Happy "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is a bust anniversary - 20 years on!

It was 20 years ago, on June 17, 2005, that white nationalist Henry Harpending, racist and Ron Unz fundee Gregory Cochran and college student Jason Hardy, published the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis.

I wrote an article about the NHAI which is still available on Rational Wiki. 

Here is the archive just in case it's not.

NHAI was promoted by race pseudoscience fans like Steven Pinker and professional racist Steve Sailer and NYTimes columnist Nicholas Wade. 

Steven Pinker claimed it would be "easy to test" but it never was tested. Because it was never more than wishful thinking by hereditarians who thought that this time for sure they'd made a case for hereditarianism.

I created a counter on the Rational Wiki page to keep track of how long it's remained untested. 

Here is the JavaScript version: 

AUTOMATIC COUNTER: Today is It has been years since the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis was published but NOT tested.

Pix from the Manhattan No Kings march

 

Neil DeGrass Tyson makes a great point about "hypothetical Black racist anthropologists"

This has crossed my mind too - I'm glad Neil Degrass Tyson is saying it. Transcript below the video.

I once pointed out to professional racist Steve Sailer that there's a good possibility that his ancestors had sex with Neanderthals. He immediately blocked me.

NOTE: on the page I link to, I use the term "Northern Superiority Hypothesis" because I did not know at the time there was already an established name for it: "Cold Winters Hypothesis." I've learned so much from doing this blog. Charles Murray could be seen promoting that "theory" because Murray, a political scientist, is a leading light of race pseudoscience.

My ancestors are just as likely to have had sex with Neanderthals as Sailer's were, but that doesn't bother me. Except the possibility of a close relationship to a marketing guy who became famous by being horrible and wrong for his entire career.

What Tyson doesn't explicitly say - in this clip at least - is that once it was apparent that white people had Neanderthal DNA, scientists started to think maybe Neanderthals were smart. 

But smart or stupid, the fact is that Neanderthals are extinct and so from an hereditarian perspective, genetic losers in the survival of the fittest contest. Which means White people (and Asians) are related to an evolutionary dead end. Another inconvenient truth for racist hereditarians to ignore or explain away.

 

TRANSCRIPT

TYSON: Suppose anthropologists were Black racists instead of White racists. What would they write? Hypothetical Black racist anthropologists:

"Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people. Distinct from their face, hands and feet. Part the hair of most chimpanzees, the way they do to each other when checking for lice and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children? White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than are black children. The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and White people more than on the hair of Black people."

For most of the 20th century Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out, beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal, Africans 0%. This goes on. This is what we were doing as humans to each other, not recognizing authentic diversity and who and what we are.

It's time to say it out loud - Steven Pinker is a racist - a shameless racist

Steven Pinker has been called many things during the years of his fame.

A "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

"The World's Most Annoying Man" by Nathan J. Robinson.

"A weasel" by me.

But it's time for another word to describe Pinker and he's been working towards it for about the last quarter-century, since at least when he was helping to promote the career of professional racist Steve Sailer. 

Pinker and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann at the "Heterodox" conference
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As already established, Steven Pinker is utterly shameless, so it's no surprise to see him following up his appearance on the neo-Nazi Aporia magazine podcast with his participation at the "inaugural Heterodox Conference" which wraps up today.

Just about every single person at this conference has a connection to Aporia, Quillette, the far right, (MAGA Christopher Rufo,) or has become famous for sexual harassment like Lawrence Krauss and Joshua Katz. Plus that idiot Yascha Mounk of the reactionary-infested Persuasion. 

And of course the Intellectual Dark Web, including named member, and complete racist Michael Shermer, good personal friend of Steven Pinker.

The conference was organized by Eric Kaufmann, a member of racist extremist Richard Hanania's think tank. Which makes me think that Hanania funded this conference, but considering how many people at the conference have worked for or with Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia and other outlets of Polygenic Scores (formerly Human Diversity Foundation) Kirkegaard is also a suspect.

And Jonathan Anomaly, eugenics huckster, and SLAPP suit plaintiff, was also there.

The Guardian took notice of Pinker's close alliance with racists today in its article, Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism, writing:

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

I had to laugh at "legitimation by association." Pinker and his sociobiology sympathizers like Abdel Abdellaoui like to cry "guilt by association" whenever their connections to racists are mentioned, so it's great to see Pinker's racist buddies admit they do exactly what I've always accused them of doing - using Steve Pinker, celebrity intellectual, in their campaign to mainstream race pseudoscience.

More from the article:

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.
He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

That was always the plan - to mainstream race pseudoscience. That's why Quillette recruited Pinker to write for them. 

After decades of Steven Pinker promoting race pseudoscience it's time to find Steven Pinker guilty of racism.

That Murderbot - still gloriously woke

I usually avoid writing personal things on Pinkerite - I have another blog for topics that are not related to Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race (pseudo)Science, but I felt justified writing a post on Pinkerite about Murderbot because it is gloriously woke.

That was back in 2023. But now there's a Murderbot TV series and it, too, is gloriously woke. While still having a lot of guns.

It was such a thrill to see much of the first book in the Murderbot Diaries series brought to life. The book series is exciting (which is why I've listened to it on audio at least five times all the way through) and it was smart of the TV show producers to trust the original source material and not make too many changes. 

And most of the changes they did make are great - like showing snippets from "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon" - which now has a theme song - and a scene, not in the series, in which Murderbot hallucinates it's a character on Sanctuary Moon. So great.

And I'm so happy for author Martha Wells, who has toiled in the field of genre fiction for decades without making much headway, and then suddenly she had a massive hit. Wells is around the same age as me, which makes her, according to some behavioral geneticists, an "old white lady."

It seems unlikely that the racists I write about on Pinkerite would like the Murderbot universe, given that it is so woke, but maybe they'll like the TV series because although Wells imagined Murderbot with medium-dark skin, Alexander Skarsgård, the Swedish actor playing the character in the series, is pretty pale. All those racists adore "Western Civilization" and have a fetish for whiteness and blondness.

But the Preservation Aux crew of the TV series is exactly as described in the books - which is to say, an absolute nightmare for racists.

The Preservation Aux team - the only white-ish person here is Guarathin, far back center.

Martha Wells is on Bluesky and if you are too, you should follow her. 

UPDATE: according to the New Yorker profile on Wells, the next Murderbot book will be called "Platform Decay."

Curtis Yarvin and race pseudoscience and the Intellectual Dark Web

Khan and "close friend" Yarvin, together again
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With Steven Pinker going full neo-nazi it's hard to keep up with everything else that's going on in the world of the race pseudoscience, especially because race pseudoscience is welcomed by the Trump administration. 

The New Yorker has just published an article about Curtis Yarvin. 

The end of the article describes Yarvin & friends visiting the castle of Renaud Camus, the "you will not replace us" guy - from whence Heather "great replacement" Mac Donald gets her nickname. 

And just this month, white supremacist Douglas Murray, named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, who writes for Bari Weiss's "Free Press" wrote an admiring article about Camus for New Criterion,

Murray's article is titled "The crime of noticing."

As the Atlantic wrote in August 2024 in the article The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ (my highlight):

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows. 

 

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

The end of the New Yorker article describes Yarvin meeting Camus, and Camus's response:

When Yarvin and Camus went on ahead, the filmmakers paused to assess the day’s shoot. Brun said that Yarvin reminded him of the long-winded character in “Airplane!” who talks so incessantly that it drives his seatmates to kill themselves. We wondered what Camus was making of the afternoon. It wasn’t long before we found out. “If intellectual exchanges were commercial exchanges—which they are, to a certain extent—the amount of my exports would not reach one per cent of that of my imports,” Camus wrote in his diary, which he posted online the following day. “The visitor spoke without interruption from his arrival to his departure, for five hours, very quickly and very loudly, interrupting himself only for curious fits of tears, when he spoke of his deceased wife, but also, more strangely, certain political situations.” 

 

It was dark by the time we all returned to the château. “Thank you so much for your hospitality and your duck and your castle,” Yarvin said, looking around. “How much money did you spend on it?”  

 

Lovingly squeezing Yarvin’s arm, Kristine (Yarvin's wife) said, “You can’t just ask people that!”
Camus gave Yarvin some of his books as souvenirs, but Yarvin’s mind already seemed elsewhere. Tomorrow, he would fly to Paris to meet with a group of red-pilled Zoomers and Éric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist who once ran to be the President of France. 

 

As we headed to the car, Yarvin was buzzing with boyish excitement about his performance. He turned to me and the filmmakers. “Was that good?” he asked. “Was that good?”

Yarvin is clearly an emotionally volatile, far-right extremist nut job, which explains why fascist freaks like Marc Andreeessen and Peter Thiel love him.

Although Yarvin tried to be discreet, he mentioned that Thiel has a bit of a “weirdo edge” and described Andreessen, the venture capitalist, as someone who, “apart from the bizarre and possibly even nonhuman shape of his head, would seem much more normal than Peter.” After Andreessen invested in Yarvin’s startup, Tlon, the two got to know each other; they texted and went to brunch long before Andreessen came out as a Trump supporter, last year. Andreessen has been known to urge his associates to read Yarvin’s blog. “Tech people are not interested in appeals to virtue or beauty or tradition, like most conservatives,” the State Department official said. “They are more like right-wing progressives, and for a long time Moldbug was the only person speaking to them this way.” (Andreessen and Thiel declined to comment.) 

Thiel is alleged to have funded racist Quillette, and Andreessen is a subscriber to the Neo-Nazi Jolly Heretic. Both have funded Trump.

And our old racist pals Razib Khan and Steve Sailer are mentioned in the article:

In person, as in print, Yarvin expresses himself with imperious self-assurance. He is nearly impossible to interrupt. “When the rabbi is speaking, you let the rabbi speak,” Razib Khan, a right-wing science blogger and a close friend of Yarvin’s, told me... 

 

...Now, wearing his leather jacket, he glared out at the reader through stylishly tousled hair. His friend Steve Sailer, a writer for white-nationalist websites, said he looked like “the fifth Ramone.”

Khan was recently expressing his hatred for NYTimes op-ed columnist Jamelle Bouie, again.

And Yarvin echoes Richard Haier in the article:

To keep the “ghetto Blacks” in line, he went on, they should be forced to live in a “traditional way,” like Orthodox Jews or the Amish. “The approach that the twentieth century took is, if we could just make the schools good enough, they would all turn into Unitarians,” he said. “If you’ve seen ‘The Wire’ and lived in Baltimore, both of which I have, that does not seem to work at all.” It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Like Richard Haier, Yarvin doesn't think environment matters at all. As Haier told Stefan Molyneux:

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.[62]

This fully aligns with behavioral genetics. And Razib Khan is not only a friend of Curtis Yarvin, he is a friend of Abdel Abdellaoui, one of the co-authors of Adam Rutherford's recent behavioral genetics paper Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences. I wrote about the many connections between authors of the paper and racists here.

Richard Haier is no longer an editor at the journal "Intelligence," so he and some racist pals  - all associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research - started a new publication that will no doubt welcome race pseudoscience. More about that soon.

Steven Pinker appears on a neo-Nazi podcast

The second time Pinker has used his "celebrity intellectual" status to promote neo-Nazi media
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I just mentioned in the last post that Steven Pinker has a byline in Aporia magazine, which is owned by neo-Nazi weirdo Emil Kirkegaard. Read more about Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi organization - including Aporia, in the Hope not hate article Race Science, Inc.

I created this handy diagram, using a lot of the information from the article. Click to enlarge. Text for the diagram on this post.

And now Pinker has appeared on the Aporia podcast, featured on Youtube.

Bluesky noticed.

Pinker is absolutely shameless.

As I say in my "who is behind Pinkerite?" page:

Fun fact: Steven Pinker is one of Emil Kirkegaard's influences. And in turn, Pinker uses the force of his "celebrity intellectual" status to promote the career of Razib Khan and the Substack-platformed neo-Nazi Aporia Magazine. 

The big question is why does Pinker, who is Jewish (although an atheist), promote a neo-Nazi media outlet?

My guess is that he is such a true believer, even evangelist, for race pseudoscience that he'll promote an organization devoted to race pseudoscience even if it includes neo-Nazis. 

And it is not hyperbole to use the term "neo-Nazi" to describe Aporia. As the Hope not Hate investigative report concluded about Aporia's parent organization: "HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS."

Clearly Steven Pinker has no qualms about promoting a neo-Nazi organization.