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Jan. 3, 2025 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
09:51
Testosterone, Race, and Crime
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Testosterone is associated with masculine traits.
A typical article at PubMed called Correlation Between Personality Traits and Testosterone Concentrations finds that high testosterone levels have been associated with aggression, sexual behavior, and social status.
High testosterone, or high T, is associated with big muscles and denser bones.
And high-T men are likely to have low-pitched voices.
Some men like testosterone so much they have tattoos of its chemical structure.
Criminals especially, violent criminals, have high T. People of different races have different average levels of testosterone, and those levels correspond closely to race differences in crime rates.
More T, more crime.
This is not a welcome finding for people who pretend that race doesn't exist.
However, T-level is important in medicine, especially for treating prostate cancer.
Here are cancer death rates in the U.S. from 1975 to 2010.
The red line at the top is black men who are more likely to die of cancer than white men who are the yellow line below them.
There are big differences for prostate cancer.
Blacks are 60% more likely to get it and nearly two and a half times more likely to die from it.
Prostate cancer is influenced by T levels, and if men of different races have different levels, doctors need to know, despite fashionable resistance, even among doctors, to recognizing racial distinctions.
And that's why there is a recent article in the Journal of Urology called Ethnicity and Race-Specific This is the most careful study of race and testosterone I've ever seen.
Some studies measure T levels from saliva samples, but these authors drew blood and used the most accurate method, isotope dilution liquid They had a sample of 4,772
men, very large for a study like this, and they controlled for body mass index, diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, high cholesterol, and smoking, all of which affect T levels.
Here is a plot of T levels for men of different ages, from top to bottom, blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Asians.
As you can see, from ages 18 to 49, blacks have the highest levels, followed by Hispanics, then whites, then Asians.
The general trend of T levels is down as men age, but to my surprise, this study found that for whites, testosterone increases from their 40s to their 50s.
Likewise for Hispanics, and to some extent for Asians, but not blacks.
In whites, T levels keep rising until their 60s, when testosterone is even higher than in their 20s.
I've never seen such findings before.
It doesn't seem plausible that whites in their 60s have so much testosterone, or that Hispanics should have the highest T levels in their 50s.
Unfortunately, the authors of this study do not comment on this, and I can't find any papers that do.
This is not a longitudinal study that followed the same people into old age.
It's possible.
That older Americans grew up in an environment with far fewer environmental pollutants, so that although their tea levels did decline with age, maybe they started from a higher level.
There are a lot of questions here.
This is a more usual plot of just black and white tea levels over time, with blacks in red and whites in blue.
Until the ages of 12 to 15, blacks have lower levels, but then peak dramatically.
Declining from the early 20s, while whites increase until their late 20s.
Then it's a steady decline for both races.
This study measured T with an electrochemic luminescence immunoassay, which is less accurate than the method of the first study.
The sample was also smaller, only 986 participants, but they were blacks and whites only with no Asians.
The fact remains that from the late teens through the 20s, What race differences do we find in crime rates?
Almost all police reports track blacks and Asians separately and accurately, but many lump Hispanics in with whites.
Hispanics have higher crime rates than whites, so this artificially raises what are reported as white crime rates.
California, however, It tracks whites and Hispanics in entirely separate categories, so it's possible to get clean data.
Table 31 shows felony arrests for 2023 by race.
Arrest rates are not the same as crime rates.
Some criminals are not arrested, and some people who are arrested are later released or found not guilty.
However, in extensive surveys that ask victims of violent crime the race of the perpetrator, the racial proportions reflected in their answers closely match the racial proportions of arrests.
Here are total felony arrests for whites, Hispanics, blacks, and others.
The number of Asians included in the other category can be calculated from Table 30 of the report.
The population of California is approximately 35% white, With these figures, we can calculate what are called odds ratios for other races compared to whites.
Hispanics are 44% more likely than whites to be arrested for a felony, and blacks are 5.3 times more likely.
Asians have only a 27% chance of being arrested for a felony compared to whites.
What about the top three felonies?
Homicide, rape, and robbery.
Again, we can calculate odds ratios.
Hispanics are arrested for homicide at 2.8 times the white rate, and blacks are arrested at 12.4 times the white rate.
For rape, the figures are 2.4 times for Hispanics and 5.4 times for blacks.
For robbery, the multiples are 2 times for Hispanics and 13 times for blacks.
All these figures are very much in line with data we have from other states.
Asians commit those crimes so seldom they aren't even included in this more detailed report.
Now, there's not a one-to-one connection between testosterone and violent crime.
This article from the NIH Library of Medicine explains, testosterone levels are influenced by conditions that are partly controlled or initiated by the hormone itself, but also by circumstances beyond hormonal or individual control.
Different kinds of behavior are not only subject to influence by environment, but also androgens, that is male-associated hormones, including testosterone, can reinforce the particular kind of conduct and the behavioral impact wield negative or positive feedback on testosterone secretion.
In other words, it's complicated.
The article also warns not to draw conclusions about individuals.
And there are other associations with crime, such as low IQ and poor impulse control.
For example, in the graph we saw earlier, in the late teens and early twenties, whites and Asians have similar levels of testosterone, but Asians are considerably less crime-prone.
So, it's not just testosterone.
But what if it were clear?
That juvenile offenders with high T were overwhelmingly likely to go on to commit serious crimes.
I can imagine several responses.
Well, they can't help it, so we need to give them more social support.
Or, they are prone to crime, so punish them more severely as a deterrent.
Another option would be to give sex criminals hormones that reduce testosterone.
There are six states that permit or even require some form of chemical castration.
Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, and Texas.
It's usually as a condition for probation for sex offenders, especially pedophiles.
Here is an article from the NIH library reporting that chemical castration reduces recidivism rates from 2% to 5% compared with expected rates of 50%.
So far as I know, there is no state or country that chemically castrates violent, non-sexual offenders.
Of course, in the United States, there's hardly any public debate, even on the association between testosterone and crime, much less the possible connection to race differences in crime rates.
This is just one more example of how taboos on race close off potentially useful discussion.
Thank you for watching.
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