I see Razib Khan was attacking me some more after the Abdel Abdellaoui incident, but he can't be bothered to spell my name right. Demonstrating, no doubt, the same amount of care he puts into his scholarship, which is why, instead of being a real scientist even though Ron Unz funded his education, he's a full-time far-right political operative with a focus on promoting race pseudoscience.
As it turns out, there are lots and lots of "Nancy Mclaren"s.
"Her life does seem really sad."
Well we can't all be living that good life, attending Curtis "democracy is done" Yarvin's wedding like that bon vivant Razib Khan.
The X/Twitter account who said "Her life does seem really sad" manages to combine all the ingredients of far-right wackiness rolled into one: AI, crypto, evo psych, heterodox, IQ and Thiel Fellow.
Trump supporters ranging from mega-investor Bill Ackman to anti-vax influencer Alex Berenson have expressed remorse about their decision to support Trump in November. Some have been harsh: Razib Khan, a geneticist and influential science writer on the right, called himself “r*****ed and wrong” for discounting the risk that Trump would actually do the tariffs.
Richard Hanania, a pundit prominent enough to occasionally swap DMs with Elon Musk on X, has gone the furthest. Last week, he published a lengthy Substack essay explaining why he now believes his reasons for voting Trump were mistaken.
Also (my bold)
Khan was briefly hired to write on the New York Times op-ed page before being dismissed over previous publications in far-right websites. He believes that race is a biological reality, and places this belief at the center of his political identity. “I’m not a lib. Never have been, never will be unless they accept views on race/sex that they’ll never accept,” Khan writes.
My life has certainly had its ups and downs, but fighting race pseudoscience gives me a sense of purpose. I believe I'm doing the right thing by shining a spotlight on the race pseudoscience that infests the field of behavioral genetics.
And if nothing else I can count one of my blessings: at least I didn't grow up to devote my life to race pseudoscience.
But it's not too late Razib Khan, you still have time to turn your life around!
But circumstances force me to write about something else first.
I really thought I made a good enough case that Abdel Abdellaoui and Razib Khan were friends and that behavioral genetics is absolutely lousy with racists.
But apparently Abdellaoui decided I needed more evidence.
Razib Khan, while quoting his friend insulting me, libelously claimed I was "stalking" him. Khan has lied about me like this before. You can't stalk someone by writing about their public statements. Actual stalking is illegal and so falsely claiming someone has stalked you is defamation of character and legally actionable.
But Khan really gets a thrill when someone pays attention to him, he even made a meme about it.
Somebody paid attention to Razib Khan! --------------------------------
But then, the new diagram doesn't mention Khan because he's only a toadie in Kirkegaard's empire.
My focus on the world of race pseudoscience used to be much smaller, but thanks to working on this blog since 2018, I've found I had to expand the scope as I learned more about racist people and organizations not considered officially part of the Intellectual Dark Web, but certainly allied with them, like Kirkegaard and the International Society for Intelligence Research.
But speaking of Emil Kirkegaard - one of his writers, Cremieux - aka Jordan Lasker - jumped in to show his support for Khan.
Lasker, like Khan, is a contributor to Aporia, the media outlet owned by Emil Kirkegaard.
And there's white nationalist Anatoly Karlin chiming in. It appears all the racists hang out together on Twitter.
But probably the very best part of Abdellaoui's attack on me are the racists who jumped on his thread to give him support.
This one is a doozy.
So to reiterate, I did not call Abdellaoui nor his co-authors racists.
I simply pointed out that eight out of the ten co-authors of the Rutherford paper, "Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences," have direct connections to racists - either through co-authoring papers with known racists like Rosalind Arden and Tobias Wolfram, or promoting their work through racist organizations like Quillette, the International Society for Intelligence Research and Razib Khan's podcast.
Although I will say it is truly stunning how Abdel Abdellaoui is not a racist and yet he seems to have so many racist supporters.
I do appreciate all the attention that Abdel Abdellaoui and his racist supporters have given to this series though, my hit rate went through the roof once all the racists got word out that behavioral genetics was being attacked.
Abdellaoui has almost nothing to say about the content of this series. I think this is the only reference to the critique itself, about the use of the term "hereditarian."
Damien Morris, apparently an ally of Abdellaoui, has written for racist Quillette. Is there anybody who writes for Quillette who is not an ally of Abdellaoui?
Abdellaoui can be seen supporting Morris on Twitter. Apparently Morris didn't want to sign a statement of principles that included "opposition to eugenics."
The more I learn about Abdel Abdellaoui, the more it looks like his racist connections are not simply the result of the fact that the field of behavioral genetics is full of racists.
Of course I did expect a vicious response to this series. Rutherford got the ball rolling early by insulting me.
Racists, and those who aid and abet racists, are horrible people, I would expect nothing less than for them to attack me with personal insults and lies and even, in the case of Razib Khan, defamation.
But as I said a few years ago: although my conflict with the Quillette/IDW industrial complex is a war of words, it's still a war and war is hell.
And Razib Khan - if you really don't want me to write about you, get out of the race pseudoscience business and stop working for people like Emil Kirkegaard. If you do that I promise I will never say another public word about you.
Madge the Palmolive-obsessed manicurist is likely only familiar to Americans of a certain age so I will share this video to illustrate her famous phrase: "you're soaking in it."
It was news to me that the Madge actor Jan Miner played that role for thirty freaking years.
Kathryn Paige Harden & Abdel Abdellaoui need to share this with their friend and colleague Razib Khan
Part 5 of this series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" is about the hereditarian belief that we live in a meritocracy and so environmental factors are no longer as significant as genetic causation in determining human socio-economic status and intelligence - as determined by "educational attainment."
I've discovered quite a bit about the Rutherford paper co-authors since I began this series What happened to Adam Rutherford?
And so in this part we will see that there is no person too racist that the authors of the Rutherford paper won't work with them, and no media outlet or organization too racist that they will refuse to use it to advance their careers.
Abdel Abdellaoui - a friend of Razib Khan, according to Khan on the podcast on which Abdellaoui appeared. Abdellaoui signed onto Khan's attack on Scientific American for daring to discuss E. O. Wilson's racism.
The cognitive disconnect is absolutely mind-boggling. Do they think other people won't find out or won't care that they are supportive colleagues of a blatant racist?
This seems to be a thing hereditarians do - publicly declare your opposition to racists and race pseudoscience while working alongside or even promoting racists.
Martin Kolk - can be seen on X/Twitter in October 2024 apparently very annoyed about the fact that Sapiens magazine published an article discussing the possible health repercussions of systemic racism, but I have found the least evidence (so far) of his working directly with racists compared to the other Rutherford paper co-authors.
We know that on average. Blacks score around 15 points lower on IQ type tests than Whites. We know that on average. East Asians score around 7 points higher than Whites on IQ type tests. We do not have any direct evidence that the causes of these differences are genetic. However these differences are fairly stable. We know too that if we invoke socio-economic status and racism as the explanation for lower average test performance, then the same factors should lower the average scores of East Asians wherever they have suffered those privations. But East Asians' average scores do not look that way, even in the presence of those factors. I don't know of any evidence that contradicts the genetic hypothesis but I know of much that supports it.
Comparing the privations of Black Americans to other ethnic groups as if they are exactly equivalent is a favorite race pseudoscience trick that Arden pulls. You can see Aporia ghoul Bo Winegard's brother Ben Winegardtrying the same trick here.
We can reveal that Wolfram has been a member of the closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist who leads the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In January 2024, Wolfram posted the anti-immigrant slogan “we were never asked” in the channel, which is closed to members of the public. He posted again in the same chat in April to criticise a leaflet organising a counter-protest against Martin Sellner in Steyregg, Austria.
So eight of the ten authors of the Rutherford paper have at least one direct connection to a racist person or organization. Let's add it up:
Abdel Abdellaoui - ISIR, Razib Khan
Hilary C. Martin - Razib Khan, Rosalind Arden
Melinda C. Mills - Tobias Wolfram
Michael Muthukrishna - Quillette, Razib Khan
Felix C. Tropf - Tobias Wolfram, ISIR
Karin J. H. Verweij - Guy Madison, Intelligence (journal)
Peter M. Visscher - ISIR, Razib Khan
Brendan P. Zietsch - Rosalind Arden, Geoffrey Miller
I did not examine every one of the hundreds of co-authors that these eight have worked with. If I did, I suspect I'd discover even more racist connections. But I basically just looked for names I had seen elsewhere in connection to race pseudoscience. Even so, it's an impressive number of racist connections.
Now I don't believe Adam Rutherford went out of his way to find co-authors who had racist connections. If anything, he would have sought to avoid those with racist connections. And yet there they are, racist connections.
I think it should be clear that the reason there are so many racist connections is because behavioral genetics is permeated through and through with racists.
And by "racist" I don't mean people who said a bad word once or have bigoted opinions. These are professional, politically motivated racists. Rosalind Arden, Razib Khan, Guy Madison, Geoffrey Miller, Tobias Wolfram, the people who run ISIR, Intelligence and Quillette don't simply want to do science. They want to promote "science" they think will prove their racist beliefs. And we know for certain that Khan and Wolfram have worked for well-funded racists. It's likely others in this list have too. Emil Kirkegaard has a plutocrat-funded organization dedicated to promoting race pseudoscience, especially through behavioral genetics.
And so you cannot have a career as a behavioral geneticist without soaking in racism.
But what about Adam Rutherford? What did happen to Adam Rutherford? I'll get into that after I talk about twin studies in the next part.
Donald Trump declares war on civil rights because "meritocracy" --------------------------------------------------
On page 7 of the Rutherford paper there is a reference to an evolutionary psychologist - you might say the king of evolutionary psychology - David Buss and two references to a racist, Gregory Clark:
A collection of about 15,000 English men’s wills from the sixteenth to the twentieth century showed a positive relationship between men’s income and net fertility in England, with the wealthiest individuals leaving nearly twice as many offspring as the poorest individuals (97, 98.) This was probably influenced by higher child mortality rates in lower-SES groups (98,99) and greater mating opportunities for higher-SES male individuals, as women tend to prefer men with more resources across cultures with different mating systems, different levels of gender equality and different religions (100.)
Reference 100 is to David Buss. It's important to know that the claim that "women tend to prefer men with more resources" comes from the evolutionary psychology belief that women are adaptedby evolution to be more sexually aroused by men with 'more resources.'
..in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").
But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).
During most of the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, English men did not buy women, but since most women had to choose a husband - or have a husband chosen by parents - in the hope that he would financially support her for the rest of her life, a woman (or sometimes just a girl) did not have the luxury of choosing a man primarily for his sexiness or great personality. She had to consider his income level. This is the socio-economic reality that evolutionary psychologists ignore.
Clark infers that before the Industrial Revolution, there must have been a substantial amount of downward mobility from the higher-income groups. They could more than reproduce themselves, but they could not reproduce the same positions of status for all their offspring. Primogeniture would see to that; and in its absence, division of inheritances would have the same effect. Younger sons would have moved into somewhat lower strata of the English income distribution, not into poverty, of course, but below the very upper crust. Along with that inference goes the hypothesis that capacities and dispositions characteristic of upper-income groups became diffused into English society along with their bearers. Among these was the ability and willingness to respond to economic incentives. Clark writes: “Thus we may speculate that England’s advantage lay in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful throughout society in the years 1200–1800.”
Notice, by the way, that “and potentially also genetic.” It, or something like it, recurs throughout successive references by Clark to this key hypothesis. I have no idea whether pecuniary aptitudes and attitudes have a genetic basis or are simply passed on in family and social settings as acceptable norms of behavior. It does not matter a bit for Clark’s argument, but that is a reason to avoid insinuating a possible biological basis for this story without any evidence at all.
"Without any evidence at all" is the basis of hereditarian claims about genetic influence on human social hierarchies. All they have is speculation based on "correlations" none of which prove causation.
But that doesn't stop hereditarians from making bold claims anyway.
Hereditarians refuse to acknowledge the reality of non-genetic causes for human social hierarchies unless it's screamingly obvious. We see that in the case of women's education. Even hereditarians acknowledge that women's educational attainment and careers were once impeded by "societal barriers." But as this cartoon based on the Rutherford paper shows, hereditarians believe that as of 1980, any woman's ability to attain higher education or not is due, more and more, to "genetic influences."
This inability to detect less-obvious sources of environmental impact was on full display in 2005 when Lawrence Summers told the attendees of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP) conference, a conference devoted to diversity in the workplace, that the reason women have less successful careers in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) relative to men was due to their evolutionarily-endowed, genetic tendency to be worse at STEM than men.
Summers' reasoning was that men and women now had equal opportunity and so the most important thing holding back women's careers was their own girly genes.
This is my chance to mention physicist Angela Collier's Youtube channel again. She has an episode Sexual harassment and assault in Astronomy and Physics in which she explains how easy it is for professors to sexually harass their students and get away with it. The harassment has been going on forever but only in the last 10 years has it gotten serious attention and as Collier says, it has driven women out of STEM careers.
But it wasn't obvious, not the way prohibiting women from attending some colleges was, so hereditarians chose to downplay it and many other possible causes for lesser STEM careers.
Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.
This conclusion gives the book a cheery tone, but there are also plenty of nasty conclusions to be drawn. One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.
That is a weakness. Mr Clark is too quick to write off the promise of recent social changes. The oldest Americans born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act are barely 50. Impressive work on the effect of good teaching or well-targeted poverty assistance suggest such programmes make a difference.
The Rutherford paper fully buys into Clark's reasoning on page 2 (my highlight):
As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, bringing increased production, economic growth and social change, a modern, more merit-based socio-economic system began to emerge, transitioning to a new social order that could accommodate an ever-expanding population, while also increasing a visible underclass.
Compared with many pre-industrial socio-economic orders, merit-based hierarchies increase opportunities across the population, allocate talent more efficiently and stimulate progress through competition between people and between firms. The term ‘meritocracy’, however, was originally coined in a negative light in the 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young(24.) This book describes a dystopian future, in which meritocracy has led to a newly stratified society, replacing an aristocracy of birth by an aristocracy of talent, with a disenfranchised lower class of the less meritorious. If behaviours associated with merit (for example, intelligence, persistence and creative talent) are partly heritable, variation in genetics within families could still facilitate social mobility. The enduring accumulation of resources within families, however, could limit this mobility, gradually reverting meritocracy back towards an aristocracy of birth.
Since 1960, two new classes have formed in America that are fundamentally shifting the nature of the society: 1) A New Upper Class, larger than that which preceded it, that is the product of an cognitive meritocracy and increased returns on brains; and 2) a New Lower Class that is the product of—well, he never says....
A great example of the hereditarian inability to detect any but the most obvious inequality is shown in the letter that a man wrote objecting to his daughter's school being too anti-racist. It was strenuously promoted by Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and other members of the racist Intellectual Dark Web
The man wrote (my highlight):
I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction.
That is what American hereditarians believe: ever since civil rights reforms, there is no systemic racism in the United States of America. In spite of easily obtainable data that says otherwise.
Abdel Abdellaoui's friend Razib Khan mocked the idea that systemic racism exists.
So how could it be that Black Americans are doing poorly compared to Whites if "We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s"
Hereditarians have the answer: they have bad genes. It makes perfect sense according to the logic of the hypothesis of survival of the smartest and most diligent.
And the hereditarian assumption has always been that once DNA testing is sophisticated enough, it will prove that Black people have deficient genes. And hereditarians never doubt DNA testing will prove it one day even in spite of the missing heritability problem.
Charles Murray was mocked on Twitter for all the times he has predicted hereditarian victory.
Hereditarians don't expect they might be surprised by genetic evidence. This is best illustrated by the exchange between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris, when Harris was defending "The Bell Curve" (my highlight):
Ezra Klein
James Flynn just said to me two days ago that it is consistent with the evidence that there is a genetic advantage or disadvantaged for African Americans. That it is entirely possible that the 10-point IQ difference we see reflects a 12-point environmental difference and a negative-two genetic difference.
Sam Harris
Sure, sure, many things are possible. We’re trying to judge on what is plausible to say and, more important, I am worried about the social penalty for talking about these things, because, again, it will come back to us on things that we don’t expect, like the Neanderthal thing. That comes out of left field. Had it gone another way, all of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.
Klein is pointing out that according to James Flynn, it is possible that the environment has been so hostile to Black Americans that it has reduced a two point Black genetic advantage over whites.
It's worth noting that Klein tells Harris he doesn't consider Andrew Sullivan a racist. This is because the bar for an hereditarian to be declared a racist is very high, no matter how strongly their views come from racists or a racist tradition nor how much they personally promote the careers of racists.
Steven Pinker - the very raison d'être of this blog - is living proof of that.
Sam Harris does not think it's plausible because the hereditarian tradition for hundreds of years has been to assume that Black people are intellectually inferior to White people and at the very least, White people are a little bit genetically smarter than Black people. This is the founding premise of all hereditarian research, very much including behavioral genetics. They absolutely expect to discover a genetic underpinning for Black socio-economic inferiority. They consider it plausible.
...a pernicious movement endangers this foundational principle, seeking to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement. A key tool of this movement is disparate-impact liability, which holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.
But Adam Rutherford is British and the co-authors of the Rutherford paper are all associated with institutions in Europe, Australia or the UK. Critics of the Rutherford paper wondered on Bluesky if there were specific cultural influences - a different sensitivity and a blindness to classism - when discussing the cartoon version of the paper.
This is why genetics has played such an important role in the dismantling of a scientific justification of race and understanding racism itself. And it's why the latest statement from Trump's White House is troubling many in the scientific community.
Trump frequently speaks about aspects of genetics to make political points. One view that he has expressed repeatedly is that some people, and predictably himself, are genetically superior. "You have good genes, you know that, right?" he said in September 2020 to a rally in Minnesota – a state that is more than 80% white. "You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota."
Similarly, in the successful 2024 campaign, he denounced immigrants as having "bad genes". It's hard for someone who studies genes – and the strange and sometimes troubling history of genetics – to understand even what might constitute a "bad" or "good" gene.
Ours may be a pernicious history, but the trajectory of genetics has been one that tends towards progress, and equity for all, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
But as we have seen, it's not as simple as that.
Hereditarians maintain that once we have removed official discriminatory policies therefore we are now living in a gene-expressing meritocracy and therefore:
a. once women have unhindered access to college after 1980, their educational attainment is primarily due to their genes; and
b. if people don't move out of their old coal mining town it's because they have the wrong genetic variants.
Per the Rutherford paper's claim: "People with genetic variants that make it easier for them to get a better education are more likely to move to better neighbourhoods, whereas the people left behind are in worse living circumstances with higher mortality rates and greater risk for health problems such as obesity, diabetes (87) and infectious diseases. "
It's impossible that Rutherford & company could fail to see how easily this could be applied to Black Americans, since there are no longer official policies keeping them from moving to better neighborhoods.
I think I've established that if it isn't official, it doesn't count to hereditarians. Yet it still happens.
I think it's because the other pillar of hereditarian thought, along with the assumed intellectual superiority of Whites over Blacks is an assumption of the intellectual superiority of men over women. I predict that hereditarians will not write papers on the genetic influence of the educational attainment of women compared to men, because they don't consider it plausible.
So you will never see this cartoon explaining an hereditarian paper.
But if socio-economic status and/or educational attainment are genetic why do the Rutherford hereditarians only apply it to some groups, like women or the British underclass. Why not race? And after all, several of the Rutherford paper references are racists and some Rutherford paper authors have worked with racists.
I think it's a public relations move, every bit as much as it was for E. O. Wilson's sociobiology when it was rebranded as evolutionary psychology and its leading advocates declared "there is no such thing as race."
And it's important to note that this no-race brand of evolutionary psychology did not last for some adherents.
Steven Pinker, referred to as an advocate of evolutionary psychology on his Wikipedia page, and better known than David Buss (although these days Pinker's real portfolio is international Great Man of Science and Politics) migrated from standard evolutionary psychology to race-based hereditarianism, although he is sly enough to avoid declaring it outright, preferring instead to spend the past quarter century promoting a parade of hereditarian racists from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Richard Hanania.
Pinker certainly believes that race is a biological fact, giving a speech in around 2013 in which he declared that to deny biological race was to deny reality itself.
So for some there is no conflict with being an advocate of evolutionary psychology and believing in the biology of race. And as we have seen, the Rutherford paper has no problem using evolutionary psychology to support its claims.
Kathryn Paige Harden, whom Rutherford admires, and whom Razib Khan considers a friend, acknowledged Khan in her book "The Genetic Lottery," saying she benefitted from conversations with him.
I think it's clear that hereditarians cannot be disentangled from racists.
In part 6 I will summarize how much Rutherford and all his co-authors are soaking in racism.
I recently came across this example of Razib Khan celebrating the pecuniary advantage of grifting via reddit.
It's a few years old but I'm sure Razib Khan has the same attitude now - that getting rich from grifting is a wonderful thing and the only reason people hate grifters like Jesse Singal and Razib Khan is because they make so much money.
But unless there is an audit of subscriber accounts on Substack there's no evidence, and even if there was evidence, I'm sure Singal, Khan and all the other awful grifters would simply keep telling themselves that they are earning so much money because - except for the soreheads who hate them for being rich - so many people love them.
Now, could there be something in the genetic makeup of hereditarians that makes them attack anybody who dares to question their claims? I don't think it's genetic, I think it's social. I think they believe they are on the path to Great Man of Science status. Hell, Rutherford is at least halfway there, he's had many TV shows in England.
And who am I to dare question these Great Men? I certainly don't have my own TV show.
And not only Abdelloaui - two other co-authors of the Rutherford paper agreed to sign on to racist Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American for daring to discuss E. O. Wilson's racism: Hilary Martin and Peter M. Visscher.
Rutherford tweeted an acknowledgement of Wilson's racism (see above.) I wonder if he had any discussions with Abdellaoui, Martin or Visscher about their support for Razib Khan's campaign against Scientific American. But I doubt it. These hereditarians seem remarkably incurious about the racism-adjacent activities of the people they work with.
Since I posted Part 3, Abdellaoui has blocked me on Bluesky. This is how hereditarians deal with questions about their claims: they refuse to discuss them.
In 2016, David S. Moore and David Shenk recommended that "heritability" no longer be used to discuss human behavioral genetics in their paper "The heritability fallacy" (my highlight) :
The term‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.
Nobody paid any attention to them. Certainly not the authors of the Rutherford paper who write (my highlight):
The considerable heritability of intelligence—that is, the extent to which genetic differences explain individual differences within a population—and its increase from childhood (about 0.43) to adulthood (about 0.65) have become among the most replicated findings in twin research...
But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.
Plomin is one of the sources used in the Rutherford paper.
Turkheimer could be seen on Twitter arguing with Kathryn Paige Harden, another source for the Rutherford paper, over the term. Turkheimer notes that one of Harden's authorities is Visscher, one of the co-authors of the Rutherford paper. (I mention him above, he was one of the signatories of racist Razib Khan's defense of racist E. O. Wilson.) In a paper co-written by Visscher, Heritability in the genomics era—concepts and misconceptions, the description says: Heritability allows a comparison of the relative importance of genes and environment to the variation of traits within and across populations.
It's striking that even people who are involved professionally with the term "heritability" don't agree on the definition. It's not surprising that those of us outside the field find it hard to understand.
But Rutherford certainly does want his claims to be understood which is why he commissioned a cartoon based on his paper. And the cartoon explains exactly what the hereditarians believe: that we live in a meritocracy now and so anybody who is doing poorly has only their genes to blame.
This is a belief shared by many racists, including Andrew Sullivan and Charles Murray. More about that in part 5.
