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PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous

I admit I LOL'd at the part about lighting up "like a Christmas tree." WATCH AND LEARN all IDWs!

~ PINKERITE TALKS TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS ~
The Brian Ferguson Interview
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Friday, December 16, 2022

Undark's Race Pseudoscience Issue

The online magazine, Undark, best known in Pinkeriteland for publishing an article on the race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan, has published a collection of articles on The Persistence of Race Science.

I hope that fans of race pseudoscience like Colin Wright and Lee Jussim don't see Angela Saini's Draper’s Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science, because it includes a diagram, similar in format to my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, here. 


My diagram prompted Wright and Jussim  to claim it was evidence that I was insane. 

I assume they will react with the same extreme graphophobia to this item. 

Note: In the original diagram, the plus signs open up to show members of the race pseudoscience-funding network, but only in the Chrome browser. It doesn't work with Safari.



A few of the people/organizations mentioned in Saini's diagram are also mentioned in my diagram, including Linda Gottfredson, J. P. Rushton,  Richard Lynn and the Pioneer Fund.

Pinker was not mentioned in any of the articles on race science in spite of his many connections to race science promoters, including Gottfredson, mentioned in the Saini piece. But Undark appears to have been friendly with Pinker so maybe the editors are reluctant to make the connection.

I was disappointed at first that Pinker's pal Razib Khan was not mentioned, but in my favorite piece in the collection Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest which focuses on E.O. Wilson, Yale professor C. Brandon Ogbunu, does reference Khan, just not by name:


Wilson’s dive into the human realm was, in my view, an exercise in the worst kind of carpetbagging, in which an expert uses their large reputation in one arena to justify parachuting into another where they are ignorant or out of their depth. In doing so, Wilson followed, and maybe helped write, a blueprint that continues to influence generations of dumpster fire biological determinists. The controversy encircled Wilson for years, but his excellent reputation eventually transcended it.
After his death was announced, however, the conflict swirled anew. An essay in Scientific American revisited the connections between “Sociobiology” and scientific racism and, much more damningly, scholars uncovered archival evidence that Wilson was an ardent defender of J. Philippe Rushton, a scientific racist who spent a career peddling pulp science fiction about the essential differences between races, draped in the lingo of evolutionary theory. In the archival materials, Wilson referred to anti-racists as “scoundrels.” But apparently, he thought the actual scientific racist that he had a cuddly relationship with was a fine person.
Amid all of this, a circus began.
A broad, mostly academic alliance formed to defend Wilson’s reputation. It included the typical cast of cancel culture vultures and race science grifters, along with a surprising number of enablers who should have known better. And most of it seemed to me to be driven by some bold hidden agenda: to portray critics of Wilson’s legacy as if they were some imaginary legion of scientific critical race theorists, destined to overtake your curricula, make you and your children sad, and cancel everyone you know and love...

Khan's attack on the Scientific American essay is linked on the word "defend" and, delightfully, Jerry Coyne's predictable defense of Wilson is linked on the words "cancel culture vultures."

Best part of all: 

...along with a surprising number of enablers who should have known better. And most of it seemed to me to be driven by some bold hidden agenda: to portray critics of Wilson’s legacy as if they were some imaginary legion of scientific critical race theorists, destined to overtake your curricula, make you and your children sad, and cancel everyone you know and love...

That may well be a reference to Pinker. The Undark review of his book Rationality notes that Pinker claimed a connection between Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory without bothering to present evidence.

The reason they portray critics of Wilson that way is because they are political operatives, who take money from right-wing racists like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel, and, in Khan's case, Holocaust-denier Ron Unz. None of those living plutocrats is mentioned in Saini's article. They should be.

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