Damn this guy is good - so thorough, so much patience to explain the hereditarian idiocy step by step.
God it's so annoying to listen to Hossenfelder talk. Why does she talk through gritted teeth like that?
I posted another video Dave made about Hossenfelder in April 2025.
Who is Bouke de Vries, the professor who brought Nathan Cofnas to Ghent—a move that has been causing a stir for months? In which circles do both philosophers move? A reconstruction of their connections leads to a network of pseudo-academics, entrepreneurs in embryo selection, and white supremacists.(NOTE: the term "white supremacists" uses the English words in the Dutch original.)
April 30, 2024, 9 a.m. In a small room on the third floor of the Blandijn campus in Ghent, a handful of people gather to listen to American bioethicist Jonathan Anomaly. He is speaking at the invitation of Dutch professor Bouke de Vries, who conducts research on loneliness at the university.
The reason for the talk has little to do with loneliness. Anomaly is coming to discuss his book, *Creating Future People*, in which he speculates on how profoundly parenthood and society would change if parents could select their embryos based on intelligence, physical attractiveness, and health. Anomaly does not merely theorize about this; he is putting these ideas into practice—to the extent that science allows—through Herasight, a company that offers embryo screening and selection services to couples.
Genetic differences are among the interests of Nathan Cofnas, the philosopher who is the talk of the University of Ghent today. Yet that morning, the American researcher was not in the audience. In the spring of 2024, hardly anyone in Ghent even knew his name—with one notable exception: Bouke de Vries, the professor who would bring Cofnas to the city.
By April 2024, however, Cofnas’s name was already circulating widely within the corridors of the University of Cambridge. The researcher had caused a stir by writing that “the number of Black professors at Harvard University would be close to zero percent if the academic system were based strictly on merit.” Cofnas held the view that Black people could only secure a prominent position in sports and entertainment.
That controversy was raging when he came to Ghent in May 2024, more than two weeks after *Anomaly*. He was invited to give a lecture there on the “rise of liberalism”—an event also organized at the invitation of De Vries. This collaboration would culminate early this year in Cofnas’s appointment as a postdoctoral researcher.
De Vries, who—like Cofnas—declined to respond to questions from *De Standaard*, has been working at Ghent University since 2023. He arrived with a prestigious European research grant worth over a million euros, which he is using to conduct research into the ‘ethics of loneliness.’ At the time, anyone securing such a prestigious ERC grant was immediately offered a professorship. Concurrently, De Vries established a research group investigating how liberal states can deal with a growing number of religious citizens from countries lacking liberal traditions.
De Vries publishes extensively on a wide range of topics. He has authored papers in academic journals on subjects such as toilet height, the question of whether men should do more vacuuming, and dating apps. Recently, De Vries published a paper online advocating for embryo selection as a means to eradicate extreme poverty; in it, he references the work of Anomaly.
There are further connections linking Cofnas, Anomaly, and De Vries. In his book on embryo selection, Anomaly expressed his gratitude to "his friend Cofnas." Cofnas reciprocated this gesture in an academic paper published in 2018. "Cofnas is a good guy," Anomaly said in response to inquiries from *De Standaard*. "Bright, courageous, and willing to challenge prevailing views. Those are precisely the qualities of a great philosopher. My favorite quote from Cofnas is this: ‘The philosophical establishment claims to be the intellectual descendants of Socrates. In reality, they descend from the Athenians who killed him.’"
Made a scapegoatIt is no coincidence that Anomaly brings up that specific quote by Cofnas. Following his suspension and the disciplinary measures taken against him at Ghent University, Cofnas has become something of a martyr in certain circles—a man sacrificed by his own peers for allegedly speaking an uncomfortable truth. A month ago, Cofnas accused British educational psychologist Jason Arday of academic misconduct. The British press eagerly picked up the accusation, and the University of Cambridge launched an investigation. Arday resigned; in mid-August, he was found dead in his home.
Cofnas’s accusations against Arday were amplified via social media accounts, blogs, and websites linked to the controversial philosopher’s network. This network comprises researchers, ideologues, and opinion-makers who operate on the premise that Black people are generally less intelligent than White people—and that this is genetically determined. They call themselves "race realists." By criticizing hiring policies that prioritize people of color, they align themselves with the broader anti-woke movement. They receive support from advocates of absolute freedom of speech, even when that speech borders on hate speech.
The foundation of their ideology—the assumption that "races" exist and that one "race" is inherently more or less intelligent than another—has been scientifically debunked. There are no distinct genetic boundaries that allow the global population to be divided into biologically distinct races. Furthermore, there is significant genetic overlap between different population groups. Yet, this network continues to disseminate its outdated ideas through various channels. Adherents meet at conferences designed to resemble academic gatherings. Some attempt to build their academic profiles by publishing on other topics in reputable journals, such as *Social Psychological and Personality Science*. That lends extra weight to posts on their personal blogs (usually via Substack) or websites that bring their voices together.
The online magazine *Aporia* is a magnet for them. Its creators attempt to lend an academic veneer to controversial ideas regarding intelligence, heredity, race, immigration, and identity—themes that feature prominently on many a far-right bingo card. Last month, for instance, *Aporia* published an article on the "Great Replacement theory." This conspiracy theory claims that the European establishment intends to replace white people with Muslims. "Some versions (of the theory, ed.) go beyond the facts, but the replacement theory does have merit," reads the article's subtitle.
Cofnas first appeared as a guest on an Aporia podcast in March 2023, discussing the importance of debates on race. That same month, when a controversy arose regarding Cofnas’s appointment at Ghent University, one of the magazine’s two regular editors wrote an article defending him. In early July, the two debated the "future of woke" together on a podcast. In 2024, Aporia discussed a paper by De Vries; one of his doctoral students also published work there.
Conference in Budapest
Emil Kirkegaard is a key figure at Aporia. The Dane shares his surname—save for a single letter—with the founder of existentialism, yet he did not follow the same philosophical path. The far-right activist studied linguistics at Aarhus University. Subsequently, he wrote primarily about genetics, intelligence, and alleged racial differences. In January 2015, he posted an article on his personal website titled "Predicting migrant performance: does inbreeding have incremental predictive value over IQ and Islam?" In 2022, he addressed what he claimed was the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa—70—and in March of this year, a "meta-analysis" of "racial differences in intelligence in America" was published.
Kirkegaard also held bizarre views regarding child abuse. In 2012, he suggested on his website that "having sex with a sleeping child (using a sedative) could be a compromise. If they don't notice, it's hard to see how it could harm them, even if it is rape." The Dane did not respond to questions from *De Standaard* regarding his views on child abuse—views he had previously described as "hypothetical." There was also no response to questions regarding Cofnas and Aporia. In March, Cofnas confirmed in an interview with *De Standaard* that he and Kirkegaard are friends.
The network does not push its ideas solely from behind keyboards and computer screens; its members also try to meet in person. Kirkegaard is a co-organizer of the London Conference on Intelligence, where eugenicists and race scientists gather to discuss their ideas. Apache revealed that De Vries was scheduled to speak at the August 2024 conference in Budapest. De Vries declined to tell Apache what the speech was about. When his academic department asked the same question, he did not answer them either.
Two years ago, an activist from the British NGO Hope not Hate managed to infiltrate this network. Posing as a potential investor, he gained a glimpse into its inner workings. Kirkegaard told the activist that he had met Peter Thiel, the German-American investor who made a fortune with PayPal and subsequently founded the data and AI company Palantir. “I went there,” Kirkegaard said. “And afterwards, he [Thiel] was so pleased with the meeting that he asked me to introduce him to a few other people. So I introduced Noah Carl [an Aporia associate] and Nathan Cofnas as well.” According to our information, Thiel never actually met Cofnas.
Cofnas did, however, find his way into the broader American circle surrounding Thiel. In a photo published in July 2024 by right-wing conservative author Richard Hanania, Cofnas poses arm-in-arm with Hanania and Curtis Yarvin. For years, Hanania wrote under a pseudonym for far-right and white supremacist publications—views he later disavowed. Yarvin is an influential ideologue who views democracy as a failed system and advocates for an authoritarian state run like a corporation by an autocrat-CEO. He also defended the idea that white people are innately more intelligent than Black people. His software company received financial backing from Thiel’s investment fund.
The campaign by Hope not Hate shone a spotlight on the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)—the organizational and financial vehicle behind research and media activities, with *Aporia* serving as the primary outlet. Kirkegaard founded the organization; last year, he changed its name to Polygenic Scores.
The HDF is viewed as a successor to the American Pioneer Fund, established in 1937. The organization later described its mission as "promoting scientific research into heredity and human differences." One of the fund's early projects involved distributing the Nazi propaganda film *Erbkrank*, which targeted people with mental disabilities. While engaging with Kirkegaard’s HDF, the undercover activist from Hope not Hate also came into contact with Erik Ahrens, a German national. Ahrens positioned himself as a political and digital strategist within the organization and spoke of his vision for a homeland for "white, Christian people." Ahrens had previously been involved with the German far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), where he developed its social media presence on platforms like TikTok.
In addition to *Aporia*, the HDF network manages other publishing outlets such as *Mankind Quarterly* and *OpenPsych*. Many articles on race, intelligence, and genetic group differences appearing there are highly controversial from a methodological standpoint, fall outside the mainstream scientific consensus, and are frequently written, peer-reviewed, and cited by the same small circle of authors.
Crowdfunding for CofnasThe controversy surrounding Cofnas in Ghent, which has been ongoing for months, follows a similar affair in Cambridge. After it emerged in 2024 that Cofnas held disparaging views regarding Black academics, several investigations were launched. Ultimately, Cofnas retained his position as a paid researcher, though—as far as is known—he no longer performed any teaching or examination duties.
During those proceedings, Cofnas received support from the British organization Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by the Conservative Toby Young. "Cofnas is one of 47,500 paying members," Young commented. "We provided him with legal assistance and helped raise funds for his legal costs through a crowdfunding campaign. We supported him because he is a member who ran into trouble for exercising his right to free speech." A campaign launched by Cofnas on the crowdfunding platform Donorbox, featuring the Free Speech Union logo, raised at least 98,000 euros.
Young states that there is no connection between the Free Speech Union and *Aporia* or the HDF. However, British corporate records show that he and a regular editor for *Aporia* are part of the same company, Skeptics Ltd.
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.”
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| In the screenshot, Shermer supports his hereditarian beliefs by linking to a New Yorker article about the work of Kathryn Paige Harden --------------------------------------------------- |
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| 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.”
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.
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Bluesky screen cap of interest because it demonstrates that--------------------------------------------------------- |
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 theirRutherford 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.Führeridol, 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.’
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"
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...”
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
(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.
Peter Thiel's whacked-out antichrist babbling has gotten the attention of the Catholic Church:
This week, Mr. Thiel arrived in Rome to deliver four lectures on the Antichrist. The series, which began on Sunday, is exploring how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work, intent on destroying what remains of the West,” according to the conservative Christian group hosting him.
In response, Catholics have decried Mr. Thiel’s vision in several articles over the past week. One was titled: “American heresy: Should we burn Peter Thiel?”
Mr. Thiel held similar lectures in San Francisco last year and in Paris in January, prompting relatively little reaction from Christian thinkers. But proximity to the Vatican appears to have prompted some Roman Catholic commentators to issue a more sustained response. In the “American heresy” essay, the Rev. Paolo Benanti, an adviser to the Vatican on A.I., described Mr. Thiel’s vision as “disturbing.”
The answer will not surprise you.
It is not difficult to find praise for Nellie Bowles, who writes a weekly column for The Free Press, a website owned by her wife, Bari Weiss. "If you don’t read Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence," says Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan says that Bowles's columns "have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny—and also deeply in the know. "
A couple of years ago her book was being trashed by enjoyers of good literature.
I will add that Bowles is also a terrible person, cheering on the stochastic terrorist Libs of TikTok versus a lesbian bar. It's what you expect for someone who is a courtier of wealthy fascists. And because she and her regime censor wife control so much media, there will always be toadies lower on the food chain to praise Bowles.
Bouie details what an absolute grifting right-wing fraud Bari Weiss is.
It was obvious to me how evil Bari Weiss is when she published her Intellectual Dark Web article, and was a major reason why I started this blog.
NYTimes columnist Bouie is a long-time critic of the race pseudoscience gang, even linking to my personal blog over ten years ago when racist Razib Khan was on the verge of being hired by the New York Times. Which is most likely why Khan hates Bouie so much.
Weiss of course was an employee of the New York Times, which helped boost her grifting right-wing reactionary career, leading to the destruction of CBS news. Unfortunately the only alternative to the New York Times is the even-worse, oligarch owned and controlled Washington Post.
That's what happens to mainstream journalism in an age of oligarchs and fascism.
How it started:
How it's going.
Moral of the story: grifters gonna grift.
In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.
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| Charles Murray fund-raising for neo-Nazis and racists ---------------------------------- |
But I guess this is where Pinker draws the line: Murray published an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Can Science Reckon with the Human Soul?" apparently in support of a book he recently published.
If I were to be cynical I'd say the difference between the way Pinker responds to Peter Thiel's religiosity versus Murray's is due to Thiel having far more money to donate to causes that Pinker cares about, like anti-trans and anti-DEI than Murray.
Murray could be seen not long ago proudly fundraising for neo-Nazis Emil Kirkegaard and Bo Winegard, whom Pinker likes well enough to appear on their podcast and support their race pseudoscience cause.
I don't have a horse in this race. Both Murray and Pinker are gutter racists with a devotion to promoting race pseudoscience and both are anti-DEI and anti-trans. Pinker is a weasel and Murray is a ghoul who famously wanted to put the children of poor people into orphanages.Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked.
I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein’s theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly.We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.
He admits that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Yet his “soul of the gaps” argument—there’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it—is extraordinarily weak.
The empirical challenge to the materialist position from terminal lucidity implies that consciousness can exist independently of the brain but isn’t necessarily “evidence for the human soul.” That was a speculative leap on my part. I plead guilty.
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| "groups" meaning "race" ------------------------------------ |
This bio implies (Brook's) a conservative whose trade books are mostly of the self-help genre. And this one article certainly is in that genre, because it gives people license to accept God. It’s part of the new spate of books touting belief in divine beings—of a piece with recent works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, Ross Douthat, and so on. Why this sudden surge of goddiness? You tell me!
Because they are all grifters.
Charles Murray's entire career of shitting on the poor has been funded by AEI and other right-wing plutocrats. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had a long association with AEI; the same with Brooks and Douthat.
When their patrons decide it's a good political move right now to promote religion, they are going to promote religion.
Mystery solved.
And Charles Murray's Christianity, as is so often the case, has not stopped him from being a wicked man. Just recently he could be seen on X/Twitter promoting his 2021 book "Facing Reality" which argues that Black people are an existential threat to the United States because, per race pseudoscience, they are genetically inclined to criminality. Murray's atheist friend Razib Khan was in total agreement.
If there is a Jesus in heaven, the same Jesus who said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me," then Charles Murray is certainly bound for hell.