The international hereditarian network rallies around Nathan Cofnas

Professional racist Nathan Cofnas accused a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday of plagiarism, an Internet mob went after Arday, and the upshot is that Arday killed himself.

It was easy for Cofnas to lead a mob because the mob already existed as an international network of supporters of eugenics and race science: neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network was the subject of an investigative report by Hope not Hate,  Race Science Inc. But it isn't only that network -  there are mainstream individuals who support race pseudoscience and even align with Kirkegaard, like Steven Pinker. 

So the mob was not only on Elon Musk's X. 

Musk, by the way, supports German neo-Nazis.

Kirkegaard, naturally, is an enthusiastic promoter of Cofnas, as revealed in the Race Science Inc. article:

Describing his meeting with Thiel, Kirkegaard said:

“I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now.”

And considering the Race Science Inc. article mentions there is an "underground research team" that is part of Kirkegaard's network, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Cofnas was on Kirkegaard's payroll. 

Nobody knows the identity of Kirkegaard co-author Seb Jensen - could that be Cofnas?

And in case you don't yet understand how deeply stupid Cofnas is - he is a Trump supporter. Although he cares more about his "Hereditarian Revolution."

Cofnas appeared on the podcast of Kirkegaard's racist magazine Aporia.

Cofnas also allies with Jonathan Anomaly, Richard Hanania and Curtis Yarvin.

I wonder about people like Cofnas and Steven Pinker - do they really believe that if Kirkegaard ever got the tiniest bit of political power, that they would be spared, just because they agree with him about the genetic inferiority of Black people? They should remember the Jews stupid enough to try to make common cause with the Nazi Party.

It's just like with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson welcomed race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer onto his program recently. 

Shermer is a longtime ally of Cofnas. 

In the screenshot, Shermer supports his hereditarian beliefs
by linking to a New Yorker article about the work
of Kathryn Paige Harden
---------------------------------------------------

And yes, of course Shermer was defending the Cofnas campaign on X.

Does Tyson really believe that just because racists are polite to him it means they consider him an exception to the race pseudoscience belief that Black people are genetically prone to violence and are intellectually inferior? If Cofnas and Shermer had their way, it seems unlikely that Tyson would keep his job.

It's easy enough to find out who is part of the international racist network by watching who comes out to defend - or even praise - Cofnas. 

First there is Kirkegaard and the professional racist with the marketing background, Steve Sailer. Steven Pinker has a lot to answer for, in his promotion of Sailer's career in the early years of this century.

Two ghouls, famous for their extreme racism
proclaim hardcore racist Nathan Cofnas a "hero"
-------------------------------------

Quillette, allegedly funded by Peter Thiel, demonstrated its support for Cofnas, with at least two articles - one written by white nationalist Arthur Jensen fan-boy Richard Haier and another written by Jenson fan-girl Rosalind Arden.

In the Haier article, he gives a history of the long hereditarian campaign to promote race pseudoscience that leads directly to Cofnas and Kirkegaard:

The marginalisation of intelligence research began more than fifty years ago with a backlash against the hypothesis that average group differences in IQ scores might be influenced by genetics. In 1969, a paper by Arthur Jensen exploring this possibility produced attempts to prevent him from teaching at UC Berkeley and from speaking at academic conferences (including death threats). E.O. Wilson was condemned as a racist after he published Sociobiology in 1975. His Harvard colleague Richard Herrnstein had experienced similar treatment after he published I.Q. in the Meritocracy two years earlier. Undaunted, Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Murray in 1994, which discussed the important role that intelligence plays in stratifying modern societies...

I wrote an article for Rational Wiki about Charles Murray which was censored: evidence points to the censorship being the work of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international racist network. Murray is a big fan of Kirkegaard.

This is the hereditarian-racist network that Nathan Cofnas represents - people who are still angry over the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Jensen's work appeared five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His work argued that Black Americans, during the days of Jim Crow, had lesser educational attainment than non-Blacks, and this therefore proved Blacks were genetically less intelligent than other "races." 

You can't be any more obviously racist - and stupid - than that.

Hereditarians still believe that educational attainment, as tracked by educational institutions, is evidence of genetically-endowed intelligence. One of these hereditarians is British science celebrity Adam Rutherford. 

Although Rutherford could be seen mocking Cofnas as an "IQ-obsessed wienie" on X/Twitter in 2024.

E.O. Wilson has been revealed to be such a devout racist that he promoted the career of racist crackpot  Jean-Philippe Rushton as much as he could without endangering his mainstream celebrity. 

Career-long racist Razib Khan is, predictably, a long-time supporter of Cofnas. Khan has also contributed to Aporia.

Infamous anti-trans campaigner Jesse Singal was given space by the NYTimes to use the Cofnas affair to campaign against universities - although Singal doesn't pretend that Cofnas is not a racist:

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the supposed correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Singal is a good buddy of career-long racist Razib Khan (they even teamed up to come after me) so I can't imagine that Cofnas' racist hereditarianism - by all evidence identical to Razib Khan's racist hereditarianism - would bother Singal at all.

In the article Singal promotes his ally, Benjamin Ryan, another right-wing political activist posing as a journalist:

The journalist Benjamin Ryan, meanwhile, documented the Orwellian efforts some of the institutions affiliated with Mr. Arday made to quietly revise or delete claims they published about him that now seem to be false. 

It was revealed last year that Ryan has a friendly relationship with Kirkegaard's ally - or possibly employee -  racist Jordan Lasker. Ryan was an enthusiastic member of the mob against Arday.

Cofnas expressed his gratitude to Singal, but wasn't entirely pleased by the article.

The allegedly non-racist mainstream media occasionally mentions Kirkegaard and other race pseudoscience promoters, but they rarely connect the dots and don't bother to mention - if they are even aware of - articles like Race Science Inc. I talked about this recently. 

And so the race pseudoscience network slithers along, with occasional publicity like the Cofnas affair, but it's mostly underground, just how they like it. All the better to promote hereditarian causes en mass without it being obvious they are all part of the same network.

The international hereditarian network considers Arday's death a victory. Here is Emil Kirkegaard having some fun over Arday's death.

We know the international hereditarian network is out there. The real question is how complicit is media like The New York Times in aiding their political goals.

Why is Neil DeGrasse Tyson promoting the career of unapologetic racist Michael Shermer?

Apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson considers Michael Shermer, a devotee of the crankiest possible brand of race pseudoscience, "someone I can claim as a friend for decades."

What is wrong with Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why is he a friend of a right-wing political activist who is not at all shy about his admiration for race pseudoscience? Although, naturally, Shermer doesn't admit to being a racist. But he doesn't have to admit it, he lets the "science" do the talking for him as when he claimed that critics of racist crackpot Jean-Philippe Rushton are the victims of "motivated reasoning."

So there's Shermer, babbling away about "post-modernism" (the far-right is obsessed with post-modernism, I wrote about that here) - on Tyson's StarTalk podcast.

Goddam, I had to watch the whole episode, in what I knew was a vain hope, that they would raise the issue of Shermer's right-wing activities and his support for the most idiotic form of race pseudoscience. Of course they did not mention any of it. It was mostly a chance for Shermer to promote his book and to pose as the voice of sweet reason. It was utterly disgusting.

I mean, Shermer also has repulsive beliefs about trans people, but I would think that Tyson would at least stand up for himself - and one of his co-hosts, Chuck Nice - against the racist idiocy of Shermer's Rushton-based beliefs.

Rushton has his own profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, identified as a "white nationalist." The profile, which needs to be updated, since Rushton died in 2012, includes this:

In recent years, Rushton has spoken on the alleged IQ deficiencies of minorities at conferences of the racist American Renaissance magazine and website, and he has published a number of articles in the group’s newsletter. His work is often published on racist websites, including the anti-immigrant hate site, Vdare.com. In 2002, after renting several academic mailing lists, Rushton mailed an abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior to 40,000 people — a mailing paid for by the Pioneer Fund, the race science outfit he now heads. Reacting to complaints from scientists who had received the mailing, the book’s original publisher, Transaction, disavowed the smaller booklet and said that the abridged version had been “purged” of any “evidentiary basis.”

And Rushton was a major participant in the International Society of Intelligence Research (ISIR) annual conferences until his timely death.

The reputation of E. O. Wilson took a big hit when, not long after he died, it was publicized in two separate articles that Wilson had a correspondence with Rushton, in which Wilson encouraged Rushton to use the r/K model, developed by Wilson to discuss different reproduction strategies of species and apply it to human "races."

Shermer promoted Rushton's ex-wife on his podcast.

Shermer's love of race pseudoscience isn't limited to his support of Rushton and his wife. Last year he was seen at a conference full of racists -  apparently neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was there. Shermer was mentioned in a Dutch article about the conference:

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic 2000, has fallen head over heels for racial biology. Shermer is friends with Elizabeth Weiss, the wife of the late race science quack Philip Rushton (Rushton thought men with long penises had low IQs and got his data from fictional soft porn). “Of course you think Rushton was a racist. I thought so too until I looked at the evidence.” (12). 

Elizabeth Weiss also got a chapter in Lawrence Krauss's book The War On Science. This isn't the only similarity between Krauss and Shermer, both have also been accused of misconduct. 

In fact, Shermer sued biologist P. Z. Myers for discussing accusations of sexual misconduct against Shermer.

I'm not the only person who finds Shermer repulsive.

I've written quite a few times, over the years, on this blog, about Shermer's racism and general ghoulishness. And of course, he's a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web, the gang of racist and reactionary dumdums, publicized by the odious Bari Weiss in her 2018 New York Times article, which is what kicked off this website.

And if you aren't convinced that Shermer is a political operative, behold - he is now working for the Trump administration.

Santa Barbara, California, June 15, 2026—Skeptic magazine and The Skeptics Society are pleased to announce that publisher and founder Dr. Michael Shermer has been appointed to the newly formed UAP Science Advisory Council, formed at the request of the White House and in coordination with the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI, and other agencies.

Possibly the low point of this whole sorry podcast episode comes at minute 38, when Shermer both-sides the murder of Renee Good, neglecting to mention his "such actions have consequences" tweet.

Shermer is also part of the MAGA McCarthyite mob coming for Fauci.

And like the standard right-wing hypocrite, while promoting the campaign against Fauci on Twitter, Shermer piously says on the StarTalk podcast: "we have to get back to trusting experts, expertise does matter, even if they occasionally get it wrong, that's fine."

Jesus. Fucking. Kee-rist. I knew Shermer had no shame, but the more I learn about him, the more degraded he appears.

Posner was fired from the Daily Beast for plagiarism.

Shermer is the bottom of the barrel. Neil deGrasse Tyson should be ashamed of himself.

I went to the podcast website contact form to ask why they decided to promote Shermer.

If they respond I will post it here, but don't hold your breath. I believe they are cowards who will refuse to discuss Shermer's racism.

The gang at StarTalk apparently believe that - unlike with Renee Good - Shermer's actions shouldn't have any consequences.

A reminder that Elon Musk supports German Neo-Nazis

As it says in a recent Gizmodo article:

...the billionaire promotes racist, far-right political actors in the UK and Germany; most recently, he used X to spread a racist movie that villainizes immigrants called Citizen Vigilante. Musk appeared to shrug when Beddoes noted that the German political party he supports, AfD, is home to some neo-Nazis.

Musk, typical far-right hypocrite, is himself an immigrant.

I first heard of the AfD because Emil Kirkegaard is a supporter and this was discussed in the Hope not Hate investigative report, Race Science, Inc., about Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi and race pseudoscience empire:

The third senior figure of HDF is Erik Ahrens, a social media advisor in Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party. He is an advocate of white nationalism, and appeared at the AfD’s Potsdam conference in November 2023, at which party leaders discussed deporting German citizens of foreign descent.

I created the diagram to illustrate the various HDF - Human Diversity Foundation - connections discussed in the article.

It should be noted that since the article, Ahrens quit the far-right. However, Kirkegaard isn't only associated with AfD via Ahrens. He proclaimed on Twitter/X that he supported the AfD.

Recently an AfD supporter on YouTube was attacking Ahrens, claiming he was "kicked out" of the AfD for being "too radical."  This reminds me of the attack campaign against a guy who was owed money by Kirkegaard, a campaign run via the City Journal (and supported by Steven Pinker) which made a big deal about the guy's neo-Nazi past.

And Pinker, ever the blatant, shameless hypocrite, has no problem forgiving Richard Hanania in spite of his neo-Nazi past. Hanania, a ridiculous laughable figure, was also part of the right-wing mob that attacked Kirkegaard's creditor.

But Charles Murray, unlike Pinker, is an enthusiastic, public supporter of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

Charles Murray, proclaiming his financial support for two neo-Nazis.

Pinker has never publicly expressed support for Kirkegaard, as far as I know, although he appeared on the podcast of the Kirkegaard-owned magazine Aporia. And he has publicly supported neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.

UPDATE:

Elon Musk is furious at the reporter for asking him about his support for neo-Nazis.

He calls her a traitor and believes "traitors" should be assassinated.

 MORE STOCHASTIC TERRORISM.

Matt Bracken is apparently a far-right conspiracy nut-job.

Racist Rodeo 2026 - the ISIR, the Institute for Mental Chronometry and the Christian Education Fund

Conference poster
---------------------------

The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) has posted information about its 2026 annual conference including a program.

I have updated my online spreadsheet to reflect the program participants.

There are no surprises from the conference, although there is one surprise from a related source...

There is no evidence that neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was a participant this year, as he was in 2024 -  at least not as an official participant, but there were the usual  participants with connections to Kirkegaard, including Emily Willoughby and Michael Woodley of Menie, who was called a racist in the New York Times because his research was included in the manifesto of the Buffalo mass-murderer. But it must be noted that several frequent ISIR meeting participants are also mentioned in that manifesto. Where are their NYTimes articles?

Also participating was Damien Morris, who is friendly with Abdel Abdellaoui. He has published in racist Quillette, and has co-authored papers with far-right political operative Tobias Wolfram, who was profiled in an article by Hope not Hate for his extremist political activities and his association with racist Jonathan Anomaly, another associate of Emil Kirkegaard.

And there was Alexandros Giannelis, an associate of Emily Willoughby who is also mentioned in the Hope not Hate profile along with Wolfram and Anomaly.

The International Society for Intelligence Research was founded on race pseudoscience, as can be seen by all the hardcore racists who participated in its first annual conference in 2000: White nationalist Arthur Jensen; race-obsessed kook and E. O. Wilson ally and penpal J. P. Rushton; Pioneer Fund grant recipient Linda Gottfriedson; Emil Kirkegaard's buddy Helmuth Nyborg and others. So it's no surprise that this year's conference was a combination of hard-core racists and right-wing political operatives, plus the usual grab-bag of moral cretins who don't mind rubbing shoulders with dedicated racists and even neo-Nazis.

What did surprise me was what I saw in the 2024 tax return of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. The Institute is a sister organization of the ISIR, originally founded by Arthur Jensen, with lots of personnel cross-over between the Institute and the ISIR. The Institute of Mental Chronometry is thanked in this year's ISIR program, as usual, for its support of the conference.

Now obviously the Institute exists to promote Jensen's racist views, which is likely why it granted Emily Willoughby and James Lee half a million dollars a few years ago. So I don't have a high opinion of its "science," but I thought that at least the organization wanted to be seen as scientific. So imagine my surprise when I saw that in its 2024 tax return it mentions it gave "Ev Becker for Christian Education TW" a grant of $356 for "Travel & Lodging Support for Attendance at Scientific Conference Pursuant To Irs Approved Procedures."

What an odd name, "Ev Becker for Christian Education TW." The organization has its own online profile on the Cause IQ website, where it is described as "a private foundation in Brooklyn, OH, which was founded in 1989 and most recently had $36,700 in revenue and no employees. Also known as Christian Education Fund 10-0046700."

What is this all about? Emily Willoughby is publicly known as a devoted atheist, so why would she, as an ISIR board member, be OK with this? 

I mean, sure, the ISIR gave a thousand bucks each to far-right extremist political operatives and racists Tobias Wolfram and Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux) in 2023, but at least the ISIR can pretend they are science guys. But there is nothing even pseudoscience about a Christian Education Fund.

Also on Medium: Adam Rutherford & Kathryn Paige Harden & Behavioral Genetics ~ the Mini-series

 I grouped three recent posts into a single mini-series on Medium.

The Fourth of July, the American media and the plutocracy

To commemorate the Fourth of July, I enjoy watching two movies back-to-back:  first 2017's "The Post" which recounts the fight over the Washington Post's publication of the Pentagon Papers, and then 1976's  "All the President's Men" which continues the chronological story of the government versus the press in the scandal called Watergate.

It's bittersweet, since these movies are about the glory days of the Post, before the diabolical billionaire Jeff Bezos decided to destroy it. The Wikipedia page on the Post contains a pretty succinct history of the downfall:

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" for its masthead.[163] Communications Director of the Post Shani George said they choose this slogan because it "conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year". He also stated that the slogan was not added in response to Trump's actions.[164]

In February 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the paper's opinion pages would endorse "personal liberties and free markets" to the exclusion of other views. According to the NPR, the announcement suggested the Post was adopting a libertarian line.[125] In October 2025, columnist Marc Thiessen stated that the paper's opinion section was now conservative.[165]

In April 2026, Nathan J. Robinson said that the paper has shifted from a centre-left economical stance to a hard-right one, opposing taxation of rich individuals, rent control, public transport, social housing and other social services. A significant number of articles in The Washington Post reportedly criticised labor unions and supported construction of new AI data centers.[166]

And on top of that, CBS is being destroyed by Bari Weiss and her diabolical billionaire sponsors. Weiss is the original inspiration for this blog. 

I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post when Bezos refused to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris. Again from Wikipedia:

More than 250,000 people (about ten percent of the Post's subscribers) cancelled their subscriptions, and three members of the editorial board left the board, though they remain with the Post in other positions.[180][181][182] An endorsement of Harris was subsequently published by the paper's humorist Alexandra Petri, who explained that "if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement", and that "I only know what's happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there's no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear."[183]

Condemning the Post's decision, several columnists, including Will Bunch, Jonathan Last, Dan Froomkin, Donna Ladd and Sewell Chan, described it as an example of what historian Timothy Snyder calls anticipatory obedience.[184][185][186][187][188]

I also cancelled my account with the Bezos-owned Amazon, which I had had for a quarter century.

And then there's the New York Times. It has been apparent to many that there is a slowly creeping conservative influence there, especially when it comes to transgender rights.

This phenomenon was noted by both the journalist Tom Scocca and the satirical newspaper The Onion as I wrote about in 2023. 

The Onion published an article mocking the NYTimes' apparent anti-trans crusade: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

Tom Scocca published a blog post THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? - 

This is pretty obviously—and yet not obviously enough—a plain old-fashioned newspaper crusade. Month after month, story after story, the Times is pouring its attention and resources into the message that there is something seriously concerning about the way young people who identify as trans are receiving care. Like the premise that the Clintons had to have been guilty of something serious, or that Saddam Hussein must have had a weapons program worth invading Iraq over, the notion that trans youth present a looming problem is demonstrated to the reader by the sheer volume of coverage. If it’s not a problem, why else would it be in the paper?

I think that the New York Times, every bit as much as the Washington Post, helped get the treasonous, rapist, orange monstrosity back into the White House.

And this latest piece from the Dissident confirms it: Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People notes the change in the NYTimes' editorial tone by 2022.

Over the last several years it has become readily apparent that there has been a shift in the editorial framing and focus of the New York Times when it regards issues relating to transgender people. This is particularly pronounced when it comes to issues of gender affirming care for transgender youth. The Times has contested this accusation of bias or editorial shifting of their priorities and framing, often by pointing to individual stories and claiming that the stories are rigorously fact checked and true. The issue is that any particular article can be argued about in isolation about whether or not the framing is biased against transgender people but when viewed in the aggregate the shift can become much more pronounced and difficult to defend.

While many organizations and activists before me have attempted to categorize and catalog the bias of the New York Times when it comes to transgender issues such as Assigned Media, GLAAD, Media Matters, and others, no one has fully analyzed the entire corpus of transgender coverage by the New York Times since 2014 to see exactly the nuanced changes in editorial focus and framing by the New York Times.[1]

The same paper that once gave a trans writer the page to argue for trans survival later treated that survival as an open question and let her contract lapse during the fight over how it covered her community. This shift in framing and coverage by the New York Times is measurable, and this piece measures it.

...

When the paper of record treats your existence as a debate, the framing does not stay on the page. The New York Times effectively sets the terms of what is considered respectable mainstream liberal opinion. What the Times treats as settled, the country treats as settled. What it frames as an open question shows up in courtrooms, in statehouses, in exam rooms, and in the minds of parents deciding whether to believe their own kids. I'm both a trans person and a lawyer. I have watched how the framing of these stories lands directly on people I know.

It is no wonder that Republican elected officials, Republican-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices, and far-right anti-trans hate groups have all cited the New York Times in their efforts to restrict transgender rights. The harm can be measured in the number of people forced to flee their homes and even their country as a result of these policies. As Howard Zinn once said, you cannot be neutral on a moving train. The New York Times chose to cynically change its framing and coverage around transgender issues in a bid to appeal to conservative voices. They did so knowing that the trans community was too small and politically powerless to effectively push back against the paper. And the organizations that did stand up would quickly be attacked by the Times itself through selective investigative reporting meant to silence criticism.[9]

I was amazed that odious Jesse Singal was not mentioned in the piece, but then by 2022 he had already been at it for several years, since at least 2018, helping to pave the way for anti-trans hostility, supported by racist far-right Quillette.

Fortunately there is still the Guardian - which is not American media.

Can Adam Rutherford and Kathryn Paige Harden have it both ways?

Bluesky screen cap of interest because it demonstrates that
(a) Rutherford was recently hanging out with Harden, (b)
Harden blocked my Bluesky account and (c) and the article
that Rutherford links to that discusses evolutionary psychology.

---------------------------------------------------------

My nine-part series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" was prompted by a paper Rutherford published with nine co-authors, called Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford also promoted a cartoon based on the paper, which made its genetic determinism obvious.

Rutherford added a postscript to the Substack (ugh) post that displays the cartoon:

Post script: My involvement, apart from simply because this stuff is important, is also because it relates to my core interests, which include evolution, genetics, the history and unwelcome return of scientific racism and eugenics. 

Genomic data are often susceptible to misinterpretation, mis­understanding and misrepresentation. Galton was the first hereditarian, and his disciples today are a vocal crop of terminally online commentators, science cosplayers and activists who seek to amplify the role of genes over that of the social environment for many personality traits. Abdel and I have had many run-ins with them, and just this week, some are detailed in an article here.

 

Now Rutherford is not a fan of mine, as I documented in the first part of my nine-part series, so I'm pleased that he links to an article that includes a reference to this blog - this page to be exact. 

Rutherford continues:

As with their Führer idol, their focus tends to be in relation to race and intelli­gence, Galton’s lifelong obsessions. Some of them exist on and draw their salaries from Substacks which I won’t link to, but I will highlight their recently exposed secret plans, in stunning undercover work by Harry Shukman et al. and Hope Not Hate. (I’m in conversation with Harry at the Hay Festival, 28th May).

I’ve secretly witnessed their group meetings, which would be comical if they weren’t so ideologically driven. They often lean heavily on misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data (such as the global IQ datasets, curated by the now dead doyen of scientific racists Richard Lynn). One of the things the Hope Not Hate investigation revealed were their political motivations: they are not truth seekers but aggrieved ideologues. In the new paper, we are striving to advance knowledge because that is what scientists do. As we say in the final paragraphs, we are not calling ‘…for genetic intervention, but rather a call for a deeper understanding and awareness that our social structures are part of an evolving environment that, over time, shapes both social and genetic outcomes.’

Rutherford criticizes dead Richard Lynn, but doesn't mention that a big focus of Harry Shukman's undercover work was documenting the racist network maintained by yet-living neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, who inherited Pioneer Fund money from Lynn.

Perhaps Rutherford does not mention Kirkegaard by name because there is a connection between Kirkegaard and Rutherford by way of racist Razib Khan, who has written for Kirkegaard's Aporia.  

Both Rutherford and his ally, Kathryn Page Harden, have thanked Khan in their books: "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" and "The Genetic Lottery" respectively. Khan testified that Harden was a friend of his. Harden promoted work by Emily Willoughby, a long-time ally of Kirkegaard. She received networking assistance from the International Society for Intelligence Research, an organization founded to promote and defend the race pseudoscience beliefs of white nationalists Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Rutherford mentions Abdel Abdellaoui in his postscript. Abdellaoui is one of the Rutherford paper co-authors and he is also a friend of Razib Khan - Abdellaoui and Khan teamed up on X to defame me, lie about me and launch personal attacks against me while I was writing the series about Rutherford's paper. Racists and right-wing political operatives jumped in to support Abdellaoui and Khan, including Cremieux (Jordan Lasker) and Anatoly Karlin.

And although Rutherford criticizes Richard Lynn, another one of the co-authors of his paper, Michael Muthukrishna, cited Lynn three times in a recent paper, and several other racists were cited.

Now, do I expect Adam Rutherford to vet all his co-authors for racist connections? Well, to be fair, it would be a huge undertaking because the field of behavioral genetics is full of racists, and it might be hard to exclude anybody who has worked with racists, given interviews to racists, or signed petitions written by racists in defense of racists and still have a career in behavioral genetics. 

This refusal to discuss the existence of the racist spiderweb onto which Rutherford and Harden have plopped themselves is at best fecklessness, and at worst a deliberate effort to launder racist beliefs held by some promoters of behavioral genetics.

The article that Rutherford links to in the image at the top of this page is How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science by Sarah Jones. It's an interesting article for many reasons, including its criticism of the awful book, The War on Science, written by right-wing cranks, racists (Amy Wax!) and friends of Jeffrey Epstein, which I've written about here, several times, including quoting from the Jones article.

But what especially caught my eye in the article this time was its discussion of evolutionary psychology:

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore "real" in this world; that's how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. "would be better off with fewer Asians" while calling herself a "race realist." The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There's something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry's one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, "disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital S Science, and maybe even rationality itself"

Now is my chance, yet again, to share this superb discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary psychology in a video made by biologist P. Z. Myers. There is also a link at the top of this blog.

Meanwhile, Rutherford's article for the New Humanist, "A twisted breed" says:

In the early 2000s, Epstein did succeed in meeting Robert Trivers, who had a profound and positive influence as a young scientist on the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Trivers’ early work included exploration of a gene-centric view of human behaviours such as altruism, parental investment and adultery. He befriended Epstein and publicly supported him long after the 2008 conviction.

Trivers, who died while I was writing this article, was the type of scientist who did truly brilliant work for a time, but was often described in euphemistic terms like “eccentric”, in part due to later choices that were at best odd. He said of a research trip, “I took one look at the women [in Jamaica] and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it...”

It's interesting to note what Rutherford leaves out. Trivers didn't only decide to move to Jamaica for the women, he defended Epstein's crimes directly using a form of sociobiology logic:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

Evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories – attempts to explain complex human behaviours, especially about sex and power, with simplistic biological explanations. Epstein’s interest in eugenics, and his desire to propagate his own DNA, reflects another area in which proponents argue that nature trumps nurture. I am generally cautious about the use of this once popular, now toxic term in relation to contemporary practices. But the deliberate manipulation of human reproduction to spread the genes of people deemed superior is pretty much the definition.

Yes, evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories - but this did not stop Rutherford and co-authors from using an evolutionary psychology just so story to support their behavioral genetics argument. As I noted in my nine-part series:

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.'

Harden, who is also cited in the paper, has an online CV from 2021 that reveals that she's done "Advising and Student-related Service" for three students in "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology," David Buss is Area Head of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology.

It appears to me that Rutherford and Harden want to have it both ways: ally with racists and promote  evolutionary psychology when it is convenient, then denounce racism and evolutionary psychology when it is not. This is a failure of intellectual integrity that I, and several critics, have also noticed in Steven Pinker.

It was never going to work, for a behavioral geneticist to distance themselves from evolutionary psychology, because behavioral genetics is nothing more than an attempt to use genetics studies to support the genetic determinism at the heart of all forms of sociobiology. Which is why leading evolutionary psychology promoter David Buss is such a fan of behavioral genetics.

And the goal of all sociobiology, from Galton to the present, is to claim that the current socio-economic order exists because those at the top have the best genes. 

It's not surprising that the British are so comfortable with this concept, so much so that the British government funds the work of leading hereditarian Robert Plomin (cited in the Rutherford paper.) The United Kingdom still maintains an hereditary monarchy, which a majority of its citizens still support.

They even knighted Robert Plomin, so how's that for the monarchy stamp of approval?

But anybody can see how extremely average, at best are the members of the royal family. They are living arguments against the behavioral genetics claim that the most intelligent and industrious rise to the top through their superior genes.

But Rutherford, Harden, Pinker and Abdellaoui are so certain that SES - socio-economic status - is determined by genes that they cannot tolerate any questions about their belief, which is why they either insult or block critics of behavioral genetics.

Recently two prominent critics of behavioral genetics, Steve Pitttelli and Jay Joseph, joined me on Bluesky to point out that I'm not the only one that Kathryn Paige Harden, illegal drug user, has blocked.

I mentioned Steve Pittelli, MD in part nine of my series. He's made some excellent points on his Substack called Unwashed Genes, about the problems with behavioral genetics, including his excellent review of Harden's current book, Original Sin. He makes an argument that I don't think Harden nor Rutherford have ever addressed:

As noted, she devotes little time to making a scientific case for a genetic underpinning for vice, only briefly indirectly referencing a few studies. At one point she summarizes the results of a study as follows:

“We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group.”

I found myself smiling at this for a whole number of reasons related to what a paltry finding it is, but feel the need to address it for those who are perhaps not as familiar with the subject. For starters, Harden herself admits in the book that she had LSD illegally sent to her and then illegally used it and even acknowledges that others might be at greater risk of arrest than her for doing something like this. This speaks to what is called population stratification, wherein someone who comes from a (white), more privileged background and geographic location, would no doubt be far less likely to be arrested for the same actions as someone non-white in a poorer neighborhood. Such population stratification is a (perhaps fatal) weakness of behavioral genetics, wherein, instead of saying that Black people and poor people are more likely to be arrested for ostensibly the same crime, one could pedantically say that people with certain genes are more likely to be arrested in the same way that we can say that people with certain genetics are more likely to eat with chopsticks. In that case, the genes in question are little more than the kinds of genetic variation that is flagged by 23 and Me to identify Asian heritage. To claim that “vice” has a genetic component, one would need to get past these benign genetic markers or we could just make all sorts of claims, like people with Italian genes are more likely to enjoy spaghetti, or people in the Southern United States are more likely to eat grits, since in both cases, due to genetic drift and other issues, one could correlate these preferences to specific genetic markers that likely have nothing to do with taste buds. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason other than ideology to believe that the genetic markers used to identify “vice” or the likelihood of being arrested have any actual function. You can’t just call anything you can conjure from a questionnaire a phenotype by identifying genetic correlations.

But the behavioral genetics gang feel they don't need to address arguments - they just mute and block, mute and block, assuming their critics will remain unknown and unheard. After all, sociobiology is supported not only by the British government but by obscenely wealthy right-wing racist plutocrats, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, a funder of Substack.

Really, it's not surprising when someone of wealth and status supports the behavioral genetics view that people with wealth and status are genetically superior, just as wealthy, high-status Christians believed their wealth and status were evidence of God's favor, a connection noted by John Basile in his review of Original Sin.

You would think that Pittelli's being a doctor would count for something. After all, you need a considerable educational attainment (EA) to be a doctor, and behavioral genetics promoters equate EA with IQ. But they have no respect for Pittelli, nor for Jay Joseph, a clinical psychologist who has written books on genetics.

I referenced Joseph in my series on Rutherford's paper. Joseph has important things to say about twin studies, and can be seen on his Substack critiquing a study by Cremieux - in case you thought Cremieux was only a right-wing racist political operative who tried to hurt the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. Cremieux has co-authored many papers with Emil Kirkegaard, and is on friendly terms, as I discussed above, with Abdel Abdellaoui and Razib Khan.

Well, if Steve Pittelli and Jay Joseph can't get any respect from Rutherford and Harden, what hope do I have? I didn't even finish college, and it was art college at that. My SES is unimpressive and my EA is worse - so from the point of view of a behavioral geneticist, I am no better than the drug-addicted prostitute that Harden contrasts herself with in Original Sin; I am like the morons with bad genes who stayed in their old coal towns, as discussed in Rutherford's paper, and described by Gregory Cochran (co-author of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence):

Abdel Abdellaoui and colleagues recent put out a paper on genetics and social stratification in Great Britain. Among other things, they found that polygenic scores of educational attainment were lower in seriously economically depressed areas, such as coal mining towns – and that this depression has increased with time. The smarter people are going where the better paying jobs are.

But at least Rutherford has posted not one, but two articles that have links to this website, which can only help my project of critiquing race pseudoscience and those who aid and abet race pseudoscience. And that is what Rutherford and Harden are doing, so long as they don't acknowledge the contemporary network of race pseudoscience promoters so fully embedded in the world of behavioral genetics, as I have demonstrated in my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?"

Most recently Rutherford reposted an article on Bluesky by Catherine Townsend, Epstein's Gifted Scientists. I've known Townsend - not personally but online - for quite a few years thanks to us both opposing race pseudoscience.

I was clued into this article when a Pinkerite post from 2019 suddenly started trending. Townsend writes:

(Pinker) has also boosted the profiles of ideologues who peddle in scientific racism and eugenics. For example, he has promoted the work of far-right blogger Steve Sailer, who mainly writes about supposed racial differences in intelligence. He re-published a Sailer essay titled ‘Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, originally published in The American Conservative, in an edited 2004 volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The article by Sailer argued that Arab societies are too inbred for the type of democratic reform that was a stated goal of Western politicians in the 2003 ‘regime change’ war on Iraq.

It's too bad she didn't also link to my series on Pinker's editorship of The Best Science and Nature Writing, where I go into detail about why the Sailer article is so bad. But I'm glad she did link to my post, The Racist Logic of Steve Sailer, and I'm grateful to Adam Rutherford for doing his part to help promote this blog, maintained by the lowly art school drop-out that I am.

Juneteenth thoughts on the failures of the degenerate racist Trump administration

One of the best American presidents is Barack Obama, and this fact is what gave us degenerate freak Donald Trump. Because Trump and his loyal supporters are racists, and the reality of a good American president who is also Black - actually only half Black but America still operates on the one-drop rule - is what drives their white supremacist humiliation and thus their political project of revenge

Republicans are opposed to giving Americans public-funded healthcare, and so Obamacare, an impressive accomplishment considering what Obama was up against, is what they consider an example of Obama's inferiority as a president. But even Republicans can't deny that Obama killed bin Laden. The day Obama got bin Laden, I knew for sure he was going to be re-elected.

The Trump administration's degeneracy and racism were on full display this past week with the moronic White House lawn cage-match. 

I don't know if anybody connected to this administration has ever seen the film Idiocracy but those of us who have seen that 20-year old movie understand the connection, including one of the film's writers:

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's first presidency.[50][51][52] An article for Collider pointed out the ways in which Trump's positions echoed the political decisions of the characters in the film in areas such as science, business, entertainment, environment, healthcare, law enforcement, and politics.[53] Internet memes have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.[54][55][56]
The comparisons resurfaced when Trump became president again in 2025,[57] and became referenced again in 2026.[58]

And the rotten racist cherry on top of the cyanide-laced sundae was the moment when one of the wrestlers, on winning his wallow in the mud, yelled "Michelle Obama is a man."

This was the same week that Trump made a deal with Iran - called a capitulation by many - that was entirely to the benefit of Iran. Trump had already sealed his standing as worst US president of all time when he used his mob of morons to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But this week has sealed his future standing as one of the most hated men in American history. 

Trump is physically unwell and in the early-middle stage of dementia. And the degenerate Republican Party will deny that, publicly, as long as it possibly can. The Republican Party needs to be punished, so hard, at the polls, if we can prevent them from destroying our democracy and ending elections entirely.

Yes, I know J. D. Vance is a soulless weasel, perfectly suited to the degeneracy of this administration. But if Trump dies while in office, I will still join the rest of the world - excluding the idiocracy, who will never stop worshipping Trump - in the massive celebration.