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.

Racist & misogynist club with Jeffrey Epstein, Steven Pinker and friends.

 I just recently saw this photo of a dinner party with Pinker and his Epstein circle.

This image is floating around various places, but I found this instance in the article The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science

It's amazing how many images there are of Pinker with Epstein considering Pinker claims he avoided Epstein.

Of course Pinker's #1 fanboy, the embarassing Jerry Coyne, had to defend Pinker with the usual excuse whenever a member of the right-wing men's club is caught while up to some mischief: "guilt by association!"

Coyne has no response to Pinker's letter in 2012 saying he'd be delighted to meet with Epstein. Because Coyne simply ignores anything he doesn’t want to know.

Pinker could be seen promoting the career of racist and neo-Nazi Richard Hanania this month.

Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel

"Ferahgo the Assassin," by Steven Pinker's

hereditarian ally Emily Willoughby, an image 

made publicly available by Willoughby 

on Facebook. Willoughby borrowed the 

character's name as a pseudonym while 

writing in support of race pseudoscience. 

It's too perfect that a Pinker ally 

identifies with a humanoid weasel.

--------------------------------------------------------

Although Steven Pinker was originally dubbed the world's most annoying man by someone else, I originated calling him a weasel. But I confess that while reading some of Pinker's latest book "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..." I found the flagrance of his weasellitude so breathtaking I'm amazed I was able to write about it outside of an oxygen tent.

In the chapter "The Instinct to Cancel" Pinker argues that it were better if we not discuss race and intelligence in public.

Fear not, Pinker has not given up on race pseudoscience.

I was alerted to Pinker's position by those who have the greatest self-interest in talking about race and intelligence because they have staked their entire careers and livelihoods on the issue: the neo-Nazis at Aporia Magazine.

In an article in Aporia called 'Pinker is wrong. We should "go there"' neo-Nazi Bo Winegard says:

Few topics inspire bad arguments as reliably as race differences in intelligence. So often have I responded to them that I have plausibly been accused of obsession. But as long as the bad arguments persist, someone must respond. Consider it a public service.

But of course Winegard is not doing anything as a "public service" - this is his full-time job. He works for Emil Kirkegaard's race pseudoscience and Nazi network, so brilliantly exposed by Hope not Hate a year ago:

In recent months, however, Aporia has dropped its pretence of balance, as evidenced by the interview that eventually took place with (Jared) Taylor in May 2024. Taylor’s interlocutor was Bo Winegard, Aporia’s new executive editor, who, on the website, has called upon his readers to “​​embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate.”

That's not to say that Winegard is only doing it for the money. I'm prepared to accept that Winegard is such a dullard he truly believes in race pseudoscience, that collection of pre-20th century European folklores presented as science from Social Darwinism to eugenics to Nazism to sociobiology to evolutionary psychology to behavioral genetics. 

I'm in favor of publicly discussing race and intelligence claims so that people who are not right-wing psychologists can gasp in wonder at how stupid race pseudoscience really is.

In the next paragraph, Winegard states why Pinker is so useful to the cause of race pseudoscience:

The latest comes from Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… It deserves attention precisely because it comes from Pinker, a celebrated academic and an outspoken defender of free speech and open inquiry. This is not some indignant progressive who made a career of castigating “racist pseudoscience”, but a rational centrist who has long argued against the left’s denial of human nature.

Pinker's also been called a "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

In "When Everyone Knows...," Pinker makes the case for race pseudoscience while pretending to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the issue:

The case for not going there, to be sure, has many problems. It’s almost impossible to enforce. It faces the polar bear paradox: telling people not to think about an idea forces them to think about the idea. It may be hard to draw the line around the no-go zone so that it doesn’t swallow up neighboring territories, like the study of intelligence or of continental ancestry. It forecloses the possibility of obtaining decisive evidence that racial differences are wholly environmental and eliminable, with all the social benefits that would bring.

And it may be too late. Our era is obsessed with racial differences, attributing them unquestioningly to racism, which only invites curious people to wonder whether they might be attributed to other causes, intensifying the regime that criminalizes such curiosity. As the writer Coleman Hughes has argued, there are good reasons for even the most open-minded people to want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation. But that tacit agreement should be a part of a larger commitment to color-blind policies in public and private life.

Coleman Hughes is in a tough spot - he's Black but has taken money from race pseudoscience-promoting Quillette -  so it is in his self-interest to "want to keep the issue of race and intelligence out of mainstream conversation." With Pinker's apparent approval, Hughes offers a deal on behalf of hereditarians along the lines of: "we won't mention that Blacks are genetically inferior if you promise to stop making efforts to ameliorate systemic racism via programs like DEI." 

Pinker hates DEI.

Pinker is so comfortable with race pseudoscience that this year he had a byline in Aporia, then appeared on the Aporia podcast.

For Pinker, being a true believer in race pseudoscience has only ever been a minor inconvenience in his progress as a celebrity intellectual. I've found only three times when the issue was raised by the mainstream press: 

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer; 
• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021;
• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. Pinker's most groveling sycophant Jerry Coyne could be seen whining that the Guardian would dare discuss that appearance.

I am convinced that Pinker's strategy, in order to promote race pseudoscience while maintaining a career as a celebrated academic/rational centrist/celebrity intellectual, is to loudly claim he is opposed to racism - he told the Guardian that racism was stupid - while at the same time promoting the careers of racists who will go there for him, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard. 

In his book, Pinker mentions the ISIR meeting participant Cory Clark with approval a couple of times (including to mention she's co-authored a paper with him) but doesn't mention she has worked for Emil Kirkegaard, and when he notes another paper Clark co-authored, fails to mention Bo Winegard is one of the co-authors.

Because that's just the kind of weasel that Steven Pinker is. 

The book's reference section includes racists, hereditarians, evolutionary psychologists and right-wing reactionaries: Lee Jussim, Nathan Cofnas, Roy Baumeister, David Buss, Richard Dawkins, Alice Dreger, Jonathan Haidt, Carole Hooven, Eric Kaufmann, Greg Lukianoff, Donald Symons, Lawrence Summers, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides and Matt Yglesias.

Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:

Journalists, too, despite their ironclad commitment to freedom of the press, muzzle themselves in particular circumstances. They may, for example, choose not to identify confidential sources, juvenile suspects, the victims of sexual assault, or details surrounding prominent suicides. They may decline to publish the manifestos of rampage shooters, or train a camera on sports fans running onto the field.

But he doesn't seem to appreciate how this has helped his career, how his weasellitude is enabled by most journalists being too chummy with celebrity intellectuals to dare ask anything potentially embarrassing. After all, Pinker might get huffy as he did when the Guardian dared ask:

Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website..

I know exactly how high the bar is for journalists to care about the pro-racism activities of celebrity intellectuals like Pinker. Back when the New Yorker was helping to promote behavioral genetics via a glowing profile of Kathryn Paige Harden, I had a brief exchange of emails with the profile's author Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a frequent New Yorker contributor. He said:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do... 

Now we do know about letters between E. O. Wilson and ultra-racist J. Philippe Rushton, which did seem to convince some people that Wilson was a racist. But the reason the correspondence was significant was that it provided evidence that Wilson used his celebrity intellectual powers to help advance Rushton's career.

But we don't need emails between Pinker and Sailer, there is plenty of evidence that Pinker has helped to promote the career of Sailer and many other racists as I've documented for the past seven years on this blog. And by the way, Pinker could be seen promoting Rushton too, on Boing Boing in 2009.

For journalists like Lewis-Kraus, which is almost all of them, Pinker can promote all the racists and appear on all the neo-Nazis podcasts in the world, he will always be acceptable as long as he doesn't record a precise declaration of his beliefs. The rest of us are forbidden from drawing conclusions based merely on a quarter century of Pinker's activities.

But if Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazis does not faze journalists (except the Guardian), I doubt anything will.

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

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

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

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

On his Substack (of course) Yglesias ponders:

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

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

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

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

Behavioral genetics promoter Eric Turkheimer responded to Yglesias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later in the post, Joseph writes: 

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

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

And speaking of Steve Sailer:

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

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

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

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

It's time to say it out loud - Steven Pinker is a racist - a shameless racist

Steven Pinker has been called many things during the years of his fame.

A "celebrity intellectual" by the New York Times.

"The World's Most Annoying Man" by Nathan J. Robinson.

"A weasel" by me.

But it's time for another word to describe Pinker and he's been working towards it for about the last quarter-century, since at least when he was helping to promote the career of professional racist Steve Sailer. 

Pinker and Quillette founder Claire Lehmann at the "Heterodox" conference
------------------------------------------------------------

As already established, Steven Pinker is utterly shameless, so it's no surprise to see him following up his appearance on the neo-Nazi Aporia magazine podcast with his participation at the "inaugural Heterodox Conference" which wraps up today.

Just about every single person at this conference has a connection to Aporia, Quillette, the far right, (MAGA Christopher Rufo,) or has become famous for sexual harassment like Lawrence Krauss and Joshua Katz. Plus that idiot Yascha Mounk of the reactionary-infested Persuasion. 

And of course the Intellectual Dark Web, including named member, and complete racist Michael Shermer, good personal friend of Steven Pinker.

The conference was organized by Eric Kaufmann, a member of racist extremist Richard Hanania's think tank. Which makes me think that Hanania funded this conference, but considering how many people at the conference have worked for or with Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia and other outlets of Polygenic Scores (formerly Human Diversity Foundation) Kirkegaard is also a suspect.

And Jonathan Anomaly, eugenics huckster, and SLAPP suit plaintiff, was also there.

The Guardian took notice of Pinker's close alliance with racists today in its article, Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism, writing:

The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.

I had to laugh at "legitimation by association." Pinker and his sociobiology sympathizers like Abdel Abdellaoui like to cry "guilt by association" whenever their connections to racists are mentioned, so it's great to see Pinker's racist buddies admit they do exactly what I've always accused them of doing - using Steve Pinker, celebrity intellectual, in their campaign to mainstream race pseudoscience.

More from the article:

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.
He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”

That was always the plan - to mainstream race pseudoscience. That's why Quillette recruited Pinker to write for them. 

After decades of Steven Pinker promoting race pseudoscience it's time to find Steven Pinker guilty of racism.

Rational Wiki censorship-palooza - so many connections to Emil Kirkegaard!

Here are the articles that I am aware of that Rational Wiki has censored. 

Charles Murray declaring his financial
support for the neo-Nazi  Emil Kirkegaard
and his (soon to be) employee Bo Winegard, March 2020
-------------------------------------------------

Murray and Claire Lehmann express
an interest in their RW articles, May 2025
---------------------------------------------------

Some articles were deleted because of SLAPP lawsuits instigated by Jonathan Anomaly, Noah Carl, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Russell T. Warne, Jan te Nijenhuis, Jonatan Pallesen and James Thompson.

But a whole bunch of other articles were removed without reference to a public lawsuit. 

All of the yanked articles have a connection to Emil Kirkegaard, the center of an international Neo-Nazi, racist, eugenics network.

It looks to me like Kirkegaard (aka William Engman) is taking care of all his allies, supporters and employees in an effort to avoid public scrutiny for various race pseudoscience and far-right political statements and activities.

I will be updating this list as needed.

• Anatoly Karlin - co-authored an article with Emil Kirkegaard for Kirkegaard's Mankind Quarterly.

• Aporia Magazine - the neo-Nazi magazine hosted by fascist Marc Andreessen-supported Substack and is funded by Emil Kirkegaard

• Asbiro University - a Polish business school associated with Edward Dutton

• Charles Murray - I will be reposting most of the contents of the article on Pinkerite since I was the main contributor - Murray has donated money to Emil Kirkegaard. Charles Murray is a famous public figure and the article was well-sourced and its removal would never have prevailed in a court of law. There is no doubt this was yanked out of pure, financial-threat SLAPP thuggery.

• Davide Piffer - has published a lot in Emil Kirkegaard's OpenPsyche

• Edward Dutton - mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the Human Diversity Foundation. He works for Kirkegaard via his "Jolly Heretic" Substack.

• Elite Human Capital - a typically worthless idea promoted by (maybe invented by?) Kirkegaard fan-boy Richard Hanania.

• Emil Kirkegaard - probably behind the SLAPP suits and the secret deal, since all the known litigants and deleted articles have a connection to Kirkegaard and/or his organizations Aporia and Human Diversity Foundation and their subsidiaries.

• Emily Willoughby Talk Archive - I didn't need any more convincing that Willoughby is part of Kirkegaard's network - after all,  she's a board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research. The deleted page mentions Willoughby's connection to Kirkegaard. Her main page was deleted a while ago, but you can still find the entry for Emily Willoughby on Archive Today.

• International Society for Intelligence Research along with its reference to Institute of Mental Chronometry. Emil Kirkegaard has participated in six ISIR annual meetings including in 2024 and published in its related journal "Intelligence."

• GegenUni - the article has references to Kirkegaard, Dutton and neo-Nazi Erik Ahrens

• Gerhard Meisenberg - is editor of Mankind Quarterly

• Helmuth Nyborg - co-authored an article with Emil Kirkegaard in Mankind Quarterly

• Heiner Rindermann - has written for Mankind Quarterly, now owned by Emil Kirkegaard.

• Human Diversity Foundation - has a Wikipedia page - it's owned by Kirkegaard.

• Human Varieties - described as an HBD (Human bio-diversity, a racist concept) website. Mentions John Fuerst.

• James Thompson - connected to Kirkegaard through the London Conference on Intelligence, at least.

• Jan te Nijenhuis - filed a lawsuit against RMF - connected to Kirkegaard via Mankind Quarterly.

• John R. G. Fuerst (aka Gerard Fuerst)  - connected to Kirkegaard via OpenPsych.

• Jonatan Pallesen - filed a lawsuit against RMF - connected to Kirkegaard via Aporia and papers he's co-authored with Kirkegaard. He could be seen celebrating his victory on X/Twitter.

• Jonathan Anomaly - filed a lawsuit against RMF - there's an article about him at Hope not Hate - "The Superbaby Factory" - Anomaly has worked for Kirkegaard's Aporia Magazine.

• Jordan Lasker - aka Crémieux, writer for Aporia.

• Lipton Matthews - a Holocaust denier who has appeared on the Emil Kirkegaard owned "Jolly Heretic." He absolutely adores "human biodiversity" and posted a list of people in HBD, many of whom appear on this here list. What a coincidence.

• Mankind Quarterly - has a Wikipedia page Mankind Quarterly - a publication run by Emil Kirkegaard

• Matthew Frost - (aka Matthew Archer)  founder of Aporia Magazine, exposed in the HOPE not hate article Race Science, Inc.

• Michael A. Woodley of Menie - the New York Times published an article about him titled "A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting" - has published in the Kirkegaard-owned Open Psych.

• Nathan Cofnas - works for Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia.

• Noah Carl - filed a lawsuit against RMF. Carl works for Kirkegaard via Aporia.

• OpenPsyche pseudojournals - founded by Emil Kirkegaard - here is the OpenPsyche article at Wikipedia.

• Richard Hanania - in case anybody is fooled by Hanania's recent pretense at being reasonable. Hanania is a big fan of Emil Kirkegaard.

• Russell T. Warne - filed a lawsuit against RMF - has published in Aporia and Mankind Quarterly

But what's up with Claire Lehmann? In the tweet I posted above, she's asking "TracingWoodgrains" (who has a Substack account that claims racist extremist Curtis Yarvin's "...framework is more relevant than ever") to check and see if her RW article was deleted. Even I didn't think Claire Lehmann was so stupid she couldn't figure out how to find her own article on Rational Wiki. Maybe she figures TracingWoodgrains knows who is on the deletion list for articles that haven't yet been deleted.

I thought that Lehmann and Kirkegaard were good buddies who go way back. How did Lehmann get left off the list? I've copied her archive link, just in case.

Based on the Rational Wiki removal log, it looks like censorship-palooza got started on May 8, starting with Lipton Matthews, then Anatoly Karlin, then Human Diversity Foundation... see for yourself below. (RMF) indicates the article was yanked by order of Rational Media Foundation, instead of going through the usual voting process.

That was a week ago, but the censorship-palooza festivities have continued right through today, with the articles for John Fuerst, Human Varieties and Asbiro University all being yanked. We'll see if anything is yanked tomorrow. I'm betting right now anything that is yanked by order of RMF in the near future will be connected to Emil Kirkegaard, one way or the other.

No matter how secret this deal is, I am confident that the truth about all this censorship will come out one day.

Pinkerite vs. the racists and Thiel Fellows of X/Twitter

I see Razib Khan was attacking me some more after the Abdel Abdellaoui incident, but he can't be bothered to spell my name right. Demonstrating, no doubt, the same amount of care he puts into his scholarship, which is why, instead of being a real scientist even though Ron Unz funded his education, he's a full-time far-right political operative with a focus on promoting race pseudoscience. 

As it turns out, there are lots and lots of "Nancy Mclaren"s.

 "Her life does seem really sad."

Well we can't all be living that good life, attending Curtis "democracy is done" Yarvin's wedding like that bon vivant Razib Khan.

I should mention that this racist-right X/Twitter conclave took place on a Saturday night. I guess that's how these guys prefer to spend their Saturday night, gossiping about a nobody blogger. They must sure have a really good life. I mean, as Abdel Abdellaoui will tell you, I am old. You can't expect that I would be out having a life on a Saturday night. So what's Razib Khan's excuse? What's Re-open the Sizzlers' excuse?

Re-open the Sizzlers (aka @SaladBarFan) who said "Her life does seem really sad" manages to combine all the ingredients of far-right wackiness rolled into one: AI, crypto, evo psych, heterodox, IQ and Thiel Fellow. 

Khan, along with Richard Hanania, was recently mentioned in an article about Trump supporters having second thoughts. You have to be a real genius to take this long to recognize Trump's incompetence and evil.

Trump supporters ranging from mega-investor Bill Ackman to anti-vax influencer Alex Berenson have expressed remorse about their decision to support Trump in November. Some have been harsh: Razib Khan, a geneticist and influential science writer on the right, called himself “r*****ed and wrong” for discounting the risk that Trump would actually do the tariffs.

Richard Hanania, a pundit prominent enough to occasionally swap DMs with Elon Musk on X, has gone the furthest. Last week, he published a lengthy Substack essay explaining why he now believes his reasons for voting Trump were mistaken.

Also (my bold)

Khan was briefly hired to write on the New York Times op-ed page before being dismissed over previous publications in far-right websites. He believes that race is a biological reality, and places this belief at the center of his political identity. “I’m not a lib. Never have been, never will be unless they accept views on race/sex that they’ll never accept,” Khan writes.

These are things about Razib Khan that everybody has known for over a decade. So it's really odd that during the past decade Kathryn Paige Harden and Abdel Abdellaoui have been such friendly colleagues of Khan while proclaiming their opposition to racism.

My life has certainly had its ups and downs, but fighting race pseudoscience gives me a sense of purpose. I believe I'm doing the right thing by shining a spotlight on the race pseudoscience that infests the field of behavioral genetics.

And if nothing else I can count one of my blessings: at least I didn't grow up to devote my life to race pseudoscience.

But it's not too late Razib Khan, you still have time to turn your life around!

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 5 ~ racists, evolutionary psychologists and the meritocracy

Donald Trump declares war on civil rights
because "meritocracy"
--------------------------------------------------

So in part 4 we talked about how hereditarians misuse the term "heritability." Now lets talk about how they promote the belief that we live in a meritocracy.

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.' 

This belief is most clearly demonstrated by Buss's claim about Turkmen women, described by David Buller in his book Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. The first paragraph is a quote, the next is Buller's commentary. (My highlights)

..in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

During most of the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, English men did not buy women, but since most women had to choose a husband - or have a husband chosen by parents - in the hope that he would financially support her for the rest of her life, a woman (or sometimes just a girl) did not have the luxury of choosing a man primarily for his sexiness or great personality. She had to consider his income level. This is the socio-economic reality that evolutionary psychologists ignore. 

But then, evolutionary psychology is pure pseudoscience as demonstrated by biologist P. Z. Myers.

The fact that the Rutherford paper uses pseudoscience to argue anything is reason enough to consider it a scientific failure.

Evolutionary psychology is a rebranding of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, as Wilson himself admitted, with one important difference: evolutionary psychologists removed considerations of race. 

Kathryn Paige Harden also claims to remove race from her work, in her book "The Genetic Lottery." 

Harden is a colleague of David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology. 

There are three references in the Rutherford paper to the work of economist Gregory Clark, seen here writing for neo-Nazi Aporia. Two of the references are in the passage above, 97 and 98. 

Clark can be seen hanging out with the neo-Nazi Aporia gang in a video they made about their visit to the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

Clark also proudly declared himself an hereditarian in racist Quillette.

Charles Murray and "Crémieux" - revealed to be Jordan Lasker who writes for racist Aporia magazine - are big fans of Gregory Clark.

In his review of Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World", economist Robert Solow writes (my highlight):

Clark infers that before the Industrial Revolution, there must have been a substantial amount of downward mobility from the higher-income groups. They could more than reproduce themselves, but they could not reproduce the same positions of status for all their offspring. Primogeniture would see to that; and in its absence, division of inheritances would have the same effect. Younger sons would have moved into somewhat lower strata of the English income distribution, not into poverty, of course, but below the very upper crust. Along with that inference goes the hypothesis that capacities and dispositions characteristic of upper-income groups became diffused into English society along with their bearers. Among these was the ability and willingness to respond to economic incentives. Clark writes: “Thus we may speculate that England’s advantage lay in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful throughout society in the years 1200–1800.” 

 

Notice, by the way, that “and potentially also genetic.” It, or something like it, recurs throughout successive references by Clark to this key hypothesis. I have no idea whether pecuniary aptitudes and attitudes have a genetic basis or are simply passed on in family and social settings as acceptable norms of behavior. It does not matter a bit for Clark’s argument, but that is a reason to avoid insinuating a possible biological basis for this story without any evidence at all.

"Without any evidence at all" is the basis of hereditarian claims about genetic influence on human social hierarchies. All they have is speculation based on "correlations" none of which prove causation.

But that doesn't stop hereditarians from making bold claims anyway. 

Hereditarians refuse to acknowledge the reality of non-genetic causes for human social hierarchies unless it's screamingly obvious. We see that in the case of women's education. Even hereditarians acknowledge that women's educational attainment and careers were once impeded by "societal barriers." But as this cartoon based on the Rutherford paper shows, hereditarians believe that as of 1980, any woman's ability to attain higher education or not is due, more and more, to "genetic influences."

This inability to detect less-obvious sources of environmental impact was on full display in 2005 when Lawrence Summers told the attendees of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP) conference, a conference devoted to diversity in the workplace, that the reason women have less successful careers in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) relative to men was due to their evolutionarily-endowed, genetic tendency to be worse at STEM than men.

Summers' reasoning was that men and women now had equal opportunity and so the most important thing holding back women's careers was their own girly genes.

This is my chance to mention physicist Angela Collier's Youtube channel again. She has an episode Sexual harassment and assault in Astronomy and Physics in which she explains how easy it is for professors to sexually harass their students and get away with it. The harassment has been going on forever but only in the last 10 years has it gotten serious attention and as Collier says, it has driven women out of STEM careers. 

But it wasn't obvious, not the way prohibiting women from attending some colleges was, so hereditarians chose to downplay it and many other possible causes for lesser STEM careers. 

Misogyny often goes hand in hand with racism, and so in 2022 Summers could be seen on Twitter promoting an article from racist Quillette written by white nationalist Bo Winegard, who is currently executive editor of neo-Nazi Aporia.

Gregory Clark's view is that we currently live in a meritocracy, evident in the Economist review of his book "The Son Also Rises" (my highlights.)

Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.

This conclusion gives the book a cheery tone, but there are also plenty of nasty conclusions to be drawn. One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

That is a weakness. Mr Clark is too quick to write off the promise of recent social changes. The oldest Americans born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act are barely 50. Impressive work on the effect of good teaching or well-targeted poverty assistance suggest such programmes make a difference.

The Rutherford paper fully buys into Clark's reasoning on page 2 (my highlight):

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, bringing increased production, economic growth and social change, a modern, more merit-based socio-economic system began to emerge, transitioning to a new social order that could accommodate an ever-expanding population, while also increasing a visible underclass.

Compared with many pre-industrial socio-economic orders, merit-based hierarchies increase opportunities across the population, allocate talent more efficiently and stimulate progress through competition between people and between firms. The term ‘meritocracy’, however, was originally coined in a negative light in the 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young(24.) This book describes a dystopian future, in which meritocracy has led to a newly stratified society, replacing an aristocracy of birth by an aristocracy of talent, with a disenfranchised lower class of the less meritorious. If behaviours associated with merit (for example, intelligence, persistence and creative talent) are partly heritable, variation in genetics within families could still facilitate social mobility. The enduring accumulation of resources within families, however, could limit this mobility, gradually reverting meritocracy back towards an aristocracy of birth.

A review of the Charles Murray book "Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010" summarizes it like this (my highlight):

 Since 1960, two new classes have formed in America that are fundamentally shifting the nature of the society: 1) A New Upper Class, larger than that which preceded it, that is the product of an cognitive meritocracy and increased returns on brains; and 2) a New Lower Class that is the product of—well, he never says....

Like Clark, Murray does not have to explicitly say "this is why Black Americans have failed to thrive since the Civil Rights movement" but the inference is obvious: if we live in a meritocracy now, which rewards the most intelligent, the most diligent etc. therefore the unrewarded - which includes Black Americans - are less intelligent, diligent etc. And of course we know that is exactly what Murray believes about Black Americans.

A great example of the hereditarian inability to detect any but the most obvious inequality is shown in the letter that a man wrote objecting to his daughter's school being too anti-racist. It was strenuously promoted by Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and other members of the racist Intellectual Dark Web 

The man wrote (my highlight):

I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism,
properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction. 

That is what American hereditarians believe: ever since civil rights reforms, there is no systemic racism in the United States of America. In spite of easily obtainable data that says otherwise.

Abdel Abdellaoui's friend Razib Khan mocked the idea that systemic racism exists.

White nationalist Henry Harpending  - one of the authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost twenty years) - compared believing in systemic racism to believing in witchcraft. 

So how could it be that Black Americans are doing poorly compared to Whites if "We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s" 

Hereditarians have the answer: they have bad genes. It makes perfect sense according to the logic of the hypothesis of survival of the smartest and most diligent.

And the hereditarian assumption has always been that once DNA testing is sophisticated enough, it will prove that Black people have deficient genes. And hereditarians never doubt DNA testing will prove it one day even in spite of the missing heritability problem.

 Charles Murray was mocked on Twitter for all the times he has predicted hereditarian victory.

Hereditarians don't expect they might be surprised by genetic evidence. This is best illustrated by the exchange between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris, when Harris was defending "The Bell Curve" (my highlight):

Ezra Klein 

 

James Flynn just said to me two days ago that it is consistent with the evidence that there is a genetic advantage or disadvantaged for African Americans. That it is entirely possible that the 10-point IQ difference we see reflects a 12-point environmental difference and a negative-two genetic difference.

Sam Harris  

 

Sure, sure, many things are possible. We’re trying to judge on what is plausible to say and, more important, I am worried about the social penalty for talking about these things, because, again, it will come back to us on things that we don’t expect, like the Neanderthal thing. That comes out of left field. Had it gone another way, all of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.

Klein is pointing out that according to James Flynn, it is possible that the environment has been so hostile to Black Americans that it has reduced a two point Black genetic advantage over whites.

Harris' response is that it's not "plausible." He was roundly mocked by the late Michael Brooks of the Majority Report for that.

It's worth noting that Klein tells Harris he doesn't consider Andrew Sullivan a racist. This is because the bar for an hereditarian to be declared a racist is very high, no matter how strongly their views come from racists or a racist tradition nor how much they personally promote the careers of racists. 

Steven Pinker - the very raison d'être of this blog - is living proof of that.

Sam Harris does not think it's plausible because the hereditarian tradition for hundreds of years has been to assume that Black people are intellectually inferior to White people and at the very least, White people are a little bit genetically smarter than Black people. This is the founding premise of all hereditarian research, very much including behavioral genetics. They absolutely expect to discover a genetic underpinning for Black socio-economic inferiority. They consider it plausible.

On April 23, 2025, Donald Trump used the argument of "restoring meritocracy" in an attempt to kill civil rights laws, stating (my highlight): 

...a pernicious movement endangers this foundational principle, seeking to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement.  A key tool of this movement is disparate-impact liability, which holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.

But Adam Rutherford is British and the co-authors of the Rutherford paper are all associated with institutions in Europe, Australia or the UK. Critics of the Rutherford paper wondered on Bluesky if there were specific cultural influences - a different sensitivity and a blindness to classism - when discussing the cartoon version of the paper.

It should be noted that Adam Rutherford is a product of the British private school system, according to his Wikipedia bio.

But Rutherford is aware of racism and certainly pays attention to American politics. He combined both in his piece for the BBC just a few days ago, entitled 'Biological reality': What genetics has taught us about race, writing:

This is why genetics has played such an important role in the dismantling of a scientific justification of race and understanding racism itself. And it's why the latest statement from Trump's White House is troubling many in the scientific community. 

 

Trump frequently speaks about aspects of genetics to make political points. One view that he has expressed repeatedly is that some people, and predictably himself, are genetically superior. "You have good genes, you know that, right?" he said in September 2020 to a rally in Minnesota – a state that is more than 80% white. "You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota." 

 

Similarly, in the successful 2024 campaign, he denounced immigrants as having "bad genes". It's hard for someone who studies genes – and the strange and sometimes troubling history of genetics – to understand even what might constitute a "bad" or "good" gene.

Ours may be a pernicious history, but the trajectory of genetics has been one that tends towards progress, and equity for all, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

But as we have seen, it's not as simple as that. 

Hereditarians maintain that once we have removed official discriminatory policies therefore we are now living in a gene-expressing meritocracy and therefore:

a.  once women have unhindered access to college after 1980, their educational attainment is primarily due to their genes; and 

b. if people don't move out of their old coal mining town it's because they have the wrong genetic variants. 

Per the Rutherford paper's claim: "People with genetic variants that make it easier for them to get a better education are more likely to move to better neighbourhoods, whereas the people left behind are in worse living circumstances with higher mortality rates and greater risk for health problems such as obesity, diabetes (87) and infectious diseases. "

It's impossible that Rutherford & company could fail to see how easily this could be applied to Black Americans, since there are no longer official policies keeping them from moving to better neighborhoods.

I think I've established that if it isn't official, it doesn't count to hereditarians. Yet it still happens.

Incidentally, I have yet to see an hereditarian make the case that because men are having increasingly worse educational attainment compared to women therefore women must have genetically-enabled intellectual superiority over men. 

I think it's because the other pillar of hereditarian thought, along with the assumed intellectual superiority of Whites over Blacks is an assumption of the intellectual superiority of men over women. I predict that hereditarians will not write papers on the genetic influence of the educational attainment of women compared to men, because they don't consider it plausible. 

So you will never see this cartoon explaining an hereditarian paper.

But if socio-economic status and/or educational attainment are genetic why do the Rutherford hereditarians only apply it to some groups, like women or the British underclass. Why not race? And after all, several of the Rutherford paper references are racists and some Rutherford paper authors have worked with racists.

I think it's a public relations move, every bit as much as it was for E. O. Wilson's sociobiology when it was rebranded as evolutionary psychology and its leading advocates declared "there is no such thing as race."

And it's important to note that this no-race brand of evolutionary psychology did not last for some adherents.

Steven Pinker, referred to as an advocate of evolutionary psychology on his Wikipedia page, and better known than David Buss (although these days Pinker's real portfolio is international Great Man of Science and Politics) migrated from standard evolutionary psychology to race-based hereditarianism, although he is sly enough to avoid declaring it outright, preferring instead to spend the past quarter century promoting a parade of hereditarian racists from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Richard Hanania.

Pinker certainly believes that race is a biological fact, giving a speech in around 2013 in which he declared that to deny biological race was to deny reality itself.

The change in Pinker's attitude was noted both by David Lubinski of the International Society for Intelligence Research and by Steve Sailer, who has claimed to be an influence on Pinker.

So for some there is no conflict with being an advocate of evolutionary psychology and believing in the biology of race. And as we have seen, the Rutherford paper has no problem using evolutionary psychology to support its claims.

Kathryn Paige Harden, whom Rutherford admires, and whom Razib Khan considers a friend, acknowledged Khan in her book "The Genetic Lottery," saying she benefitted from conversations with him.

I think it's clear that hereditarians cannot be disentangled from racists. 

In part 6 I will summarize how much Rutherford and all his co-authors are soaking in racism.

UPDATE: since I published this post, I found an excellent response to Gregory Clark's claims. Here is the abstract for the paper, Confounding Fuels Hereditarian Fallacies:

Scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on socioeconomic outcomes. Such investigations are often limited by confounding between signals of genetic and non-genetic influences. An illustrative example is Clark (2023), which considers the similarity in socioeconomic status between relatives, drawing on genealogical records spanning four centuries in England. Based on the fit of a quantitative genetics model, it suggests that social status is largely determined by one’s DNA; and that, for that reason, contemporary English people “remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England.” These conclusions are based on a conflation of genetic and non-genetic transmission (e.g., of wealth) within families. We demonstrate that additional errors and statistical artifacts influenced inferences in Clark (2023). In reality, Clark (2023) provides no information about the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic factors to social status. We discuss how lessons learned from the failure to account for confounding generalize to contemporary studies that claim to establish genetic underpinnings to social outcomes.