What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 2 - the NHAI and ISIR connections

I was a big fan of Adam Rutherford in part because he is a harsh critic of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost 20 years.) 

The NHAI paper, published by racist Gregory Cochran and white nationalist Henry Harpending, basically said that Ashkenazi Jews became smart because they were selected for intelligence through their work as money changers. Or as hereditarian Nicholas Wade put it: "The adaptation of Jews to capitalism..."

Rutherford's paper that this cartoon is based on, Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences, has a different methodology from the one described in the NHAI paper but the claims are strikingly similar: the intelligence of a group of people is connected to their way of making a living. And as the illustration explicitly states, success and status is clustered through their genes.

Rutherford would not explain how his paper's brain->business conclusion was different from the one in the NHAI even though his business is "science popularizer." 

Now as we saw in What happened to Adam Rutherford Part 1, an underlying belief of hereditarians, in this case "behavioral geneticists" is that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence, a belief that has been around since at least the days of Arthur Jensen.

So let's look at who wrote the Rutherford paper. 

There are ten authors: Abdel Abdellaoui, Hilary C. Martin, Martin Kolk, Adam Rutherford, Michael Muthukrishna, Felix C. Tropf, Melinda C. Mills, Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij & Peter M. Visscher. 

Out of those ten, three of them have participated in annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). 

The ISIR was founded to promote the hereditarian - and racist - beliefs of Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. Each year it has an annual meeting and each meeting always includes presentations by racists and even neo-Nazis like Emil Kirkegaard.

Abdellaoui attended two ISIR meetings, in 2021 and 2022. His presentation in 2021 was Socio-economic status: A social construct with genetic consequences, which appears to be a version of the current Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper under discussion. His presentation in 2022 was Gene-environment correlations across geographic regions affect genome-wide association studies.

Also at the meeting in 2021 was Michael A. Woodley of Menie who became notorious the next year thanks to the New York Times running an article about him entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting. It seems that the racist Buffalo mass-murderer had cited Woodley's work in his manifesto. 

Although it was really unfair to single out Woodley - several participants in ISIR meetings were cited by the killer, including Thomas Bouchard, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Donald Temple, Tatu Vanhanen and Charles Murray.

The 2022 meeting Abdellaoui attended, while it did not officially platform Emil Kirkegaard thanks to Abdellaoui, it did platform Gregory Clark who believes black American failure to thrive is due to inferior black American genes, and Heiner Rindermann, who has written for Kirkegaard's Mankind Quarterly and co-authored a paper with Michael Woodley of Menie, as well as other racist activities.

Felix C. Tropf gave a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting with Tobias Wolfram called 250 words written at age eleven predict intelligence and final educational attainment close to expert assessment. 

I told you these hereditarians are obsessed with "educational attainment." 

Great big racists who gave presentations at the 2023 meeting included Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Richard Haier and Gregory Clark. And then there was Steven Pinker. 

I remember how excited people associated with the Neo-Nazi Substack Aporia were about that conference, held in Berkeley - Aporia even published videos about it. Many hard-core racists show up in these videos including Razib Khan, Gavin Tredoux, Edward Dutton and Gregory Clark.

Peter M. Visscher has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2015 and 2021. In 2021 Visscher presented with many others "Polygenic prediction within and between families from a 3-million-person GWAS of educational attainment."

There's that educational attainment again.

One of the contributors to the paper was the "23andMe Research Team," in case you were wondering whether 23 and Me was run by hereditarians.

I've already talked about the racists at the 2021 meeting, so let's talk about the racists at the other meeting Visscher attended in 2015. His paper was "THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND LIFESPAN IS MOSTLY GENETIC." Several of the co-authors are ISIR bigwigs: Ian J. Deary and Matt McGue and Rosalind Arden,  who defended Linda Gottfredson in far-right racist Quillette. One of the authors of the Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper, Hilary C. Martin, co-authored a paper with Arden.

Hardcore racists that year included Alice Dreger (also known for her anti-trans views) Aurelio Jose Figueredo, Linda Gottfredson Richard Haier (Gottfredson and Haier are also ISIR bigwigs) and yes, Emil Kirkegaard. 

And Steven Pinker.

So besides the fact that some authors of the Rutherford paper share the belief that "educational attainment" represents intelligence, and have a very high tolerance for rubbing shoulders with Neo-Nazis, right-wing political operatives and racists, what is actually wrong with their paper?

I'll talk about that in Part 3.