Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-trans gender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral psychology to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.