Pretty decent article about Pinker in Boston Magazine

Pinker can be seen on Facebook, this February,
promoting the website of racist and
Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.
---------------------------------------------------------------

I mean, as usual the author didn't push Pinker very hard but the article is about as critical as you can hope for from the mainstream media, which until recently rarely did anything except fawn over Pinker and his twinkling blue eyes.

Robert Huber's article Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard? actually raises the issue of Pinker's long-term alliance with race pseudoscience promoters, while somewhat down-playing how much Pinker is involved in promoting race pseudoscience by proxy.

For example:

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour.

I should point out here that it's been a dream of Emil Kirkegaard (who owns Aporia) for a long time to team up with Pinker for the cause of race pseudoscience, as documented here.

To continue the Boston Magazine article from where we left it...

After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.

Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.

Then a little later:

I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?

“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”

I guess we can infer from Pinker's response that he doesn't think Aporia (owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard) holds repugnant opinions, only that third parties think Aporia's ideas are repugnant.

It's good that the article mentions Pinker platforming Murray - but Murray is not the only racist whose career has gotten a boost from Pinker. As I have documented since I started this Pinkerite blog (and before on my personal blog) Pinker has aided and abetted racists for the past quarter century, from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Bo Winegard to Emil Kirkegaard.

As recently as February of this year Pinker could be seen promoting the website of racist Richard Hanania.

The problem is that the media, even well-meaning writers, are too respectful of celebrity intellectuals to really dig into what Pinker has been up to for the past twenty-five years.

Which is why I have to keep doing this blog. So the information will be here for when a journalist decides to get serious about Pinker's pro-race pseudoscience activities.

The saga of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard

When we last discussed neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, leader of an international network of promoters of far-right and neo-Nazi beliefs and race pseudoscience, he was pleased that the NYTimes had published an article about him and his race pseudoscience associates.

I first mentioned Kirkegaard on this blog in May 2019 in connection with gutter racist Charles Murray, but I didn't really pay a lot attention to him until 2021, when I learned he was attacking me on Twitter. 

Kirkegaard and Murray have a mutual admiration society, as we can see from a recent Murray retweet of Kirkegaard in which Kirkegaard and his Aporia toady neo-Nazi Bo Winegard are happy to explain how they became racists - or even bigger racists - thanks to Murray's best-known work, the Bell Curve. Kirkegaard has even made it available for free as a PDF on his website - I assume with Murray's permission. This is great - you don't have to pay to find all the times Murray used infamous gutter racist Jean-Phillippe Rushton as his source. Plus, any method of keeping money out of the pocket of creepy old gutter racist Charles Murray is fine with me.

The person who gave me a heads-up about the attack in 2021 is Oliver Smith, who has more first-hand knowledge of the awfulness of Emil Kirkegaard than anybody else.

The mission of this blog is more about mainstream "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker than outsiders like Kirkegaard, but since Pinker likes to make common cause with Kirkegaard and with long-time Kirkegaard allies like International Society for Intelligence Research board member Emily Willoughby, there's plenty of overlap.

Recently Oliver Smith has shared the story of his unpleasant dealings with Kirkegaard in this long post Emil Kirkegaard vs. Oliver Smith.

Some highlights:

• The purpose of this post, is to fully document what Kirkegaard put me through for over six years; the tl;dr version: Kirkegaard filed a frivolous libel lawsuit, lost the preliminary judgment, discontinued his unmeritorious claim, but refused to pay my awarded costs. I initiated enforcement action but found he changed his name to William Engman; moved country and closed his bank account after I filed a third-party debt order to prevent me seizing his assets.A warrant for his arrest was issued in a bailiff’s court (Fogedretten) in Denmark. It was in effect for several months (since he breached summonses and failed to attend court). His lengthy evasion was likened by a judge at the bailiff’s court to the movie Catch Me If You Can (2002). 

• Ultimately, for his non-attendance there would have been an imposed prison sentence (for contempt of court). Realising severity of his situation, Kirkegaard stopped evading me and began to comply with court orders; he resolved the judgment debt by reaching a settlement, which vacated the hearing on my application for a suspended committal order. While the settlement remains private, and I will not breach this confidentiality, I think anyone can take an ‘educated guess’—Kirkegaard paid me a five-digit sum; the judgment debt he owed (over £50,000) was already part of the public record and it was discussed at length in a judgment.6

• In August 2017, Kirkegaard showed up at RationalWiki (user: EmilOWK) to complain about my criticisms of his OpenPsych journals but was blocked for doxxing me (again). His account was banned on 19 October 2017 and his unblock request was denied. Not long afterwards, he began legally threatening the RationalMedia Foundation who own and operate RationalWiki. 

Note: based on the purging of articles on RationalWiki related to race pseudoscience and promoters of race pseudoscience in 2025, it seems likely to me that Kirkegaard was behind the threatened lawsuits - and possibly the actual lawsuits.

• In May 2016, OpenPsych was embroiled in a scandal that involved doxxing, specifically Kirkegaard had published the data of 70,000 OkCupid users (without their permission) in the journal Open Differential Psychology. Kirkegaard claimed that he was publishing “already public information” but this is questionable. Data he scraped from OkCupid profiles was only accessible if logged in to an account; ethics scholar Michael Zimmer therefore pointed out: “Since OkCupid users [accounts] have the option to restrict the visibility of their profiles to logged-in users only, it is likely the researchers collected and subsequently released the profiles that were intended to not be publicly viewable.” Kirkegaard was subsequently investigated—by the Danish Data Protection Authority.

• Seeming as Kirkegaard doxxed my ISP and was embroiled in scandals,20 I started to look into his digital footprint. I disturbingly discovered—Kirkegaard once admitted viewing child pornography and wrote comments on the internet, sympathising with legalising the possession of child pornography. In 2013, on a Danish internet forum, Kirkegaard under his real name discussed and linked to a list of illegal websites on a “Danish child porn filter” on Wikileaks (these were websites the Danish government blocked access to). He admitted to viewing these child porn sites (with a Tor browser to hide his Danish IP-address) since he had knowledge the websites “are still up and actually contain child porn” so must have gone through the censored list of websites.

• Kirkegaard has had some success in censoring webpages that factually document his internet posts on child pornography or that merely quote his comments; for example, the aforementioned article by DeWereldMorgen that described Kirkegaard a “pedofilie apologeet” (“pedophile apologist”) was removed despite it accurately quoted his posts downplaying the harm of CSA. Kirkegaard suppressed this information in an attempt to get his posts on paedophilia and child pornography memory-holed. He is known to deindex articles from Google (and other search-engines) which mention his comments on child pornography by sending ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. Kirkegaard currently lives in Germany; he can still deindex webpages under EU privacy law (Art. 17 GDPR).

Note: Kirkegaard's sympathy for pedophilia is not only in the past - he retweeted someone criticizing the prosecution of a teacher for abusing a student, just a couple of days ago. Apparently protecting minors is an example of American "Calvinist inheritance."

• Aside from Kirkegaard’s web of lies and deceptions to obfuscate service, I had to deal with him moving address to avoid enforcement. After he left his address in Kiel, I was informed by a journalist that he was sighted on the grounds of the Villa Adlon (a villa in the district of Potsdam). In December 2023, the German online newspaper Die Zeit reported Emil Kirkegaard was living on the grounds of the villa and was embroiled in yet another scandal. I hired a private investigator who confirmed to me he was at least visiting the guesthouse near the villa. The guesthouse’s mailbox was in his girlfriend’s name (I was shown a photograph of this) and I could not serve him by post. By January 2024, Kirkegaard was no longer spotted near the villa; he was rumoured to be in Spain.

• According to the article and investigative journalism by Die Zeit, the co-owner of Villa Adlon, Mathilda Huss gave Kirkegaard “free lodging” and “also supported Kirkegaard two years ago, in founding the Society for German-Danish Knowledge Transfer” (note this is the same company I months earlier had served Kirkegaard by publication in the District Court of Kiel). Huss, his business partner, seems to have given him a place (on the grounds of her villa) to stay or hide, after he deregistered from his property in Kiel. His girlfriend’s name was already on a mailbox. I was later informed that Kirkegaard’s girlfriend is Mathilda Huss’ au pair. Kirkegaard moved address again so I dropped the enforcement action, I had filed in the Potsdam Regional Court (Landgericht Potsdam).

Note: Mathilda Huss provided Villa Aldon to the infamous far-right Postdam meeting, which included neo-Nazi activists. This Huss-Kirkegaard connection is especially important because it demonstrates how the international neo-Nazi network will help members evade the law.

• In November 2024, I found Mankind Quarterly was offering to purchase subscriptions to the journal by PayPal. This opened up the possibility of a third-party debt order in the UK because PayPal UK Ltd is a subsidiary of PayPal Holdings Inc (the former is a private limited company in the UK with its office in London). It was clear from Hope not Hate’s undercover investigation (which was broadcast as Undercover: Exposing the Far Right) and the fact Kirkegaard is the domain registrant of Mankind Quarterly’s site that he now owned the journal.

• Aside from falsely accusing me of being a stalker, I received extensive abuse by emails under pseudonymous names when I was trying to enforce the judgment debt. It seems Kirkegaard was hiding behind these fake names (to avoid legal liability). He might not have realised, that the standard of proof in civil harassment is balance of probabilities and not evidence beyond reasonable doubt. I would only need to show it is more likely than not he sent these abusive emails. Who else would be taunting me about evading? I can only describe Kirkegaard’s behaviour as sociopathic: he filed and lost a frivolous lawsuit, refused to pay my legal costs, then was antagonising me about evading service under fake names sent from unsolicited emails while the same time playing the victim

• While writing this long post, I got in contact with Erik Ahrens now named Andrew Y who was a former friend and associate of Kirkegaard. As noted above, Ahrens fell out with Kirkegaard; he then published a blog post leaking information about Kirkegaard (such as Kirkegaard’s Human Diversity Foundation74) and his business connection to Mathilda Huss (screenshot). Ahrens confirmed Kirkegaard had lived at (or at least was visiting frequently) the Villa Adlon up to January 2024 but relocated to Spain; he lived in Spain for about five months and afterwards traveled to other countries. Ahrens told me he later moved to Berlin. I managed to confirm this, since Kirkegaard in his sworn affidavit (on 10 October 2025), explicitly stated his address was an apartment in Berlin.
• I consider Ahrens to be a reliable source of information concerning Kirkegaard (since most of his claims I have independently verified). Ahrens for months, had stayed with Kirkegaard at a house in Spain. Furthermore, he was formerly involved in setting up a company with Kirkegaard’s girlfriend (Liegent LLC) and was a close friend. According to Ahrens, Kirkegaard often discussed his dislike of me with him and openly admitted he was evading my enforcement proceedings. What Kirkegaard told Ahrens in private contradicted what he wrote in court witness statements, which sums up his dishonest character. Most concerning is Ahrens told me Kirkegaard planned in early 2024, to kill me by hiring a hitman on the dark web (as a way to stop paying me the judgment debt).

I was disappointed that Smith does not mention the 2023 smear campaign against him which included a hit piece in the Manhattan Institute's publication City Journal. The libelous article was promoted by a long list of right-wingers and racists, very much including Charles Murray and Steven Pinker. Smith successfully sued to have the article removed. 

Considering that the article was an attack on a private citizen who was owed money by Kirkegaard at the time, and considering the article attacks Rational Wiki, it looks to me like the article was published by City Jounal at the behest of Emil Kirkegaard. If true, that makes the Manhattan Institute part of the international neo-Nazi network.

Anybody who is opposed to racism and race pseudoscience should give thanks to Oliver Smith for fighting Emil Kirkegaard and documenting the fight - clearly the forces of the international neo-Nazi network - including Steven "friend of Epstein" Pinker - were brought in to try to destroy his life for daring to oppose racist, neo-Nazi weirdo Emil Kirkegaard.

UPDATE: Kirkegaard claims he's not sad the Nazis lost WWII - but somehow that doesn't stop him from promoting neo-Nazis, aligning with neo-Nazis, or continuing Mankind Quarterly which was created by Nazi-sympathizer money and devoted to the same race pseudoscience promoted by the original German Nazis.

Well, you can't expect logical consistency from neo-Nazi racist weirdos.

Very good video: "You Are Not Your Genes: The Hereditarian Fallacy"

It's by Zach B. Hancock, Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology and  it appropriately places Steven Pinker in the center of the hereditarian fallacy, with mentions of Charles Murray, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Gregory Clark.

The best part is his pointing out that self-described hereditarian Gregory Clark uses the "classic" heritability (as opposed to "molecular") method invented by racist Francis Galton to make claims about social success and genes.

I will point out again that the Adam Rutherford co-authored paper cites Clark three times to make its arguments.

In case there is any doubt how extreme are the hereditarian claims being promoted by Adam Rutherford, Abdel Abdellaoui and their eight co-authors.

Who were the biggest racists at the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research?

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. 

Although as I've said many times, it's really unfair to Woodley, as the work of several ISIR meeting participants showed up in the manifesto.

Woodley has co-authored papers with so many other racists, including Kirkegaard, that I wonder if he is capable of authoring a paper with someone who is not a racist.

Woodley is one of the ghouls who used a SLAPP lawsuit to censor Rational Wiki. You can tell it was pure SLAPP intimidation since the New York Times article is at least as damning as the Rational Wiki one, but as far as I know, Woodley did not try to sue the New York Times.

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:

White-Black differences in tech tilt: Support for Spearman's law and investment theories. 

There appears to be no effort in this paper to determine exactly who counts as "Black" and who counts as "White" - which is absolutely typical of race pseudoscience. 

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.

Exquisite take-down of Richard Dawkins

I just discovered a really good atheist YouTuber, Drew McCoy, known as Genetically Modified Skeptic.

It seems that one of Dawkins' PR guys tried to bring him into the Dawkins fold. 

McCoy refused and then did an exquisite take-down of Dawkins instead. This is how you do it. 

Hemant Mehta the Friendly Atheist makes an appearance.

Mentioned as allies of Dawkins: Jerry Coyne, Colin Wright, Edward Dutton, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

Related Genetically Modified Skeptic videos:

• Why the Anti-Woke Right Has So Many Atheists

• Why the Right Hates Atheists but Loves Elon Musk

• The "Skeptics" Are Crashing Out Hard - about the infamous "War on Science" right-wing grievances book

Charles Murray is done

Just a wretched excuse for a 
human being - which is why
the American Right loves him
------------------------------------------------------

I completed the Rational Wiki article on Charles Murray. He is just an absolute stinker of a human being. 

Probably my favorite parts of the piece are:

• Casting doubt on Murray's claim that as a "bright" high school senior, planning to attend college, he had no idea that burning a cross would be racially charged.

• Pointing out that Murray was motivated to trash "Hidden Figures" because Twitter critics did not like his tweet that cast doubt on the mathematical accomplishment of two Black teenage girls. Murray got his revenge!

• Digging up astronaut Michael Collins' criticisms of Murray's no-longer-in-print book "Apollo: The Race to the Moon"

And having another excuse to share Al Franken's rip on The Bell Curve.

Racist Rodeo's a-coming - the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research is only weeks away

David Lubinski yukking it up with
Linda Gottfredson in 2016 - isn't racism jolly?
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Racist Rodeo is coming up, July 26 - 29 in Berkeley California.

This is the twenty-third annual meeting of the race pseudoscience gang. 

Seems like only yesterday when extreme racists like J. P. Rushton, Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jenson met for the first rodeo in Cleveland Ohio to discuss why those Blacks (and other "races" like Hispanics) are so damn genetically inferior. And look how quaint, their first program cover uses the Comic Sans typeface. 

I guess to present the casual, friendly side of "race realism."

The latest update for the upcoming Rodeo indicates that the timetable for the conference is still being finalized. But I see the "conference will feature a special symposium on giftedness with invited talks by giftedness researchers Michael Mhlolo and Camilla Benbow, among others."

Mhlolo is Black, so they now have two Black people attending this Racist Rodeo. But never fear, Camilla P. Benbow will be there to balance him out. Benbow is the wife of race pseudoscience hardcore David Lubinski, who is apparently the interview guy for the ISIR - here he interviews Charles Murray.

I discussed Lubinski conducting an interview with Pinker, asking Pinker why it took him a half-minute before joining the race pseudoscience true believers club. Or as Dubinsky calls it, "human psychological diversity."

It's clear that the push to legitimize race pseudoscience is not simply the project of weirdos like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard (will he show up at the ISIR this year now that Abdel Abdellaoui isn't there to chase him away?) This is a mainstream project with establishment people involved - Lubinski is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt, and Benbow is Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development, Office of the Dean at Vanderbilt.

We know their project is mainstreaming race pseudoscience because Lubinski signed Linda Gottfredson's race pseudoscience manifesto back in 1994, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence." This document is the Declaration of Independence of the ISIR - if you signed it, you are a founding father of twenty-first century race pseudoscience.

The ISIR's devotion to hereditarianism is obvious on its articles page. The fifth item down is "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" with the comment "The article is a classic. It’s one of the best overviews of intelligence, its causes, and its consequences."

The first two articles include incorrect definitions of the term "heritability." 

I've written on this blog about the misuse of the term. A great resource is The heritability fallacy by David S. Moore and David Shenk published in 2016, which states:

Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is.

Now they say "popular belief" which might indicate the general public. But the articles presented by the ISIR are written by people whose careers are staked on hereditarianism and should know better. 

And yet the first paper Genetics and Intelligence Differences by Robert Plomin and Ian Deary states:

For some areas of behavioural research—especially in psychiatry —the pendulum has swung so far from a focus on nurture to a focus on nature that it is important to highlight a second law of genetics for complex traits and common disorders: All traits show substantial environmental influence, in that heritability is not 100% for any trait.

They are using the term "heritable" as an exact synonym for genetically inheritable, and contrast that with "environmental influence."

The second paper in the list, Heritability in the genomics era - concepts and misconceptions states in its first key point:

Heritability, the proportion of variation in a particular trait that is attributable to genetic factors, is a fundamental parameter in genetics.

Now why would hereditarians so often mis-define the term heritable? Is it deliberate, with the goal of claiming that GWAS studies prove the hereditarian hypothesis? Or could it be that their belief in the ability of genes to control social outcomes is so reflexive that they can't imagine the term "heritable" could mean anything else?

Or could it be that the ISIR and fellow race pseudoscience travelers don't care so much about actual science - as long as their beliefs are presented in a way that sounds sufficiently sciencey to the lazy gullible media and the general public - as they do about political goals? 

The "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" paper, so essential to the ISIR and the race pseudoscience project ("a classic"), was written as a defense of The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve's co-author Charles Murray made it obvious, two years ago, that he would be happy to see a return to hiring discrimination, based on the beliefs of race pseudoscience.

Like Charles Murray, Thomas Bouchard, the twins studies guy and one of the ISIR's favorites, is the beneficiary of far-right racist funding:

 ...of the largest single beneficiaries of Wickliffe Draper’s generosity in the 20th century was the psychologist Thomas Bouchard, currently the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota, whose twin studies remain influential in intelligence research circles. Most recently, Bouchard’s work was cited in a 2022 paper in the Nature journal npj Science of Learning looking at genetic effects on cognitive performance as people learn over time. 

‍

In her 2012 book “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study,” the evolutionary psychologist Nancy Segal claims that Bouchard had never heard of the Pioneer Fund until its staff contacted him in 1980 or 1981. Despite concerns among his colleagues about accepting money from what was known to be a disreputable source, according to Segal, Bouchard admitted in 2009 that, “If not for Pioneer we would have folded long ago.” 

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Wickliffe Draper was a political activist and the Nazis were big fans - and vice versa.

Racists funding race pseudoscience for political ends. That's what the ISIR is ultimately all about.

Fun fact - of course like Bo Winegard, racist weirdo Emil Kirkegaard has a Substack account. That's because Substack is run by people with Peter Thiel connections who have no qualms about hosting racism.

Another fun fact: Charles Murray is a big fan - and funder - of Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.

Andrew Sullivan, still promoting racist pseudoscience

Andrew Sullivan is well-known for promoting the racist nonsense of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

More recently, when confronted by a New York Times reporter, Sullivan stepped back just a tiny bit from race pseudoscience.

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q. (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups.

“It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,” he said. (He later told me he’s “open-minded” on the issue and thinks it’s “premature” to weigh the data.)

“I barely write about this,” he went on. “It’s not something I’m obsessed with.”

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.”

It was obvious that Sullivan was still committed to race essentialism and pseudoscience by his mentioning Jews and the Nobel Prize - he's referencing the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis, created by racists, with the goal, I believe, of inventing a "scientific" justification for a long-standing racist belief about Jews. 

In the past week, Sullivan not only recommitted himself to race pseudoscience, he did it via an even less-reputable individual, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, best known as being described by comedian Stewart Lee as "weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil."

Emil Kirkegaard has such a bad reputation that even Abdel Abdellaoui refused to participate in a conference unless Emil O. W. Kirkegaard was disinvited from the Racist Roundup.

I think it's likely that Abdellaoui is just as committed to sociobiological (hereditarian) explanations of human hierarchies, given that he is an ally of anti-Black racist Razib Khan, as Kirkegaard. I think the issue is about status - Kirkegaard doesn't have the academic credentials that most people associated with the International Society for Intelligence Research, aka "the Racist Roundup" have.

UPDATE - SULLIVAN RETRACTED

However, I doubt this indicates that Sullivan is no longer a believer in race pseudoscience.

Then Kirkegaard jumped on the thread to defend white supremacy.

Scary Peter Thiel and Google censorship

So Google decided to censor my blog post "Scary rightwing anti-democratic Quillette-funding Peter Thiel" - and while it certainly could be political censorship, it could also be due to Google stupidly using AI to moderate Blogger content now.

The claim was that the post somehow violated "community standards" but I don't see how. And Google does not tell you exactly why it flags a post for censorship - you are supposed to guess. 

I will be moving this blog to a new platform as soon as possible.

You can read the original article here.

VIVE LA INDEPENDENT WEB!

Michael Shermer and Equalitarianism and the Citizens' Councils

Last time I wrote about Quillette author Michael Shermer it was to note his agreement with Quillette author Nathan Cofnas on the issue of "genetic diversity." 

Lately I've found that Michael Shermer is in agreement with racist Bo Winegard on the issue of the term "equalitarian." Both believe it would be a good term to use against those who oppose and criticize race pseudoscience and racism - the ideological enemies of Shermer and Winegard.

Shermer cites Thomas Sowell, a rightwing economist. From a Washington Post review of a book by Sowell:

Sowell’s central message is that the reason some people are poor — in any country, at any period in history — is not discrimination or exploitation or malicious actions on the part of the rich. Rather, people are poor because they don’t or won’t produce. For him, the only mystery is why.

Michael Shermer and his friends are ready to supply the answer to the mystery, via pseudoscience: they believe poor people have genes that make them poor. 

This belief isn't new of course, racist Charles Murray has made a career out of that belief since at least The Bell Curve. 

The term equalitarian is not new either. It was a favorite term of segregationist Carlton Putnam as noted by Neil R. McMillen in The Citizen’s Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction:

Setting forth his ethnological assumption in an influential and widely circulated book, Race and Reason (1961), Putnam asserted that one need not have advanced scientific training to dispute theories of racial equalitarianism: “Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo… can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence…” That so few informed Americans saw things so clearly was compelling proof to Putnam that the nation had been victimized by a “pseudo-scientific hoax” popularized by such early exponents of racial equipotentiality as Franz Boas and several subsequent generations of like-minded anthropologists more devoted to “the demo-goddess of Equalitarianism” than to “the Goddess of Truth.”

Putnam's pro-segregation pamphlet "High Court's Arrogance is Viewed by Northerner" was published by the Educational Fund of the Citizens' Councils of Greenwood, Mississippi.

If you do a search for "equalitarian" you can see how popular the term is with racists:

• The Equalitarian Dogma by HE Garrett · 1961 · 

• The equalitarian dogma revisited by JP Rushton · 1994  

• (PDF) Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias by Bo Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor Hasty, Roy Baumeister - Oct 30, 2020 

• "Equalitarianism" and Progressive Bias - Quillette by Bo Winegard 2018

Garrett was a segregationist and briefly a director of The Pioneer Fund. J. P. Rushton was an infamous racist and racemonger.

Rushton's "The equalitarian dogma, revisited," is a defense of Garrett's "The Equalitarian Dogma."

Rushton is listed as a reference in "Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias" by Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister.

I don't believe any of these authors are ignorant of the use of "equalitarianism" by segregationists, racists and racemongers. I think that, more likely, this attempt to revive the term "equalitarian" by Shermer, Winegard, Clark, Hasty and Baumeister is a knowing homage to 20th century racists, and perhaps a dogwhistle to other promoters of race pseudoscience.

Cory Clark is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania and co-author with Bo Winegard of this retracted paper; Connor Hasty is a professor at Florida State University; and Roy Baumeister was associated with Winegard at Florida State University and is now Emeritus professor at the University of Queensland.

Putnam's Wikipedia entry includes these passages from his book "Race and Reason: A Yankee View": 

In the next 500,000,000,000 years I would be quite prepared to concede the possibility the Negro may, through normal processes of mutation and natural selection within his own race, eventually overtake and even surpass the white race. [...] When the Negro has bred out his limitations over hundreds, or thousands, of years, it will be time enough to consider absorbing him in any such massive doses as would be involved in the South today.[6]: 53 

The mulatto who was bent on making the nation mulatto was the real danger. His alliance with the white equalitarian often combined men who had nothing in common save a belief that they had a grudge against society. They regarded every Southerner who sensed the genetic truth as a bigot [...]. Here were the men who needed to be reminded of the debt the Negro owed to white civilization.[6]: 117 

Contemporary racemongers must be so jealous of Putnam, who could get away with such blatant public racism and still have a career in business, serving as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines after he published his racist swill.

Winegard's career seems to be wholly supported by the racist wingnut welfare system via Quillette, but Shermer still has Skeptic magazine. I can only assume Skeptic is supported by racists and idiots who either don't know Shermer is a racist, or don't care.

Fun fact: Ruby Bridges, whose quest for desegregated education was supported by the "equalitarians" so hated by Shermer, Putnam, Garrett, Rushton, Clark, Hasty, Baumeister and Winegard, is 67 years old. The same age as Steven Pinker (within 10 days) and Michael Shermer (same birthday) and one year younger than Roy Baumeister.

The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker

I've spoken admiringly in the past of the work of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in particular his in-depth look at the work of David Reich.

Lewis-Kraus has recently published an article in the New Yorker along a similar theme - left-leaning hereditarian whose work has provided some comfort to purveyors of race pseudoscience.

In this case it's an article about Kathryn Paige Harden entitled Can Progressives Be Convinced that Genetics Matter? which, as some on Twitter pointed out, is a bullshit question.

Something that really jumped out at me in the article (my highlights):

Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”

But Razib Khan isn't just a race science guy who thought Harden's book was good. Razib Khan considers Kathryn Paige Harden to be his friend:

My friend Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality is a well-written book that presents a somewhat tendentious position, at least to many of a progressive bent, that genetics must be considered when we design a liberal order. You can read my review over at UnHerd, though if you are subscribed to the paid version of this newsletter I’ll eventually be posting a much longer version of the review on this Substack.

How merciless can Harden be, if Razib Khan considers her a friend? I found that when I have been merciless towards the race pseudoscience of Razib Khan, he blocked me on Twitter. 

The New Yorker article mentions Quillette, Razib Khan and Charles Murray, but somehow neglects to mention that in July of this year, Khan wrote a positive review of Charles Murray's latest book for Quillette. 

And by the way, Khan declares Charles Murray to be his friend too. Is that how it works in the world of race-mongering? Friends always review the work of friends? 

The New Yorker piece demonstrates, contrary to its main theme, how much more extreme and politicized the hereditarian right is in comparison to the hereditarian left. 

Lewis-Kraus writes:

Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

As one Twitterer responded:

Meanwhile this is what the hereditarian right is saying. In his review of his friend Charles Murray's book, Razib Khan writes:

But why read a book on this topic when you can discover these facts within a few minutes? Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. Acknowledging unambiguous patterns of this kind will often result in the rebuke that some beliefs are divine mysteries, to be accepted on faith rather than analyzed more deeply. Which is precisely why Murray wants to inject these taboo realities into the intellectual bloodstream of our society. Despite being a brisk read, Murray’s short book lays out all the inferences and conclusions that remain lacunae in our public discourse. Without these facts on the table, the contemporary American debate has had to rely upon the ether of social science and nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer has remarked that “theory is information for free,” and these are theories which purport to explain everything in American history.

How can this be interpreted in any way but "as long as we believe Black Americans are the victims of systemic racism and white supremacy we will not "connect the dots" about them and therefore fail to arrive at the truth: their real problem is their genetic inferiority"?

And this conclusion is not just something we can all agree to disagree about, according to Murray. As Khan writes earlier in the review:

The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur.

 

So according to the hereditarian right, we face DISASTER if we don't face the truth of Black American genetic inferiority.

That's quite a bit stronger than: "if genes are important then everybody should get healthcare."  

But for some reason, Lewis-Kraus, who has already acknowledged the existence of Quillette, Murray and Khan doesn't mention the review. Instead, when he mentions Quillette, it's part of a both-sides theme:

In Quillette, the researcher Richard Haier compared Harden and Turkheimer’s repudiation of Murray to climate-change denial—the second time in a year that Harden had been thus indicted, this time from the right.

Quillette published a review that says unless we acknowledge the genetic inferiority of Black Americans we face disaster. 

You would think that would be of some interest in an article that includes discussions of the dangers of race pseudoscience.

Richard Haier, it must be noted, writes for the far-right Federalist. In this tweet he reveals that Charles Murray is a political operative on the payroll of the Koch-funded AEI.

But of course this entire Pinkerite blog has demonstrated again and again how very well-financed the hereditarian right is by right-wing plutocrats. This is a hugely important issue in discussions of the political impact of hereditarianism, and one that Lewis-Kraus ignores. 

I'm very disappointed, New Yorker.