Jonathan Anomaly files a SLAPP lawsuit against Rational Wiki

A photo of Jonathan Anomaly is featured 
next to the title of the HOPE not HATE 
investigation "The Superbaby Factory."
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I am not a lawyer, but it sure looks to me like the lawsuit that Jonathan Anomaly has filed against Rational Wiki can fairly be classified as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) as defined by Wikipedia (itself the target of SLAPP lawsuits over the years) :

In a typical SLAPP, the plaintiff does not normally expect to win the lawsuit. The plaintiff's goals are accomplished if the defendant succumbs to fear, intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandons the criticism... SLAPPs bring about freedom of speech concerns due to their chilling effect and are often difficult to filter out and penalize because the plaintiffs attempt to obfuscate their intent to censor, intimidate, or silence their critics.

And a little bit later...

A common feature of SLAPPs is forum shopping, wherein plaintiffs find courts that are more favourable towards the claims to be brought than the court in which the defendant (or sometimes plaintiffs) live.[9]

That last point is especially important because I don't think it is a coincidence that Jonathan Anomaly filed the suit just as Rational Wiki was in the process of fundraising to defray the costs of moving from a more-pro-SLAPP state, New Mexico, to a less-favorable SLAPP state, Oregon. 

The lawsuit lists various of Anomaly's gripes against RationalWiki which includes:

> Rational Wiki has a point of view:

31. A very particular, highly ideologized, and readily identifiable left-liberal view of what is rational, what constitutes legitimate science, and what constitutes scientific consensus, pervades all of RationalWiki’s articles, with virtually no variation.

> Anybody can edit Rational Wiki:

40. No particular background, knowledge, training, or credential—academic, scientific, or otherwise—is required to be an editor, tech, moderator, or sysop of RationalWiki. The only requirements are to adhere to RationalWiki’s Mission and uphold its point of view, and submit to oversight, by the specialized editors, of the user’s content and “edits.”

> Then Anomaly - original name  Jonathan S Beres - claims he was defamed even though he's respectable, accomplished and important:

 45. Plaintiff Jonathan Anomaly is a philosopher and economist who earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, a M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Tulane University.

46. Dr. Anomaly has served as a visiting professor at Oxford University, and has taught in PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) programs at Duke University, U.N.C. Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Anomaly has authored dozens of peer-reviewed academic papers and is the co-author of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics: An Anthology, a widely used college textbook, published by Oxford University press.

> But not a public figure.

47. Plaintiff is not a public figure.

I don't know what the legal definition of "public figure" is these days, but Anomaly is certainly public enough that he was mentioned in a Guardian article this month, US natalist conference to host race-science promoters and eugenicists which says:

Broadly, eugenics is a group of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of a human population. It became the basis of a popular movement from the late 19th century, and led to governments around the world adopting policies such as forced sterilization of disabled and mentally ill people. The field was discredited due to its association with racial policies in Nazi Germany, and many critics have attacked it as a pseudoscience. 

One scheduled speaker, Jonathan Anomaly is a former academic and an advocate of what he has called “liberal eugenics”. 

The Guardian reported in October that he was a senior staff member at Heliospect, a startup offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ even though screening embryos for these traits would be illegal in the UK. 

On the podcast of “new right” figure Alex Kaschuta, in an episode published on Tuesday, Anomaly said of his company’s services: “What can you do? Well, through embryo selection, you’re going to be able to calculate polygenic scores that reduce disease, boost IQ at least a bit, and maybe more in the future.”

And Hope not Hate discussed Anomaly's activities back in October in The Superbaby Factory - my highlights:

Former philosophy professor, early PolygenX employee (born Beres) is our undercover reporter’s first point of contact with PolygenX. He is an early employee of the company. He regularly appears on podcasts and blogs associated with scientific racism and the wider far right. Anomaly spoke in a panel alongside Simone and Malcolm Collins at the Natalism conference in Austin in 2023. The panel was moderated by Kevin Dolan, an activist in the DezNat far-right Mormon movement, which uses the Fasces as part of its symbol.

Anomaly has co-hosted live events for Aporia, the scientific racism website, and his writings have appeared on The Unz Review, a website run by the Holocaust denier Ron Unz. In 2018, Anomaly published an article titled “Defending eugenics” in the peer-reviewed Monash Bioethics Review. In an October 2023 video call with our undercover reporter, he described himself as a “race realist”, referring to the belief that scientific evidence proves racial differences. Although he is American, he spends time in the UK and has appeared on Lotus Eaters, a British far-right media outlet.

When we reached Anomaly for comment, his representative responded that he neither not held nor promoted far-right ideologies. We were told his appearance on Lotus Eaters was for “the furtherance of debate with those who he knew held different views to him”. Anomaly’s representative claimed that he asked Matthew Frost, Aporia’s founder, to remove any material featuring him from the website, as over the course of 2023, he began to disagree with its editorial stance. Anomaly nevertheless hosted a live event for Aporia in New York in February 2024 and many of his podcast appearances remain live on the website. He furthermore reposted four articles from Aporia on his Substack page this year, the most recent being July 22nd 2024. On December 26th 2023, Anomaly reposted an article titled: “The case for race realism.”

"Race realism" is race pseudoscience-speak for "some races are superior to others."

Anomaly claims his Rational Wiki article is defamatory. Although I have contributed to several articles on Rational Wiki,  I have never contributed to the Anomaly article, and hadn't read it until now. 

The lawsuit says:

48. RationalWiki contains an article titled “Jonathan Anomaly.” The article is dedicated to portraying Dr. Anomaly as a fascist and his work as pseudoscience. The article was published on RationalWiki in 2019 and has remained published and viewable on the website since that time. The article has been edited within the last three years Defendants by Will, Hughes, and Doe 1. 

The word "fascist" appears nowhere in the article, so it is unclear exactly why Anomaly makes this claim.

The article does classify Anomaly under the category "The colorful pseudoscience Race & Racialism and the article includes a section entitled "Pseudoscience and controversial writings" - but it appears perfectly justified. The article says:

Anomaly published a provocative article "Defending eugenics" in a peer-reviewed bioethics journal.[35] It has been harshly criticised,[36][37] with nearly 200 academics signing a letter of complaint to Monash Bioethics Review for publishing the article.[38]

The lawsuit continues:

49. The article is false because Dr. Anomaly is not a pseudoscientist or a fascist, but is a libertarian (or classical liberal), and has authored dozens of papers and articles where he identifies as such and propounds libertarian ideas.

I was just talking about how the term "classical liberal" usually means a libertarian who wants to seem less conservative. It's nice that Anomaly confirmed this for me.

So there's no evidence that Anomaly was described as a fascist, and if 200 academics objected to Anomaly's "Defending eugenics" that certainly might suggest that Anomaly was dabbling in pseudoscience.

And then there's the fact that in his article Defending Eugenics: From cryptic choice to conscious selection, Anomaly includes a footnote which states:

6 Informal evidence for this claim comes from the success of Jews around the world even in the presence of social and legal discrimination, and from the percentage of Nobel prizes and other scientific accolades Jews were awarded in the twentieth century. More rigorous evidence comes from the heritability of IQ scores (Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the world, nearly two standard deviations above the global average). For more on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence, See Cochran et al. (2006), Cochran and Harpending (2009, ch. 7), and Wade (2014, ch. 8).

There is nothing "rigorous" about "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (NHAI) which is what Anomaly is talking about. I was the main contributor to the Rational Wiki article about NHAI, and I know how NHAI is nothing but a hypothesis based on speculation by two racists, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

This hypothesis, almost twenty years old now, has never been tested and some of its premises were debunked by anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

If Anomaly claims that the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence speculation is "rigorous" then you would be a damn fool to trust his judgement on what is and what is not pseudoscience.

And Anomaly's use of the term "heritability" appears to be the standard race pseudoscience effort to conflate the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "inheritance." For more about the frequent misuse of the term heritability see The Heritability Fallacy.

I will continue to write about Anomaly and this lawsuit in future blog posts.

Pinkerite is 6 years old

The big news of the year of course was that the race pseudoscience candidate Donald Trump is back in power in spite of being a rapist, a traitor and a felon 34 times over. He's ready to destroy American democracy,

I am curious to see Steven Pinker's reaction - last I heard he was not a fan of Trump in spite of so many of his IDW fellow travelers being on the side of fascism - but I can't be bothered to go look on Twitter anymore and see if he tweeted about it. It's such garbage thanks to Musk.

The second biggest news is the banger of an expose on Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate. 

And also that the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) let  Kirkegaard participate in its conference this year. 

I created a database of people mentioned in all ISIR conference programs.

And last November Kirkegaard was in German news for his connection to the German fascist political organization Alternative für Deutschland.

So what else have I talked about in the past year?

• I discovered who Marc Andreessen is. Ugh.
• I created a Rational Wiki article for Richard Haier.
• I wrote about the Neo-Nazi connections of the ISIR
• I wrote about Richard Jensen, patron saint of the ISIR, and his feeble "science" 
• I was one degree from Rachel Maddow (sort of) thanks to John Jackson
• I discovered that ANTIFA has been doing the work the FBI should be doing in monitoring and countering far-right racist organizations. And thanks to the Trump election, they will likely continue to do the FBI's work.
• Steve Sailer was sued, Pinkerite got a third citation and Jerry Seinfeld was palling around with Bari Weiss.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 551

• Jerry Seinfeld is apparently a member of the Bari Weiss right-wing racist club - 482

• Polite Conversations' Eiynah and her revealing interview with Sam Harris - 409

• Sabine Hossenfelder and the Intellectual Dark Web - 252

• Jerry Coyne promotes racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard's racist Substack Aporia ~ Steven Pinker promotes an attack on a critic of Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard - 220

• Aporia - the most prominent bunker full of racists on Substack - 192

• Steven Pinker fights to maintain his title of "World's Most Annoying Man" - 191

• The Institute of Mental Chronometry gives money to its gang members - and the University of Minnesota is so proud - 163

• Is Emil Kirkegaard taking refuge from the law in DAS LANDHAUS ADLON? - 163


• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 150

Biologist vs. Steven Pinker

Biologist Keira Havens has written a superb piece on the appalling race pseudoscience career of Steven Pinker. Well-written, well researched and even funny:

Gould wasn’t wrong when he said that the field of evolutionary psychology had some work to do in developing falsifiable hypotheses and considering causal factors other than biology (an issue it continues to struggle with today). But hit dogs will holler. Pinker rushed to the head of the pack to defend his friends, the concept of biological determinism, and the narrow, barren conclusion such dogmatic thinking generates. Enthusiasm doesn’t translate to expertise though, and Pinker reveals an inability to distinguish between origins and outcomes and a weakness for flawed studies, citing phrenology-adjacent work to support his arguments.

Gould responded:

If we define poetic justice as defeat by one’s own favored devices — Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation — then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words”.

Even though Gould passed away in 2003, Pinker still fights his ghost on the regular, probably because burns like that leave you scarred for life.

But my favorite part of her post is her timeline of Pinker's career. Of special interest to me is this bit, because I've been planning to write about this little incident for a long time and will, soon:

2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).

And here's a fun coincidence - in the next bullet point Havens mentions a conflict between John Horgan and Pinker and his gang:

2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”

Horgan's article is damning:

I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer.

I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm--that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.

Demonstrating how accurate it is to refer to the race pseudoscience gang as a gang.

BTW - Edward Wilson is E. O. Wilson the indisputable racist and Marc Hauser was accused by Harvard of research misconduct. So he's a natural for the race pseudoscience gang.

It so happens that just the other day I discovered a video of a discussion on war for the now-defunct Philoctetes Society. It features historian David Blight, whom I recently mentioned for the first time on Pinkerite; anthropologist R Brian Ferguson whom I've mentioned many times; the psychiatrist, the late Dori Laub; and moderated by John Horgan. But I hadn't realized Horgan is a hero.

Thanks for your excellent work, Keira Havens.

Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?

I recently recommended R. Brian Ferguson's under-recognized Rosetta Stone of anthropology approaches, Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. Per page it is one of the most valuable explanations of the three main camps of human behavior theorizing, in my opinion. You should read it - it's short, clearly written and free.

And today I have finally gotten around to recommending Ferguson's latest book "Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?" Thanks for the heads-up, Sam.

Ferguson, along with Maxine Margolis and a few others, is one of the most important students of cultural materialism-pioneering anthropologist Marvin Harris.

I haven't read the book yet, but I can share an interview with Ferguson on a YouTube channel called The Dissenter. Enjoy.

Steven Pinker at the 2023 Racist Rodeo (the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research)

Wheee it's the
Racist Rodeo!

The International Society for Intelligence Research is having its annual conference  and guess who's going to be there? 

We are delighted to announce the 23rd annual ISIR conference in Berkeley, California, USA! The conference will be held from Thursday, July 27 until Saturday, July 29 at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, located at 2086 Allston Way, Berkeley, California. We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell! 

But this isn't Pinker's first racist rodeo, he was there in 2015, complaining about bad writing. 

I find it odd that Pinker is touted as some kind of language expert when he chose a truly rancid piece of dreck - poorly argued, poorly researched - written by professional racist Steve Sailer for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." I think we should all have doubts about Steven Pinker's opinion on the subject of good writing.

But I don't think the primary reason for the speech is a concern for style so much as a chance to retaliate against Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, or as Pinker describes them in the most weaselly way possible: "critics of the value of intelligence research." Oddly he includes idiot David Brooks with them - Pinker and Brooks are now allies.

Pinker will never get over the fact that Gould humiliated him in the New York Review of Books. And he was mad at Malcolm Gladwell for daring to point out Pinker's cozy relationship with racist Steve Sailer, but Pinker - and Geoffry Miller - seemed to feel better about Gladwell after he signed the Harper's Letter. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist who gained notoriety through fat-shaming.

The audience chuckles when Pinker shows the slide of Gould, Gladwell and Brooks. Pinker says:

...three prominent critics of the value of intelligence research and of the major findings that I think are accepted by most people in this group...

This tells us two important things - "intelligence research" means race pseudoscience - and that Pinker is in agreement with alleged "major findings" that the pack of racists in the room believe in. Pinker continues:

What the three of them have in common is that they are all excellent writers. And what a lot of people who do research in intelligence have in common is, like most academics, they're not. And so in the battle for hearts and minds, I think many of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight. Namely, the people who are most vociferous in proposing the idea that intelligence doesn't matter, it can't be measured, it's all an artifact of socio-economic status, it doesn't matter above a certain low threshold and so on, they present their case very clearly and articulately. And so I think it behooves intelligence researchers to get their side of the story out in an effective matter...

What Pinker is proposing is nothing less than a coordinated political campaign by partisans of race pseudoscience.

But certainly Pinker's buddy Razib Khan demonstrates how badly race pseudoscience proponents write, so bad that even his fellow racists recognize it. Pinker tries to excuse the bad writing of his racist pals due to their being academics, but Khan is not an academic, he's a rightwing political operative posing as a scientist, so what's his excuse?

Pinker was also at the racist rodeo in 2017. He participated in the Distinguished Contributor Interview, available on YouTube. The audio is terrible. The interviewer, David Lubinski is:

...one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence",[8] an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.

I haven't had a chance to review the whole interview but this part is pretty fascinating at minute 3.40:

                        Lubinski

...How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate"

                         Pinker

It's true that at the end of "The Language Instinct" my first popular book, I commented on how one topic I did not cover in that book, that I never studied myself up to that point was just because the individual differences in the normal range just seemed a little ripple of noise on top of something interesting that we all have in common. Compared to the question of what makes the brain smart, how do we solve problems, how do we invent things, how do we discover things. What makes some of us a little better than others on a quantitative scale, struck me as less interesting. But then - as you pointed out I was not right back today(?) - individual differences are interesting in a number of ways. One of them is, if you're interested in human nature, what is innate, across the human species, what makes a human human, one of the ways to study it is to look at how something varies. Since you need some kind of independent variable in science to study anything. If you're interested in what do the (?) human nature. You can compare humans to chimpanzees, there are a number of ways of getting at it. But one of them has to be well, let's look at the differences in the genes and see how they correlate with differences in psychological abilities. Another was the fact that - I didn't appreciate until reading an article by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues in the late 80s in Science, that pointed out a problem that I had a deepening appreciation of, that behavioral genetics isn't just the study of the genetic influences but it leads to surprising discoveries about environmental influences, mainly the small contribution of the so-called shared environment, which I think came as a surprise to everyone, pointed out by Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, David Rowe and later Judith Harris. One of the profound discoveries of behavioral genetics is not so much that genes matter, though that still comes as a shock to many people, but that the part that isn't genetic isn't necessarily familial, isn't necessarily parental. That there's some profound source of variation in what makes us what we are that is neither genes nor families. That's a discovery that I find, even - almost 15 years after publishing The Blank Slate - it's very hard to get people to even understand it, let alone try to explain it. But that is a profound intellectual puzzle about what makes us what we are. I have my own favorite hypothesis about it, my own interpretation of the evidence. A lot of it seems developmental noise, and so non-shared environment as the name of the variable that counts for that chunk of variance may be somewhat dissuading. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression but in answer to your question, it is a highly interesting question what is it other than our genes that make us what we are and that's something that can only come to light through the study of intelligence and personality...

First, the notable use of the term "human psychological diversity" which I have no doubt is another way of saying "human biodiversity" a favorite euphemism for race pseudoscience promoters, as is, almost always, "individual differences."

I think the subtext for Lubinski putting Pinker on the spot here is "you used to be opposed to race pseudoscience, what made you decide to join our club?"

Second, Pinker is alluding to the theories of his protegée Judith Rich Harris when he talks about "non-shared environment." Basically what Judith Rich Harris meant was society:

What children learn in the context of their home may not, in fact, work in the world outside the home. Western societies demand very different behaviors in the home and outside the home; for example, displays of emotion that are acceptable in the home are unacceptable outside of it ( Dencik, 1989 ; Fine, 1981 ). A central assumption of GS theory is that socialization is a highly context-dependent form of learning. Children learn separately how to behave at home (or in the presence of their parents) and how to behave when they are not at home. The manner of learning, the reinforcement contingencies, may also be quite different: In the home they may be reprimanded for mistakes and praised when they behave appropriately; out of the home they may be ridiculed for mistakes and ignored when they behave appropriately.

What is so incredibly irritating about Pinker's amazement about this "discovery" allegedly made via behavioral genetics is that anthropologist Marvin Harris's entire career, since at least the mid-1960s, has been pointing out the non-family influences on human behavior, via his research strategy "cultural materialism." Specifically infrastructural determinism.

For a comparison of the research strategies of cultural materialism, sociobiology (which Pinker most often agrees with) and the "ideas control behavior" position, see R. Brian Ferguson's "Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why the Yanomami make war."

And Pinker is certainly aware of Marvin Harris, enough to dismiss him with this absurdly simplistic assessment: "But his view of human nature is too narrow — everything boils down to calories."

Apparently Pinker just can't or won't make the connection between Judith Rich Harris' shallow analysis of this "variable" and the decades-long body of work of Marvin Harris.

More about this interview later when I write about Pinker's progress in the exciting field of "human psychological diversity." 

Now back to Racist Rodeo 2023.

Frank C. Worrell is Black, but also takes money from Koch and other right-wing plutocrats, so can be relied on not to make a fuss about the core racist beliefs of many of those associated with ISIR. 

As Pascal Robert said (via F. D. Signifier) :

...the whole purpose of (Black) conservatives is to disabuse the notion that Black people are deserving of any policy that would transform their economic condition, because they are so culturally defective that capitalism can't save them. And they do this because their paymasters, like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and other think tanks pay them to say this crap...

Black people willing to sign onto a race pseudoscience club are extremely valuable to organizations  like ISIR, so they can say: "see, even Black intellectuals agree with us about Black people."

For another example see JayMan - if they aren't actually a white nationalist man-baby.

So how racist is the ISIR? Glad you asked.

The current president, Rosalind Arden is a Quillette author who has also co-authored with hardcore race-ranking racist Linda Gottfredson, which is why I recognized her name on sight. Gottfredson was president of ISIR in 2012. 

Board member Emily Willoughby is a big fan of race pseudoscience. 

Earl Hunt, president in 2011, now deceased, liked to talk about "racial differences."

2016 president Richard Haier is a Quillette author and a defender of hard-core racist/neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. He's co-authored with  ISIR's 2020/2021 president and current secretary/treasurer, Rex E. Jung. 

Board member John Protzko wrote a paper on intelligence that cites Linda Gottfredson.

Board member Guy Madison is a sociobiologist who defends all the other promoters of race pseudoscience and has co-authored with white supremacist Edward Croft Dutton.

Board member Andreas Demetriou co-authored a paper that references Pinker, Gottfredson, Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen.

Board member Robert Colom is a big fan of the crackpot theories of Richard Lynn.

Board member Timothy Bates is a race pseudoscience ghoul who likes to retweet other race pseudoscience ghouls like long-time Bo Winegard associate and co-author Cory Clark. Bates was also ISIR president in 2017 & 2018. Co-authored a paper with right-wing racist kook Hans J. Eysenck.

The 2019 conference was a bumper crop of the hardest of hard-core racists featuring Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Greg "600K from Ron Unz" Cochran, Johnny Anomaly, Razib Khan, Stephen Hsu AND Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was finally banned last year because Abdel Abdellaoui complained about him.

Other racists were not happy that Kirkegaard was banned. 

The conference flyer for 2022 lists Abdellaoui, and also Emily Willoughby's advisor Matt McGue, a proponent of behavioral genetics (sociobiology); Jochen Paulus, a German journalist; Aljoscha Neubauer an Austrian psychologist; and Anna-Lena Schubert a psychologist with distinct sociobiology leanings, who co-authored a paper with Kirsten Hilger, an ISIR board member who won the Richard Haier prize. The local host was Jakob Pietschnig, who cited, as credible sources, in a paper on IQ: Edward Dutton, Herrnstein/Murray, three citations from J. P. Rushton and seven from Richard Lynn. That guy loves his race pseudoscience. Which is why he is part of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

I finally found the 2022 program online and it turns out that Steven Pinker was at this conference too, giving an invited speech called "Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters" which is part of Pinker's campaign to associate race pseudoscience with rationality.

Also featured - racists! Including Tobias Wolfram who likes to retweet Cory Clark; Heiner Rindeman, who co-authored with racist Noah Carl; and Damien Morris, author at Quillette. And the usual ISIR gang already mentioned.

Of course Richard Lynn and JP Rushton both participated in ISIR conferences. The 2012 conference program notes the passing of two leading promoters of race pseudoscience, Arthur Jensen and Rushton. Rest in hell, racists.

So many extreme racists have been associated with this organization I wouldn't be surprised if they made Steve Sailer their next president.

The ISIR has a Facebook page and they are NOT ashamed of all the racists associated with their organization. Their page banner is full of racists. This demonstrates how obsessed ISIR - and behavioral genetics, sociobiology and "human psychological diversity" is with race.

Top row, left to right: 

• Ronald Aylmer Fischer - huge racist
• Charles Spearman - inspiration for racists
• Cyril Burt - racist fraud
• Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr - behavioral geneticist racist twin studies guy
• Alfred Binet
• Arthur Jensen - huge racist - major thought leader of ISIR, along with Rushton
• Robert Plomin - promoter of race pseudoscience

Bottom row, left to right:

• Francis Galton - huge racist, founder of behavioral genetics and eugenics
• Illustration by Henry Thomas Aiken - I'm not sure its relevance to ISIR, when I asked Google to find the image source, the first hit was for some kind of presentation, no longer available except for the front page, called British History and the Census from the University of Glasgow
• Stephen J. Ceci - apparently not an hereditarian but took money from Cato (Koch) to defend them
• Charles Murray - huuuuge racist
• Charles Darwin as a young man
• Sandra Wood Scarr - Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, of great interest to racists like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard - writing in "Intelligence" the publication of the ISIR

So apparently "Intelligence" will publish anything as long as the author is devoted to race pseudoscience. According to its Wiki:

It has been criticized for having included on its editorial board biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg and psychologist Richard Lynn, both of whom are promoters of eugenics and scientific racism.[1][3][4][5] The editor-in-chief of the journal defended their involvement on the basis of academic freedom.[1] Lynn and Meisenberg no longer serve in the editorial board as of 2018.[2][6]

Currently Haier is the editor, associate editors are Thomas Coyle, right-wing fan of racists like Bo Winegard, and Sophie Von Strumm a proponent of behavioral genetics via her Hungry Mind lab, and a frequent co-author with Plomin. 

The editorial board includes Bates, Demetriou, Colom, Hilger, Jung, Neubauer, Pietschnig, Plomin, Schubert plus two names I recognized on sight, David C. Geary, an author at Quillette who co-authored a paper with the "human biodiversity" Winegard twins, and Heiner Rinderman, identified as a "human biodiversity pseudoscientist" in Rational Wiki. And there's Russell T. Warne, another Quillette author.

Probably not everybody associated with ISIR and "Intelligence" is a racist, but even if not, they are comfortable working with lots of racists.

Ooh - more YouTube videos from ISIR conferences:

Linda Gottfredson in 2016 for the "Distinguished Contributor Interview" - I haven't had a chance to watch it yet - I dipped in every now and then and there appears to be plenty of whining about how she's been treated with less than the adulation she expects, because she's a huge honking racist. I don't know if she repeats the performance she gave when she was invited onto racist Stefan Molyneux's show and together they ranked races by intelligence. 

Brian Boutwell in 2018 - "biosocial criminologist" and some time co-author with neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard. Boutwell also appeared on Molyneux's show.

Gregory Clark in 2018 - hardcore hereditarian economist. White supremacist Douglas Murray was devastated when Clark was deplatformed.

Toby Young in 2017 - Young was a Quillette editor and comedian Stewart Lee had some amusing things to say about him and Emil Kirkegaard.

I will be reviewing more Racist Rodeo videos ASAP.

Gregory Cochran demonstrates how to do race pseudoscience *** PLUS *** racists on Linked In

Cochran:

Rushton thought that the explanation of geographical variation in IQ was adaptation to a world with winters. I didn’t think that was crazy, but I was pretty sure I could come up with ten other comparably plausible explanations. In some, the key events might have happened tens of thousands of years ago, while others might have been recent enough to be documented in the historical record. 

 

Increasingly, I suspect that there is no single explanation. Maybe several of my notions are partly true. The Ashkenazi Jews look like a case of recent selection for white-collarism in a reproductively closed merchant caste – and maybe there are similar explanations for the Parsees and some of the high Indian castes. Cousin marriage explains some of what we see in places like Iraq or Uttar Pradesh.

More racist brainfarting here.

Basically, you just imagine what you consider plausible scenarios about race and intelligence. 

Write it down. 

Boom, you did a race pseudoscience. 

But I doubt Cochran, who I think is likely every bit as racist as his late partner in pseudoscience, Henry Harpending, thinks he needs to prove anything. I expect he believes that he knows better than anthropologists like R. Brian Ferguson (who Cochran has insulted) and geneticists like Adam Rutherford (who Cochran also insulted), even though Cochran's training is in physics. 

What was biologist PZ Myers saying again about physicists?

Rushton was the racist who got lots of support from E. O. Wilson.

Crackpot Ron Unz was so impressed by Cochran's "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" brainfart he gave him more than half a million dollars. Racism is very lucrative if you have the right racist kook as your sugar daddy. 

Cousin marriage was the explanation that Steve Sailer dreamed up, and Steven Pinker was so impressed he put the theory into The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004.

Speaking of Sailer - like Cochran, professional racist Steve Sailer has a profile on Linked In. 

And so does professional racist Jared Taylor. Although, like Sailer, he doesn't list his racist "accomplishments" but instead lists himself as "Translation Consultant and Professional." Not a word about Taylor's actual job as an infamous white supremacist creep.

And professional racist Richard Spencer is also on Linked In. He does mention his racist history, kind of, but no doubt few know how hardcore racist Taki's Mag is.

I didn't go looking for these profiles by the way. When I looked at Cochran's profile, all these other professional racists popped up in the right-hand sidebar under the heading "People Also Viewed."

Professional racists funded by right-wing racist plutocrats - this is why we can't have nice things.

Oh look David Duke has a Linked In profile which lists under Experience "Grand Wizard of the KKK" and he uses a photo of George Floyd as his avatar.  I reported that account. If you have a Linked In account, you should too. Just click the More button under the profile name, and then select "Report" from the drop-down.

Apparently Linked In has no moderators - or just doesn't care

Steve & Gregory & Henry & Steven: how racist Steve Sailer birthed "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper that Steven Pinker loves so much

The far-right, race pseudoscience-promoting,
Thiel-funded trash-rag Quillette likes to
use Steven Pinker in its promotional materials -
presumably with his enthusiastic permission

Quillette is at it again, promoting race pseudoscience. 

(The link goes to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the article, not to Quillette itself.)

And given how much Steven Pinker loves Quillette, and vice-versa, it was appropriate that Pinker got a shout-out in the article, in reference to his promotion of the paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence":

Although they comprise only about 0.2 percent of the world’s population, the Jewish people account for a large portion of its top achievers in domains of intellectual success. For example, they have won between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s Nobel prizes, and comprise over half of its chess champions. Ashkenazi Jews are particularly noted for their high achievement, including their high average performance on IQ tests. In his textbook IQ and Human Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2011), Nicholas Mackintosh gives the following summary:

[I]t has long been known that Ashkenazi Jews have an unusually high average IQ (see Chapter 1); some of them also have the misfortune to suffer from a number of diseases, such as Tay Sachs disease, caused by the possession of two copies of particular recessive genes. One suggestion is that the two are linked: while homozygotes with two copies of the genes develop the disease, heterozygotes with only one copy develop higher than usual intelligence (Cochran et al., 2006). (Mackintosh 2011, p. 285)

Aside from its scientific importance, this topic of research is also an important part of the rebuttal to antisemitic explanations for Jewish achievements. In 2006, Steven Pinker wrote in the New Republic that “Jewish achievement is obvious; only the explanation is unclear. The idea of innate Jewish intelligence is certainly an improvement over the infamous alternative generalization, a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”

I've written many times of Pinker's support for the NHAI paper.

The paper, which is an untested hypothesis, debunked by, among others, anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford, was written by Gregory Cochran, a one-time recipient of over half a million dollars from Holocaust-denying kook Ron Unz, and who has written for Quillette and the racist Taki's Magazine; and Henry Harpending, who has his own white nationalist profile at the Southern Poverty Law Center site. 

But that's not all. I've written about this before but it doesn't hurt to underline it - the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper so beloved by Quillette's favorite public intellectual, Steven Pinker, was not only written by a couple of racists, it was facilitated by professional racist Steve Sailer.

2012 was the year Steven Pinker abruptly stopped mentioning Sailer in public, after spending years promoting Sailer's career (that promotion was resolutely ignored by the media until very recently.)

In 2012 Sailer made this claim in proudly racist VDARE: (The link goes to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the article, not to VDARE itself.)

On a rather less epochal note, the publication of The 10,000 Year Explosion marks the tenth anniversary of my invitation-only Human Biodiversity email group, which I started in 1999.

And that's where Greg and Henry got to know each other! Peter Brimelow [note: founder of VDARE] recently called to my attention that the inscription on the Westminster Abbey tomb of concert impresario J.P. Salomon reads, "He brought Haydn to England …" Perhaps my gravestone will read, "He introduced Cochran to Harpending."

VDARE is currently funded by wealthy conservatives, including Charles Koch, via Donor's Trust. 

If anybody doubts the United States is in the grip of systemic racism, mention this fact to them.

Considering how many racists were involved in the creation of "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" - and considering how much race pseudoscience promoters like Quillette and Steven Pinker love the paper, it looks to me like the whole project was simply an attempt by racists to give "scientific" credence to an old racist trope, expressed 60+ years ago by infamous segregationist Henry E. Garrett, writing in infamously racist Mankind Quarterly, funded by the infamously racist Pioneer Fund.

The article by Garrett is entitled "The Equalitarian Dogma." This term, "Equalitarian," used by  segregationists against their critics, is sometimes revived by Quillette-associated race pseudoscience promoters like Bo and Ben Winegard and Michael Shermer who are certainly aware of the term's use by segregationists. I assume the segregationist connection is precisely why they use the term.

The endless hypocrisy of Steven Pinker: infinity & beyond!

In this second part of the infinite series on the endless hypocrisy of Steven Pinker, we look at Pinker and Koch-funded, Koch-defending, Federalist Society contributor Harvey Silverglate, singing the praises of Carl Sagan.

Where? Why of course in the right-wing, race pseudoscience-promoting, Peter Thiel-funded Quillette. 

(I linked to the Wayback Machine version of the article to avoid giving Quillette the hits.)

Can there be any doubt that if Sagan was alive today, Pinker and all the rest of the plutocrat-funded Quillette gang would hate him for being too "woke"?

 

And if Sagan was alive today, I don't doubt he would despise racist Quillette and everybody associated with it.

In this paragraph in the article we see Steven Pinker reaching new heights of hypocrisy:

(Sagan) highlighted the virtues common to science and civil liberties that are needed to deal with these challenges: freedom of speech, skepticism, constraints on authority, openness to opposing arguments, and an acknowledgment of one’s own fallibility.

Wow. The shamelessness of the last two items took my breath away:

Openness to opposing arguments: Steven Pinker never ventures outside his cozy plutocrat-funded bubble to talk to anybody who might give him an opposing argument. 

Probably because when he does venture outside his bubble, he is asked about his promotion of the career of hardcore racist Steve Sailer. 

How unpleasant for Steven Pinker. He can be sure that Quillette has no problem with his promotion of Steve Sailer since Quillette is 100% in favor of Sailer's racist views, as displayed in its very positive review of Charles Murray's race pseudoscience screed against Black Americans, written by J. P Rushton's most devoted disciple, Razib Khan. Steven Pinker, naturally, has also been promoting the career of Razib Khan, since at least 2006.

Pinker is also infamous for blocking anybody on Twitter who has anything critical to say.

Acknowledgement of one's own fallibility: the only time Pinker has ever admitted to being wrong, to the best of my knowledge, is for helping Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense. He's never admitted it was a bad idea to promote the careers of Steve Sailer or Razib Khan, and he's resolutely ignored others pointing out that he miscalculated evidence in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" such as Brian Ferguson's paper  Pinker's List.

And when Steven Pinker was caught misrepresenting the words of others, as if the others agreed with him, Pinker had his fanboys Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer attack Phil Torres for daring to point out the truth and for good measure, Shermer called Torres a "cockroach."

Pinker for his part, misrepresented the complaint against him and then said "so what?"

The rest of Torres’s complaint consists of showing that some of the quotations I weave into the text come from people who don’t agree with me. OK, but so what? 

Which is typical Pinker. Whenever someone mentions his long career of promoting race pseudoscience from Sailer to Khan to Quillette, his response is "guilt by association." As if picking a truly wretched piece written for a far-right publication and including it in a volume of "The Best Science and Nature Writing" is pure, innocent "association."

Even one of Pinker's biggest fans notes this inability of Pinker to admit when he's wrong:

Steven Pinker having it both ways as usual

Reviewers of Steven Pinker's work notice his logical inconsistencies, which is especially amusing when Pinker's work is about logic.

Back in September when Pinker's book "Rationality..." was released, Ted McCormick, writing in Slate, noted the inevitable Pinker logic fail, which has been characterized by other reviewers as Pinker "having it both ways":

Rather than argue for his own liberal, technocratic goals, however, Pinker lets their presumed superiority color his use of “rational” and “irrational” throughout. This creates a recurring dissonance, since what is irrational (or “cockamamie,” or “stupid”) from his perspective often turns out to be eminently rational by his initial definition: That is, it serves the purposes of those who hold to it effectively. 

I give other examples of Pinker's critics noticing Pinker trying to have it both ways here.

The article also notes Pinker's (inevitable) hypocrisy, combined with his inevitable support for far-right, race pseudoscience-promoting organizations:

Blaming universities’ “suffocating leftwing monoculture” for popular mistrust of expertise, Pinker mentions two examples in the text: University of Southern California professor Greg Patton’s removal from a course after using the Chinese ne ga, which can sound like the N-word, and testimony from unnamed personal “correspondents.” (In a footnote, he invites readers to look to Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Quillette—all of it—for further examples.) The very next paragraph warns of “illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.” Doctor, heal thyself!

And although Pinker, along with right-wing media, trumpeted the Greg Patton controversy far and wide, in the end, the university found in Patton's favor:

After weeks of an internal investigation by USC’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX), however, Patton was found to have acted appropriately, as Garrett announced to students and the rest of the Marshall School community in a September 25 email. The EEO-TIX found that “the concerns expressed by students were sincere,” the dean wrote, “but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.

One or more hyper-sensitive students made an absurd charge against a professor, the university investigated the issue, and the professor was found to have acted appropriately. 

So is Steven Pinker's right-wing fear-mongering an example of rationality? I suppose if your goal is to curry favor with the deep pockets of the racist right, then yes, it is rational.

But going back to Pinker having it both ways. I mentioned recently that anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson introduced me to the work of another anthropologist, Douglas Fry, who sent me a link to his review of Pinker's 2012 book "Better Angels of Our Nature." 

I enjoyed Fry's review especially because he also noticed Pinker's trait of having it both ways:

Pinker’s evident fondness for state-based solutions also seems to make for greater analytical confusion as he tries to supply an anatomy of peaceable instincts that may inhere in human subjects apart from the imposition of state control. Pinker proposes that along with self-control, a moral sense, and the capacity to reason, a fourth “better angel” in our nature is empathy. But Pinker can’t seem to make up his mind about empathy. On the one hand, he quotes Charles Darwin in his final chapter’s epigraph, thereby appearing to give a last word to the great natural scientist’s hopeful formulation: 

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

However, Pinker concludes earlier in the book, after much discussion, that it is actually rights, norms, and policies—not empathy—that are important for protecting people from violence. Pinker also concludes that “empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness.” If that’s the case, then why isn’t fairness promoted to angel status and empathy demoted? It’s hard to avoid the impression that Pinker is just jumping, halfheartedly, onto the empathy bandwagon in the wake of best-selling treatments of the subject such as Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization (2009) and Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (2009)—both of which are far more thorough and lucid treatments of the subject than one finds in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Whatever else you can say about Pinker, he's consistent.

Fry shared his review of Napoleon Chagnon's self-aggrandizing autobiography "NOBLE SAVAGES My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists." The autobiography was called "a lively and paranoid romp through the thick jungles of the Amazon and the thicker tangles of academic and religious intrigue" by the NYTimes.

Fry's review can be accessed via JSTOR here. Fry critiqued Chagnon's claim that Yanomami men who killed more also fathered more children, explaining why Chagnon's calculation is incorrect, which concurs with Ferguson's paper Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. 

The critique was enough to get Fry on Chagnon's enemies list:

I had begun to think that somehow I had escaped being put on the "detractor list" for my mathematical recalculation of Chagnon's unokai data (Fry 2006; Miklikowska and Fry 2012), but then I discovered that he cites a book I co-edited (Kemp and Fry 2004) as a supposed example of an ad hominem attack related to his 1988 unokai article (Chagnon, 2013: 278). However, Chagnon got the basic facts wrong. The only mention of Chagnon in the edited book involves his use of the label "fierce," has nothing to do with his 1988 article, and says nothing that could be considered ad hominem (Kemp and Fry 200422: 5). 

Regular visitors to this Pinkerite site will not be surprised to learn that Steven Pinker (and other supporters of sociobiology) is a big fan of Chagnon.

Fry also shared a link to an interview with Phillip Dwyer, author of The Dark Angels of Our Nature, which raises many of the objections that Ferguson did in his Pinker's List and adds a few more. Check it out.

Resources from anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson

Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson

Although many come to this site to read about the latest IDW/race pseudo-science idiocies, quite a few have visited to check out my interview with anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems Ph.D., Division of Global Affairs, Sociology and Anthropology, International Institute for Peace at Rutgers University.

Check out Ferguson's site at https://www.rbrianferguson.com

The interview is available in audio and transcript formats. The post for the interview also includes links to many excellent resources.

I heard from Ferguson recently that he will be publishing a new book this year. In 2021 he published Masculinity and War - this excellent paper includes a refutation of the evolutionary psychology approach to the issue - such refutations are always welcome here at Pinkerite. 

(Check out biologist PZ Myer's efficient and effective refutation of the entire evolutionary psychology research strategy here.)

And Ferguson pointed me to an excellent YouTube video, by Lewis Waller, entitled Steven Pinker is WRONG about the decline of violence - all critiques of the claims of Steven Pinker are very much welcome here at Pinkerite.

Ferguson also introduced me to the work of Douglas Fry, Professor & Chair Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Health and Human Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Fry's website is here. Both he and Ferguson are mentioned in the Lewis Waller video.