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| Emil Kirkegaard has no comments so far about the Undark article - maybe because he's too busy collaborating with Razib Khan on Twitter -------------------------------------------------------- |
The piece is called In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views by Ashley Smart.
The Pinkerite shout-out section starts by mentioning one of the plaintiffs suing Rational Wiki, Russell T. Warne:
Warne, who also spoke at the (2024 ISIR) conference and live posted on X during the proceedings, shared and then deleted a post announcing Kirkegaard’s talk. (Warne told Undark an ISIR board member asked him to delete the post.) According to an image capture shared by the blog Pinkerite, Kirkegaard gave his affiliation as The Arthur Jensen Institute — an organization that, if it exists, does not appear to have an institutional website.
They neglect to mention that I also provide an archive of the Russell T. Warne tweet that originally displayed the image.
I'm glad to see my site has been of use to a journalist, since that is the raison d'être for Pinkerite, as I discuss here.
This was new to me: James J. Lee, a board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research, given a half-million dollars by the ISIR's support organization Institute of Mental Chronometry, was a protege of Steven Pinker.
One of Kirkegaard’s earliest speaking appearance at ISIR, according to conference programs, came in 2017 in Montreal, where he presented a poster that examined relationships between cognitive ability and genetic ancestry among self-identified African Americans and Hispanic Americans.Also in Montreal that year was an assistant professor of psychology from the University of Minnesota, James Lee. A protege of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Lee had become a key player in the development of GWAS, which were breaking new ground in the study of the genetics of intelligence.
Warne is mentioned elsewhere in the article:
Studies with larger, more genetically diverse databases will yield polygenic scores that apply more generally across different racial groups, noted Warne in a 2021 article that suggested that Asian and White Americans, on average, are genetically predisposed to have higher IQs than Hispanic and Black Americans.
Oh Russell T. Warne, you gigantic racist with your IQ testing service.
The article implicates J. D. Vance in the racism. And Musk, but of course Musk is already known as a racist and neo-Nazi.
In November, on the heels of President Donald Trump’s reelection, Kirkegaard shared a blog post that featured an image of a red baseball cap emblazoned, in Trumpian fashion, with the words “Make Science Great Again.” In it, he petitioned the incoming administration to “remove all pro-affirmative action laws and regulations.” He boasted that then Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance follows — and tech-entrepreneur-turned-Trump-adviser Elon Musk interacts with — the anonymous X account @cremieuxrecueil, which has frequently shared posts asserting that Black Americans, as a group, are less intelligent than their White counterparts and occasionally spun that into arguments against diversity and affirmative action. Reporting from The Guardian links the account to a graduate student named Jordan Lasker, who has previously spoken at ISIR and frequently collaborated with Kirkegaard. (Lasker did not respond to an email from Undark asking for confirmation that he runs the account.)
I was pleased to see ISIR getting so much attention for its association with racists and neo-Nazis, but I don't think the article gives enough of a sense of how extreme Emil Kirkegaard is, and doesn't mention Human Diversity Foundation by name, only mentioning the Hope not Hate article about Kirkegaard with a link.
But speaking of Kirkegaard, another one of his colleagues/employees has filed a lawsuit against Rational Wiki, Jonatan Pallesen.
More and more it looks like a a huge coordinated SLAPP scheme.
