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| This should have been a clue about Rutherford Kathryn Paige Harden has promoted the career of hereditarian racist Razib Khan, seen here celebrating the wedding of extreme racist Curtis Yarvin. |
I'm sure if I continued to look I'd find even more connections between some of the authors and racists.
Oops, I did it again.
Tobias Wolfram, who co-authored a paper with Rutherford co-author Felix C. Tropf (mentioned in Part 2) - actually multiple papers - is a member of Jonathan Anomaly's genetic business (discussed further below and in the HOPE not Hate article The Superbaby Factory.)
I'm pretty good at spotting hereditarian racist names on sight, as a benefit, if you can call it that, of spending the past six and a half years tracking them, especially since I created a spreadsheet of attendees of ISIR annual meetings.
So I can't help noticing, just scanning down the References section of the Rutherford paper, the many hereditarian and even racist names there are, including David Buss, Kathryn Paige Harden, Francis Galton, Robert Plomin, Thomas. J. Bouchard, James J. Lee, R. A. Fisher and Gregory Clark. Clark is cited twice. The Economist noted:
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.
Clark "may not be a racist" - but I don't know how you could fail to understand that racism is the foundation of Clark's beliefs.
As I've demonstrated in the many years of tracking them, you can't swing a dead cat in a group of hereditarians without hitting some racists.
The recent article in Undark, In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views subtitled In an era of open data, genome-wide association studies have become entangled with efforts to prove Black inferiority noted (my highlights):
...when the educational attainment GWAS published in Nature Genetics in 2018, with Lee as the first author, it created a stir. At a website run by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, the authors shared detailed data known as summary statistics that allowed anyone with enough technical savvy to calculate polygenic scores for the datasets of their choosing. Scholars from an array of disciplines took notice, repurposing the data to see how well educational attainment polygenic scores predicted not just academic prowess, but related characteristics such as social mobility, political participation, and intelligence.
(According to a recent report, at least one company is now using polygenic scores to screen IVF embryos for intelligence.)
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| If Kirkegaard approves, you've done something wrong. |
The article was so kind to Kirkegaard, that Kirkegaard expressed his approval of the article on Twitter.
Which is why my work here is never done.
*** sigh ***
Kirkegaard can also be seen mocking Abdel Abdellaoui for saying that Kirkegaard is not on his team, but is that really true? I think hereditarians have more in common than not.
We know that Abdellaoui has appeared on Razib Khan's podcast, where Khan referred to Abdelloaui as "a friend" and we know that Razib Khan has worked for Emil Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi network.
Hereditarians go through some impressive mental gymnastics to disassociate themselves from racists.
A favorite tactic of hereditarians, when you point out that they are soaking in racism, is to claim you are using the logical fallacy "guilt by association." It's an absolute favorite of Steven Pinker. No matter how many racists and racist organizations - even Neo Nazi organizations Steven Pinker has promoted for at least the past twenty-five years, and no doubt will continue to promote, I expect he will go to his grave screaming "guilt by association."
Two things about the Undark quote I highlighted above:
The first highlight demonstrates how certain hereditarians are that "educational attainment" is directly connected to intelligence. I know the passage mentions "social mobility" and "political participation" too. But for hereditarians, those things are related to intelligence, because everything is related to intelligence and intelligence is always genetic, in spite of the reflexive "of course the environment matters a bit" admission of the less shameless hereditarians.
The reason they are so obsessed with "educational attainment," I believe, is because it's much easier to get data on the educational attainment of large groups of people, than to get data for intelligence test scores of large groups of people, since in many countries educating children is mandated by law, while intelligence tests are not.
And the belief that educational attainment is related to intelligence has existed in hereditarian-land since at least Arthur Jensen and The Bell Curve - and the International Society for Intelligence Research was founded by people who agree with Arthur Jensen and The Bell Curve.
It is worth pointing out, however, that equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve. We can move in the direction of equalizing opportunities with carefully crafted redistributive policies. But even egalitarians who understand human nature, such as the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, know that we cannot truly equalize opportunities because people are born with unequal traits that are at least partially caused by different outcomes in a “genetic lottery.” We can make society open to talent, but we cannot distribute talent equally.
Social inequality is an inherently societal phenomenon driven by cultural, structural, economic, political and technological forces, although, as we show here, it is also associated with genetic variation. Although behavioural genetics research is actively examining the relationship between genetics and SES (8), most studies within the broader social sciences aiming to understand social inequalities tend to focus on societal factors (6,9.) By not including genetic effects, these studies omit a substantially contributing force that may be increasing in importance due to recent societal changes. When acknowledging these genetic effects, however, it is important to tread with caution. Recent history has shown that attempts to control the genetic make-up of populations—in the form of eugenics—can result in serious violations of human rights, including limiting access to edu-cation and labour markets, involuntary sterilization, infanticide, and genocide (10–12.)
SES means "Socio-Economic Status."
The line "By not including genetic effects, these studies omit a substantially contributing force that may be increasing in importance due to recent societal changes" has a faint echo of Harden comparing skeptics of hereditarianism to bank robbers:
The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences… Is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong.
A writer in the white supremacist American Renaissance approved of that comparison.
A curious thing about the reference to eugenics, in the Rutherford paper, as pointed out by clinical psychologist Jay Joseph - it says nothing about the fact that the eugenicists were wrong, scientifically.
It is important to note here that Harden does not, in fact, study the question of how genes produce social outcomes. Frustrated by the slow progress of assigning clear social results to scientists' ever-more-complicated understanding of how genes operate, the behavior geneticists have simply skipped over the whole "how" business. Harden's work, Lewis-Kraus explained, relies on the use of the GWAS—genome-wide association study—in which computation is used "to identify hundreds or even thousands of places in the genome where differences in our DNA sequence could be correlated with a trait or an outcome.""[E]ven if researchers don't fully understand what they're learning, this is how the genome is used now," an unnamed population geneticist told Lewis-Kraus.Here's how Lewis-Kraus described Harden's own account of the tool she uses to address the most loaded social questions of our time:
GWAS simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular society at a particular time.....GWAS results are not "portable"; a study conducted on white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria.
That is, the genome makes people unequal, but it does so by an unclear mechanism, the effects of which are contingent on a person's social position in a particular time and place. Yet the reader was supposed to share Harden's regret or bafflement that Darity, a scholar of the material processes of racial inequality, would be hostile to her work.Meanwhile, here was Harden, in an email to Lewis-Kraus, putting a precise number on the effects of visible discrimination:
Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we've only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.
Those numbers may sound low to those of us who attended underfunded public schools. Is three quarters of the difference in educational outcomes between my Aberdeen (Maryland) High School Class of '89 and the Phillips Andover Academy Class of '89 really due to our lower-quality germ plasm?But Harden's message, the theory behind hereditarian leftism, is that there is no reason to believe that the effort to find inborn inequalities between people should lead to greater social inequality. Kraus-Lewis wrote, "Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort."This is the disclaimer that Murray and Herrnstein attached to The Bell Curve, in a pose of political neutrality. If we decide we know that some people are naturally disadvantaged at school and in our education-based system of economic opportunity, who is to say that our society won't decide to help those people out more, to make up for it?At least Murray and Herrnstein knew they were being cynical about this. Harden and her fellow hereditarian leftists seem to believe in phrenology as a neutral tool, an absurd position for self-styled empiricists to take. We have a long, detailed record of what happens when the skull calipers come out, and it's never an advance in equal treatment of all...
...offers polygenic embryo screening and is a more advanced statistical analysis of the genomic sequence of fertilised embryos before they are implanted during IVF. In effect, it lets parents — who might typically generate 10 embryos during IVF treatment — select which one will be the likeliest to have certain traits. Of all the traits that PolygenX can identify, IQ was described by Tobias Wolfram to our undercover reporter as “basically the starting point of the company”.
In their review of Harden's book, Anne O'Connor (PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology), Brenna M. Henn, an associate professor of population genetics, Emily Klancher Merchant, assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies, and Tina Rulli, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Davis note the connection between Harden's and Jensen's views on educational attainment (my highlight):
DNA PLAYS A major role, indeed a starring role, in generating socioeconomic inequality in the United States, according to Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas. In her provocative new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, she contends that our genes predispose us to getting more or less education, which then largely determines our place in the social order. This argument isn’t new. It has appeared perhaps most notoriously in Arthur Jensen’s infamous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review (“How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?”) and in The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, published in 1994.
They also identify the slippery divide between genes and environment as described by behavioral geneticists (my highlight):
Harden expects that, as GWAS samples grow, the polygenic index will become more predictive, but exactly how it predicts educational attainment is not at all straightforward. Consider how Harden chooses to present the 10–15 percent figure, making it account for educational attainment through biological mechanisms. She tells her readers that the genes involved are expressed preferentially in our brains, where they increase the bearer’s intelligence, executive function, grit, and perseverance — the cognitive and non-cognitive skills rewarded in our educational system and labor market. What Harden doesn’t tell us is that these genes are also “expressed” in our environments. People with higher polygenic indices for educational attainment are both more likely to be raised by parents with higher socioeconomic status and to go to well-funded schools. A study of adoptees suggests that about half of the effect of the polygenic index operates through these indirect mechanisms. Harden acknowledges this complex causality, demonstrating that small differences early in life lead to children being placed into environments that magnify those differences. For her, these are all genetic causes because, with different genes, we also would experience different environments. By identifying social mechanisms as “genetic,” Harden is naturalizing them, attributing the inequality they produce to the individuals who benefit from or are harmed by them rather than to the policies and practices that privilege some genotypes over others.
A favorite tactic of hereditarians since the days of Henry E. Garett is to claim that critics of hereditarianism only care about moral/political issues not scientific ones. In their New York Review of Books piece, M.W. Feldman, Professor of Biology and Jessica Riskin, Professor of History note Harden pulling the same tactic with the hereditarian bête noire (along with Stephen Jay Gould), the late Richard Lewontin:
Such talk of entanglements and braids is misleading, implying that genetics and environment are discrete strands, when in fact living things are in continual interaction with their environments in ways that transform both at every level. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin used the concept of the “reaction norm”—a curve expressing the relation between genotype and phenotype as a function of the environment—to describe this interaction and its implications. Lewontin showed that since the relationship between genotype and phenotype depends on the environment in which the phenotype is measured, one can’t infer genetic causes from correlation and regression calculations. Harden mentions Lewontin as a critic of behavioral genetics, but she implies that he didn’t approve of the field simply on ideological grounds. She never mentions or engages with his substantive refutation of the core assumption that genetic and environmental causes of behavior are separable.
The review describes the weakness of GWAS-based hereditarian claims (my highlights):
Explaining how social scientists make genome-wide association studies and polygenic scores, Harden writes:
Correlations between individual SNPs and a phenotype are estimated in a “Discovery GWAS” with a large sample size…. Then, a new person’s DNA is measured. The number of minor alleles (0, 1, or 2) in this individual’s genome is counted for each SNP, and this number is weighted by the GWAS estimate of the correlation between the SNP and the phenotype, yielding a polygenic index.
This alphabet soup in the passive voice implies that no one actively does all this estimating, measuring, counting, weighting, correlating—or that these are such technical processes that any human presence in them is irrelevant. But people are making interpretive decisions at every stage: how to define a phenotype and select people to represent it, how to count these people, which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate them. Interpretive decisions are of course essential to all science, but here there are a great many opinions dressed up in facts’ clothing. “This polygenic index will be normally distributed,” Harden continues, now disguising an assumption—that there are intrinsic cognitive and personality traits whose distribution in a population follows a bell-shaped curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—as an objective fact. Harden then tells us that “a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes.” All these trappings of scientific objectivity notwithstanding, a polygenic index “captures” differences in educational outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s Summertime painting captures the season: as a reflection of its creator’s radically subjective view of things (which is just fine for abstract expressionism).
If you find a magical hammer that, whenever you swing it, rewards you with funding and professional advancement, you look at your research area and see nothing but nails. Genome-wide association studies are the social sciences’ new magical hammer. Macular degeneration seems plausibly to be a nail: genomic analysis revealed two sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that were importantly associated with having the disease. Schizophrenia appears not to be a nail, though it might have some structural features a hammer could help with. The things social scientists have been swinging at aren’t just non-nails. They are to nails as ships to sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To suggest that macular degeneration has genetic causes is to make an empirically testable proposal; to suggest that “grit” or “openness to experience” has genetic causes is to make a category mistake. These are interpretive descriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and practices, not molecules.
But as we've seen with the Rutherford paper, the weakness of their claims does not stop hereditarians from promoting the hell out of the "magical hammer" in exactly the same way that Steven Pinker and Nicholas Wade did not wait for the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" hypothesis to be proven - or even tested - before promoting it via the New York Times and through lectures.
Hereditarians have plenty of motivation to claim to wield the nice kind of calipers: it could damage their careers if they are found to be too racist, as Razib Khan discovered (probably why he hates NYTimes op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie so much) and as Jonathan Anomaly complains in his SLAPP lawsuit against the Rational Media Foundation for their Rational Wiki entry on Anomaly:
131.In October 2021, Dr. Anomaly was under consideration for a teaching position at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Dr. Anomaly underwent a series of job interviews for the position, over the internet via videoconference. Faculty members responsible for making a hiring determination regarded Dr. Anomaly as an outstanding candidate, and he was advanced to the final round of interviews.132.During the final interview, one of the faculty members conducting the interview began searching Google for Dr. Anomaly’s name, and was exposed the RationalWiki article about him. Despite the other faculty members responsible for the determination all wishing to hire Dr. Anomaly, the faculty member who was exposed to the RationalWiki article objected so strongly that Dr. Anomaly was withdrawn from consideration for the position.133.Dr. Anomaly’s business and academic opportunities continue to be placed in jeopardy (exactly as they were when he interviewed with Lingnan University) as a result of the RationalWiki article and its appearance in Google search results, causing Dr. Anomaly ongoing financial damages as well as mental anguish and suffering.
According to the HOPE not Hate article: (my highlights)
In late 2023, HOPE not hate’s undercover reporter posed as a potential customer in the process of beginning IVF with his partner, and was quoted a price of $50,000 to use PolygenX. He was referred by Malcolm and Simone, the American pronatalist couple and had several meetings with company leaders. Our infiltrator met Jonathan Anomaly, who is described in one of his books as the company’s co-founder; the CEO Michael Christensen; and Tobias Wolfram, who was introduced as the Chief Science Officer. They told our reporter that at PolygenX, they had invented an extraordinary product.
More about Tobias Wolfram: (my highlights)
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.
In response to HOPE no hate’s findings, Wolfram’s representatives told us that he “vehemently denies being associated with the ‘far-right’, rather he considers himself a libertarian”. His representatives furthermore told us that Wolfram was unaware that he had been posting in Martin Sellner’s private chat group on Telegram. They added: “Immediately upon realising that the post was on Mr Sellner’s channel, Mr Wolfram removed it.”
So why do hereditarians, the ones who sincerely consider themselves anti-racist, work with and aid and abet racists so often?
Well, unfortunately now in our country we're living in a time that's profoundly anti-science. We have many government heads and important agencies who are overtly anti-science. I don't understand it, but it's not good. And it's not good in general for for many scientific things and for the kind of things we're talking about here, which are kind of far out. Not many people are talking about manipulating genes that raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation, and to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or or racism or or or or something like that.
