So I wasn't surprised to see hereditarian Gregory Cochran, one of the co-authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis - now coming up on 20 years since it was published but never tested and never proven - was praising the hereditarian claims of Abdel Abdellaoui.
Abdel Abdellaoui and colleagues recent put out a paper on genetics and social stratification in Great Britain. Among other things, they found that polygenic scores of educational attainment were lower in seriously economically depressed areas, such as coal mining towns – and that this depression has increased with time. The smarter people are going where the better paying jobs are.
There it is - educational attainment is assumed to be genetic - and low educational attainment equals stupidity.
Cochran considers Abdellaoui's work a triumph for hereditarianism - and of course race pseudoscience - my highlight:
Note that this effect happens even among a single ethnic group. So you see a surprisingly large number of National Merit scholars at Los Alamos High School or Oak Ridge High School – or Cocoa Beach, back during the Apollo project. The effect shows up in university towns, in particular neighborhoods of cities where people with higher average smarts cluster, etc.This is all obvious, and everybody has seen it. But if you are a real anti-hereditarian, every example has to be explained by some environmental advantage ( none of which we can find). Los Alamos and Oak Ridge must be secretly bathing the kids in N-rays, while the meals served to the kids in the Chicago Public School system must be enriched with lead.To a true anti-hereditarian, every day is fresh & new & surprising, because hardly anything happens as they expect.
Fun fact: a paper co-authored by Abdellaoui cites Harpending and Cochran as well as Gregory Clark. Clark who believes that Black Americans have failed to thrive due to their genetics, has been known as an influence on Harpending and Cochran.
This belief that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence probably comes directly from Arthur Jensen's paper that claimed Black Americans during the later decades of Jim Crow were mentally inferior to white Americans. This is most likely why he named his organization, which received money from the racist Pioneer Fund "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences." Black and white educational differences, is what he meant.
The organization's name was changed to the Institute of Mental Chronometry which still exists today, giving money to the ISIR for support services for its annual meetings, and giving half a million dollars to two hereditarian researchers (and members of the ISIR board) Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker's protege (per this Undark article) James J. Lee.
I've mentioned Abdel Abdellaoui here before.
But I don't think there is really much difference in the views held by Kirkegaard and Abdellaoui - they are after all, both hereditarians. I think Abdellaoui kicked up a fuss because he was embarrassed by Kirkegaard's lack of academic credentials and unsavory reputation. And Kirkegaard was back at the ISIR meeting in 2024 anyway, so a lot of good that did him.
Probably because Kirkegaard has plenty of supporters in the ISIR and likely Kirkegaard has donated some money to them, considering he has all that Pioneer Fund and racist plutocrat cash, per the article Race Science Inc. by HOPE not hate.
In spite of the ISIR being unable to quit Neo-Nazi Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui has been ISIR's guy, seen in this tweet image from 2020, being promoted by the ISIR X/Twitter account, supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin.
Abdellaoui was also described as a "friend" by Razib Khan when Abdellaoui appeared on Khan's podcast. Khan was last seen on this blog in a photo where he is celebrating ultra-racist ghoul Curtis Yarvin's wedding.
OK so Abdellaoui is a friend of hereditarian Razib Khan, he's promoted by the hereditarian ISIR while supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin and his work is promoted by hereditarian Gregory Cochran who celebrates the work explicitly because it is hereditarian.
So a great big hereditarian cluster-munch, no big surprise.
And Adam Rutherford, who is a huge "science populariser" in England, and whom I have admired a lot for years was hated by Gregory Cochran. They even exchanged insults on Twitter (with Cochran joining in with hereditarian Geoffrey Miller seen here commenting at Neo-Nazi Aporia.)
So Rutherford is an anti-hereditarian, right?
Except then he started promoting this cartoon on his Bluesky account that he created with hereditarian Abdel Abdellaoui. And I was following Rutherford on Bluesky.
I engaged with Rutherford about his cartoon's hereditarianism and his co-author's hereditarianism and it was not a pleasant experience, as you can see in the image at the very top of this post.
I never found out exactly why Rutherford thought my skeet or my blog post - it wasn't clear which - was "garbage." Rutherford's response to my questions and comments was to be flippant or dismissive of me - which I guess is understandable, since I'm nobody.
But he was the same way to various scientists and academics who skeeted at him to criticize his work, including David Sepkoski who co-authored a stellar piece with Mark Borrello in the New York Review on the racism of E. O. Wilson.
...In their hurry to defend Wilson, the signatories of the letter may not have realized the past involvement of its author, science blogger Razib Khan, with alt-right and white nationalist publications like The Unz Review and the Internet forum VDARE. When some learned of Khan’s background and withdrew their names, it brought a fresh round of outrage on social media and in popular science blogs.
The unwitting alliance between members of the scientific establishment and fringe proponents of race science, the defensive posturing of hereditarian biologists, and the general reluctance to critically engage with Wilson’s legacy and questions of racism in science are perennial features of the decades-long “nature vs. nurture” debate. Wilson’s defenders have frequently alleged that his critics are motivated merely by ideology, and challenge Wilson’s detractors to produce evidence that would demonstrate that sociobiology or hereditarian theories of innate human ability are racist. So, like good historians, we decided to delve into Wilson’s past. We found, independently, what other researchers have recently corroborated—that between 1987 and 1994, Wilson engaged in a lengthy and revealing correspondence with a notorious race scientist named J. Philippe Rushton, in which he more openly associated his own scientific ideas with racialized views of human ability than he ever did publicly.
It must be noted that Abdel Abdellaoui signed on to Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American's article that dared to mention E. O. Wilson's indisputable racism. But I don't think in his case it was "unwitting."
