The international hereditarian network rallies around Nathan Cofnas

Professional racist Nathan Cofnas accused a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday of plagiarism, an Internet mob went after Arday, and the upshot is that Arday killed himself.

It was easy for Cofnas to lead a mob because the mob already existed as an international network of supporters of eugenics and race science: neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network was the subject of an investigative report by Hope not Hate,  Race Science Inc. But it isn't only that network -  there are mainstream individuals who support race pseudoscience and even align with Kirkegaard, like Steven Pinker. 

So the mob was not only on Elon Musk's X. 

Musk, by the way, supports German neo-Nazis.

Kirkegaard, naturally, is an enthusiastic promoter of Cofnas, as revealed in the Race Science Inc. article:

Describing his meeting with Thiel, Kirkegaard said:

“I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now.”

And considering the Race Science Inc. article mentions there is an "underground research team" that is part of Kirkegaard's network, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Cofnas was on Kirkegaard's payroll. 

Nobody knows the identity of Kirkegaard co-author Seb Jensen - could that be Cofnas?

And in case you don't yet understand how deeply stupid Cofnas is - he is a Trump supporter. Although he cares more about his "Hereditarian Revolution."

Cofnas appeared on the podcast of Kirkegaard's racist magazine Aporia.

Cofnas also allies with Jonathan Anomaly, Richard Hanania and Curtis Yarvin.

I wonder about people like Cofnas and Steven Pinker - do they really believe that if Kirkegaard ever got the tiniest bit of political power, that they would be spared, just because they agree with him about the genetic inferiority of Black people? They should remember the Jews stupid enough to try to make common cause with the Nazi Party.

It's just like with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson welcomed race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer onto his program recently. 

Shermer is a longtime ally of Cofnas. 

In the screenshot, Shermer supports his hereditarian beliefs
by linking to a New Yorker article about the work
of Kathryn Paige Harden
---------------------------------------------------

And yes, of course Shermer was defending the Cofnas campaign on X.

Does Tyson really believe that just because racists are polite to him it means they consider him an exception to the race pseudoscience belief that Black people are genetically prone to violence and are intellectually inferior? If Cofnas and Shermer had their way, it seems unlikely that Tyson would keep his job.

It's easy enough to find out who is part of the international racist network by watching who comes out to defend - or even praise - Cofnas. 

First there is Kirkegaard and the professional racist with the marketing background, Steve Sailer. Steven Pinker has a lot to answer for, in his promotion of Sailer's career in the early years of this century.

Two ghouls, famous for their extreme racism
proclaim hardcore racist Nathan Cofnas a "hero"
-------------------------------------

Quillette, allegedly funded by Peter Thiel, demonstrated its support for Cofnas, with at least two articles - one written by white nationalist Arthur Jensen fan-boy Richard Haier and another written by Jensen fan-girl Rosalind Arden.

In the Haier article, he gives a history of the long hereditarian campaign to promote race pseudoscience that leads directly to Cofnas and Kirkegaard:

The marginalisation of intelligence research began more than fifty years ago with a backlash against the hypothesis that average group differences in IQ scores might be influenced by genetics. In 1969, a paper by Arthur Jensen exploring this possibility produced attempts to prevent him from teaching at UC Berkeley and from speaking at academic conferences (including death threats). E.O. Wilson was condemned as a racist after he published Sociobiology in 1975. His Harvard colleague Richard Herrnstein had experienced similar treatment after he published I.Q. in the Meritocracy two years earlier. Undaunted, Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Murray in 1994, which discussed the important role that intelligence plays in stratifying modern societies...

I wrote an article for Rational Wiki about Charles Murray which was censored: evidence points to the censorship being the work of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international racist network. Murray is a big fan of Kirkegaard.

This is the hereditarian-racist network that Nathan Cofnas represents - people who are still angry over the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Jensen's paper appeared five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His paper argued that Black Americans, during the days of Jim Crow, had lesser educational attainment than non-Blacks, and this therefore proved Blacks were genetically less intelligent than other "races." 

You can't be any more obviously racist - and stupid - than that.

Hereditarians still believe that educational attainment, as tracked by educational institutions, is evidence of genetically-endowed intelligence. One of these hereditarians is British science celebrity Adam Rutherford. 

Although Rutherford could be seen mocking Cofnas as an "IQ-obsessed wienie" on X/Twitter in 2024.

E.O. Wilson has been revealed to be such a devout racist that he promoted the career of racist crackpot  Jean-Philippe Rushton as much as he could without endangering his mainstream celebrity. 

Career-long racist Razib Khan is, predictably, a long-time supporter of Cofnas. Khan has also contributed to Aporia.

Infamous anti-trans campaigner Jesse Singal was given space by the NYTimes to use the Cofnas affair to campaign against universities - although Singal doesn't pretend that Cofnas is not a racist:

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the supposed correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Singal is a good buddy of career-long racist Razib Khan (they even teamed up to come after me) so I can't imagine that Cofnas' racist hereditarianism - by all evidence identical to Razib Khan's racist hereditarianism - would bother Singal at all.

In the article Singal promotes his ally, Benjamin Ryan, another right-wing political activist posing as a journalist:

The journalist Benjamin Ryan, meanwhile, documented the Orwellian efforts some of the institutions affiliated with Mr. Arday made to quietly revise or delete claims they published about him that now seem to be false. 

It was revealed last year that Ryan has a friendly relationship with Kirkegaard's ally - or possibly employee -  racist Jordan Lasker. Ryan was an enthusiastic member of the mob against Arday.

Cofnas expressed his gratitude to Singal, but wasn't entirely pleased by the article.

The allegedly non-racist mainstream media occasionally mentions Kirkegaard and other race pseudoscience promoters, but they rarely connect the dots and don't bother to mention - if they are even aware of - articles like Race Science Inc. I talked about this recently. 

And so the race pseudoscience network slithers along, with occasional publicity like the Cofnas affair, but it's mostly underground, just how they like it. All the better to promote hereditarian causes en mass without it being obvious they are all part of the same network.

The international hereditarian network considers Arday's death a victory. Here is Emil Kirkegaard having some fun over Arday's death.

We know the international hereditarian network is out there. The real question is how complicit is media like The New York Times in aiding their political goals.

UPDATE: of course Steven Pinker supports Cofnas.

Pinker is also an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.

I've always said that Steven Pinker is absolutely shameless. 

There is something seriously wrong with Pinker.

UPDATE 2: The infamous grifter Andy "too extreme even for Quillette" Ngo and Cofnas team up on X to attempt to smear a group of people attending a memorial.

News reports about the memorial don't mention anything about threats against Cofnas. But it's not like grifters and members of the international hereditarian network ever need evidence for anything. They just make shit up.

Quillette has published yet another piece about Arday, this time written by the conscience-deficient Jonathan Kay. 

The international hereditarian network seems to believe that the death of one troubled academic will spark the rise of the racist eugenics empire they dream of, so it's likely they'll be dancing on Arday's corpse for weeks to come.

LAST UPDATE: Byline Times has more details about the international hereditarian network that targeted Jason Arday for destruction.

Also on Medium: Adam Rutherford & Kathryn Paige Harden & Behavioral Genetics ~ the Mini-series

 I grouped three recent posts into a single mini-series on Medium.

Can Adam Rutherford and Kathryn Paige Harden have it both ways?

Bluesky screen cap of interest because it demonstrates that
(a) Rutherford was recently hanging out with Harden, (b)
Harden blocked my Bluesky account and (c) and the article
that Rutherford links to that discusses evolutionary psychology.

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

My nine-part series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" was prompted by a paper Rutherford published with nine co-authors, called Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford also promoted a cartoon based on the paper, which made its genetic determinism obvious.

Rutherford added a postscript to the Substack (ugh) post that displays the cartoon:

Post script: My involvement, apart from simply because this stuff is important, is also because it relates to my core interests, which include evolution, genetics, the history and unwelcome return of scientific racism and eugenics. 

Genomic data are often susceptible to misinterpretation, mis­understanding and misrepresentation. Galton was the first hereditarian, and his disciples today are a vocal crop of terminally online commentators, science cosplayers and activists who seek to amplify the role of genes over that of the social environment for many personality traits. Abdel and I have had many run-ins with them, and just this week, some are detailed in an article here.

 

Now Rutherford is not a fan of mine, as I documented in the first part of my nine-part series, so I'm pleased that he links to an article that includes a reference to this blog - this page to be exact. 

Rutherford continues:

As with their Führer idol, their focus tends to be in relation to race and intelli­gence, Galton’s lifelong obsessions. Some of them exist on and draw their salaries from Substacks which I won’t link to, but I will highlight their recently exposed secret plans, in stunning undercover work by Harry Shukman et al. and Hope Not Hate. (I’m in conversation with Harry at the Hay Festival, 28th May).

I’ve secretly witnessed their group meetings, which would be comical if they weren’t so ideologically driven. They often lean heavily on misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data (such as the global IQ datasets, curated by the now dead doyen of scientific racists Richard Lynn). One of the things the Hope Not Hate investigation revealed were their political motivations: they are not truth seekers but aggrieved ideologues. In the new paper, we are striving to advance knowledge because that is what scientists do. As we say in the final paragraphs, we are not calling ‘…for genetic intervention, but rather a call for a deeper understanding and awareness that our social structures are part of an evolving environment that, over time, shapes both social and genetic outcomes.’

Rutherford criticizes dead Richard Lynn, but doesn't mention that a big focus of Harry Shukman's undercover work was documenting the racist network maintained by yet-living neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, who inherited Pioneer Fund money from Lynn.

Perhaps Rutherford does not mention Kirkegaard by name because there is a connection between Kirkegaard and Rutherford by way of racist Razib Khan, who has written for Kirkegaard's Aporia.  

Both Rutherford and his ally, Kathryn Page Harden, have thanked Khan in their books: "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" and "The Genetic Lottery" respectively. Khan testified that Harden was a friend of his. Harden promoted work by Emily Willoughby, a long-time ally of Kirkegaard. She received networking assistance from the International Society for Intelligence Research, an organization founded to promote and defend the race pseudoscience beliefs of white nationalists Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Rutherford mentions Abdel Abdellaoui in his postscript. Abdellaoui is one of the Rutherford paper co-authors and he is also a friend of Razib Khan - Abdellaoui and Khan teamed up on X to defame me, lie about me and launch personal attacks against me while I was writing the series about Rutherford's paper. Racists and right-wing political operatives jumped in to support Abdellaoui and Khan, including Cremieux (Jordan Lasker) and Anatoly Karlin.

And although Rutherford criticizes Richard Lynn, another one of the co-authors of his paper, Michael Muthukrishna, cited Lynn three times in a recent paper, and several other racists were cited.

Now, do I expect Adam Rutherford to vet all his co-authors for racist connections? Well, to be fair, it would be a huge undertaking because the field of behavioral genetics is full of racists, and it might be hard to exclude anybody who has worked with racists, given interviews to racists, or signed petitions written by racists in defense of racists and still have a career in behavioral genetics. 

This refusal to discuss the existence of the racist spiderweb onto which Rutherford and Harden have plopped themselves is at best fecklessness, and at worst a deliberate effort to launder racist beliefs held by some promoters of behavioral genetics.

The article that Rutherford links to in the image at the top of this page is How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science by Sarah Jones. It's an interesting article for many reasons, including its criticism of the awful book, The War on Science, written by right-wing cranks, racists (Amy Wax!) and friends of Jeffrey Epstein, which I've written about here, several times, including quoting from the Jones article.

But what especially caught my eye in the article this time was its discussion of evolutionary psychology:

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore "real" in this world; that's how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. "would be better off with fewer Asians" while calling herself a "race realist." The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There's something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry's one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, "disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital S Science, and maybe even rationality itself"

Now is my chance, yet again, to share this superb discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary psychology in a video made by biologist P. Z. Myers. There is also a link at the top of this blog.

Meanwhile, Rutherford's article for the New Humanist, "A twisted breed" says:

In the early 2000s, Epstein did succeed in meeting Robert Trivers, who had a profound and positive influence as a young scientist on the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Trivers’ early work included exploration of a gene-centric view of human behaviours such as altruism, parental investment and adultery. He befriended Epstein and publicly supported him long after the 2008 conviction.

Trivers, who died while I was writing this article, was the type of scientist who did truly brilliant work for a time, but was often described in euphemistic terms like “eccentric”, in part due to later choices that were at best odd. He said of a research trip, “I took one look at the women [in Jamaica] and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it...”

It's interesting to note what Rutherford leaves out. Trivers didn't only decide to move to Jamaica for the women, he defended Epstein's crimes directly using a form of sociobiology logic:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

Evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories – attempts to explain complex human behaviours, especially about sex and power, with simplistic biological explanations. Epstein’s interest in eugenics, and his desire to propagate his own DNA, reflects another area in which proponents argue that nature trumps nurture. I am generally cautious about the use of this once popular, now toxic term in relation to contemporary practices. But the deliberate manipulation of human reproduction to spread the genes of people deemed superior is pretty much the definition.

Yes, evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories - but this did not stop Rutherford and co-authors from using an evolutionary psychology just so story to support their behavioral genetics argument. As I noted in my nine-part series:

On page 7 of the Rutherford paper there is a reference to an evolutionary psychologist - you might say the king of evolutionary psychology - David Buss and two references to a racist, Gregory Clark:

A collection of about 15,000 English men’s wills from the sixteenth to the twentieth century showed a positive relationship between men’s income and net fertility in England, with the wealthiest individuals leaving nearly twice as many offspring as the poorest individuals (97, 98.) This was probably influenced by higher child mortality rates in lower-SES groups (98,99) and greater mating opportunities for higher-SES male individuals, as women tend to prefer men with more resources across cultures with different mating systems, different levels of gender equality and different religions (100.)

Reference 100 is to David Buss. It's important to know that the claim that "women tend to prefer men with more resources" comes from the evolutionary psychology belief that women are adapted by evolution to be more sexually aroused by men with 'more resources.'

Harden, who is also cited in the paper, has an online CV from 2021 that reveals that she's done "Advising and Student-related Service" for three students in "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology," David Buss is Area Head of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology.

It appears to me that Rutherford and Harden want to have it both ways: ally with racists and promote  evolutionary psychology when it is convenient, then denounce racism and evolutionary psychology when it is not. This is a failure of intellectual integrity that I, and several critics, have also noticed in Steven Pinker.

It was never going to work, for a behavioral geneticist to distance themselves from evolutionary psychology, because behavioral genetics is nothing more than an attempt to use genetics studies to support the genetic determinism at the heart of all forms of sociobiology. Which is why leading evolutionary psychology promoter David Buss is such a fan of behavioral genetics.

And the goal of all sociobiology, from Galton to the present, is to claim that the current socio-economic order exists because those at the top have the best genes. 

It's not surprising that the British are so comfortable with this concept, so much so that the British government funds the work of leading hereditarian Robert Plomin (cited in the Rutherford paper.) The United Kingdom still maintains an hereditary monarchy, which a majority of its citizens still support.

They even knighted Robert Plomin, so how's that for the monarchy stamp of approval?

But anybody can see how extremely average, at best are the members of the royal family. They are living arguments against the behavioral genetics claim that the most intelligent and industrious rise to the top through their superior genes.

But Rutherford, Harden, Pinker and Abdellaoui are so certain that SES - socio-economic status - is determined by genes that they cannot tolerate any questions about their belief, which is why they either insult or block critics of behavioral genetics.

Recently two prominent critics of behavioral genetics, Steve Pitttelli and Jay Joseph, joined me on Bluesky to point out that I'm not the only one that Kathryn Paige Harden, illegal drug user, has blocked.

I mentioned Steve Pittelli, MD in part nine of my series. He's made some excellent points on his Substack called Unwashed Genes, about the problems with behavioral genetics, including his excellent review of Harden's current book, Original Sin. He makes an argument that I don't think Harden nor Rutherford have ever addressed:

As noted, she devotes little time to making a scientific case for a genetic underpinning for vice, only briefly indirectly referencing a few studies. At one point she summarizes the results of a study as follows:

“We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group.”

I found myself smiling at this for a whole number of reasons related to what a paltry finding it is, but feel the need to address it for those who are perhaps not as familiar with the subject. For starters, Harden herself admits in the book that she had LSD illegally sent to her and then illegally used it and even acknowledges that others might be at greater risk of arrest than her for doing something like this. This speaks to what is called population stratification, wherein someone who comes from a (white), more privileged background and geographic location, would no doubt be far less likely to be arrested for the same actions as someone non-white in a poorer neighborhood. Such population stratification is a (perhaps fatal) weakness of behavioral genetics, wherein, instead of saying that Black people and poor people are more likely to be arrested for ostensibly the same crime, one could pedantically say that people with certain genes are more likely to be arrested in the same way that we can say that people with certain genetics are more likely to eat with chopsticks. In that case, the genes in question are little more than the kinds of genetic variation that is flagged by 23 and Me to identify Asian heritage. To claim that “vice” has a genetic component, one would need to get past these benign genetic markers or we could just make all sorts of claims, like people with Italian genes are more likely to enjoy spaghetti, or people in the Southern United States are more likely to eat grits, since in both cases, due to genetic drift and other issues, one could correlate these preferences to specific genetic markers that likely have nothing to do with taste buds. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason other than ideology to believe that the genetic markers used to identify “vice” or the likelihood of being arrested have any actual function. You can’t just call anything you can conjure from a questionnaire a phenotype by identifying genetic correlations.

But the behavioral genetics gang feel they don't need to address arguments - they just mute and block, mute and block, assuming their critics will remain unknown and unheard. After all, sociobiology is supported not only by the British government but by obscenely wealthy right-wing racist plutocrats, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, a funder of Substack.

Really, it's not surprising when someone of wealth and status supports the behavioral genetics view that people with wealth and status are genetically superior, just as wealthy, high-status Christians believed their wealth and status were evidence of God's favor, a connection noted by John Basile in his review of Original Sin.

You would think that Pittelli's being a doctor would count for something. After all, you need a considerable educational attainment (EA) to be a doctor, and behavioral genetics promoters equate EA with IQ. But they have no respect for Pittelli, nor for Jay Joseph, a clinical psychologist who has written books on genetics.

I referenced Joseph in my series on Rutherford's paper. Joseph has important things to say about twin studies, and can be seen on his Substack critiquing a study by Cremieux - in case you thought Cremieux was only a right-wing racist political operative who tried to hurt the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. Cremieux has co-authored many papers with Emil Kirkegaard, and is on friendly terms, as I discussed above, with Abdel Abdellaoui and Razib Khan.

Well, if Steve Pittelli and Jay Joseph can't get any respect from Rutherford and Harden, what hope do I have? I didn't even finish college, and it was art college at that. My SES is unimpressive and my EA is worse - so from the point of view of a behavioral geneticist, I am no better than the drug-addicted prostitute that Harden contrasts herself with in Original Sin; I am like the morons with bad genes who stayed in their old coal towns, as discussed in Rutherford's paper, and described by Gregory Cochran (co-author of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence):

Abdel Abdellaoui and colleagues recent put out a paper on genetics and social stratification in Great Britain. Among other things, they found that polygenic scores of educational attainment were lower in seriously economically depressed areas, such as coal mining towns – and that this depression has increased with time. The smarter people are going where the better paying jobs are.

But at least Rutherford has posted not one, but two articles that have links to this website, which can only help my project of critiquing race pseudoscience and those who aid and abet race pseudoscience. And that is what Rutherford and Harden are doing, so long as they don't acknowledge the contemporary network of race pseudoscience promoters so fully embedded in the world of behavioral genetics, as I have demonstrated in my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?"

Most recently Rutherford reposted an article on Bluesky by Catherine Townsend, Epstein's Gifted Scientists. I've known Townsend - not personally but online - for quite a few years thanks to us both opposing race pseudoscience.

I was clued into this article when a Pinkerite post from 2019 suddenly started trending. Townsend writes:

(Pinker) has also boosted the profiles of ideologues who peddle in scientific racism and eugenics. For example, he has promoted the work of far-right blogger Steve Sailer, who mainly writes about supposed racial differences in intelligence. He re-published a Sailer essay titled ‘Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, originally published in The American Conservative, in an edited 2004 volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The article by Sailer argued that Arab societies are too inbred for the type of democratic reform that was a stated goal of Western politicians in the 2003 ‘regime change’ war on Iraq.

It's too bad she didn't also link to my series on Pinker's editorship of The Best Science and Nature Writing, where I go into detail about why the Sailer article is so bad. But I'm glad she did link to my post, The Racist Logic of Steve Sailer, and I'm grateful to Adam Rutherford for doing his part to help promote this blog, maintained by the lowly art school drop-out that I am.

Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-transgender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral genetics to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.

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

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

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

This is something I noticed myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to SourceWatch:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Boot Boys versus Pinkerite ~ is Jerry Coyne deliberately obtuse? Is Steven Pinker really a racist?

One of the "Boot Boys" displays his 
value as an alpha male.
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Almost a year ago I was called "tenacious" by infamous anti-trans grifter and Kiwi Farms apologist Jesse Singal, although I prefer the word "relentless."

But at the time I admitted that in fact I do a fairly half-assed job with this blog. Especially compared to people who make money from promoting the issues I write about - like race pseudoscience and transphobia. People like Singal and Razib Khan.

And here's another example: Jerry Coyne came after me back in June, and only now am I getting around to discovering it.

In my defense, I do have a Google alert set to "Pinkerite," but apparently Coyne's blog is not notable enough to get flagged.

The amazing part is that last month I even linked to the blog post where he mentions me, but I missed the mention. 

Here it is:

I haven’t heard the podcast, nor do I read Aporia, though I am a bit aware of Noah Carl. But what the Guardian is doing here is really smearing Pinker, trying to make him out to be a racist because of who he’s associated with. The relevant question is this, though: Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist. The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class.

Finally, I still fail to understand why so many people have it in for Pinker, and this was well before the Aporia magazine podcast.

First, Coyne has claimed to "understand why so many people have it in for Pinker." 

In his article about Pinker "The World's Most Annoying Man" Nathan J. Robinson said:

The Chronicle suggested that “by proclaiming the gospel of progress,” Pinker “has made a lot of enemies.” (It cited a cartoon printed in Current Affairs as an example of the “hate” Pinker gets.) Pinker’s friend Jerry Coyne thinks people dislike Pinker because he is famous.

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

Well, yes, I do think that some people dislike Pinker because he is famous, for they’re always mentioning his fame and his books (and often, like P.Z. Myers, their own lack thereof).

Coyne's deliberate obtuseness, if it is deliberate, is on display when he writes:

Has Pinker expressed any sentiments that would brand him as a racist? I’ve read nearly all of Pinker’s books and essays, and talked to him a fair bit, and never have I heard a single word that would make me think him racist.

So unless Pinker is explicit about it, it doesn't count. The entire past quarter-century of Pinker promoting racists and participating in racist organizations like the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), and publications like Quillette and now Aporia - none of that counts.

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. 

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, from Sailer, to Razib Khan, to Linda Gottfredson to Claire Lehmann to Richard Hanania to Bo Winegard, who is a neo-Nazi and works for Aporia, owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard.

What's perhaps even more breathtaking than Coyne's obtuseness is his shameless hypocrisy. Coyne is obsessed with antisemitism, frequently writing about it and about Holocaust victims on his blog, and has a horror of pro-Palestinian protesters.

So how is Coyne able to be so sanguine about Pinker making common cause with neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his Aporia magazine, (see this post on how we know Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi) while being hyper-sensitive to anything that he believes has a hint of antisemitism?

But maybe worst of all, for someone who used to be a scientist, is Coyne's lack of intellectual curiosity. Coyne writes:

The guilty-by-association trope is a lazy strategy used by people who don’t want to do the work of adjudicating the science or parsing the arguments, and is a speciality of one of the worst sites on the internet, called Pinkerite (I won’t link to it). The writer knows nothing about heredity or the genetics of differences between groups, but simply dismisses the whole endeavor as “race pseudoscience.” 

Her latest endeavor involves not just calling Pinker a racist explicitly, but also adding both Adam Rutherford and Michael Shermer to that class. 

But if Coyne wasn't so lazy himself he would realize that I have parsed the arguments, which he should know because he mentions Rutherford, so he is aware that I wrote a nine-part series: "What happened to Adam Rutherford" in which I discuss a paper Rutherford co-authored with nine other people and in which I critiqued behavioral genetics. I'm not a scientist, but I can certainly read what scientists and scholars have written about behavioral genetics and draw my own conclusions and then write about them.

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
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Although unsurprisingly, Coyne lies about what I said about Rutherford. I never called Rutherford a racist. I pointed out that he and most of the co-authors of a paper he wrote have racist connections. 

What is it about these hereditarians that makes them incapable of accurately reporting on articles about hereditarians?

I did call Shermer a racist because, among various reasons, one of Shermer's heroes is racist charlatan Jean-Philippe Rushton. E. O. Wilson's encouraging correspondence with Rushton even convinced Wilson's fan club that Wilson was a racist. Shermer and Pinker are best buddies.

I certainly wasn't happy to have to discuss Rutherford's hereditarianism, since it had been so great to have someone so charismatic and famous and explicitly anti-racist on the anti-hereditarian side. Or what I thought was the anti-hereditarian side.

It was so depressing to discover that Rutherford's paper makes its argument in part through the disgraced pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology. 

Biologist P. Z. Myers explains why it's so bad here.

I really just could have saved time and dismissed Rutherford's paper for its use of evolutionary psychology alone, but there were a lot of issues I wanted to talk about, so I spent hours and hours writing about those issues. 

But Coyne doesn't know any of this because he already made up his mind in advance that I hadn't done any work on the issues. 

I'm sure that part of Coyne's refusal to face unpleasant facts about Pinker is because Coyne has a personal relationship with Pinker. 

It's not my place to kink-shame Coyne, but I have the distinct impression that Coyne has Daddy issues with Pinker. I've noted Coyne's obsession with Pinker's cowboy boots before, but recently Coyne bought his own cowboy boots, in what looks to me like an attempt to impress Daddy. 

He likes to call himself and Pinker "the Boot Boys."

As I said, Coyne's blog is apparently not noteworthy enough for Google alerts to flag his mention of "Pinkerite." If you ask Google's AI about "Why evolution is true," it doesn't talk about Coyne's blog, only about Coyne's book by the same name.

HOWEVER, Pinkerite does get a mention by Google's AI.

Although I don't call Pinker a "public intellectual" I call him a "celebrity intellectual" because that's what the New York Times called him. But still, pretty impressive for one of the worst blogs on the internet, huh?

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
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