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.

Does the Genetic Literacy Project think Adam Rutherford is a "postmodernist"?

I had come across the "Genetic Literacy Project" website before and knew it was an organization of true believers of race pseudoscience, but they didn't seem interesting enough to write about.

Until I just noticed they ran an article about Adam Rutherford, published two years before my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?" (single page version on Medium) in which they point out that in spite of his often-stated opposition to racism, Rutherford's hereditarian beliefs are quite similar to those of gutter racist Charles Murray.

This is something I noticed myself.

If you've been analyzing hereditarian/far-right media as long as I have, it doesn't take long to figure out that Genetic Literacy Project is on Team Right-wing Race Pseudoscience, simply by reading the article How to argue about ‘race’: Charles Murray and Adam Rutherford are not so far apart by Patrick Whittle which includes this passage 

Adam Rutherford, on the other hand, is an outspoken critic of both systemic racial inequality and of the sort of intellectual racism that The Bell Curve is seen to represent. As his strong social justice beliefs are clearly evident in his personal social media accounts, he is also often simplistically linked to the post-modernist concept of ‘race’ as largely a social construct.

The keyword there is "post-modernist." Actual postmodernism had its greatest popularity in 1970s-80s, and outside of perhaps obscure corners of Academia, almost nobody talks about it today except for the far-right.

For example, gutter racist Claire Lehmann, the founder of far-right and racist Quillette, the ideological twin of the Genetic Literacy Project, uses the term while being platformed by Yascha Mounck, back in May, moaning about "woke":

...but I was very familiar with postmodernism, the denigration of objective truth and empirical investigation. I thought that these philosophies were nihilistic and could only lead to a bad place.

An article in Medium by Michael Barnard discusses the strange, seemingly anachronistic use of the term as an all-purpose bogeyman by the far-right:

Postmodernism is mostly just a form of artistic criticism, but conservative intellectuals are constantly attacking it these days. Liberals are perplexed by the attacks, if they think about them at all. What the heck is going on? 

On the right side of the political spectrum (by most standards), we have statements like these: 

• “Postmodernism, in many ways — especially as it’s played out politically — is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Obama is the first postmodern president.” — Ben Shapiro
• “These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.” — Michael Aaron
• “Between the Carybde of pseudo-empiricism and the Scylla of postmodernism.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• “Since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities. It’s come to dominate all of the humanities — which are dead as far as I can tell — and a huge proportion of the social sciences.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Everything to the postmodernists is about power.” — Jordan Peterson
• “Is postmodernism inherently authoritarian?” — Zane Beal

And to be clear, "‘race’ as largely a social construct" is not a "post-modernist" concept, it is a scientific concept that race pseudoscience true believers like Whittle don't like.

The Genetic Literacy Project website does include articles by people opposed to hereditarianism and race pseudoscience, but those seem to always be reprints of articles by people unconnected to the Genetic Literacy Project. 

The most strongly pro-hereditarian articles are written by people associated with the Genetic Literacy Project. For example, Patrick Whittle is listed as a contributing columnist on its Our Team page. Whittle has written for... wait for it... QUILLETTE! Surprise surprise! 

On his own website, Whittle lists an article written for the Genetic Literacy Project in 2019 that has since disappeared from the GLP website, but can still be found via Archive.org. The article, Genetics and race: How do we have this awkward conversation? argues:

In sum, then, anyone discussing genetics and race must be conscious of the connotations and impact of words. And this is especially true when engaging in dialogue with those with a standard social science conception of ‘race’, one in which human evolved biology is seen as irrelevant to social issues — a paradigm, moreover, in which the very idea of human biological difference is treated with the utmost suspicion. Given this latter mindset — and the human tendency towards righteous indignation — it is hardly surprising that many liberal-minded people react badly when confronted with arguments about human difference that they perceive (rightly or wrongly) as morally offensive. If worthwhile or meaningful discussion of genetics and race is to proceed, therefore, it is beholden on geneticists and their ilk to take this into account — not through political timidity but through simple courtesy and common-sense.

In the process of making the case for "human biological (racial) difference," Whittle uses the evergreen hereditarian fallacy that anti-hereditarians are basically knee-jerk hysterics who only care about the morality of hereditarian claims, and never mind the scientific failure of hereditarian claims.

This argument has been used since at least when segregationist Carlton Putnam was using the term "Equalitarian" to attempt to smear Civil Rights proponents. The term has lately been adopted by racists like Bo Winegard, once an editor for Quillette, now working for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network. 

Hereditarians manage to shamelessly make this argument by simply pretending the scientific arguments don't exist. Winegard could be seen doing this in Quillette in 2019, and more recently Kathryn Paige Harden tried that old trick.

Now let's have a look at some of the other Genetic Literacy Project team members.

Jon Entine, executive director, has also written for Quillette and has been on the American Enterprise Institute's payroll. His Wikipedia entry mentions the controversy over the organization's connection to Monsanto: 

"US Right to Know, an advocacy group funded in large part by the Organic Consumers Association,[23][24] raised concerns after the GLP ran a series of articles in 2014 supportive of crop biotechnology after the scientists had been encouraged to do so by American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto.[25] The GLP said the authors were not paid for their articles. Entine remarked that he had total control of the editing process and that there was nothing to disclose.[25] " 

In 2020 and 2021 the GLP received US$741,183 and US$494,075 in donations, respectively.[26] 

Note 26 links to the Genetic Literacy Project's 2021 annual report which lists the Charles Koch Foundation (68.5K in 2020) and the infamous Donors Trust (25K in 2021) as donors.

According to SourceWatch:

Bloomberg and The Progressive have reported that lawyers suing Monsanto state in court documents that companies funnel money to the Genetic Literacy Project in order to "shame scientists and highlight information helpful to Monsanto and other chemical producers."[2][3]

Entine is a long-time fan of race pseudoscience. In an editorial about his book in the New York Times, "A Feckless Quest for the Basketball Gene," Jonathan Marks begins:

You know what they say about a little knowledge. Here's some: The greatest sprinters and basketball players are predominantly black. Here's some more: Nobel laureates in science are predominantly white. 

 

What do we conclude? That blacks have natural running ability and whites have natural science ability? Or perhaps that blacks have natural running ability but whites don't have natural science ability, because that would be politically incorrect?

Or perhaps that we can draw no valid conclusions about the racial distribution of abilities on the basis of data like these. That is what modern anthropology would say.

But it's not what a new book, ''Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It,'' says. It says that blacks dominate sports because of their genes and that we're afraid to talk about it on account of a cabal of high-ranking politically correct postmodern professors -- myself, I am flattered to observe, among them.

The book is a piece of good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism (those dang perfessers!) that plays to vulgar beliefs about group differences of the sort we recall from ''The Bell Curve'' six years ago. These are not however, issues that anthropologists are ''afraid to talk about''; we talk about them a lot. The author, journalist and former television producer Jon Entine, simply doesn't like what we're saying. But to approach the subject with any degree of rigor, as anthropologists have been trying to do for nearly a century, requires recognizing that it consists of several related questions.

Writing for AEI, Entine could be seen promoting that failure of race pseudoscience, the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

Entine and Whittle are the worst, but other team members have shown their comfort with, if not outright allegiance with, race pseudoscience:

Henry I Miller, listed as Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar has written for Quillette.

Steve E. Cerier, contributing columnist has written for Quillette.

And although the Genetic Literacy Project claims innocence over any connections to the food tech industry, one of its team members,  Dr. S. Eliza Dunn (Halcomb) is listed as Co-host of GLP Facts & Fallacies Podcast and Video. According to her Linked In profile she works for both Monsanto and Bayer.

It seems pretty obvious that not only is Genetic Literacy Project devoted to, if not outright owned by the food technology industry, it is firmly devoted to promoting racist pseudoscience bullshit as part of this alleged "genetic literacy."

Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582

Happy "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is a bust anniversary - 20 years on!

It was 20 years ago, on June 17, 2005, that white nationalist Henry Harpending, racist and Ron Unz fundee Gregory Cochran and college student Jason Hardy, published the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis.

I wrote an article about the NHAI which is still available on Rational Wiki. 

Here is the archive just in case it's not.

NHAI was promoted by race pseudoscience fans like Steven Pinker and professional racist Steve Sailer and NYTimes columnist Nicholas Wade. 

Steven Pinker claimed it would be "easy to test" but it never was tested. Because it was never more than wishful thinking by hereditarians who thought that this time for sure they'd made a case for hereditarianism.

I created a counter on the Rational Wiki page to keep track of how long it's remained untested. 

Here is the JavaScript version: 

AUTOMATIC COUNTER: Today is It has been years since the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis was published but NOT tested.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 6 - racism: you're soaking in it!

Madge the Palmolive-obsessed manicurist is likely only familiar to Americans of a certain age so I will share this video to illustrate her famous phrase: "you're soaking in it."

It was news to me that the Madge actor Jan Miner played that role for thirty freaking years.

Kathryn Paige Harden & Abdel Abdellaoui
need to share this with their friend
and colleague Razib Khan

Part 5 of this series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" is about the hereditarian belief that we live in a meritocracy and so environmental factors are no longer as significant as genetic causation in determining human socio-economic status and intelligence - as determined by "educational attainment."

I've discovered quite a bit about the Rutherford paper co-authors since I began this series What happened to Adam Rutherford?

And so in this part we will see that there is no person too racist that the authors of the Rutherford paper won't work with them, and no media outlet or organization too racist that they will refuse to use it to advance their careers.

Abdel Abdellaoui - a friend of Razib Khan, according to Khan on the podcast on which Abdellaoui appeared. Abdellaoui signed onto Khan's attack on Scientific American for daring to discuss E. O. Wilson's racism.

It's true that Abdelloaui raised a stink about Emil Kirkegaard showing up at annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISR), but that doesn't stop him from being a friend of Khan, who has taken money from  Kirkegaard via Aporia; nor promoting the work of Richard Haier, a racist bigwig at the ISIR. And then there's the fact that ISIR meetings always include racists, even infamous ones like Michael Woodley, who is, according to the NYTimes, A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting. And Kirkegaard participated in the 2024 ISIR meeting in spite of Abdellaoui.

Abdellaoui can be seen on Twitter in 2020 promoting an anti-race pseudoscience message from Kathryn Paige Harden and Philipp Koellinger. And yet both Abdellaoui and Harden have each been called a friend by Razib Khan and both are friendly colleagues of Khan, with Harden thanking him in the acknowledgments of her book The Genetic Lottery and offering to promote Khan's career. 

It appears to concern neither Harden nor Abdellaoui that Razib Khan's entire career has been devoted to promoting race pseudoscience since at least when racist Holocaust-denying plutocrat Ron Unz (a former student of racist E. O. Wilson) funded Khan's education. 

The cognitive disconnect is absolutely mind-boggling. Do they think other people won't find out or won't care that they are supportive colleagues of a blatant racist?

This seems to be a thing hereditarians do - publicly declare your opposition to racists and race pseudoscience while working alongside or even promoting racists. 

Martin Kolk - can be seen on X/Twitter in October 2024 apparently very annoyed about the fact that Sapiens magazine published an article discussing the possible health repercussions of systemic racism, but I have found the least evidence (so far) of his working directly with racists compared to the other Rutherford paper co-authors.

Hilary C. Martin - signed Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American for pointing out E. O. Wilson's racism. Co-authored a paper with Rosalind Arden, who is a board member of the ISIR, a Quillette author, a defender of racist extremist Linda Gottfredson - Arden also co-authored a paper with Gottfredson and Geoffrey Miller.

Arden considers Arthur Jensen a "great scientist" and she is a true believer in race pseudoscience:

We know that on average. Blacks score around 15 points lower on IQ type tests than Whites. We know that on average. East Asians score around 7 points higher than Whites on IQ type tests. We do not have any direct evidence that the causes of these differences are genetic. However these differences are fairly stable. We know too that if we invoke socio-economic status and racism as the explanation for lower average test performance, then the same factors should lower the average scores of East Asians wherever they have suffered those privations. But East Asians' average scores do not look that way, even in the presence of those factors. I don't know of any evidence that contradicts the genetic hypothesis but I know of much that supports it.

Comparing the privations of Black Americans to other ethnic groups as if they are exactly equivalent is a favorite race pseudoscience trick that Arden pulls. You can see Aporia ghoul Bo Winegard's brother Ben Winegard trying the same trick here.

Melinda C. Mills -  Co-authored at least two papers with anti-immigrant far-right political activist Tobias Wolfram. See the section on Felix C. Tropf below, Tropf has worked much more often with Wolfram.

Michael Muthukrishna - promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan.

Felix C. Tropf - gave a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting of the ISIR with Tobias Wolfram called 250 words written at age eleven predict intelligence and final educational attainment close to expert assessment. Tropf has co-authored multiple papers with Wolfram. Wolfram is discussed in the investigative report by HOPE not hate on eugenicists:

We can reveal that Wolfram has been a member of the closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist who leads the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In January 2024, Wolfram posted the anti-immigrant slogan “we were never asked” in the channel, which is closed to members of the public. He posted again in the same chat in April to criticise a leaflet organising a counter-protest against Martin Sellner in Steyregg, Austria.

Per the article, Wolfram is now working for racist Jonathan Anomaly's  eugenics company.

Karin J. H. Verweij - Verweij co-authored a paper with Brendan P. Zietsch (see below) plus four ISIR annual meeting participants, Fredrik Ullén (five meetings), Miriam A. Mosing (two meetings), Nancy Pedersen (three meetings) and ISIR board member Guy Madison (eight meetings) who has co-authored a paper with racist extremist Edward Dutton,  (who currently works for Emil Kirkegaard) as well as participating in the infamously racist London Conference on Intelligence.  Madison can be found co-authoring a paper in defense of race pseudoscience in Intelligence (the journal associated with the ISIR) with a metric shit-ton of hardcore racists.

Verweij also published in Intelligence. One of Verweij's co-authors for the Intelligence paper is David Hugh-Jones seen on his Substack having a friendly exchange with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia. 

Peter M. Visscher - Signed onto Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American; particpated in two ISIR annual meetings; and co-authored a paper with ISIR annual meeting regular Ian Deary. Michael Woodley was singled out by the NYTimes because his work was cited by the racist Buffalo shooter but several other ISIR participants including Deary were cited in the shooter's manifesto. 

Brendan P. Zietsch - co-authored a paper where the only other co-author was racist/Jensen fangirl Rosalind Arden. (See the entry for Hilary C. Martin above for exactly how racist Arden is.) Also co-authored with extremist  Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist (the racist kind) creep who writes for Quillette. His wife Diana Fleischman works for Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia. Miller can be seen here teaming up with Gregory Cochran while calling Adam Rutherford an "ideologically driven hack." 

It's a tiny tiny hereditarian world. 

So eight of the ten authors of the Rutherford paper have at least one direct connection to a racist person or organization. Let's add it up:

1. Abdel Abdellaoui - ISIR, Razib Khan
2. Hilary C. Martin - Razib Khan, Rosalind Arden
3. Melinda C. Mills  - Tobias Wolfram
4. Michael Muthukrishna  - Quillette, Razib Khan
5. Felix C. Tropf - Tobias Wolfram, ISIR
6. Karin J. H. Verweij - Guy Madison, Intelligence (journal)
7. Peter M. Visscher - ISIR, Razib Khan
8. Brendan P. Zietsch - Rosalind Arden, Geoffrey Miller

I did not examine every one of the hundreds of co-authors that these eight have worked with. If I did, I suspect I'd discover even more racist connections. But I basically just looked for names I had seen elsewhere in connection to race pseudoscience. Even so, it's an impressive number of racist connections.

Now I don't believe Adam Rutherford went out of his way to find co-authors who had racist connections. If anything, he would have sought to avoid those with racist connections. And yet there they are, racist connections. 

I think it should be clear that the reason there are so many racist connections is because behavioral genetics is permeated through and through with racists. 

And by "racist" I don't mean people who said a bad word once or have bigoted opinions. These are professional, politically motivated racists. Rosalind Arden, Razib Khan, Guy Madison, Geoffrey Miller, Tobias Wolfram, the people who run ISIR, Intelligence and Quillette don't simply want to do science. They want to promote "science" they think will prove their racist beliefs. And we know for certain that Khan and Wolfram have worked for well-funded racists. It's likely others in this list have too. Emil Kirkegaard has a plutocrat-funded organization dedicated to promoting race pseudoscience, especially through behavioral genetics.

And so you cannot have a career as a behavioral geneticist without soaking in racism.

But what about Adam Rutherford? What did happen to Adam Rutherford? I'll get into that after I talk about twin studies in the next part.  

Update - circumstances force me to change the subject of part 7 to What happened to Adam Rutherford? part 7: Abdel Abdellaoui and his racist allies come for me.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 2 - the NHAI and ISIR connections

I was a big fan of Adam Rutherford in part because he is a harsh critic of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost 20 years.) 

The NHAI paper, published by racist Gregory Cochran and white nationalist Henry Harpending, basically said that Ashkenazi Jews became smart because they were selected for intelligence through their work as money changers. Or as hereditarian Nicholas Wade put it: "The adaptation of Jews to capitalism..."

Rutherford's paper that this cartoon is based on, Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences, has a different methodology from the one described in the NHAI paper but the claims are strikingly similar: the intelligence of a group of people is connected to their way of making a living. And as the illustration explicitly states, success and status is clustered through their genes.

Rutherford would not explain how his paper's brain->business conclusion was different from the one in the NHAI even though his business is "science popularizer." 

Now as we saw in What happened to Adam Rutherford Part 1, an underlying belief of hereditarians, in this case "behavioral geneticists" is that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence, a belief that has been around since at least the days of Arthur Jensen.

So let's look at who wrote the Rutherford paper. 

There are ten authors: Abdel Abdellaoui, Hilary C. Martin, Martin Kolk, Adam Rutherford, Michael Muthukrishna, Felix C. Tropf, Melinda C. Mills, Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij & Peter M. Visscher. 

Out of those ten, three of them have participated in annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). 

The ISIR was founded to promote the hereditarian - and racist - beliefs of Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. Each year it has an annual meeting and each meeting always includes presentations by racists and even neo-Nazis like Emil Kirkegaard.

Abdellaoui attended two ISIR meetings, in 2021 and 2022. His presentation in 2021 was Socio-economic status: A social construct with genetic consequences, which appears to be a version of the current Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper under discussion. His presentation in 2022 was Gene-environment correlations across geographic regions affect genome-wide association studies.

Also at the meeting in 2021 was Michael A. Woodley of Menie who became notorious the next year thanks to the New York Times running an article about him entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting. It seems that the racist Buffalo mass-murderer had cited Woodley's work in his manifesto. 

Although it was really unfair to single out Woodley - several participants in ISIR meetings were cited by the killer, including Thomas Bouchard, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Donald Temple, Tatu Vanhanen and Charles Murray.

The 2022 meeting Abdellaoui attended, while it did not officially platform Emil Kirkegaard thanks to Abdellaoui, it did platform Gregory Clark who believes black American failure to thrive is due to inferior black American genes, and Heiner Rindermann, who has written for Kirkegaard's Mankind Quarterly and co-authored a paper with Michael Woodley of Menie, as well as other racist activities.

Felix C. Tropf gave a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting with Tobias Wolfram called 250 words written at age eleven predict intelligence and final educational attainment close to expert assessment. 

I told you these hereditarians are obsessed with "educational attainment." 

Great big racists who gave presentations at the 2023 meeting included Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Richard Haier and Gregory Clark. And then there was Steven Pinker. 

I remember how excited people associated with the Neo-Nazi Substack Aporia were about that conference, held in Berkeley - Aporia even published videos about it. Many hard-core racists show up in these videos including Razib Khan, Gavin Tredoux, Edward Dutton and Gregory Clark.

Peter M. Visscher has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2015 and 2021. In 2021 Visscher presented with many others "Polygenic prediction within and between families from a 3-million-person GWAS of educational attainment."

There's that educational attainment again.

One of the contributors to the paper was the "23andMe Research Team," in case you were wondering whether 23 and Me was run by hereditarians.

I've already talked about the racists at the 2021 meeting, so let's talk about the racists at the other meeting Visscher attended in 2015. His paper was "THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND LIFESPAN IS MOSTLY GENETIC." Several of the co-authors are ISIR bigwigs: Ian J. Deary and Matt McGue and Rosalind Arden,  who defended Linda Gottfredson in far-right racist Quillette. One of the authors of the Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper, Hilary C. Martin, co-authored a paper with Arden.

Hardcore racists that year included Alice Dreger (also known for her anti-trans views) Aurelio Jose Figueredo, Linda Gottfredson Richard Haier (Gottfredson and Haier are also ISIR bigwigs) and yes, Emil Kirkegaard. 

And Steven Pinker.

So besides the fact that some authors of the Rutherford paper share the belief that "educational attainment" represents intelligence, and have a very high tolerance for rubbing shoulders with Neo-Nazis, right-wing political operatives and racists, what is actually wrong with their paper?

I'll talk about that in Part 3.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1

Hereditarians stick together because they hold the same fundamental belief about humanity: that human social structures are based on genes. Those on the top of the socio-economic hierarchy are there because they have good genes - usually smart genes - while those on the bottom are there because they have bad genes.

So I wasn't surprised to see hereditarian Gregory Cochran, one of the co-authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis - now coming up on 20 years since it was published but never tested and never proven  - was praising the hereditarian claims of Abdel Abdellaoui. 

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.

There it is - educational attainment is assumed to be genetic - and low educational attainment equals stupidity. 

Cochran considers Abdellaoui's work a triumph for hereditarianism - and of course race pseudoscience - my highlight:

Note that this effect happens even among a single ethnic group. So you see a surprisingly large number of National Merit scholars at Los Alamos High School or Oak Ridge High School – or Cocoa Beach, back during the Apollo project. The effect shows up in university towns, in particular neighborhoods of cities where people with higher average smarts cluster, etc.

This is all obvious, and everybody has seen it. But if you are a real anti-hereditarian, every example has to be explained by some environmental advantage ( none of which we can find). Los Alamos and Oak Ridge must be secretly bathing the kids in N-rays, while the meals served to the kids in the Chicago Public School system must be enriched with lead.

To a true anti-hereditarian, every day is fresh & new & surprising, because hardly anything happens as they expect.

Fun fact: a paper co-authored by Abdellaoui cites Harpending and Cochran as well as Gregory Clark. Clark who believes that Black Americans have failed to thrive due to their genetics, has been known as an influence on Harpending and Cochran.

This belief that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence probably comes directly from Arthur Jensen's paper that claimed Black Americans during the later decades of Jim Crow were mentally inferior to white Americans. This is most likely why he named his organization, which received money from the racist Pioneer Fund "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences." Black and white educational differences, is what he meant. 

The organization's name was changed to the Institute of Mental Chronometry which still exists today, giving money to the ISIR for support services for its annual meetings, and giving half a million dollars to two hereditarian researchers (and members of the ISIR board) Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker's protege (per this Undark article) James J. Lee.

I've mentioned Abdel Abdellaoui here before. 

He was the one who kicked up a fuss over Emil Kirkegaard being invited to participate in an annual meeting of the International Society of Intelligence Research in 2022. 

But I don't think there is really much difference in the views held by Kirkegaard and Abdellaoui - they are after all, both hereditarians. I think Abdellaoui kicked up a fuss because he was embarrassed by Kirkegaard's lack of academic credentials and unsavory reputation. And Kirkegaard was back at the ISIR meeting in 2024 anyway, so a lot of good that did him. 

Probably because Kirkegaard has plenty of supporters in the ISIR and likely Kirkegaard has donated some money to them, considering he has all that Pioneer Fund and racist plutocrat cash, per the article Race Science Inc. by HOPE not hate.

In spite of the ISIR being unable to quit Neo-Nazi Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui has been ISIR's guy, seen in this tweet image from 2020, being promoted by the ISIR X/Twitter account, supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin.

Abdellaoui was also described as a "friend" by Razib Khan when Abdellaoui appeared on Khan's podcast. Khan was last seen on this blog in a photo where he is celebrating ultra-racist ghoul Curtis Yarvin's wedding.

OK so Abdellaoui is a friend of hereditarian Razib Khan, he's promoted by the hereditarian ISIR while supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin and his work is promoted by hereditarian Gregory Cochran who celebrates the work explicitly because it is hereditarian.

So a great big hereditarian cluster-munch, no big surprise.

And Adam Rutherford, who is a huge "science populariser" in England, and whom I have admired a lot for years was hated by Gregory Cochran. They even exchanged insults on Twitter (with Cochran joining in with hereditarian Geoffrey Miller seen here commenting at Neo-Nazi Aporia.) 

So Rutherford is an anti-hereditarian, right?

Except then he started promoting this cartoon on his Bluesky account that he created with hereditarian Abdel Abdellaoui. And I was following Rutherford on Bluesky.

I engaged with Rutherford about his cartoon's hereditarianism and his co-author's hereditarianism and it was not a pleasant experience, as you can see in the image at the very top of this post. 

I never found out exactly why Rutherford thought my skeet or my blog post - it wasn't clear which - was "garbage." Rutherford's response to my questions and comments was to be flippant or dismissive of me - which I guess is understandable, since I'm nobody. 

But he was the same way to various scientists and academics who skeeted at him to criticize his work, including David Sepkoski who co-authored a stellar piece with Mark Borrello in the New York Review on the racism of E. O. Wilson. 

...In their hurry to defend Wilson, the signatories of the letter may not have realized the past involvement of its author, science blogger Razib Khan, with alt-right and white nationalist publications like The Unz Review and the Internet forum VDARE. When some learned of Khan’s background and withdrew their names, it brought a fresh round of outrage on social media and in popular science blogs. 

 

The unwitting alliance between members of the scientific establishment and fringe proponents of race science, the defensive posturing of hereditarian biologists, and the general reluctance to critically engage with Wilson’s legacy and questions of racism in science are perennial features of the decades-long “nature vs. nurture” debate. Wilson’s defenders have frequently alleged that his critics are motivated merely by ideology, and challenge Wilson’s detractors to produce evidence that would demonstrate that sociobiology or hereditarian theories of innate human ability are racist. So, like good historians, we decided to delve into Wilson’s past. We found, independently, what other researchers have recently corroborated—that between 1987 and 1994, Wilson engaged in a lengthy and revealing correspondence with a notorious race scientist named J. Philippe Rushton, in which he more openly associated his own scientific ideas with racialized views of human ability than he ever did publicly.

It must be noted that Abdel Abdellaoui signed on to Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American's article that dared to mention E. O. Wilson's indisputable racism. But I don't think in his case it was "unwitting."

More in Part 2.