'd also like to point out your selective data pull is very misleading (whether it was intentional or not I don't know; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). Of those 9 deaths per 100k, 5.75 are suicides and 0.27 are unintentional; only 2.98 were murders (so we have nearly 75% of our murders by gun, but overall a quite low murder rate compared to over a dozen countries at 30+/100k and four over 50). Also from missing from your quote - the US is #12 in terms of firearm deaths per capita, not #1 as your data implies.

The only data that is really relevant to gun control arguments are murders that would not have been possible without a gun and (probably more relevant) accidental gun deaths. Anyone sufficiently determined to kill themselves will find any number of ways, so that's almost completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Precisely: the attack in china wounded twenty. As of this writing none were killed. The "severity of the damage" is a highly relevant measure, not something to dismiss.

"...poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease". Sorry, the symptoms (i.e. lots of people dead) are the problem here.

My data pull was primarily for the countries mentioned earlier, I added some others I find relevant because I have experience living there (never been to Finland). I did not imply the US was #1, the extract was obviously a very short one.

The Wikipedia page you cite tells essentially the same story as the Washington Post article: of the OECD countries, the US is by far the most violent, more than 4x more than Germany, for example. Take a look at the countries surrounding the US in the statistic! If you're not embarrassed, you're not paying attention.

The "would not have been possible without a gun" argument is specious, as is "anyone sufficiently determined" argument for suicides: you are assuming that anyone with a suicide attempt is sufficiently determined, as is someone wanting to kill someone. This is a fallacy, both logically and from what the data show.

Not being able to stop everyone is no excuse for not even trying to stop those that can be stopped (or reducing the damage...heck if no-one gut hurt, would the "rampage" even be a problem??)

In 2010 a similar attack occurred in China, and over twenty were killed.

Do you mean this series of attacks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–2...

If Wikipedia is correct, this was a whole series of attacks, sometimes with multiple assailants, with each attack having far fewer fatalities, so the point about reducing the damage stands.

Still awful.

Yes- point taken. Also here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14china.html

I believe we were ignoring the severity of the damage because we were attempting to investigate what mental factors went into making people decide to go on killing sprees. How much damage they did ultimately doesn't affect the factors that led them to decided to make the attempt.

It seems that that data gives statistics for a single year, and not the same year for each country. While the annual gun-related death rate may be somewhat stable for the U.S., I would guess it varies a lot from year to year in smaller countries depending on whether there was a major incident that year or not. I'd want to look across a similar-size population (e.g. all of EU) and (say) a 10 year span, and then calculate #deaths/year/1,000 population

The Wapo article links to a graph that has the "deaths due to assault" (not limited to guns) for OECD countries: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/07/20/america-...

Luxembourg (total population 1/2 million) has the higher variance you mention, the rest of are pretty stable.

Have you considered that this might be a purely statistical phenomena? What I mean is, isn't it possible that such things occur in the US only because there are so many people in the US, and once the population gets large enough, the number of outliers get large enough, in absolute terms, to become noticeable? It's often forgotten that US has the 3rd largest population, after China and India (although admittedly far behind either one)

I'd certainly be curious to see statistics that adjust for population. The stat quoted by 'slyn above is that the next country for gun violence over the last 25 years would be Finland with 2 incidents, but Finland has 1/30th the population of the U.S. It would be more appropriate to look at the EU overall for comparison. Last year there was a shooting in Norway with 70+ dead and I believe one in southern France in a school.

It is interesting to see of the Norway shooting falls in the same statistical category of "mad shooter" or in something like "homeland terrorism". But yes. There seems to be a rise of similar incidents all over the developed world, although access to guns is in the USA a lot easier than elsewhere and that reflects on these excesses. For example, knivings (is that a word?) seem to be more common than shootings around here.

The most common term is "stabbing", e.g. "stabbings are up 25% this year."

That makes sense: with a gun we shoot -> shooting; with a knife we stab -> stabbing. Although it could also be a slicing or dicing then, I suppose :-)

In my opinion, this is the correct way to think about the problem, but you should go deeper, and keep in mind that cultural traits aren't solely good or solely bad - they might be both good and bad, like a prescription medication with side-effects.

Elsewhere in this thread I wondered if American dynamism and individualism produces individuals both great and vile - and that America tempered the 'vile' segment with moral education and community ties that's since gone on the decline. That's my culturally-based theory, but I'm sure we can find other plausible ones as well.

I'm betting on that you are completely wrong about that. That the signs were completely obvious to everyone around these guys. People knew that they were some deeply fucked up kids with huge mental problems long before they went on their killing sprees.

But mental illness is something incredibly shameful around the world and maybe even moreso in the US. Almost no parent will ever be able to admit that there might be something wrong with their children. And for the people around them, the most convenient path is to ignore the problem and say it's "a phase" they are going through.

There are plenty of deeply fucked up people with huge mental problems who do not go on to kill anyone.

Should we lock up those people to prevent the small number who might go on to commit violent crime?

There's a huge number of possible ways to offer help to people. A million things can be done, but what everyone does is pretending the problem doesn't exist.

You realize the US will likely be waging wars for the foreseeable future, and that being a soldier will likely pay more than minimum wage, certainly up to past the age of procreation (I like to think of this as the event horizon for evolution; evolution only "sees" up your youngest child; if you then die, you gave still made the right evolutinary choices).

The military will have need of sociopaths and killers.

I don't think the military is exactly enamored by the thought of sociopathic killers, they tend to not follow orders very well. Come on, that's a bit much!

You haven't thought it through. Try to visualize how such a program would be implemented. You run into intractable problems. One: who defines what traits are undesirable? (Do you imagine this would ever be uncontroversial? Aggression, for example, is needed -- sometimes.) Two: who determines how future behavior is linked to genes; and how is it ever proved that future behavior is only and certainly genetically-based and in no part linked to upbringing? Three: what if a genetic pattern associated with unwanted behavior turns out to be linked with another trait that is desirable (e.g. the subject of this story is both violent and highly intelligent; what if both traits come from the same genes?). Four: by what means do you coerce parents into not breeding? Is deliberate breeding a crime? Punishable by what? Five: what do you do about accidental children? Execute them? And so on. No democracy would ever install such a scheme.

You're not understanding me correctly. I'm not saying it will be a government mandate or coercion of any kind. I'm saying cultural attitudes will change on their own as "genetic awareness" becomes more mainstream.

I'm making predictions about the future here and you are looking through modern day eyes. Twenty years ago people would be appalled to see the kind of things we openly share on Facebook with our friends today. In the future people may have no qualms about sharing their genetic profiles. There very well may be an eHarmony type service that matches based on potential offspring rather than answers to a questionnaire.

The problem with what you're saying here is that many people TODAY, myself included, are appalled and what people naively share on Facebook today, and most probably this too will change in time.

I think this is more of a boyish fantasy or the landscape of a sci-fi novel, which by the end people will inevitably reject. It's not like this is some thing that will be instituted in a vacuum.

This is a very confused comment. Parents make these kinds of choices all the time, albeit on much coarser grounds (bring the down syndrome baby to term, or not?). If we started doing finer-grained genetic screening, clearly the choice would be the parents, and the question of "accidental children" doesn't even make sense: by default, the kids we make will be 'accidental' just more thoroughly, optionally, screened.

There is almost no mental illness with data that links it to genes. Schizophrenia, for instance, has no data showing a genetic cause and plenty data linking it to environment. Oliver James is lovely to read on this, if you fancy.

That's not true. There are dozens of candidate genes for Schizophrenia. None have been linked conclusively, probably because none of them are entirely responsible.

I think the general agreement in the field is that genetic abnormalities are necessary but not sufficient to cause Schizophrenia. If you are going to crack, it's usually because you are genetically predisposed to it and in the right environment to trigger the disorder.

Using Schizophrenia as an example, there are plenty of mid-20's males that are in stressful environments...but don't become schizophrenic. A minority of those males will have a genetic abnormality that predisposes them, and they start hearing voices.

I think gene therapy and possibly selective abortion would be common as well. People won't leave someone they love because of some simple genetic tests when there are other alternatives.

I think this relies on an overestimation of the planning and foresight that goes into most pregnancies. About half of US pregnancies are unplanned, and it certainly seems like there are large segments of the population for whom even relatively short-term risks, like the propensity of the father to cheat--or never be involved at all--are basically ignored when choosing a mate.

A few randomish thoughts:

The U.S. (and Australia, which was a penal colony) likely has a higher than average (at least for Europe) incidence of what I will call "maverick" traits -- gene based traits that make people less able to go along to get along, for some reason. They aren't necessarily bad traits, they just aren't very conducive to "domestication". The tend to be some of the same traits necessary for activities like exploration and other risky behaviors -- including founding a start up. One of the things YC asks about on its application is rule breaking behaviors. Folks who are too compliant are not well suited for doing groundbreaking work. So I don't personally think that breeding these traits out is necesarily a good thing.

The reason America has higher rates is because a lot of our ancestors left Europe (or other countries) when they just could not fit in. Many left to seek the right to worship as they saw fit -- in other words to think and believe as they wished. So it looks to me like Europe already tried to get rid of these genes and, instead of extinguishing them, mostly exported them, thereby concentrating them in a couple of countries. People with these genes tend to not "go quietly into the night". They tend to go kicking and screaming. So I do not think criminalizing people for having such traits is a good policy. It is better to find ways to help them live constructively with certain traits and to carefully distinguish between traits, which are value neutral, and outcomes or behaviors, which are not value neutral.

I usually do not say this publically, but if Joan of Arc were alive today, she would likely be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted, trying to make the voices stop, instead of playing midwife to the bloody birth of modern Fance. I have also read that Alexander the Great was likely bipolar. Again: I am not so sure that our desire to rid ourselves of people who aren't "normal"/adequately compliant or "cure" them of their differences is such a good thing. I think there are better ways to deal with peope like that than simply trying to break them. I think the goal of breaking them is likely a loss for both the individual being broken and for society. Take that too far and we lose important human traits, like adaptability.

I have a genetic disorder. It is more common in populations which historically were subjected to high death rates from a particular infectious disease (though I don't recall which disease). In other words, carrying at least one gene was likely protective against dying from this infection. Thus this deadly genetic disorder became more common in cases where it helped you survive in the face of worse things. The same is true of Sickle Cell disease, which is protective against malaria. Viewing genetic variations of that sort solely as defects and not as adaptations misses the big picture. If they weren't adaptive in some situations, they wouldn't be selected for by evolutionary pressure.

Do you really believe that though? It seems like a nice just-so story that has a nice sociological tie-in with "frontier ism." I don't think that's genetic at all; I think it's just hand-wavy. Somewhere around half of people in this country believe the world is about 6,000 years old, think people can live to be 900 years and so on; I don't know if that is "mavericky." I think the race to find genes for every kind of behavior is a bit misguided and simplistic. I don't think Europe was trying to get rid of any genes during the times of pilgrims and so forth. The pilgrims were a dreadful lot that many were happy to see go but I don't think it was as you describe; it may fit in nicely with this explanation, but I think it is too simplistic.

I have a genetic disorder, as does my oldest son. It is homozygous recessive, which means my youngest son and ex husband are carriers. Both my kids were extremely challenging to raise and I ended up homeschooling them both, in part to not have my family wind up being "the next Columbine" in the headlines. I have a long list of ornery relatives and have a fair degree of familiarity with physical traits with known psychological tie-ins, such as red hair being associated with high pain tolerance and also high risk tolerance.

So, yes, I believe that. Europe may not have been explicitly trying to get rid of genes per se, but they did essentially ship literally boatloads of undesirables to both America and Australia, countries which have some things in common in terms of having maverick social norms, more so than a lot of older cultures.

I can't prove it in a few comments in a public forum, but it isn't just some idea I dreamed up earlier this afternoon. It is rooted in many years of reading and discussing the connection between inborn traits and characteristics like tolerance for risk. I am not someone who likes risk. But my genetic disorder has made me unable to go along to get along, even though my default personality makes me wish I could. So, yes, I see clear connections between socially difficult behaviors and genes.

Taking the US as an example, how many Americans share a lineage that can be traced back to the pilgrims? I would venture that the majority of the population comes from immigrants outside of the parameters that you provide. Does this higher incidence of 'maverick behaviour' come from a minority of the population?

You don't really need to be descended from a pilgrim. Most people who immigrate have a higher tolerance for risk than those who stay behind. Going to a strange land, with new rules, is very risky and challenging. Some people find ways to mitigate that risk, like marrying an American and then coming here. But it is still a huge life changing thing where you don't really know the outcome.

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