Charles Murray prophesies the triumph of race pseudoscience again - and fails again

In a recent post on his Substack (ugh Substack) blog, psychologist Eric Turkheimer writes:

The third leg of the missing heritability problem is the mechanism gap. This refers to the fact that no matter what our estimate of heritability is, for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences. We can analyze variance, in Lewontin’s famous phrase, but we can’t analyze causes. All of the interesting within and between family work that Sasha (Gusev) catalogs is a step in the right direction, but the truth is there isn’t much progress toward actual mechanistic understanding. I personally doubt there ever will be (for complex human behavior), but that is another topic. The mechanism gap is crucial to my bet with Charles Murray, for example. Murray bet that by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out, and that entails more than a reasonable estimate of a black-box heritability coefficient.

There are two especially interesting points, the first being Turkheimer's statement:

"...for human behavioral phenotypes we have essentially zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences." 

Based on what I have learned about the claims of hereditarians, especially through my series on Adam Rutherford, (now in a convenient single-page format) I agree with this, as I went to great lengths to explain in my Rutherford piece.

But I suspect Jerry Coyne respects Turkheimer, who refers to himself in the same post as an "anti-hereditarian," in a way he does not respect me. Coyne has mentioned Turkheimer a few times on his blog and always respectfully, in spite of admitting that Turkheimer is opposed to race pseudoscience. Although I think Coyne likes Turkheimer in part because of Turkheimer's support for the ghastly Emily Willoughby. Coyne is a big supporter of Willoughby, and I'm sure her being chummy with neo-Nazis bothers him no more than Steven Pinker's alliance with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia bothers him. In spite of Coyne's performative anxiety over antisemitism.

Hell, I bet that if Turkheimer bought a pair of cowboy boots, Coyne would let him join the Boot Boys.

The second interesting point in the paragraph is that Turkheimer had a bet with Charles Murray with Murray supporting the claim that:

"...by 2025 we would have IQ differences pretty much figured out."

Charles Murray will never learn.

Back in the pre-Musk days of Twitter, Murray had been mocked for his frequent predictions (see image above), since the publication of the Bell Curve, that his race pseudoscience beliefs would be vindicated through science.

It's Murray's true belief in race pseudoscience that makes him such an important thought leader of hereditarianism, enough so that even Turkheimer takes him seriously enough to make bets with him, instead of endlessly mocking him for being a grotesque old delusional racist crank. 

Murray is a political scientist, not a life scientist, which is exactly why hereditarians have confidence in his views of genetics, along with professional racist Steve Sailer who holds a degree in marketing. 

Murray is as likely to stop believing in the eventual triumph of race pseudoscience as a devout Christian is likely to stop believing in the Second Coming. And these days, Murray is a devout believer of both sects.

Hereditarian Jonathan Haidt (a big fan of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence) could be seen making a similar prediction back in 2009. These
days Haidt is writing for Bari Weiss' The Free Press, because of course he would.

Meanwhile Murray can be seen on X/Twitter joining with far-right political operative (and apparent employee of Emil Kirkegaard) "Cremieux" being mad about the efforts to retract the garbage of white nationalist Richard Lynn, from whom neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard inherited the remaining Pioneer fund assets.

Murray thinks Lynn was right about everything. But data will never matter to a true prophet like Charles Murray.

Right-wing political operative "Cremieux" (Jordan Lasker) seen 
hypocritically whining about someone else having "political reasons."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the same Substack post, Turkheimer snipes at Jay Joseph:

And the truth is, there aren’t many people writing these days who are willing to adopt a strictly zero-genetic-influence position. Jay Joseph is pretty much the only one I can think of.

I doubt this is exactly Joseph's position, as indicated by his comment on a Steve Sailer tweet. As I said, Sailer, a guy with a degree in marketing, is an important figure in hereditarian science, no doubt why Steven Pinker promoted Sailer's career for a decade.

I assume Joseph will have a direct response to Turkheimer's claim eventually.

Although at least Turkheimer has gotten fed up with Sailer and his obsession with race.

Turkheimer discussed his bet with Murray in an article in the Atlantic called Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are, published in October:

Seven years ago, I took a bet from one of the most controversial figures in the scientific world. Charles Murray, the political scientist who—along with the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein—wrote The Bell Curve in 1994, wagered that one of his core ideas about genetics and intelligence would be proved true by 2025. He emailed me some time after I’d helped stoke an online furor about his insistent defense of The Bell Curve’s main points, which he’d recently reiterated on a popular podcast and which I, along with two other psychologists and intelligence researchers, had denounced in Vox. I took the bet because I was confident I would win.

Turkheimer then describes Murray's beliefs evident in "The Bell Curve," which is essentially the  hereditarian Bible:

In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein argue that intelligence, as measured by an IQ score, is a crucial determinant of success in modern society. They also argue that a person’s intelligence is substantially determined by genetics, leading to the establishment of “cognitive elites” as intelligent people select one another for reproduction. 

Based on Adam Rutherford's paper, and its accompanying cartoon, Rutherford appears to be in complete agreement with Murray.

On Bluesky, I asked Rutherford about Turkheimer's characterization of the Bell Curve and its apparent agreement with Rutherford's paper, but I don't expect a response, since he's never been anything but dismissive or insulting towards me, but if he does respond I will report it here.

The fact that there is "zero knowledge of how genetic differences produce behavioral differences" does not stop hereditarians from starting businesses based on this zero knowledge. Turkheimer mentions one of them, Herasight, run by several believers in race pseudoscience:

Phenotypic parental IQ accounts for something like half the variance in offspring IQ. A properly controlled PGS accounts for 5% on a good day. (The embryo testing company Herasight has recently made big claims that they can do better, but I will wait until I see a peer-reviewed paper.) 

But promoting hereditarian claims as settled science has been around since at least when Pinker, Haidt and friends were promoting the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis.

To be completely fair to Murray, there are still 31 days left for his prophesy to come true. But it's not looking good.

Is Matt Yglesias a more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinker or just a great big racist?

Since we were talking about the racist extremist Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) recently, I couldn't help noticing that "centrist" political pundit Matthew Yglesias was, right in the middle of the NYTimes controversy involving Crémieux, promoting a tweet by Crémieux over at the Bad Place.

I had been aware of Yglesias' alliance with racists before. I wrote about his support for Razib Khan, and his defense of Richard Hanania.

While promoting and defending racist ghouls, Yglesias claims to be concerned about racism and bigotry.

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

But I also think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to worry that stereotyping will lead to discrimination. And parsing the difference between “taste-based” and “statistical” discrimination doesn’t really change the fact that people are individuals, and they reasonably do not want to be discriminated against. Conversely, I think there is a broadly accurate stereotype that people who roam around the world articulating unflattering statistical observations about ethnic groups they don’t belong to mostly are, in fact, bigots with bad intentions. And the classic postwar observation that this kind of behavior can lead to extremely dark places with terrible results for everyone strikes me as pretty much correct. It’s not a coincidence that movements that want to destigmatize racism also want to do World War II revisionism.

But in this very same Substack post he includes extremist Curtis Yarvin, calling him "an influential and well-regarded voice on the MAGA right" while failing to mention his racism.

Yglesias appears to be doing all he can to normalize racists while claiming to be opposed to racism.

This has been Steven Pinker's strategy for a quarter of a century. Culminating most recently in aligning himself with and helping to mainstream the neo-Nazi organization run by Emil Kirkegaard.

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

Coming back to Yglesias’ concern with the manners of discussing group differences, I have a rule: All discussions of black-white differences in athletics are really about cognitive ability. If we accept that it is obvious that the predominance of Black people in the NBA is somehow the result of genetic differences, then it opens the door to having a similar discussion about why Black people have historically scored lower on IQ tests. This, I think, it the ultimate reason why Yglesias is uncomfortable with the topic, and I agree that he should be.

But genetic differences in cognitive ability are even more implausible than genetic differences in spelling or ping pong, for an obvious reason: there are massive environmental effects that compete with a genetic hypothesis. It isn’t especially easy to specify exactly how sports programs in Jamaica might go about producing top sprinters, but only bad-faith racists can deny the history of racism in the United States and around the world, beginning with slavery 500 years ago and proceeding through Jim Crow, segregation, and all of the reverberating cross-generational effects in the modern world. It is not possible to “control for” such massive environmental effects, and without doing so speculation about genetic causes is pointless.

I don’t mean to be too tough on Yglesias here. He is just trying to be reasonable about a very complex subject, and he doesn’t mention cognitive ability, although I think it is implicit in his concerns. There are many more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers, from Yglesias to Andrew Sullivan to Sam Harris to Jon Haidt, who try to establish their heterodox, pro-science, academic freedom bona fides by giving a fair shake to genetic explanations of race differences in behavior.

The last paragraph is the most telling -  "I don't mean to be too tough on Yglesias here..."

The "more or less well intended" Andrew Sullivan, Sam Harris and Jon Haidt have all demonstrated their devotion to race pseudoscience and to what I call the "American hereditarian assumption" which goes like this:

In spite of 250 years of slavery, followed by more than one hundred years of anti-Black terrorism, including organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, periodic "race riots" such as the Tulsa Race Massacre, and lynchings, Jim Crow, voter suppression, redlining,[143] segregation and theft of Black property and wealth,[144] the most plausible explanation for Black inability to thrive in the United States is the Black genome.

Andrew Sullivan is clearly a racist, promoting and defending the absolute racist Charles Murray for the past thirty years, but even Ezra Klein refuses to call Sullivan a racist.

Not long ago Sullivan was promoting neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

The bar to being called a racist is very high for hereditarians, especially establishment white male hereditarians who make a living as opinion-havers.

Sam Harris promoted the hard-core racist rag Quillette while defending Charles Murray. The Quillette article he linked to, written by (now) Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and his equally racist brother Ben, contains an example of the American hereditarian assumption in the wild:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

This is evidence-free bullshit, but it impresses morons like Sam Harris.

Jonathan Haidt has flown under the radar more than Harris and Sullivan have, but he has demonstrated his race pseudoscience beliefs in talks; he's a defender of the garbage "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper written by a couple of racists although never proven or tested; and in the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Edge, in 2009 Haidt said:

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. 

 

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) 

 

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism.

Like all respectable promoters of race pseudoscience Haidt would never use the N word, so most people will miss what he's getting at - although maybe his mention of "Bell Curve" will be a clue to some. 

But I understand what he's saying after all these years of reading the claims of race pseudoscience promoters: in 2009 Haidt believed that genetics studies would prove that there are fundamental genetic racial differences and that racists had been right all along - that Black people as a group have fewer "virtues" than other groups.

But instead of evidence for Haidt's version of the American hereditarian assumption, what we got from genetics studies was evidence of the utter failure of the claims of genetic behavioralists, as recently discussed by Jay Joseph on his (unfortunately Subtack) blog called The Gene Illusion:

Missing heritability is a term that human genetic researchers invented around 15 years ago to acknowledge unexpected causal gene discovery failure, and to describe the large discrepancy between heritability estimates derived from twin studies versus those derived from DNA-based (molecular genetic) methods such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Importantly, as behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer emphasized in his recent book (see my review here), GWASes of psychiatric conditions and behavioral characteristics such as educational attainment (EA, often seen as an IQ “proxy measure”) identify (potentially spurious) gene-behavior “associations” (correlations), not causes.

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

Most likely, future commentators will tell a similar story about behavioral polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression. Alexander’s post merely continues (1) the 100-year fallacy of assuming that behavioral twin (and adoption) studies are based on sound assumptions and should be interpreted genetically; (2) the 55-year fallacy of assuming that twin studies are sound, so let’s spend billions of dollars trying to find the genes; and (3) the 15-year fallacy of believing that twin studies are sound while DNA-based methods failed, so “heritability must be missing.” It’s time to abandon behavioral and psychiatric research based on twin studies after a disastrous and harmful 100-year run. 

The "Alexander" mentioned in the paragraph above is Scott Alexander, real name Scott Siskind, yet another self-impressed dumbass who promotes race pseudoscience. His Slate Star Codex is a comfortable place for Steve Sailer to hang out and promote his racist extremism. 

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

Turkheimer may have done some good work, and may be publicly anti-racist, but he's a goddam fool to quickly absolve these pernicious ghouls of their racism.

As a result of Turkheimer's hands-off attitude towards racists, you can see Sailer is all over the comments section of the Turkheimer post about Yglesias. Turkheimer makes no response to Sailer, he just allows Sailer to promote his bullshit.

Also in the comments: "Slowly Reading" provides links to neo-Nazi Aporia and yes, of course to a tweet by Crémieux.

This acceptance, by people who should know better, of race pseudoscience promoters, as "more or less well-intended heterodox-type thinkers" is why I have to keep doing this blog.

Racist Claire Lehmann and her goon squad

I wasn't paying attention to Claire Lehmann on Bluesky, because I assumed she had already blocked my Bluesky Pinkerite account since she's a snowflake and she already blocked my other account. 

But while I wasn't looking she was replying to my skeets about her and her grotesquely racist friends. People like Steve Sailer and the neo-Nazi Aporia gang. 

And her goon squad was thrilled.

Now that I've responded to her of course she will block me, so I made sure to grab some screen caps.

(Update: yes she did block me.)

Here are the racists and right-wing grifters that Claire Lehmann recommends others should follow:

Charles Murray, Bari Weiss, Eric Weinstein, Jonathan Haidt,  Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux),  Jonah Goldberg, Nicholas Christakis, Iona Italia, Jerry Coyne, Razib Khan, Michael Shermer, Steve Sailer, Aporia and of course the racist rag she founded, Quillette.

Jesse Singal defends Jon Haidt - all the racists approve

By some miracle, a discussion of the career of Jonathan Haidt, in the New Yorker, actually included a mention of Haidt's support for race pseudoscience:

Haidt had risen to public-intellectual fame in the early two-thousands via his work on positive psychology, but “Coddling” turned him into a folk hero in a frequently specious war against cancel culture, winning him fans among the revanchist likes of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Jordan Peterson. He has often taken a both-sides approach to political conflict that equates leftist activism with deadly right-wing extremism. (A section in “Coddling” that deals with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally of white supremacists and the counter-demonstrators it drew, in Charlottesville, is an especially egregious example of this tendency.) He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes.

To understand just exactly how racist Haidt's beliefs are, it's useful to know that Jesse Singal, infamous transphobe and supporter of Steve Pinker, immediately jumped in to defend Haidt and then ALL THE RACISTS jumped on Singal's thread to shout amen, including the most infamous racists, Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.

As is written in "The Heritability Fallacy" a paper published in 2016:

The term ‘heritability,’ as it is used today in human behavioral genetics, is one of the most misleading in the history of science. Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait. Because we already know that genetic factors have significant influence on the development of all human traits, measures of heritability are of little value, except in very rare cases. We, therefore, suggest that continued use of the term does enormous damage to the public understanding of how human beings develop their individual traits and identities.

But hereditarians benefit from the confusion over the term and so they will never drop it.

But being stupid and wrong has never prevented a mediocre white man from becoming a celebrity intellectual, just ask Steven Pinker.

The INTERNATIONAL League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters publishes a Westminster Declaration

A tweet from Michael Shermer in
supporter of racist extremist
J. Philippe Rushton - I think
Shermer is a fair representative of 
the reactionaries and race
pseudoscience promoters 
who signed this 
Westminster Declaration
But racist Toby Young would also
be a good choice.
===========================

Hot on the heels of the most recent right-wing declaration of their right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics without pushback (a "scholarly" paper,) comes a DECLARATION for the right to promote race pseudoscience and reactionary politics - including anti-trans hatred, climate change denial and Covid conspiracies - without pushback.

Apparently this has been out for like a month but I'm only finding out about it now.

Anyway, let's review this INTERNATIONAL list of utterly shameless race pseudoscience ghouls, evolutionary psychology goons and rightwing grifters. Some of the same people who published the paper also signed this declaration. 

This list includes former far-leftists who are now stooges of the right.

The rightwing is basically addicted to this kind of declaration ever since the Harper's Letter - no wait - ever since racist Linda Gottfredson published a defense of The Bell Curve. 

Signing these papers and declarations is how the Right performs virtue-signaling.

I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as the list is international, but I really didn't expect to see so many Putin supporters and apologists.

You know Steven Pinker is going to be here - I'd bet he had some role in organizing both the paper and the declaration:

1. Matt Taibbi, Journalist, USA - reactionary grifter - went down the path to rightwingdom after his behavior with Russian women and women correspondents became better-known - Taibbi is absolute psychopathic misogynist filth, based on that Washington Post article, and once that became well-known he apparently had nowhere else to go except to the far right, where they absolutely love psychopathic misogynist filth.  His buddy Mark Ames appears to have been even worse, if you can believe it, bragging about statutory rape with a 15-year old and bragging about how he induced his pregnant Russian girlfriend to get an abortion by threatening to kill her. Both men claimed it was all just "satire" and complete fiction. I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans tried to recruit either Taibbi or Ames as candidate for president in 2028.
2. Michael Shellenberger, Public, USA - Koch employee, climate change denier, failed candidate for governor of California
3. Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, USA - race pseudoscience promoter
4. John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, USA - long time Koch employee - also signed the paper
5. Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, USA - of course of course of course
6. Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia - rightwing stooge
7. Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, USA - stooge of the Right - apparently turning into Bob Roberts
8. Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, USA - supporter of race pseudoscience
9. Glenn Loury, Economist, USA - Koch employee - also signed the paper
10. Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK - creepy old reactionary - get off his lawn you hippies!
11. John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK - creepy old reactionary - get off his lawn you hippies!
12. Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia - anti-trans reactionary
13. Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US - dictator apologist
14. Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, USA - conspiracy theory promoter
15. Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, USA - bullshit - he's a traitor to the USA and he's a Russian now
16. Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA - Koch employee via FIRE
17. Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK - wife of Julian Assange
18. Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, USA - reactionary grifter, Trump apologist
19. Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK - "cancel culture" hysteric
20. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada - infamous crackpot
21. Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA - the odious rightwing grifter, Supreme Court corrupter Harlan Crow is her sugar daddy
22. Walter Kirn, Author, USA - ally of Matt Taibbi
23. Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK - far-right ghoul
24. Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK - far-right ghoul
25. Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK - rightwing ghoul
26. Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/USA - one of the creepiest of the rightwing grifters - likes to display herself for Peter Boghossian- speaking of whom...
27. Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, USA - a rightwing creep - mad at me for being a nobody yet daring to criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker
28. Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece - the far-right's idea of a leftist
29. Michael Shermer, Science Writer, USA - racist who thinks infamous racist J. Philippe Rushton was right about Black people and Pinker's personal friend
30. Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK - idiot stooge of the right
31. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK - rightwing idiot who signed the Koch-connected Great Barrington Declaration
32. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, USA - another Great Barrington idiot
33. Martin Kulldorff, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, USA - another Great Barrington idiot
34. Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA - rightwing idiot
35. Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA - one of those leftists whose mission is to help Republicans win elections
36. Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, USA - ally of reactionary stooge Glenn Greenwald
37. Alex Gutentag, Journalist, USA - reactionary stooge - COVID hysteric
38. Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK - right-winger, purveyor of woo
39. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands - rightwinger, born-again Christian
40. Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK - Putinbot and right-wing extremist - but I repeat myself. Also a Barbie-phobic misogynist asshole. He needs to be sent back to Russia, toot sweet.
41. Leighton Woodhouse, Public, USA - ally of Shellenberger
42. Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia - stooge of the right, ally of Matt Taibbi
43. Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA - Putin sympathizer - appears to be Canadian not American
44. Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK - right-winger, supporter of crackpot RFK Jr.
45. Nina Power, Writer, UK - right-winger
46. Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA - rightwing grifter, loves Ayn Rand
47. Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK - infamous racist, former Quillette staffer, comedian Stewart Lee mocked him in the Guardian
48. Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK - right-winger
49. Jacob Siegel, Tablet, USA/Israel - rightwing stooge
50. Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany - Putinbot
51. Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - evolutionary psychologist trying to trade on the good reputation of evolutionary biology - rightwing grifter - lately spending her time drumming up anti-trans hysteria
52. Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - ask Bret and Heather about Game Theory! They became infamous for promoting ivermectin as a treatment for Covid
53. Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy - rightwing Catholic
54. Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil - anti-trans reactionary
55. Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil - anti-trans
56. Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada - anti-trans, right-wing extremist
57. Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany - Putinbot, ally of Konstantin Kisin
58. Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland - Trump supporter
59. Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland - right-winger
60. Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy - right-winger pretending to be of the left
61. Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain - far-right goon
62. Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand - apparent supporter of conspiracy kooks
63. Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK - marketing ghoul, former associate of Koch-infused CATO Institute
64. Craig Snider, Independent, USA - Koch ally
65. Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK - rightwing COVID hysteric
66. Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK - anti-trans fanatic
67. Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany - stooge of the Right
68. Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, USA - rightwing grifter 
69. Helen Pluckrose, Author, UK - rightwing grifter
70. Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia - right-winger ally of racist Eric Kaufmann
71. Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, USA -rightwing anti-"woke" idiot
72. Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain - "hard-right"
73. Andrew Neish, KC, UK - right-winger, likes to retweet Fox News and Nigel Farage
74. Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright (sic), UK - hideous old misogynist
75. Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK - this guy, I guess - racist Nicholas Wade is a fan
76. Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia - anti-"woke" hysteric
77. Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK - rightwing embarrassment to the UK
78. Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany - conspiracy promoter
79. Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK - far-right ghoul, ally of Shellenberger and Taibbi
80. Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany - "The Journalist Sebastian Leber referred to Pohlmann in the Tagesspiegel in April 2022 as a "conspiracy ideologue" who had conspired jointly in the secret action "Leberschaden" (liver damage) with the "who's who of the German "swashbuckler scene" (German: Schwurblerszene)," especially blogger Robert Cibis."
81. Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany - conspiracy kook
82. Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK
83. Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK
84. Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of Buckingham, Canada - extreme right-winger and racist
85. Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK - Covid kook
86. Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA - Bari Weiss' wife - rightwing reactionary grifter - one-time (and possibly still?) fan of psychotic stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok
87. Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University, UK - right-winger, member of the Koch-connected Heterodox Academy
88. Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK - anti-trans crusader
89. Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK - right-winger, "comedian"
90. Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK - right-wing, libertarian Bitcoin bro and "comedian"
91. James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK - rightwing extremist
92. Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, spiked, UK - Koch employee "Marxist libertarian" LOL
93. Jan Jekielek, Journalist, Canada - rightwing ghoul, likes to repost James "your mom" Lindsay on Twitter
94. Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK - far right
95. Robert Tombs, Historian, UK - right-winger
96. Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA - right-winger, former national editor of the Steve Sailer-publishing, founded-by-racists The American Conservative
97. Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France - promoter of anti-vaccine kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
98. Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK - far-right
99. James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK - far-right CPAC ghoul
100. David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK - rightwing Covid hysteric
101. Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark - right-winger, member of the racist Quillette gang
102. Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK - rightwing, ant-woke, transphobic religionist
103. David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK - right-winger, reposts Putinbot Kosnstantin Kisin on Twitter
104. Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands - Republican idiot
105. Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK - rightwing ghoul
106. Alan Miller, Together Association, UK - anti-vax kook
107. Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA - "leftist" idiot
108. Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland - everything about him I could find is written in German. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
109. Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA - PragerU freak
110. Andrew Doyle, Author and journalist, UK - rightwing grifter - idiot Jerry Coyne loves him
111. Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia -  Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded
112. Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA - libertarian Bitcoin idiot
113. Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa - Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded - Gon looks like an old-school pro-Apartheid racist to me
114. Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia - Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded - Macdonald appears to be a far-right ghoul
115. Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand -  Free Speech Union a far-right organization founded by racist Toby Young and run by members of the far-right including white supremacist Douglas Murray - "related" to Heterodox Academy - so probably Koch-funded
116. David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA - rightwing idiot
117. Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain -  everything about him I could find is written in Spanish. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
118. Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA - evolutionary psychologist, anti-trans fanatic, ally of far-right freak Christopher Rufo, disgraced researcher
119. Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada - evolutionary psychologist, rightwing oaf, attendee of Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists
120. Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA - anti-vax kook
121. Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA - anti-vax kook (see link for Robert W. Malone)
122. Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain - appears to be a Covid hysteric
123. Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia - rightwing anti-trans idiot, contributor to racist Quillette
124. Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV Host, Presenter, Italy - stooge of the Right
125. Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK - stooge of the Right
126. Francis Foster, Comedian, UK - rightwing "comedian" and ally of Putinbot Konstantin Kisin - Kisin sure has a lot of friends on this list
127. Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA - rightwing grifter, Quillette author
128. Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy -  everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
129. Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy - almost  everything about her I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that she's a right-winger
130. Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
131. Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy - no surprise here: "Marcello Foa, a Eurosceptic journalist who has often shared stories proved to be fake..."
132. Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy - too much Italian
133. Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy
134. Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy - anti-vax kook
135. Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy - libertarian idiot
136. Alessandro Di Battista, Political Activist, Writer, Italy - Putinbot: "Di Battista declared that "for the world peace, thankfully we have Putin". On 22 February 2022, Di Battista declared "Russia is not invading Ukraine" and "that Putin wants everything but a war"."
137. Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy
138. Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy
139. Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy - appears to be a Putinbot
140. Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy  - everything about him I could find is written in Italian. But based on the previous 100+ signers of the declaration, I'm going to take a wild guess that he's a right-winger
141. Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel - anti-vax kook
142. Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil - right-winger, idiot
143. Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada - there are too many Stephen Moores in the world. I'm going to guess that the one listed is this right-wing Trudeau-hating idiot.

Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists - an update

The Peter Thiel-lead conference featuring many speakers who are racists and supporters of race pseudoscience is officially called the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.

The College Fix, an organization funded by many right-wing plutocrats like Charles Koch, is claiming the conference will unite "big name conservatives and liberals," using this as evidence:

The event does include many thinkers who identify as either Democrat, traditionally liberal, or centrist, including New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianoff. The two co-authored “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Another panelist is Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Chicago, who maintains the popular blog Why Evolution Is True.

“Be aware that some speakers have been extensively canceled or demonized, but I refused to be tarred by going to the same meeting with them, so please refrain from that,” Coyne wrote on his blog last week.

We know that Charles Koch loves fake bi-partisanship. But in fact the conference is not so bi-partisan, according to Inside Higher Education:

Conference organizers told FIRE that they’d invited numerous progressives to participate, Perrino also said, but over time “more conservatives said yes, and very few of the big-name progressives said yes. The political polarization and tribalism is dispiriting.”

Abbot said that organizers invited several dozen progressives who’d previously expressed a “negative view” of academic freedom, who ultimately declined.

Marinovic said that "we invited many academics who have argued for some kind of restrictions on academic speech to present and debate their views, and all of them declined."

David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford and professor of comparative literature, who’s publicly opposed the conference, said he wasn’t asked to participate, but that a few of his colleagues had been asked and “objected to the lopsidedness of the program. The organizers placed them on panels where it was clear they were there only as tokens.”

Livestreaming the conference doesn’t change much at all, Palumbo-Liu added.

“This in no way solves the problem of the inability of those not present being able to substantially question or interact with speakers. That is, it does not reflect a change of thinking whatsoever, nor does it cover up the original intent of the conference.”

An organization like College Fix, which exists to promote the views of right-wing plutocrats isn't going to mention that Jonathan Haidt is a long-time promoter of race pseudoscience, including most recently defending a highly speculative paper about intelligence written by a pair of right-wing racists. 

Greg Lukianoff is on the right-wing plutocrat payroll via Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (formerly "Education"), founded by Ayn Rand-lovers Charles Kors and Thor Halvorssen, and libertarian Harvey Silverglate who writes for the Thiel-funded racist rag Quillette. 

FIRE is funded by the usual right-wing extremists - just like The College Fix.

Jerry Coyne is a reactionary misogynist who loves Steven Pinker and supports race pseudoscience. He's been a little defensive lately, about his upcoming participation in CPAC for racists:

I predict that the mainstream media and many on social media will deem the entire conference a conclave of bigots, racists, and transphobes because a few people on the schedule have been called those names. Indeed, Steve Pinker himself has been the object of criticism, and has been called a racist; and I (deemed “someone with a solid reputation who speaks his mind and is honest in his arguments”) have also been called a transphobe and a racist. Hardly anybody is immune!

But as my recent piece on CPAC for racists demonstrates, most of the speakers are either racists, supporters of race pseudoscience, or take money from one right-wing racist plutocrat or another, or often more than one.

And it's likely that I will find similar issues with the speakers I haven't yet reviewed, which I will have to do soon.

There are few people on the American political scene at the moment who are worse than Peter Thiel, starting with his support for evil monster Donald Trump who tried to destroy American democracy and still might succeed. 

Steven Pinker appears to dislike Trump. But for some reason that doesn't stop him from participating in a Thiel festival sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to which Thiel must certainly donate. And Thiel has funded Quillette, which Steven Pinker loves.

A man's love for race pseudoscience will lead him to accepting some very strange, but very wealthy bedfellows.

The fact that Peter Thiel, an opponent of democracy in general and American democracy in particular is headlining this event tells you everything you need to know about the deliberate right-wing partisanship built right into the "Stanford Academic Freedom Conference." 

The heritability fallacy

Although Pinkerite focuses most often on the political implications of the promotion and funding of race pseudoscience, every now and then I must get technical. 

Because, although most race pseudoscience promoters are obvious oafs, there are mainstream promoters of race pseudoscience, like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, who base their support for race pseudoscience on claims that, at a casual glance, seem like they might be true. 

The kind of claims that make people you'd think would know better, like Gideon Lewis-Kraus, write an article promoting the sociobiology politics of Kathryn Paige Harden, which implied the critics of her claims are anti-science.

Harden's theories rest on the concept of heritability. Here we see Harden quibbling on Twitter with Freddie de Boer's use of the term, in a book which she generally likes.

In the same thread, professor of psychology Eric Turkheimer argues with Harden about the terminology. We can see that even people thoroughly immersed in making arguments about heritability don't agree with each other about the term.

Unfortunately Turkheimer dropped the online debate. 

Harden then went on to publish a book "The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality" making huge claims in favor of a sociobiological approach to social policy, and, in typical sociobiology fashion waxed dramatic, claiming that those who refused to accept her claims were no better than felons.

Late last year I wrote a post about the term "heritability" and how often it is misunderstood. 

Not long after, a Twitter friend pointed me to this excellent paper The heritability fallacy by David S. Moore and David Shenk:

For hundreds of years, the word ‘heritable’ was used without confusion as a synonym for ‘hereditary.’ But in the early 20th century, the word was repurposed to represent something new and rather narrow...

...The term heritability was first given this new meaning in J. L. Lush’s 1937 book Animal Breeding Plans.1 In that text, Lush proposed a calculation for what he called ‘heritability’ that neatly codified the then-popular deterministic viewpoint. Because, Lush argued, an animal’s phenotype (i.e., its observable traits, such as intelligence, height, eye color, etc.) is a function of genetic instructions plus the finishing influence of the environment, we should be able to statistically separate the influence of each. Relying on mathematical guidelines from the geneticist Sewall Wright, Lush proposed that in any given group:

Vp (phenotypic variation) = Vg (genetic variation)

+ Ve (environmental variation)

Lush asserted that the Vg portion of that total can reasonably be termed ‘heritability,’ as it revealed the portion of the trait variation that could be accounted for by variation in genes. The intention was ‘to quantify the level of predictability of passage of a biologically interesting phenotype from parent to offspring’. In this way, the new technical use of ‘heritability’ accurately reflected that period’s understanding of genetic determinism. Still, it was a curious appropriation of the term, because—even by the admission of its proponents— it was meant only to represent how variation in DNA relates to variation in traits across a population, not to be a measure of the actual influence of genes on the development of any given trait. For example, in a large group of people with eyes of different colors (Figure 1), ‘Vg’ only represents the extent to which variation in the group’s DNA accounts for variation in different eye colors in that group—not whether or how DNA is responsible for the development of eye color. In that sense, it was a highly misleading new use of the term (even in the context of determinism) that was bound to cause confusion: And indeed it did...

...because the term (if not its new-fangled scientific meaning) is so familiar to the public, the casual misinterpretation of the term’s narrower meaning has been rampant in the popular press. For many decades now, we have been entertained with journalistic accounts of twin studies suggesting that ‘personality is heritable’, ‘criminals are born, not made’, and ‘cheating genes play [a] large role in female infidelity’. Twin studies have reaffirmed the strong public impression that some physical and personality traits can be passed directly from parent to child through DNA. While understandable, this impression is flatly incorrect, as brightly illustrated by three significant flaws in some scientists’ use of— and thus the public’s understanding of—the term ‘heritability.’

The article concludes:

 Heritability statistics do remain useful in some limited circumstances, including selective breeding programs in which developmental environments can be strictly controlled. But in environments that are not controlled, these statistics do not tell us much. In light of this, numerous theorists have concluded that ‘the term “heritability,” which carries a strong conviction or connotation of something “[in]heritable” in the everyday sense, is no longer suitable for use in human genetics, and its use should be discontinued.’ Reviewing the evidence, we come to the same conclusion. Continued use of the term with respect to human traits spreads the demonstrably false notion that genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits. Instead, scientists need to help the public understand that all complex traits are a consequence of developmental processes. Without such an understanding, we are at risk of underestimating the extent to which environmental manipulations can have profoundly positive effects on development. Thus, the way ‘heritability’ is used in most discussions of human phenotypes not only perpetuates false ideas; it also blinds us to steps we might otherwise take to improve the human condition.

I am beginning to suspect that psychologists who work in genetics are reluctant to drop the term heritability because the confusion masks the fact that when it comes to the claims of people like de Boer and Harden, there is no there there. 

And you can see why there would be a temptation to maintain the facade. Statistics-based claims about genetics give the field of psychology a quantitative aspect it normally does not have. It gives the impression that psychologists are real scientists. And if you've staked your career on that, the confusion over the term "heritable" could save you from facing an eventual reckoning, at least for the length of your professional career.