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| Donald Trump declares war on civil rights because "meritocracy" -------------------------------------------------- |
So in part 4 we talked about how hereditarians misuse the term "heritability." Now lets talk about how they promote the belief that we live in a 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 adapted by evolution to be more sexually aroused by men with 'more resources.'
This belief is most clearly demonstrated by Buss's claim about Turkmen women, described by David Buller in his book Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. The first paragraph is a quote, the next is Buller's commentary. (My highlights)
..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.
But then, evolutionary psychology is pure pseudoscience as demonstrated by biologist P. Z. Myers.
The fact that the Rutherford paper uses pseudoscience to argue anything is reason enough to consider it a scientific failure.
Evolutionary psychology is a rebranding of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, as Wilson himself admitted, with one important difference: evolutionary psychologists removed considerations of race.
Kathryn Paige Harden also claims to remove race from her work, in her book "The Genetic Lottery."
Clark can be seen hanging out with the neo-Nazi Aporia gang in a video they made about their visit to the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research.
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.
The change in Pinker's attitude was noted both by David Lubinski of the International Society for Intelligence Research and by Steve Sailer, who has claimed to be an influence on Pinker.
Clark also proudly declared himself an hereditarian in racist Quillette.
Charles Murray and "Crémieux" - revealed to be Jordan Lasker who writes for racist Aporia magazine - are big fans of Gregory Clark.
In his review of Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World", economist Robert Solow writes (my highlight):
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.
Misogyny often goes hand in hand with racism, and so in 2022 Summers could be seen on Twitter promoting an article from racist Quillette written by white nationalist Bo Winegard, who is currently executive editor of neo-Nazi Aporia.
Gregory Clark's view is that we currently live in a meritocracy, evident in the Economist review of his book "The Son Also Rises" (my highlights.)
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.
A review of the Charles Murray book "Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010" summarizes it like this (my highlight):
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....
Like Clark, Murray does not have to explicitly say "this is why Black Americans have failed to thrive since the Civil Rights movement" but the inference is obvious: if we live in a meritocracy now, which rewards the most intelligent, the most diligent etc. therefore the unrewarded - which includes Black Americans - are less intelligent, diligent etc. And of course we know that is exactly what Murray believes about Black Americans.
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.
White nationalist Henry Harpending - one of the authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost twenty years) - compared believing in systemic racism to believing in witchcraft.
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.
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
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.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.
Harris' response is that it's not "plausible." He was roundly mocked by the late Michael Brooks of the Majority Report for that.
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.
On April 23, 2025, Donald Trump used the argument of "restoring meritocracy" in an attempt to kill civil rights laws, stating (my highlight):
...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.
It should be noted that Adam Rutherford is a product of the British private school system, according to his Wikipedia bio.
But Rutherford is aware of racism and certainly pays attention to American politics. He combined both in his piece for the BBC just a few days ago, entitled 'Biological reality': What genetics has taught us about race, writing:
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.
Incidentally, I have yet to see an hereditarian make the case that because men are having increasingly worse educational attainment compared to women therefore women must have genetically-enabled intellectual superiority over men.
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.
