A couple of years ago now (before I got into this blogging thing, anyway) there was a brief flurry of media interest over a study that – according to various stories in the press – showed that the Maori population has a higher frequency of a ‘warrior gene’ & that this explained all sorts of negative behaviour. I thought at the time that the reports seemed overblown, but I didn’t look into it further at the time. Now there’s been another spurt of interest, with claims that new research has debunked the old. As it turns out – and is explained very well at The chicken or the egg – a) the original research never made these claims, so b) the original media reports were completely off the ball, & c) the ‘new research’ is not a scientific examination of the original data, so ‘debunked’ is hardly the term to use. The chicken or the egg gives an excellent explanation of this & also of the original genetics work & its findings, so well worth going over there to read it all 🙂
