Quillette: still utterly racist, promoting racist Nathan Cofnas

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, like Quillette
celebrates extreme racist Nathan Cofnas
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In a recent Quillette article, Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London takes the opportunity, while celebrating Cambridge University siding with racist Nathan Cofnas, to argue in favor of race pseudoscience by citing gutter racists; ISIR meeting participants; employees of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard; and Scott Alexander, idiot. 

Cofnas is known for writing on his blog that “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent.” 

Cofnas has appeared on the podcast of the neo-Nazi magazine Aporia, own by Kirkegaard.

Quillette's founder, Claire Lehmann is a gutter racist who pals around with Kirkegaard  and nurtured the career of neo-Nazi Bo Winegard - now an employee of Kirkegaard - from the time when he was but a graduate student racist. Lehmann recently got an award from the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research, which is the beneficiary of Pioneer Fund Nazi legacy money through its sister organization Institute of Mental Chronometry as well as all its members and meeting participants whose careers have been supported by Pioneer Fund money, such as Thomas Bouchard.

Saha writes:

...Others, including cognitive psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, educational psychologist Linda Gottfredson, and social scientist Noah Carl, argue that inquiry into this question is ethically justifiable, scientifically and educationally valuable, and that suppressing it leads to misguided policies and other tangible harms.

The hereditarian hypothesis is notoriously difficult to test because of pervasive confounding factors and the non-inferability of between-group heritability from within-group heritability. But one common objection—that it must be false because “race” is socially constructed—proves unconvincing on closer examination. Social racial categories are not identical to genetic-ancestry clusters, but the overlap is often sufficient to conclude that, if average differences exist by ancestry, they will show up as average differences across socially defined races. As the psychiatrist and influential essayist Scott Alexander has argued, insisting on perfect biological precision for “race” while accepting rough categories elsewhere is an isolated demand for rigour.

Standard Quillette goon squad: Ceci and Williams both participated in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting, notable for the participation of Emil Kirkegaard.

Noah Carl works for Kirkegaard.

Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist, long-time ISIR member and meeting participant, and beneficiary of Nazi legacy money through the Pioneer fund.

And Scott Alexander, idiot, promotes Emil Kirkegaard as a serious researcher. 

Note that promoters of race pseudoscience are almost all of them psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists. Abhishek Saha is a mathematician. Cofnas is a philosopher who specializes in being a racist.

It's as if they believe that promoting race pseudoscience will make them seem like real scientists who know what they are talking about when it comes to genetics and "race." 

They are not, and they do not, and that's why their adversaries are invariably people who do know what they are talking about like biologists P. Z. Myers, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. 

But the most interesting part of the article is when Saha illustrates how racists try to smuggle their racism into scientific respectability through behavioral genetics:

Most experts in behavioural genetics agree that genes significantly influence individual differences in intelligence, a consensus supported by large-scale meta-analyses and review papers.

The review paper Saha links to is co-authored by Ian Deary, a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings. And the meta-analyses link goes to a paper co-authored by Peter Visscher, one of Adam Rutherford's hereditarian co-authors who also signed onto racist Razib Khan's attack against the author of an article that discussed E. O. Wilson's racism. Visscher is also an ISIR meeting participant.

People like Kathryn Paige Harden and Adam Rutherford have a lot to answer for, for their promotion of the pseudoscientific failure that is behavioral genetics.