Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 2

Razib Khan & Spencer Wells.
Observe Wells ignoring Khan's well-known, decades-long
career as a promoter of race pseudo-science.

Continued from part 1

So Razib Khan, in spite of his long-term involvement in race pseudo-science, has found support for his career from the Insitome Institute. 

Khan is their "Director of Scientific Content."

Reminds me of the days when "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker supported the career of Razib Khan, going so far as to use Khan to respond to a negative review of The Better Angels of Our Nature in the New Yorker. Which was a seriously unequal match in terms of literary ability alone - Razib Khan vs the New Yorker. 

Pinker also promoted the career of the blatantly racist Steve Sailer, before dropping him, at least in public.

Khan and Sailer are buddies. Here we see Sailer, in the infamously racist VDARE, promoting Khan's review of "Facing Reality".

In 2019, Donor's Trust, a funding vehicle for right-wing plutocrats like Koch and the Mercers, gave over $1.5 million to the VDARE Foundation in 2019, according to tax records obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Razib Khan has been associated with VDARE for at least twenty years, and he is mentioned there often by Steve Sailer and especially too-racist-for National Review John Derbyshire. Derbyshire described Khan as "my old friend" in December 2019 and gives some insight into the Khan-Sailer relationship:

Blog post of the week comes from my old friend Razib Khan at the Gene Expression website. Razib is a close competitor with Steve Sailer for the title Smartest Gink I Know. Indeed, it was at Steve's original HBD listserv twenty years ago that I first got acquainted with Razib.

"HBD" stands for "Human Bio-Diversity" and is a code word for anti-Black racism.

So who are Razib Khan's new friends at the Insitome Institute think tank?

The Team consists of Spencer Wells, Ph.D; Gareth Highnam, Ph.D; and Khan. 

Wells has worked for National Geographic and is on the record saying things like:

WHEN ASKED about the question of race, Wells’s answer was unequivocal. “Racism is not only socially divisive, but also scientifically incorrect. We are all descendants of people who lived in Africa recently,” he says. “We are all Africans under the skin.” The kinds of differences that people notice, such as skin pigmentation, limb length, or other adaptations are “basically surface features that have been selected for in the environment. When you peer beneath the surface at the underlying level of genetic variation, we are all much more similar than we appear to be. There are no clear, sharp delineations.”

So Wells believes the exact opposite of what Razib Khan believes.

Meanwhile Gareth Highnam doesn't have much to say about race in the media, although I did notice him liking a tweet by Amy Harmon, that was critical of hereditarian Nicholas Wade back in 2014. 

Needless to say, Khan is a fan of Wade because of his hereditarian beliefs.

Also, Highnam does give a shit about the World Health Organization, at least in 2018.

So that's the Team. There is also a Board of Directors which consists of Spencer Wells and Carlos D. Bustamante, Ph.D. 

Everybody has a Ph.D except Khan, who has two Bachelors of Science degrees, in Biochemistry and Biology, according to his Wikipedia page, as well as some graduate work. Although Khan is described as a "geneticist" on the Insitome site and many other places, his Wiki page describes him, more accurately as a "writer in population genetics and consumer genomics."

Bustamante is interviewed in Technology Review (my highlight):

Many genetic researchers have long argued that race has no basis in science. But the debate doesn’t seem to go away. 

 

In a global context there is no model of three, or five, or even 10 human races. There is a broad continuum of genetic variation that is structured, and there are pockets of isolated populations. Three, five, or 10 human races is just not an accurate model; it is far more of a continuum model.

Humans are a beautifully diverse species both phenotypically and genetically. This is very classic population genetics. If I walk from Cape Horn all the way to the top of Finland, every village looks like the village next to it, but at the extremes people are different.

But as a population geneticist?

I don’t find race a meaningful way to characterize people.

In 2017 Razib Khan published an article in Skeptic, founded by hereditarian (and creep) Michael Shermer. It's co-written with "biosocial criminologist" and frequent Quillette contributor Brian Boutwell and titled "Is race a useful concept."  It ends this way (my highlight):

Here is perhaps the most important point and one on which we will end. Injecting bluster, rhetoric, and anger around this topic is an entirely pointless exercise. We have the tools necessary to answer this question: Are racial classifications meaningful? The answer is "yes."

So Bustamante believes the exact opposite of what Khan believes. 

And Bustamante knows exactly who Khan is because in February of this year he blocked someone on Twitter for daring to ask about Razib Khan's connections to Ron Unz and Richard Spencer.

Khan, for his part, is happy to use Bustamante's much more impressive attainments to legitimize his work.

So what is going on here? Khan is the only non-Ph.D at the Insitome Institute and his beliefs are the opposite of the others associated with the Institute. He's not really a geneticist, he's a writer, and he's not even a good writer. 

In June of this year Khan made a big discovery, which he announced in the science magazine Nautilus: The Human Family Tree, It Turns Out, Is Complicated.

Adam Rutherford has been talking about this topic for years. And Rutherford is a much better writer than Khan.

Let's start with the last sentence of the Nautilus piece: 

The first 20 years of this century have been the most exciting decades of paleoanthropology since the emergence of the field, in large part due to the rise of paleogenetics. I see no reason to assume that wave has crested. I for one, can’t wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020’s unfold.

The last sentence is awkward: I for one, can't wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020s unfold. But even more awkward is that his priors are not mentioned anywhere else in the article - Khan never tells us what his prior beliefs are. I guess we are supposed to assume they aligned with the orthodoxy of all science guys in the year 2000, since for most of the article he uses the first person plural:

Finally, we need to acknowledge that our long-standing and intimate interest in Neanderthals may have misled us when it came to Denisovans. Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archaeology. But it turns out they may not be typical “archaic” humans. The best genetic work indicates that Denisovans were not one homogeneous lineage, as seems to have been the case with Neanderthals, but a diverse group that were strikingly differentiated.17 The Denisovan ancestry in modern populations varies considerably in relatedness to the genome sequences from Denisova Cave. It is clear that the Denisovan ancestry in Papuans is very different from the Siberian Denisovan sequences. The most geographically distant Denisovan groups, those in Siberia and those from on the far edge of Southeast Asia into Wallacea, were likely far more genetically different from each other than Khoisan are from the rest of humanity. Depending on the assumptions you set your “molecular clock” with, the most distant Denisovan lineages probably separated into distinct populations from each other 200,000 to 400,000 years before their extinction.

He seems to be implying that "we" have somehow refused to acknowledge that our "long-standing" interest in Neanderthals has misled us about Denisovans. Denisovans were discovered in 2010 and Neanderthals were identified as such in the mid-1800s. So I don't see how anybody was "misled" - we've just known about Neanderthals a century and a half longer than Denisovans. 

Is there some contingent of scientists who are refusing to acknowledge the significance of Denisovans compared to Neanderthals? (Maybe some dastardly "woke" scientists?)

If there are, Khan doesn't say who they are. And I absolutely cannot figure out what he thinks is the significance of "Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archeology." Nothing in the rest of the paragraph explains why it matters where Neanderthals were discovered.  

The point he appears to be making with the paragraph is that Denisovans had a wider range than Neanderthals, but it's confusing since the fact that Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, and that Europe is the continent with the "most well-funded tradition in archeology" do not contribute to the issue of difference in ranges. 

This article was originally posted on Khan's "Unsupervised Learning" blog. But Khan has a Wikipedia page that describes him as a writer. He presumably gets paid to write. And parts of Unsupervised Learning are behind a paywall. Did Nautilus have any editors look at this when they decided to reprint it? Or did they just figure, well, Khan uses big science-y words and footnotes so that's good enough? I hope they didn't pay him for this rambling mess.

In Khan's review of "Facing Reality", discussed in Part 1, he accuses the "regnant culture" of refusing to "connect the dots" about Black people. But he never says explicitly what it would mean to connect the dots. It's hard to tell if this vagueness is intentional or not. It probably is, but on the other hand, he really is a terrible writer.

So he's not a geneticist; not a Ph.D; he believes the exact opposite of what the other people at the Insitome Institute believe about race; and he's not even a good writer. 

And on top of that he has a career checkered with connections to horrible racists and has an obnoxious right-wing personality on social media and can't even restrain himself from publicly disparaging one of the Institute's partners.

Why would the Insitome Institute want him?

Adam Rutherford, who is only two years older than Khan, is more their kind of guy: an actual geneticist - with a Ph.D in genetics - an opponent of race pseudo-science and a great writer as well as a charismatic and funny presenter. I realize the Insitome Institute probably couldn't afford Adam Rutherford and anyway he's busy with his own projects, but there is surely a range of science writers between Razib Khan and Adam Rutherford, so that the Insitome Institute could have found someone better qualified and less likely to embarrass them.

So why have Khan? I have some theories. Razib Khan must want a career as a legitimate science explainer, not as a sleazy race pseudo-science promoter, aiding and abetting disgusting racists like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire and Charles Murray. I could be wrong of course. It's possible Khan is such a devoted racist he can't image ever forsaking his career of race-mongering. But I think it's about the money.

I think it's likely that he's been getting paid through the wingnut welfare system for years, like so many people associated with the IDW and Quillette. We know Ron Unz gave Khan a total of $31,000 as a "research fellow." And we've seen how Koch and other right-wing plutocrats will throw big money even at a blatantly racist organization like VDARE - 1.5 million dollars in one year. Who knows how much they might give to Quillette or other right-wing race-mongers who maintain even a thin veneer of respectability? 

Khan has been associated with VDARE, Unz and Taki's magazine - all founded by wealthy racist kooks - for years. It's hard to establish a career as a science writer. It's a competitive field and neither Khan's educational background nor his literary abilities are impressive. Getting a boost from wingnut welfare is likely his only option to have a career as a writer. 

So maybe one of Khan's sugar daddies offered the Insitome Institute money to take him on, to help white-wash Khan's career, in expectation Khan will continue to further the Koch/Mercer/VDARE cause of making "scientific" racism acceptable.

This is purely speculation of course, but it seems far more plausible to me than a scenario in which an organization of Ph.Ds, opposed to race pseudo-science, would freely choose Razib Khan of all people to be their Director of Scientific Content.

Part 3: blocked by Spencer Wells

So what is Abdel Abdellaoui's problem with Monica McLemore and old white ladies?

Monica McLemore wrote an article
which correctly noted the racism
of E. O. Wilson. The article
 was attacked by
Razib Khan and Abdel Abdellaoui
--------------------------------------------

It seems that Abdel Abdellaoui is a much closer friend of racist Razib Khan than I originally guessed, because he's teamed up with him again to attack me.

I hoped my next blog post would be about the crappiness of twin studies that are so beloved by hereditarians.

I must have really hit a nerve with my ongoing series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?" especially What happened to Adam Rutherford? part 7: Abdel Abdellaoui and his racist allies come for me because Razib Khan and Abdel Abdellaoui can't stop lying about me.

Fifteen years ago I got into an argument on Facebook, of all places, about whether or not John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists because of this song. I maintained they were not - I said they were trying to make a point about the status of women. 

Now whether you agree with my position or not, it takes an amazing amount of deliberate obtuseness - or just bad faith - to claim that says something about my views on race. But that didn't stop those old-time "social justice warriors" from lying about and smearing me. One of those social justice warriors who smeared me is White and refers to herself as "mentally ill."

The social justice warriors were attacking and smearing everybody back then, including Stephen Colbert. The relatively new power of Twitter and Tumbler as social megaphones inspired them. And some were complete, over-the-top assholes about it.

Thanks to the relative uniqueness of my name, and the particular viciousness of those old-time social justice warriors, their lies still pop up on Google searches on my name. 

That's the magic of the Internet for you.

Two racists: Razib Khan 
and his pal Curtis Yarvin
---------------------------------------

But it's funny that a huge racist like Razib Khan would end up sort of long-distance teaming up with old-time social justice warriors.

Razib Khan is such a big racist he agrees with Charles Murray - another huge racist - that Black Americans are an existential threat to the United States because, per race pseudoscience, they have genes that make them inclined to be criminals.

Razib Khan is such a big racist he can be seen celebrating the marriage of Curtis Yarvin. 

Here is an article about Yarvin, entitled Curtis Yarvin “Historian” for Tech Bros Says Blacks Were Better Off With Slavery. 

I don't think it's possible for anybody to be more racist than Curtis Yarvin. Not even Razib Khan.

It's obvious that Razib Khan does NOT believe Abdellaoui's lie about me, because if he did he would want to be my friend. 

To be honest, I really didn't anticipate just how close Razib Khan and Abdel Abdellaoui were, until they started teaming up so often to attack me for daring to point out that:

a. Razib Khan is a racist and

b. Abdel Abdellaoui is a friend of Razib Khan who not only promoted his own work through Razib Khan's podcast, but signed Razib Khan's letter attacking Monica McLemore, a Black American, for writing an article for Scientific American about E. O. Wilson's racism.

To be fair, it wasn't only Khan and Abdellaoui who attacked McLemore, the whole race pseudoscience gang went absolutely nuts over her article. And two other co-authors of the Rutherford paper, Hilary C. Martin and Peter M. Visscher signed Khan's attack on McLemore.

And Abdel Abdellaoui has a problem with White women.

I think it's just as stupid to be prejudiced against people for being White - and women - as it is to be prejudiced against people for being Black. I made that point on this blog years ago back when Robin DiAngelo was all the rage in the more extreme corners of the anti-racist left. 

Ethnic essentialism is stupid no matter which ethnicity is the target.

Although of course anti-Black essentialism has been far more vicious in the United States and I think is a major reason why such a high percentage of hereditarians, especially American hereditarians, are anti-Black racists.

Now when Abdel Abdellaoui dismissed my opinion (not my real opinion, he lied about me but still,) he seemed to be dismissing my opinion for no other reason than that I'm an "old white lady."

So what exactly is Abdel Abdellaoui's problem with old white ladies? Is it the age? The ethnicity? The gender? All three? 

Melinda Mills co-author with Abdel
Abdellaoui of the Rutherford paper.
Who is older? Melinda or me?

After he called me that, I wondered about the three women who contributed to the Rutherford paper
 Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Two of the women authors, Melinda C. Mills and Karin J. H. Verweij appear to be white but about in their forties, more or less. 

Then again, I'm not sure how old a woman has to be before Abdel Abdellaoui considers her "old."

But based on her profile photo from the Oxford Martin School, I would guess that Melinda Mills is white and that she is as least as old as I am, possibly even older. 

So does Abdel Abdellaoui dismiss Melinda Mills' opinions on the grounds that she is an "old white lady?"

Melinda Mills' racist connection is that she co-authored at least two papers with anti-immigrant extremist far-right political activist Tobias Wolfram.

So why does Abdel Abdellaoui have so much contempt for old white women? And why does he keep lying about me?

I'm not surprised by this attack - I am in a war (of words, but still) against race pseudoscience, racists and their allies, and they are awful people who will lie, smear, fling bigoted insults and in the case of Razib Khan, defame. 

But you can't fight in the trenches without getting covered in mud. That's just how it is.

I am really going to try to do twin studies next.

The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan

Razib Khan, an atheist, compares
the belief in systemic racism to religion 

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

The purpose of this site is to get the word out about all the people in the media, in science and in academia
who promote race pseudoscience - which often bleeds into racism, and especially, in the United States, into anti-Black racism.

Although I am occasionally contacted for background info by professional journalists - as with the Undark article about Razib Khan by Michael Shulson and the Quillette article by Donna Minkowitz, sometimes it feels like I am not making any progress getting the word out about the individuals and organizations promoting race pseudoscience. 

Which is why it was nice that Razib Khan put together a political campaign attacking a Scientific American article about E. O. Wilson: not only did the letter help to show who people like Nicholas Christakis are, it created a controversy, which led to more people learning about the appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan. Probably way more, in one swoop, than I reach in a year.

Fun fact - Stephen Jay Gould, the great Satan of race pseudoscience promoters, was attacked by Khan in a way characterized by biochemist Larry Moran as "childish" - but you didn't see Moran writing a protest letter about it and getting all his friends to sign it. Maybe because Moran is an actual scientist while Khan is a political operative.

The SciAm letter controversy revealed many people in science and academia were utterly clueless about Khan's career as a pseudoscience-monger, and there's really no excuse. In addition to the Undark piece, there was the controversy in 2015 when the New York Times hired then dumped Khan when journalists pointed out Khan's history of race pseudoscience claims. I had a small part in that, because Jamelle Bouie had linked to my personal blog, among other sources, to reveal Khan's race obsession.

Although according to Khan's own testimony, "getting cancelled" was no big deal for him.

I became aware of Khan and his race pseudoscience blog, Gene Expression around 2005. I had basically dismissed him as yet another racist crank, until I realized in 2006 that Steven Pinker was helping to promote his career. Something I later discovered Pinker had done for racist Steve Sailer in 2004.

I've written about Khan on my personal blog and on Pinkerite several times, including:

• His relationship with the Insitome Institute

• The ongoing relationship with Steven Pinker.

• Khan's desire to erase American history in favor of genetics

• His Quillette authorship, including with "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell

His latest Quillette piece, December 2021, is entitled "The Aristocracy of Talent" and if we are talking the aristocracy of literary talent, Khan ranks as a peasant. He's such a bad writer even his fellow racists recognize it. 

• The financial support he's gotten (along with Steve Sailer and crank Gregory Cochran) from rightwing, anti-immigration Holocaust denying Ron Unz, publisher of The Unz Review

And what should be the best known thing about Razib Khan, his 2021 review of Charles Murray's "Facing Reality" in which Khan says in so many words, in agreement with "his friend" Murray that American society must do something about the fact that Black Americans are innately, genetically pre-disposed to being stupid and criminal and if America does not do something about those genetically-degraded Blacks we "face disaster."

Only in America - someone born in Bangladesh moves to this country and makes himself a lucrative career dehumanizing a group of Americans whose roots in North America and the United States go back centuries. 

That's nothing against Bangladesh: European immigrants have been rising in the social pecking order on the backs of Black Americans for a long time, although admittedly, not all Europeans all at once. The Irish have about the palest skin around but it took them awhile, as most of them were impoverished and fleeing famine, to become respectable enough to be truly white. As this caricature from 1876 makes clear.

Razib Khan is a pioneer in that respect, pushing the boundaries so that all you have to do to get a leg up in the American nativist hierarchy these days is to portray Black Americans as subhuman and deny the existence of systemic racism. You don't even have to have European ethnicity anymore. 

Khan's family must be so proud of him.

We can see this new system in action from the very beginning of Razib Khan's appalling career. The anti-immigration, white supremacist hate organization VDARE gave immigrant, non-white Razib Khan his start on the road to race pseudoscience fame and fortune.

In May 2000, right around the time he received his BS in biochemistry from the University of Oregon, Khan can be seen sharing his thoughts on race and intelligence with racist Steve Sailer on the VDARE web site (the link goes to the archived version of the page.)

If by "intelligence" one means analytic reasoning skills, it seems that the Northeast Asians —Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — are somewhat more intelligent than the white norm. (I believe the I.Q. difference is generally listed as somewhere between 2-8 points, depending on the study). Most of the evidence also seems to point to New World Indians' scoring slightly below whites.  Thus, Mestizos (white-Indian mixes) would have slightly lower IQs than whites, while Eurasians (white-East Asian crosses) would have slightly higher IQs.  The correlation between the increasing blondeness of high I.Q. Eurasians would be somewhat mitigated if the less intelligent Eurasian men happened to import intelligent East Asian women to make up for their competitive disadvantage on the marriage market, while the more intelligent Eurasians would marry less intelligent blondes (i.e., European derived females).  The key is how much more intelligent the high status Eurasian males are, and how much more intelligent Asian females are vs. European females

In addition, the most intelligent Eurasian men might also be the most "nerdish" as Mr. Sailer would say. [See Steve Sailer's essay "Nerdishness: The Great Unexplored Topic" at http://www.iSteve.com/nerds.htm ]. This would make it rather more difficult for them to attract high status "blondes."  What I am saying is that there is a difference between the macho Mestizo and black men, who attain high status in most likely extroverted fields (say entertainment, sports, law, politics, and business) while highly intelligent Eurasians might be funneling into scientific fields, making their values, and their possible mates, a bit different.  Melinda French Gates for instance, to use the classic example of a nerd-wife, is attractive, but not blonde.

Sailer must have been impressed. By March 2002 he was praising Khan and referring to him as a geneticist. Although if Khan's Wikipedia page is to be believed, his only credential at that point was for biochemistry.

Khan then got a column at Unz Review and started his own website, Gene Expression, which has archives available here. 

June 2002, the first month archived, is full of racist gems:

Khan discusses Steve Sailer's views on race and asks when Sailer will write a book on the topic. In a different post he refers to the "race realist project" and "politically correct scientists like Cavalli-Sforza who deny the reality of race." Khan recommends the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, infamous racist and crappy scientist: "read Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective and you get the same data interpreted in a rather different manner."

The June 30 post again acknowledges his debt to Rushton and he uses the term "human biodiversity" coined by Sailer.

...here is something that I want to look at from the prism of human biodiversity: 21% of Asian-Americans, 11% of Hispanic Americans, 10% of white Americans and 6% of black Americans describe themselves as "Secular." This tends to map onto Rushton's Rule rather well (blacks at one end-Asians at the other).

The "Rushton's Rule" link goes to Steve Sailer's website.

In a post from June 27, Khan writes:

How much more social science data do we really need to convince people about race differences? We've had decades of a consistent 15 point gap between blacks and whites-spanning Jim Crow, desegregation and the rise of the black middle class. And yet the dominant position still remains that the gap is an artifice of social discrimination and oppression. What will really convince the opposition-what they'll have a harder time dismissing-are genuine structural differences (neurological) between races on average in the neocortex itself. 

Khan's view here in 2002 is identical to the one expressed in his positive review of Charles Murray's book in 2021. 

And Khan's view of race isn't merely "scientific":

Now, it is true that I believe that races are different. I also believe that private organizations-individuals or corporations-should be able to take race into account in their everyday decisions.

Another view Khan shares with his friend Charles Murray.

Clearly Razib Khan's two decades-long job of smearing Black Americans has been extremely easy. He simply repeats the same J. Phillippe Rushton/Charles Murray talking points year after year, with some slight changes to the wording. But the message is always the same: "Black" people are portrayed as completely separate from the rest of humanity, and claimed to be genetically inferior both intellectually and morally. 

And he's been paid well to promote this message, by Unz, Quillette, Taki's Magazine, and who knows what or who else. We know that Charles Koch along with other rightwing racist plutocrats give millions via Donors Trust to white nationalist organizations like American Renaissance and Khan's original mentor, VDARE. It wouldn't be surprising if they gave money directly to Khan. And Khan has already written for the Koch-funded City Journal

But Khan hasn't written exclusively for racist organizations. For a time Khan was even pushing race pseudoscience via Discover magazine.

But it's not all fun, Khan will have you know. Sometimes he has to venture outside the race pseudoscience bubble and answer questions about his race beliefs and he finds it just so tiresome, as he told one of these (likely astro-turfed ) pro-IDW organizations the "New Liberals":

Ultimately like I know people in Academia who talk about like systemic racism and prejudice and all this stuff, I just say like it's really easy, all you need to do is minorities that you think should have these jobs, you guys just need to like draw straws and one out of five of you resign and free up the positions, hire somebody of color, and we're all good, right, it's a simple thing to do, but they never do it, do they? They don't make the hard decision, I told an acquaintance of mine who wanted to talk to me about racism and I just got sick of it, and I was just like, well what you need to do is give your son's inheritance to a Black family. If you're talking about wealth and equality right now, he needs to be poor, and make his own way, and they need to have money, so just do it. And the person flipped out at me. Cause they just wanted to talk. And I'm just not super interested in talking. I am a non-white person. I don't need to be talked to about racism all the time. It's not interesting to me.

Not interesting to him. But interesting enough to monologue about race in the most flippant, offensive way possible. "give your son's inheritance to a Black family." See, systemic racism solved. Why didn't those stupid Old Liberals think of that?

Recently he was bemoaning his job along with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, another Quillette author.

So why doesn't Khan get a real science job, doing what he has credentials for: biochemistry and biology? 

Kathyrn Paige Harden promoted 
Razib Khan's career in 2017. 
In 2021 Khan testified she was his friend

My theory is that over the past 20 years he has become addicted to the easy money of being a right-wing political operative. I suspect biochemistry is much harder than writing (badly) his Substack articles or a letter of protest to Scientific American. 

And as long as the feckless - or worse - like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis and others keep defending and promoting him,  while Ron Unz (and/or whoever else) keep paying him, what incentive is there for Razib Khan to get a career that is not appalling? 

Khan will likely spend his entire career, like Charles Murray, on wingnut welfare.

Razib Khan for sale

I am extremely sick of talking about and thinking about race pseudoscience promoter Razib Khan. 

The past week has been such a tiresome trek through racism and utter shamelessness. Not only because of Khan himself but all his horrific defenders. Although Steve Pinker was strangely missing in action, there was still his biggest fanboy Jerry Coyne, plus Nicholas Christakis and, as always, Claire Lehmann who paid Khan to agree with Charles Murray that Black Americans are an existential threat.

Like Khan, Lehmann doesn't care about scientific rigor, all she cares about is getting paid to promote racism masquerading as science. 

After this post I'll have to take a break for a little bit from being eyeball deep in their ethics-free bullshit.

Thanks to reading the transcript from Khan's October 2021 interview, which I talked about in my previous post, Razib Khan blackmail strategy revealed, I found further confirmation that Razib Khan is a race pseudoscience promoter for the money. 

As I said in the post The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan:

My theory is that over the past 20 years he has become addicted to the easy money of being a right-wing political operative. I suspect biochemistry is much harder than writing (badly) his Substack articles or a letter of protest to Scientific American. 

And as long as the feckless - or worse - like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis and others keep defending and promoting him,  while Ron Unz (and/or whoever else) keep paying him, what incentive is there for Razib Khan to get a career that is not appalling? 

Khan will likely spend his entire career, like Charles Murray, on wingnut welfare.

About minute 73 of the video, Khan says this: 

KHAN

...I mean everyone has a price, like I'll go woke for like uh for Elon type money, I mean there's there's a price you know what I'm saying? Like if you show me the cash like, I will I'll say whatever you want me to say. But at this point um, no one's like offering me money to conform so I'm not gonna conform, you know, like I'm just gonna say what I think is true...

There's plenty of reason to doubt Khan's incessant babbling about his non-woke positions is purely from his love of the truth, although I'm certainly willing to believe he's dull enough to believe the race pseudoscience garbage he professes. 

But we have evidence that Khan has gotten money directly or indirectly from the following right-wing racist extremists: Ron Unz, Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, Taki Theodoracopulos and Mark Carnegie. Certainly Thiel and Koch, at least, are capable of paying Khan "Elon type money."

And now we see Khan freely admitting, to a friendly audience, that he has zero ethics when it comes to his political positions. 

I'm sure I could find many more embarrassing statements from Khan if I combed through his many online platforms: there's his Twitter account, his Brown Pundits site, his Substack, his articles for Quillette and City Journal, podcast interviews and YouTube videos and - it seems endless. All he seems to do all day is express his poorly-organized and unoriginal right-wing views.

Because he's not a scientist, he is a political operative.

Those opposed to race pseudoscience don't need to pay someone like Khan. We have working scientists like PZ Myers and Adam Rutherford. 

As I wrote back in August:

Adam Rutherford, who is only two years older than Khan, is more their kind of guy: an actual geneticist - with a Ph.D in genetics - an opponent of race pseudo-science and a great writer as well as a charismatic and funny presenter. I realize the Insitome Institute probably couldn't afford Adam Rutherford and anyway he's busy with his own projects, but there is surely a range of science writers between Razib Khan and Adam Rutherford, so that the Insitome Institute could have found someone better qualified and less likely to embarrass them.

But as Krugman noted, the Right has a wingnut welfare system to pay for tame intellectuals - and yes, as unimpressive as he is, Khan is what passes for an intellectual on the Right:

Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

Lucky for the right, the world is full of the morally bankrupt like Razib Khan, happy to take money to make the world a worser place.

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 3: blocked by Spencer Wells

Part 1 & Part 2

I hadn't planned to write a third part to my series on Razib Khan and the Insitome Institute, but then I discovered that the founder of the Insitome Institute, Spencer Wells, Ph.D., blocked me on Twitter.

Since he could have ignored me or muted my Pinkerite1 account, instead of blocking me, I get the impression the block is his way of punishing me for daring to ask him what he thought of Razib Khan's positive review of Charles Murray's latest book, specifically when Khan suggested we should "connect the dots" about Black Americans.

I can't say I'm surprised by Wells' response, the other member of the Insitome Institute's board of directors, Carlos D. Bustamente, did the same thing when he was asked about Khan, although he did unblock later. But erasing criticisms - or even questions - about race-mongers seems to be the knee-jerk response.

Wells has known about Khan's checkered past for a long time. I just found an interview with Wells in the Austin Monthly from July 2018 in which he defends Khan:

*Editor’s Note: In 2015, Razib Khan, Insitome’s director of scientific content, was hired and then fired by the New York Times after reports surfaced that he had in the past written articles for publications deemed racist. We asked Wells for a comment on the controversy. Here is his response:

“Razib Khan is certainly not a racist, though he has in the past written for publications that later became associated with the far right. I would characterize him more as a libertarian than anything else—he believes in free and uncensored rational inquiry, and in the current divisive political era that can sometimes get you in trouble. He's an extremely well-read scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of human population genetics and a talent for communicating it—that's why he's our director of scientific content.”

Khan hasn't merely written for far-right publications - he's been on the payroll of at least one far-right publisher, Ron Unz, as discussed in part 2. 

It's an interesting question, whether Khan is a racist. But whether he is or not, he is most certainly a race-monger: he's written about race for many right-wing racists, whether it's to promote the oft-debunked Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis for racist Taki Theodoracopolus; or to suggest we "remove all the history we take for granted" to understand the positions of Black and indigenous Americans while platformed by racist Ron Unz; to expounding on his racialist theories in agreement with Steve Sailer, in VDARE, founded by racist Peter Brimelow; to supporting racist Charles Murray, whom Khan declares is his friend.

And it's not like Khan's support for Charles Murray is ancient history. His positive review of "Facing Reality" was published just a couple of weeks ago in the race-mongering Quillette.

Race-mongering has gained Khan both money and notoriety. 

But it's possible he's not a racist, he could be just a feckless opportunist.

Khan isn't only a race-monger, he's been so involved in right-wing politics that he was profiled as a conservative operative - in the NYTimes several years before they "cancelled" him due to his race-mongering.

Which is why it's funny to see Khan, in a blog post from 2003, which has aged like supermarket sushi, attacking Richard Lewontin for having leftist leanings while doing science. 

See this article by Steve Sailer taking on Lewontin's assertion. Additionally Wells does not even hint at the fact that Lewontin is a politicized Marxist who played a critical role in personally attacking E. O. Wilson during the sociobiology controversies of the 1970s. In fact, though S. J. Gould continued the good fight on behalf of the "anti-hereditarian" Left until his death, Lewontin faded away from public view, but books like Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, pin-point him as the real svengali behind the scientists who made the scientific controversy into a circus.

Lewontin "faded" so much that on his recent death at age 92, he received lengthy obituaries in the most prominent mainstream and scientific media. 

In addition to Steve Sailer, look who else Khan mentions in the passage quoted above: Wells. Yes, that is Spencer Wells. Lewontin was his advisor. 

So Wells and Khan go way back and Khan appears to be a big fan. He mentions Wells several times on his Unz blog. In 2004 he discusses Wells and Wells book, recently published at that time, Journey of Man, and apparently Khan thinks Wells is very handsome, even Robert Redford-esque. But then, one of Khan's race obsessions is blondeness.

I speculated that one of Razib Khan's right-wing racist patrons offered money to the Insitome Institute to take Razib Khan on, but this latest info makes me wonder if there's another possible explanation for why Wells engaged Khan in spite of Khan's race-mongering career: flattery.

Since being blocked by Wells, I've taken a good look at the Insitome web site and I wonder what is going on there. It looks as though everything stopped about a year ago: the blog posts, the podcasts, its Facebook page even the Insitome Institute Twitter account.

But even when they were active, it's not impressive. Khan was apparently in charge of the blog and the blog posts range from nothing more than summaries of podcast episodes; to very short and badly-written ramblings about vaguely genetics-adjacent topics; to non-existent. Here's one of the older posts I found.

That is all the content...

Several of the other listed posts are also empty. And the ones that are not empty don't seem to have much to do with the stated purposes of the Insitome Institute:

Understanding the Story of You

We provide key insights about your DNA to gain a richer understanding of your origins and to help you better navigate the path forward. We explore ancestry and personal genetic traits, such as metabolism: how well you personally tolerate sensitive food substances such as glucose and lactose; how well you absorb vitamin D and calcium; how quickly you metabolize caffeine; how well you tolerate alcohol and how quickly your system is able to flush it...

Building Trust & Safeguarding your Data

DNA sequencing technology is the most rapidly growing technology of our time and it is still early days. It is widely anticipated that 30 million people will have been sequenced by the end of 2020 and, by the middle of this century, it’s likely that all humans will be sequenced at (or before) birth...

Using Science for Good

We believe that understanding how similar we all are from a genetic perspective has the power to influence hearts and minds, helping to reduce racial biases and the tendency to stereotype, and to move us past outdated notions of race.

It's very odd that the Insitome Institute has Razib Khan on staff, while they claim they want to move past "outdated notions of race." I guess that's why Spencer Wells blocked me for asking about Khan's statement that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans. 

Another interesting item: although Gareth Highnam is listed as if he is currently associated with Insitome, on their Team page, his Linkedin page indicates his association with the Institute ended in January 2020.

So what happened to the Insitome Institute? Why did everything suddenly stop, without explanation a year ago? Why haven't they updated the team page? The web site's primary purpose now seems to be to link three anti-race science Ph.Ds to an infamous race-monger.

Razib Khan also blocked me on Twitter, of course, but there are ways to get around that. So while having a peek at his Twitter feed I was amazed to see he and Lindsay Beyerstein are pretty friendly. I knew of Beyerstein through Amanda Marcotte's old web site Pandagon. Beyerstein & Marcotte were pals (I didn't realize Ezra Klein was also involved in Pandagon), and I came to know about Khan because commenters on Pandagon were strongly critical of the hereditarian views at Khan's blog Gene Expression. And Khan was critical in turn of Marcotte and Pandagon.

Beyerstein is still critical of racism. Does it not bother her at all that Khan is a firm supporter of Charles Murray and his hereditarian claims about Black Americans?

Beyerstein also blocked Pinkerite1 on Twitter, but I'm not sure why now. I assume because I disagreed with her about something.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

Miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for backup from racist Razib Khan

This is a repost from my personal blog originally posted November 2011

---

Since the earliest days of this blog I've had my eye on Razib Khan, the bigwig at Gene Expression the web site devoted to the "science" of evolutionary psychology. The very first time I mentioned Khan was to point out that he is a blatant racist and a big admirer of Steven Pinker - and it was obvious to me even then that Pinker returned the admiration. Here's Khan talking about aptitude:

I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.

Now what Khan means by "aptitude" is intelligence and what he has in mind is that infamous work of racialist science "The Bell Curve." Predictably, Khan is a huge fan of the Bell Curve and featured this interview with author Charles Murray.

Another time Khan clarified further on the "aptitude" issue:

right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional. conservatives excoriate underclass social structures and cultures and encourage their own rival social engineering programs (vouchers, enterprise zones, privating public housing). if some aptitudes were genetic on average between groups, then we have an even harder task: identify the points in the genome that effect “g”-general intelligence, and figure out ways to manipulate these segments of the genome (gene therapy).

There is no question, Razib Khan believes that non-whites, especially Africans, have evolved to be less intelligent than whites. He is a full-on racist.

Here Khan lays out his theories of intelligence of various national/ethnic groups and the desirability of blondes.

UPDATE DECEMBER 14:
In the link above Khan presents the race science belief that Native Americans are a separate race from East Asians. Pinkerite has recently discussed the why that is genetically incorrect.


The proudly racist American Renaissance likes to republish the work of Razib Khan.

But Khan is careful not to make his racism too blatant these days. Instead he lets you draw your own conclusions about Black Americans as in this Discover Magazine column he writes:

Here’s a case of inversion: in the early 20th century ideologues turned the roots of all civilizations into examples of Aryan/Nordic superiority. Today from what I can tell the mainstream sentiment is to not comment or inquire too deeply into the Afrocentrist fiction that St. Augustine, Hannibal or Cleopatra were black. A fiction which from what I can tell has spread widely within the African American community. How the pendulum has swung!

So how does he know that the fiction "has spread widely within the African American community"? He says it right there: "from what I can tell."

In other words, the Aryan/Nordic superiority myth, which was widely disseminated and believed and acted upon in the Holocaust, is equivalent to the myth-making of the African American community - from what Razib Khan can tell.

According to his online bio he is an "Unz Foundation Junior Fellow." The Unz Foundation was created by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative.

Now it's not surprising that Pinker has a hissyfit over the New Yorker review of his most recent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." - Pinker is not accustomed to analysis by someone who is not baffled by his bullshit - and legions in the media are. Pinker is accustomed to being lionized and revered.

So who does Steven Pinker turn to for a reply to The New Yorker? Razib Khan:

But aren’t you just being defensive? Authors always think that negative reviews of their book are wrong. Has anyone else replied to Kolbert?

Razib Khan has a response in the Gene Expression blog on the Discover magazine Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20111012170040/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/10/relative-angels-and-absolute-demons/

The funny thing is, both in the link above and here, Khan admits he hasn't even read the entire book, estimating he's read about 20% as late as November 28.

A racist who doesn't do his homework. That's who Steven Pinker cites in defense of his work against the New Yorker.

Steve Sailer, a buddy of Khan's and an even more blatant racist, is a huge fan of Pinker's book and gives the book a rave review in - where else - The American Conservative.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 6 - racism: you're soaking in it!

Madge the Palmolive-obsessed manicurist is likely only familiar to Americans of a certain age so I will share this video to illustrate her famous phrase: "you're soaking in it."

It was news to me that the Madge actor Jan Miner played that role for thirty freaking years.

Kathryn Paige Harden & Abdel Abdellaoui
need to share this with their friend
and colleague Razib Khan

Part 5 of this series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" is about the hereditarian belief that we live in a meritocracy and so environmental factors are no longer as significant as genetic causation in determining human socio-economic status and intelligence - as determined by "educational attainment."

I've discovered quite a bit about the Rutherford paper co-authors since I began this series What happened to Adam Rutherford?

And so in this part we will see that there is no person too racist that the authors of the Rutherford paper won't work with them, and no media outlet or organization too racist that they will refuse to use it to advance their careers.

Abdel Abdellaoui - a friend of Razib Khan, according to Khan on the podcast on which Abdellaoui appeared. Abdellaoui signed onto Khan's attack on Scientific American for daring to discuss E. O. Wilson's racism.

It's true that Abdelloaui raised a stink about Emil Kirkegaard showing up at annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISR), but that doesn't stop him from being a friend of Khan, who has taken money from  Kirkegaard via Aporia; nor promoting the work of Richard Haier, a racist bigwig at the ISIR. And then there's the fact that ISIR meetings always include racists, even infamous ones like Michael Woodley, who is, according to the NYTimes, A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting. And Kirkegaard participated in the 2024 ISIR meeting in spite of Abdellaoui.

Abdellaoui can be seen on Twitter in 2020 promoting an anti-race pseudoscience message from Kathryn Paige Harden and Philipp Koellinger. And yet both Abdellaoui and Harden have each been called a friend by Razib Khan and both are friendly colleagues of Khan, with Harden thanking him in the acknowledgments of her book The Genetic Lottery and offering to promote Khan's career. 

It appears to concern neither Harden nor Abdellaoui that Razib Khan's entire career has been devoted to promoting race pseudoscience since at least when racist Holocaust-denying plutocrat Ron Unz (a former student of racist E. O. Wilson) funded Khan's education. 

The cognitive disconnect is absolutely mind-boggling. Do they think other people won't find out or won't care that they are supportive colleagues of a blatant racist?

This seems to be a thing hereditarians do - publicly declare your opposition to racists and race pseudoscience while working alongside or even promoting racists. 

Martin Kolk - can be seen on X/Twitter in October 2024 apparently very annoyed about the fact that Sapiens magazine published an article discussing the possible health repercussions of systemic racism, but I have found the least evidence (so far) of his working directly with racists compared to the other Rutherford paper co-authors.

Hilary C. Martin - signed Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American for pointing out E. O. Wilson's racism. Co-authored a paper with Rosalind Arden, who is a board member of the ISIR, a Quillette author, a defender of racist extremist Linda Gottfredson - Arden also co-authored a paper with Gottfredson and Geoffrey Miller.

Arden considers Arthur Jensen a "great scientist" and she is a true believer in race pseudoscience:

We know that on average. Blacks score around 15 points lower on IQ type tests than Whites. We know that on average. East Asians score around 7 points higher than Whites on IQ type tests. We do not have any direct evidence that the causes of these differences are genetic. However these differences are fairly stable. We know too that if we invoke socio-economic status and racism as the explanation for lower average test performance, then the same factors should lower the average scores of East Asians wherever they have suffered those privations. But East Asians' average scores do not look that way, even in the presence of those factors. I don't know of any evidence that contradicts the genetic hypothesis but I know of much that supports it.

Comparing the privations of Black Americans to other ethnic groups as if they are exactly equivalent is a favorite race pseudoscience trick that Arden pulls. You can see Aporia ghoul Bo Winegard's brother Ben Winegard trying the same trick here.

Melinda C. Mills -  Co-authored at least two papers with anti-immigrant far-right political activist Tobias Wolfram. See the section on Felix C. Tropf below, Tropf has worked much more often with Wolfram.

Michael Muthukrishna - promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan.

Felix C. Tropf - gave a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting of the ISIR with Tobias Wolfram called 250 words written at age eleven predict intelligence and final educational attainment close to expert assessment. Tropf has co-authored multiple papers with Wolfram. Wolfram is discussed in the investigative report by HOPE not hate on eugenicists:

We can reveal that Wolfram has been a member of the closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist who leads the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In January 2024, Wolfram posted the anti-immigrant slogan “we were never asked” in the channel, which is closed to members of the public. He posted again in the same chat in April to criticise a leaflet organising a counter-protest against Martin Sellner in Steyregg, Austria.

Per the article, Wolfram is now working for racist Jonathan Anomaly's  eugenics company.

Karin J. H. Verweij - Verweij co-authored a paper with Brendan P. Zietsch (see below) plus four ISIR annual meeting participants, Fredrik Ullén (five meetings), Miriam A. Mosing (two meetings), Nancy Pedersen (three meetings) and ISIR board member Guy Madison (eight meetings) who has co-authored a paper with racist extremist Edward Dutton,  (who currently works for Emil Kirkegaard) as well as participating in the infamously racist London Conference on Intelligence.  Madison can be found co-authoring a paper in defense of race pseudoscience in Intelligence (the journal associated with the ISIR) with a metric shit-ton of hardcore racists.

Verweij also published in Intelligence. One of Verweij's co-authors for the Intelligence paper is David Hugh-Jones seen on his Substack having a friendly exchange with the neo-Nazi ghouls of Aporia. 

Peter M. Visscher - Signed onto Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American; particpated in two ISIR annual meetings; and co-authored a paper with ISIR annual meeting regular Ian Deary. Michael Woodley was singled out by the NYTimes because his work was cited by the racist Buffalo shooter but several other ISIR participants including Deary were cited in the shooter's manifesto. 

Brendan P. Zietsch - co-authored a paper where the only other co-author was racist/Jensen fangirl Rosalind Arden. (See the entry for Hilary C. Martin above for exactly how racist Arden is.) Also co-authored with extremist  Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist (the racist kind) creep who writes for Quillette. His wife Diana Fleischman works for Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia. Miller can be seen here teaming up with Gregory Cochran while calling Adam Rutherford an "ideologically driven hack." 

It's a tiny tiny hereditarian world. 

So eight of the ten authors of the Rutherford paper have at least one direct connection to a racist person or organization. Let's add it up:

1. Abdel Abdellaoui - ISIR, Razib Khan
2. Hilary C. Martin - Razib Khan, Rosalind Arden
3. Melinda C. Mills  - Tobias Wolfram
4. Michael Muthukrishna  - Quillette, Razib Khan
5. Felix C. Tropf - Tobias Wolfram, ISIR
6. Karin J. H. Verweij - Guy Madison, Intelligence (journal)
7. Peter M. Visscher - ISIR, Razib Khan
8. Brendan P. Zietsch - Rosalind Arden, Geoffrey Miller

I did not examine every one of the hundreds of co-authors that these eight have worked with. If I did, I suspect I'd discover even more racist connections. But I basically just looked for names I had seen elsewhere in connection to race pseudoscience. Even so, it's an impressive number of racist connections.

Now I don't believe Adam Rutherford went out of his way to find co-authors who had racist connections. If anything, he would have sought to avoid those with racist connections. And yet there they are, racist connections. 

I think it should be clear that the reason there are so many racist connections is because behavioral genetics is permeated through and through with racists. 

And by "racist" I don't mean people who said a bad word once or have bigoted opinions. These are professional, politically motivated racists. Rosalind Arden, Razib Khan, Guy Madison, Geoffrey Miller, Tobias Wolfram, the people who run ISIR, Intelligence and Quillette don't simply want to do science. They want to promote "science" they think will prove their racist beliefs. And we know for certain that Khan and Wolfram have worked for well-funded racists. It's likely others in this list have too. Emil Kirkegaard has a plutocrat-funded organization dedicated to promoting race pseudoscience, especially through behavioral genetics.

And so you cannot have a career as a behavioral geneticist without soaking in racism.

But what about Adam Rutherford? What did happen to Adam Rutherford? I'll get into that after I talk about twin studies in the next part.  

Update - circumstances force me to change the subject of part 7 to What happened to Adam Rutherford? part 7: Abdel Abdellaoui and his racist allies come for me.