Steven Pinker was not at the 2025 meeting although he's been to a few others. But he was apparently thrilled that his gutter racist chum Claire Lehmann received an award from ISIR this year.
ISIR did not make its meeting program available on its website in 2024, unlike every other year prior, possibly because in August 2024 I created a spreadsheet to track all those who have been official participants of ISIR meetings. And without that resource, there is not much data in my database for 2024.
And I feared 2025 would be the same story since the 2025 program was not posted either.
BUT THEN! A MENSA person named Laura Endicott Thomas posted the 2025 ISIR program on the Northern New Jersey MENSA website. Thomas is a hard-core fan of race pseudoscience so I don't think she's being deliberately mean by noting the low attendance for this year's meeting. Thomas is also a Trump supporter and has a theory - a lot of Europeans did not show up because they believed the "propaganda" about Trump and his administration's utter disregard for the rule of law.
Yeah, I had heard that MENSA people were not very impressive.
So far I've seen no evidence that neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard was at the 2025 meeting although he was clearly welcomed back by the ISIR organization in 2024. But several of his close allies and people he's funded were there.
Russell T. Warne's far-right and racist views are obvious from the list of work published by Warne on his own website. He is unashamed to admit he's published in Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi, racist Aporia Magazine and he's also published in Quillette and Mankind Quarterly. As the Hope Not Hate exposé about Kirkegaard noted:
A recent research paper, published in the respected scientific journal PLOS ONE and co-authored by Mankind Quarterly contributor Russell T. Warne, acknowledged that it had been funded by a grant from HDF. His paper looked to undermine the idea that African Americans suffer from “stereotype threat”, a psychological theory that negative stereotypes internalised by minority groups can damage their cognitive performance.
"HDF" stands for "Human Diversity Foundation" which was the name for Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi umbrella organization until he changed it to the more behavioral genetics-sounding "Polygenic Scores."
I was somewhat horrified to discover that Warne provides a link to an article in which he claims to be "a theatre critic and self-avowed 'Shakespeare fanboy.'" I certainly hope Warne tells the readers of his theater reviews that he is allied with - and funded by - a racist/neo-Nazi. Especially if he reviews "Othello." Oh wait, he has reviewed Othello, in 2011 - maybe that was before Warne became a dedicated gutter racist.
Naturally Kirkegaard is a fan of Warne's work, testifying on his blog in 2023: "Back in 2021, Russell Warne wrote a nice summary article about race differences in intelligence..."
Warne was also one of the censorship ghouls who SLAPP-sued Rational Wiki for telling the truth about his extremism.
At the ISIR meeting, Warne gave a talk on Rethinking Mental Speed: Unraveling the Mystery of Item Response Time. I assume that is related to Arthur Jensen's "Mental Chronometry" which was a big disappointment to race pseudoscience. But they keep trying anyway, I guess.
Warne's business account on Twitter, Riot IQ, promotes the work of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, which makes it it clear that Riot IQ's "science" is based on the joke pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology so exquisitely eviscerated by biologist P. Z. Myers in this video.
No doubt about it - by multiple metrics, Russell T. Warne is a gutter racist.
David Geary, the keynote speaker for the annual meeting, is a gutter racist, appearing on the Aporia podcast after the HOPE not Hate exposé made it crystal clear that Aporia was part of a neo-Nazi network owned by Emil Kirkegaard. Although to be fair, Geary's beat is more about misogyny just-so stories than about race. Still, he co-authored a paper with the race-obsessed twins, Ben and Bo Winegard - Bo Winegard is now one of Emil Kirkegaard's main toadies. So Geary is a definite gutter racist.
Geary's piece for the ISIR meeting was "The nurture of nature: Why sex differences are larger in healthy and wealthy nations" Looks like it's part of the ongoing hereditarian project to prove that girls are genetic losers in STEM subjects.
Michael A Woodley of Menie - unlike these other gutter racists, Woodley is the only one that I know of who has been declared outright a "racist" in the New York Times, in the article "A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting." That article is about Woodley's work showing up in the racist manifesto of the anti-Black mass murderer in Buffalo New York a few years ago.
Thomas R. Coyle, past president of ISIR has co-authored several papers with gutter racist Heiner Rinderman who publishes in Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudo-journal. According to the ISIR 2025 program "...a new open-access journal, Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities, was established by Thomas Coyle and Richard Haier to reflect the growing need for an unbiased publication platform committed to free inquiry."
I had heard about this journal, I heard it was a response by the more racist members of the ISIR network to Intelligence magazine saying it would be less welcoming in the future to race pseudoscience. I fully expect that Coyle and Haier's new journal will publish work by Emil Kirkegaard, as Intelligence has done in the past but presumably no longer will. They've already published articles by Warne, Woodley and other racists.
Coyle teamed up with other members of the league of racist villains in a paper responding to critics of race pseudoscience. You can almost smell the burning cross coming from this list of Coyle and his co-authors Michael A Woodley of Menie, Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Aurelio-José Figueredo, Geoffrey F Miller, Noah Carl, Fróði Debes, Craig L Frisby, Federico R Leon, Guy Madison and Heiner Rindermann.
At this annual meeting Coyle chaired sessions, introduced Lehmann's speech, and was represented by a paper called "Tilt increases at higher ability levels: support for differentiation theories."
I first heard about "tilt" when I saw Lehmann and Kirkegaard having a friendly chat about it on Twitter.
In case anybody has any doubts about Lehmann's comfort with neo-Nazis.
Coyle wrote about "tilt" for Intelligence magazine, with a somewhat more vivid title:
Douglas K. Detterman was honored at the meeting for founding ISIR. Detterman is part of the old guard of racists, along with white nationalist Arthur Jensen, who is, mercifully, dead.
Detterman was the Vice President of another organization created to promote the work of Jensen, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which received Nazi money via the Pioneer Fund. The institute was later renamed Institute for Mental Chronometry, which still exists, and which pays for support services for ISIR meetings and recently donated a large sum to Emily Willoughby and James Lee, board members of ISIR.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Detterman worships Jensen - and because of, not in spite of his racism. On a website created by Emil Kirkegaard to honor Jensen there is an article by Detterman explaining why Jensen was right to suggest that "group differences" in intelligence testing were genetic.
Into this cauldron of social and scientific confusion, Arthur Jensen (1969) published a paper in Harvard Educational Review entitled, “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?” According to rumors, the paper was based on a talk given at a meeting of the American Association for Educational Research and editors of the Harvard Educational Review invited the paper and perhaps even sought to make it more controversial than the original submission. When the paper came to press, the results were explosive.
A brief synopsis of the paper is that this more than 120 page paper presented evidence bearing on the title question—is it possible to boost scholastic achievement and IQ through environmental intervention. Jensen's answer to the question was that it may not be possible to boost either IQ or academic achievement through environmental interventions because both have a substantial heritable component and are highly correlated with each other. Not more than a few pages of the paper dealt with race and intelligence but given the frequently observed mean IQ differences between groups, there was some inevitable discussion of these differences. The basic thesis of the majority of the paper was that it may not be possible to raise IQ and subsequent academic achievement through environmental interventions.
Jensen had hit every exposed nerve of the time and immediately became a lightning rod for those against the ideas he presented which seemed to be nearly everyone.
Heritable differences between groups were repugnant to psychological environmentalists, to communists, and to those who misinterpreted the fundamental concept of democracy that “all people are created equal” (instead of equal under the law). His thesis was also difficult to accept for those who believed that all differences between people could and should be accounted for by environmental differences.
As usual with hereditarians, Detterman misuses the term "heritable." And obviously Detterman agrees with Jensen's idiotic racist beliefs. The problem, in his mind, is all those communists who refuse to accept that some "groups" are clearly intellectually, genetically inferior.
Detterman is predictably a big fan of indisputable gutter racist Charles Murray. In his glowing review of Murray's more recent piece of hereditarian garbage, "Human Diversity," he piously lectures those of us who are not afraid to point out that Charles Murray is a racist:
Do not engage in ad hominem attacks. Calling people racists or fascists or other nasty names does not resolve scientific debates.
Like E. O. Wilson, Detterman would like to be seen as a genteel racist, and genteel racists are shocked by naughty words like fascist and racist.
Something that Murray's defenders reliably fail to mention: Murray is not a life scientist, he's a political scientist. And as such, he's had a very successful career - thanks in large part to far-right reactionaries funding wingnut welfare - convincing the stupid and the gullible that he speaks as a scientist about race, intelligence and genetics. It's fascinating that Detterman fully accepts Murray as an expert on scientific issues. But then, Detterman is a psychologist, which is only a slightly more scientific field than political science.
Detterman also signed gutter racist Linda Gottfredson's defense of the Bell Curve with dozens of other racists and assorted right-wing ghouls.
I'm certain that every one of them considers Charles Murray a better source of science information than Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, in part because they hate Gould's political views. Politics is everything to race pseudoscience.
Not only does Detterman adore Jensen, he attempted to mainstream the career of gutter racist Jean-Phillip Rushton. As Rushton testifies in his paper The Equalitarian Dogma Revisited:
Fortunately, albeit after another lengthy review process, Douglas Detterman accepted the paper for Intelligence (Rushton, 1994), and invited me to write this editorial.
"Equalitarianism Dogma" is the term that race pseudoscience racists use to attack their critics, claiming that the only reason anybody opposes hereditarianism is because of politics, not because of science. The term was used by segregationist Henry Garrett in 1961 in Mankind Quarterly (now owned by Emil Kirkegaard) and more recently by Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard and associates in 2023.
Here is some of what Rushton says in the editorial published by Detterman:
Evolutionary hypotheses for why Asians average the largest brains and have the most intelligence have been provided (Rushton, 1995) . The currently accepted view of human origins, the "African Eve" theory, posits a beginning in Africa some 200,000 years ago, an exodus through the Middle East with an African/non-African split about 110,000 years ago, and a Caucasoid/Mongoloid split about 40,000 years ago. Evolutionary selection pressures are different in the hot savanna where Africans evolved than in the cold arctic where Mongoloids evolved. The further north out of Africa that populations migrated, the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering, and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children during prolonged winters . I proposed that as the original African populations evolved into Caucasoids and Mongoloids, they did so in the direction of larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and other traits differentiating the populations .
To further account for why Negroids are also, on average, more fertile, faster maturing, and more sexually active, I proposed a gene-based evolutionary theory familiar to population biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy . At one end of this scale are r-strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates, and, at the other, K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment (nurturing). The scale is generally used to compare different species, but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species . I hypothesized that Mongoloid people are more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids,
In the first paragraph, Rushton calls on the 19th-century
"cold winters" fantasy, in the second, he uses E. O. Wilson's work on r/K strategies, to basically suggest that "Negroids" are a separate species from "Caucasoids" and "Mongoloids." We know he did that
with the complete approval of Wilson.
But how DARE you call that racist! Quick, Detterman, the smelling salts!
Conclusion: If E. O. Wilson is a gutter racist for aiding and abetting Rushton, than Douglas K. Detterman is also a gutter racist.
Curtis Dunkel is part of Kirkegaard's network. Dunkel's contribution to the ISIR meeting is a paper, "A cross-trait analysis of the Dunning-Kruger effect" co-authored with Dimitri Van Der Linden, who has also co-authored a paper with racist extremists Edward Dutton and the mercifully dead Richard Lynn.
So those are the biggest racists of the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. I'm sure there were plenty more at this meeting, in spite of its low attendance, but those are the names that jumped out at me. But the ISIR is never going to rid itself of racist extremists because without them and the beliefs they represent, ISIR would barely exist.
