Hello Dr. Melissa,

This is the first time I have commented on your blog which I visit almost every day.

I found an article on then same study titled Junk Science Strikes Again which I found very interesting. The author is a man by the name of Phillip Ellis Jackson (I don’t know if he is well known in psychologist circles) but he gives a male perspective on this study that I enjoyed. I will let you read the article for yourself but I agree with him that, given the definitions used in the study, most boys from my generation would be classified as being “pre-disposed to genetically-induced violent behavior.”

Phil isn’t a psychologist. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago. I don’t know anything specific about the methodology of the violence study in question, but Phil is not formally qualified to evaluate matters of medicine, sociology or psychology; as such, he shouldn’t be using the title “Dr.” when he writes on these topics, as it of course lends formal authority where none exists. (Traditionally, MDs or PhDs do not use their titles when they write or comment outside the areas of their expertise. Phil self-publishes science fiction novels, quite properly WITHOUT prefixing his author’s credit with his academic title, as his PhD is not awarded in some offshoot of the study of literature.)

Note also, he replies to comments about his essay with “…1% of the male population between that gene sequence in violence and delinquency, then it’s a pretty weak link — to the point of irrelevancy…”. One percent, however unremarkable to the layman, is in fact statistically significant. This, I would expect, he should have learned at Chicago, no matter his field of study was political science.

A couple decades back, I worked with Phil at an economic development organization — at the time, it was the second largest such institution in the US — in one of the top ten largest cities, by population, in our country. I remember Phil as avid but not terribly bright. As an example, he was charged with developing a plan for recovering or discovering increased capitalization and/or revenue for the city. He developed his plan; one of the core revenue generators therein was the recovery of unpaid felony criminal fines from “street-crime offenders” after their release from confinement in the state corrections system. Felony criminal fines are usually rather large, running into the tens of thousands of dollars. “Street-crime offenders”, typically, have little income — at least little discoverable income — prior to their incarceration, and even less after they are paroled or have served the full term of their sentences of confinement — they don’t have a great deal of future earning power, either. There is literally almost nothing to recover, certainly not enough on which to base a capitalization plan for a large city; Phil just saw all those huge numbers in the “uncollected fines” column of some spreadsheet. Not to mention, felony crimes are county charges, and, even in a optimal hypothetical scenario with his concept could have recovered a lot of criminal fine revenue, the money would have belonged to the county, not the city. Also, Phil was frequently called out on the carpet by his peers for his unduly harsh, often snide and disrespectful treatment of his staff; Phil would, by way of explanation — with a logic none of us could follow — relate the tale of his time as an undergrad dormitory RA at Chicago, a job he held during the years of his doctoral study, keying in on, as he insisted, the dozens of times his car tires were slashed by residents of the dorm in which he was RA. We never did happen to correspond with any of his old undergrad charges — and how he behaved to them was really rather immaterial to the subject at hand — but defending his questionable conduct with staff in our organization by saying, essentially, “I was a jerk then and I’m a jerk now,” never made much sense to us.

Also, notable, Phil held a fairly important position in our organization, a high step toward a potentially bright, notable career in civic planning and management. However, as his competence came more into question, ultimately leading to his resignation — which, as far as I know, was willful, not directly imposed by our superiors — he’s never again managed to establish himself, not to any recognizable degree, in his chosen career. Lamentably, he’s rather become sort of a multidisciplinary crank.

The upshot of this story is, I wouldn’t trust Phil’s analyses of anything outside the field of political science, and I’d have a hard time placing much faith in his evaluation of any subject within that field. He seems to retain his propensity to self-aggrandizement sans substantiating bona fides.