Until I just noticed they ran an article about Adam Rutherford, published two years before my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?" (single page version on Medium) in which they point out that in spite of his often-stated opposition to racism, Rutherford's hereditarian beliefs are quite similar to those of gutter racist Charles Murray.
This is something I noticed myself.
If you've been analyzing hereditarian/far-right media as long as I have, it doesn't take long to figure out that Genetic Literacy Project is on Team Right-wing Race Pseudoscience, simply by reading the article How to argue about ‘race’: Charles Murray and Adam Rutherford are not so far apart by Patrick Whittle which includes this passage
Adam Rutherford, on the other hand, is an outspoken critic of both systemic racial inequality and of the sort of intellectual racism that The Bell Curve is seen to represent. As his strong social justice beliefs are clearly evident in his personal social media accounts, he is also often simplistically linked to the post-modernist concept of ‘race’ as largely a social construct.
The keyword there is "post-modernist." Actual postmodernism had its greatest popularity in 1970s-80s, and outside of perhaps obscure corners of Academia, almost nobody talks about it today except for the far-right.
For example, gutter racist Claire Lehmann, the founder of far-right and racist Quillette, the ideological twin of the Genetic Literacy Project, uses the term while being platformed by Yascha Mounck, back in May, moaning about "woke":
...but I was very familiar with postmodernism, the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and could only lead to a bad place.
An article in Medium by Michael Barnard discusses the strange, seemingly anachronistic use of the term as an all-purpose bogeyman by the far-right:
Postmodernism is mostly just a form of artistic criticism, but conservative intellectuals are constantly attacking it these days. Liberals are perplexed by the attacks, if they think about them at all. What the heck is going on?
- On the right side of the political spectrum (by most standards), we have statements like these:“Postmodernism, in many ways — especially as it’s played out politically — is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits.” — Jordan Peterson
- “Obama is the first postmodern president.” — Ben Shapiro
- “These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.” — Michael Aaron
- “Between the Carybde of pseudo-empiricism and the Scylla of postmodernism.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “Since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities. It’s come to dominate all of the humanities — which are dead as far as I can tell — and a huge proportion of the social sciences.” — Jordan Peterson
- “Everything to the postmodernists is about power.” — Jordan Peterson
- “Is postmodernism inherently authoritarian?” — Zane Beal
And to be clear, "‘race’ as largely a social construct" is not a "post-modernist" concept, it is a scientific concept that race pseudoscience true believers like Whittle don't like.
The most strongly pro-hereditarian articles are written by people associated with the Genetic Literacy Project. For example, Patrick Whittle is listed as a contributing columnist on its Our Team page. Whittle has written for... wait for it... QUILLETTE! Surprise surprise!
On his own website, Whittle lists an article written for the Genetic Literacy Project in 2019 that has since disappeared from the GLP website, but can still be found via Archive.org. The article, Genetics and race: How do we have this awkward conversation? argues:
In sum, then, anyone discussing genetics and race must be conscious of the connotations and impact of words. And this is especially true when engaging in dialogue with those with a standard social science conception of ‘race’, one in which human evolved biology is seen as irrelevant to social issues — a paradigm, moreover, in which the very idea of human biological difference is treated with the utmost suspicion. Given this latter mindset — and the human tendency towards righteous indignation — it is hardly surprising that many liberal-minded people react badly when confronted with arguments about human difference that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as morally offensive. If worthwhile or meaningful discussion of genetics and race is to proceed, therefore, it is beholden on geneticists and their ilk to take this into account — not through political timidity but through simple courtesy and common-sense.
In the process of making the case for "human biological (racial) difference," Whittle uses the evergreen hereditarian fallacy that anti-hereditarians are basically knee-jerk hysterics who only care about the morality of hereditarian claims, and never mind the scientific failure of hereditarian claims.
This argument has been used since at least when segregationist Carlton Putnam was using the term "Equalitarian" to attempt to smear Civil Rights proponents. The term has lately been adopted by racists like Bo Winegard, once an editor for Quillette, now working for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network.
Hereditarians manage to shamelessly make this argument by simply pretending the scientific arguments don't exist. Winegard could be seen doing this in Quillette in 2019, and more recently Kathryn Paige Harden tried that old trick.
Now let's have a look at some of the other Genetic Literacy Project team members.
Jon Entine, executive director, has also written for Quillette and has been on the American Enterprise Institute's payroll. His Wikipedia entry mentions the controversy over the organization's connection to Monsanto:
"US Right to Know, an advocacy group funded in large part by the Organic Consumers Association,[23][24] raised concerns after the GLP ran a series of articles in 2014 supportive of crop biotechnology after the scientists had been encouraged to do so by American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto.[25] The GLP said the authors were not paid for their articles. Entine remarked that he had total control of the editing process and that there was nothing to disclose.[25] "In 2020 and 2021 the GLP received US$741,183 and US$494,075 in donations, respectively.[26]
Note 26 links to the Genetic Literacy Project's 2021 annual report which lists the Charles Koch Foundation (68.5K in 2020) and the infamous Donors Trust (25K in 2021) as donors.
According to SourceWatch:
Bloomberg and The Progressive have reported that lawyers suing Monsanto state in court documents that companies funnel money to the Genetic Literacy Project in order to "shame scientists and highlight information helpful to Monsanto and other chemical producers."[2][3]
Entine is a long-time fan of race pseudoscience. In an editorial about his book in the New York Times, "A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene," Jonathan Marks begins:
You know what they say about a little knowledge. Here's some: The greatest sprinters and basketball players are predominantly black. Here's some more: Nobel laureates in science are predominantly white.What do we conclude? That blacks have natural running ability and whites have natural science ability? Or perhaps that blacks have natural running ability but whites don't have natural science ability, because that would be politically incorrect?Or perhaps that we can draw no valid conclusions about the racial distribution of abilities on the basis of data like these. That is what modern anthropology would say.But it's not what a new book, ''Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It,'' says. It says that blacks dominate sports because of their genes and that we're afraid to talk about it on account of a cabal of high-ranking politically correct postmodern professors -- myself, I am flattered to observe, among them.The book is a piece of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism (those dang perfessers!) that plays to vulgar beliefs about group differences of the sort we recall from ''The Bell Curve'' six years ago. These are not however, issues that anthropologists are ''afraid to talk about''; we talk about them a lot. The author, journalist and former television producer Jon Entine, simply doesn't like what we're saying. But to approach the subject with any degree of rigor, as anthropologists have been trying to do for nearly a century, requires recognizing that it consists of several related questions.
Writing for AEI, Entine could be seen promoting that failure of race pseudoscience, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.
Entine and Whittle are the worst, but other team members have shown their comfort with, if not outright allegiance with, race pseudoscience:
Henry I Miller, listed as Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar has written for Quillette.
Steve E. Cerier, contributing columnist has written for Quillette.
And although the Genetic Literacy Project claims innocence over any connections to the food tech industry, one of its team members, Dr. S. Eliza Dunn (Halcomb) is listed as Co-host of GLP Facts & Fallacies Podcast and Video. According to her Linked In profile she works for both Monsanto and Bayer.
It seems pretty obvious that not only is Genetic Literacy Project devoted to, if not outright owned by the food technology industry, it is firmly devoted to promoting racist pseudoscience bullshit as part of this alleged "genetic literacy."
