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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Rutherford continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Kathryn Paige Harden's genes make her use illegal drugs?

Oh, yes, and Harden promoted the career
of Razib Khan after he was known
far and wide as a huge racist.
-------------------------------------------------

I was prepared to critique the behavioral genetics beliefs in Katheryn Paige Harden's new book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness like I did with her last one, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality, but there's really no point.

In the opening chapter of the book, Harden talks about her illegal drug use:

It was a sweltering, tedious summer, the first summer of the pandemic, when Travis and I decided to go to the West Texas desert to drop acid. Our itinerary did, of course, include things other than taking drugs. We plan a day hiking in Big Bend. We book a Donald Judd–esque gray concrete casita with a view of the Chisos Mountains. We look forward to drinking Modelo and doing crossword puzzles and having morning sex. But lovely as all of that will be, our main purpose is to take LSD.

The DEA is clear about the legal status of LSD:

LSD is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I substances have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

 

And Harden herself considers LSD to be a potential instrument of manslaughter:

Imagine two women, equally bored by life, equally restless. One gives her boyfriend LSD and he has a bad trip inside the safety of their hotel room. The other gives her boyfriend LSD and he, in the throes of paranoid delusion, runs out of the hotel room into the surrounding West Texas desert, where he rapidly suffers from heat exhaustion. Only one woman would be blamed for contributing to a man’s death. Consider: When in your life have you gotten lucky and so were spared from blame?

Realize: “You are poised on fortune’s razor-edge.”

In the chapter, she talks about how a prisoner in the US penal system was murdered through horrific jail conditions:

Powell was serving a twenty-seven-month prison sentence for offering a blowjob to a police officer. Powell was doing sex work to get money for drugs. She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. She had, according to court reports, a serious polysubstance addiction that was complicated by untreated disorganized schizophrenia and mild intellectual disability.

Harden admits that she has privilege and so doesn't suffer the consequences of doing illegal drugs like Powell. But what about the causes of the illegal drug use?

The alleged focus of her book is vice or crime or sin or, I guess, some combination. So I expected Harden to provide a behavioral genetics explanation for how it came to pass that Kathryn Paige Harden, respectable soccer mom and public intellectual ("one of the world's leading scientists" according to her publisher) and Marcia Powell, a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability both became illegal-drug-using criminals.

But what follows is a poorly-organized combination of Harden's life story, her personal feelings and her musings on the texts of various philosophers, famous public intellectuals, and religious leaders.

Many reviews of the book are utterly clueless, written by reviewers who don't understand or don't care about Harden's place in the genetic determinism network. Fortunately I found the LA Review of Books review by Jonathan Basile, who is hip to the scene:

...Original Sin distinguishes itself by a far more personal tone; it features a series of anecdotes, not always thematically transparent, about Harden’s abusive childhood, her departure from the church, her divorce, her struggles to raise her children, her experiences taking LSD and having sex in the desert, and her arc of becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church. None of this deepens our understanding of the scientific or religious questions posed, and again, that may not be the point. The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy.

"Not always thematically transparent" is such a diplomatic way to describe the disorganization. 

And such a great line: "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting..."

It's funny 'cause it's true.

Harden promotes genetic determinism in her interviews, even as she misrepresents the words of her PhD advisor Eric Turkheimer:

...but my PhD advisor from graduate school is very famous for a paper called “The Three Laws of Behavior Genetics.” The third law of behavior genetics is: everything is heritable—which means that everything that differs between people, when you look at it scientifically, tends to show some influence of the genes that you were born with. I’m a scientist; I’ve been working in this field since I was 18. It’s important to me because I think it’s a scientific fact that is incontrovertible at this point: genes influence behavior.

So does this mean, per her own scientific expertise, that Harden believes she and a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability share genes that influenced them both to become illegal-drug-using criminals? 

She does claim that polygenic scores can predict the likelihood of an addiction to drugs, but I haven't found anything in the book where she addresses the urge to try illegal, potentially manslaughter-inducing drugs - after all, you can't become addicted if you never try the drugs in the first place.

...my colleagues and I have developed a polygenic score that is correlated with the likelihood of developing conduct disorder and ADHD, of becoming addicted to alcohol and opiate drugs, of being convicted of a felony crime. The correlations are small but meaningful; they are about the same size as correlations with lead exposure or child maltreatment.

We know Harden is less likely to be convicted of a felony crime from her illegal activities not because of polygenic scores but, by her own admission, due to her social privilege. But I assume a behavioral genetics proponent like Harden will argue that the fact that she deliberately took an illegal drug considered dangerous by both the US government and herself - as a middle-aged adult and with all the knowledge that "one of the world's leading scientists" presumably has, makes it more probable that her genes made her do it.

Turkheimer chided both Steven Pinker and Robert Plomin in 2024 for the same misunderstanding that Harden has (my highlight):

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

Harden justifies her claims with "I'm a scientist," but I think her poor literary organization and her misinterpretation of her own PhD advisor's views indicate she's not a very good one. I wonder if maybe she's better-suited to another career. Basile seems to wonder the same thing, in his review, if she might be more successful as an inspirational writer, or perhaps as a political operative:

In The Genetic Lottery, (her first book) Harden claimed that progressives seeking a more egalitarian system of education need to take account of students’ innate genetic differences in educability. I’ll examine, below, the reasons we may remain skeptical of any such claim to distinguish nature from nurture. Harden’s tenacious commitment to such methods, despite her familiarity with many of these criticisms, might lead us to suspect an ulterior motive: the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse, which is sometimes called shifting the Overton window.

 "...the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse" is also the goal of the racist, Peter Thiel-funded publication Quillette:

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

Certainly Harden's work is a favorite of racist hereditarians who appear to have right-wing views and motives for shifting the Overton window. In 2016, the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) helped Harden and her team search for a research fellow. The ISIR was founded to promote and defend the views of gutter racists - or "white nationalists" if you prefer - Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Harden has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2009 and 2015. The ISIR 2016 post for Harden mentions Harden works with Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob, who has participated in nine ISIR annual meetings, in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2023. 

And it just so happens that my previous post mentions Tucker-Drob - he has co-authored work with Stuart Ritchie, who appears to be a political activist working against transgender people.

In spite of Harden's genetic determinism beliefs, I actually doubt she thinks she shares any drug-taking DNA with the poor murdered prostitute. 

This passage is revealing:

She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. 

This is the key, I think to what Harden is really on about. The issue for her isn't that she and Marcia Powell are similar for taking illegal drugs, but rather, the manner in which they obtained the drugs is what makes them so different. Harden obtained them calmly and decorously and only to relieve boredom, not as a desperate attempt to cope with an impossible life.

And that is why Basile is right to accuse her of Scientific Calvinism:

In religious terms, this is Scientific Calvinism or Evangelicalism, the insistence that we must be punished for our predestined sinfulness. In political terms, it is the fever dream of neoliberalism, a state that individualizes responsibility for the forms of life it predetermines, and spares no expense punishing those it relegates to wretchedness.

It doesn't matter that Harden also broke the law - the important thing is that she did it in a state of privilege that comes from having superior genes.

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

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

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

This is something I noticed myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to SourceWatch:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ferahgo the Assassin," by Steven Pinker's

hereditarian ally Emily Willoughby, an image 

made publicly available by Willoughby 

on Facebook. Willoughby borrowed the 

character's name as a pseudonym while 

writing in support of race pseudoscience. 

It's too perfect that a Pinker ally 

identifies with a humanoid weasel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinker hates DEI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinker talks about journalists muzzling themselves:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quillette: still utterly racist, promoting racist Nathan Cofnas

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, like Quillette
celebrates extreme racist Nathan Cofnas
-----------------------------------------------------

In a recent Quillette article, Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London takes the opportunity, while celebrating Cambridge University siding with racist Nathan Cofnas, to argue in favor of race pseudoscience by citing gutter racists; ISIR meeting participants; employees of neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard; and Scott Alexander, idiot. 

Cofnas is known for writing on his blog that “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent.” 

Cofnas has appeared on the podcast of the neo-Nazi magazine Aporia, own by Kirkegaard.

Quillette's founder, Claire Lehmann is a gutter racist who pals around with Kirkegaard  and nurtured the career of neo-Nazi Bo Winegard - now an employee of Kirkegaard - from the time when he was but a graduate student racist. Lehmann recently got an award from the gutter racist organization International Society for Intelligence Research, which is the beneficiary of Pioneer Fund Nazi legacy money through its sister organization Institute of Mental Chronometry as well as all its members and meeting participants whose careers have been supported by Pioneer Fund money, such as Thomas Bouchard.

Saha writes:

...Others, including cognitive psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, educational psychologist Linda Gottfredson, and social scientist Noah Carl, argue that inquiry into this question is ethically justifiable, scientifically and educationally valuable, and that suppressing it leads to misguided policies and other tangible harms.

The hereditarian hypothesis is notoriously difficult to test because of pervasive confounding factors and the non-inferability of between-group heritability from within-group heritability. But one common objection—that it must be false because “race” is socially constructed—proves unconvincing on closer examination. Social racial categories are not identical to genetic-ancestry clusters, but the overlap is often sufficient to conclude that, if average differences exist by ancestry, they will show up as average differences across socially defined races. As the psychiatrist and influential essayist Scott Alexander has argued, insisting on perfect biological precision for “race” while accepting rough categories elsewhere is an isolated demand for rigour.

Standard Quillette goon squad: Ceci and Williams both participated in the 2024 ISIR annual meeting, notable for the participation of Emil Kirkegaard.

Noah Carl works for Kirkegaard.

Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist, long-time ISIR member and meeting participant, and beneficiary of Nazi legacy money through the Pioneer fund.

And Scott Alexander, idiot, promotes Emil Kirkegaard as a serious researcher. 

Note that promoters of race pseudoscience are almost all of them psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists. Abhishek Saha is a mathematician. Cofnas is a philosopher who specializes in being a racist.

It's as if they believe that promoting race pseudoscience will make them seem like real scientists who know what they are talking about when it comes to genetics and "race." 

They are not, and they do not, and that's why their adversaries are invariably people who do know what they are talking about like biologists P. Z. Myers, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. 

But the most interesting part of the article is when Saha illustrates how racists try to smuggle their racism into scientific respectability through behavioral genetics:

Most experts in behavioural genetics agree that genes significantly influence individual differences in intelligence, a consensus supported by large-scale meta-analyses and review papers.

The review paper Saha links to is co-authored by Ian Deary, a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings. And the meta-analyses link goes to a paper co-authored by Peter Visscher, one of Adam Rutherford's hereditarian co-authors who also signed onto racist Razib Khan's attack against the author of an article that discussed E. O. Wilson's racism. Visscher is also an ISIR meeting participant.

People like Kathryn Paige Harden and Adam Rutherford have a lot to answer for, for their promotion of the pseudoscientific failure that is behavioral genetics.

Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby, Emil Kirkegaard, RationalWiki and censorship

Kirkegaard and Willoughby
working together for a common goal
---------------------------------------------------------

EMILY WILLOUGHBY is a Board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). 

Recently, according to her long-time associate Jonathan Kane, she provided information to Kane which he used to make a litigation threat against the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation, the parent organization of RationalWiki.

Lawsuits & Secret Parties

This year, lawsuits were filed against the New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation (RMF), the former parent organization of RationalWiki. All of the plaintiffs were connected in one way or another to neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and four of them have participated in at least one ISIR annual meeting.

RMF settled the lawsuits by agreeing to remove RationalWiki articles about the plaintiffs, along with all references to or mentions of the plaintiffs.

Then there were threats of lawsuits from secret parties. The New Mexico-based RationalMedia Foundation made agreement(s) with those parties, which resulted in at least 30 articles about individuals and even about the International Society for Intelligence Research and the publication Aporia, (owned by Kirkegaard) being censored. Once again, the censored articles were connected to Emil Kirkegaard.

Among the censored articles was the one I created about Charles Murray. I reposted the article on this blog, months ago, without a peep from Murray or his representatives since.

Censorship forever?

The lawsuits and secret parties agreements occurred at a time when the RationalMedia Foundation was attempting to move from the SLAPP-friendly state of New Mexico to the less SLAPP-friendly state of Oregon by shutting down the New Mexico organization and registering a new organization in Oregon. It completed the change in July-August 2025.

Initially there seemed to be a general understanding that once RationalMedia Foundation was reborn in Oregon, the censorship could be lifted, since the Oregon organization would not be bound by settlements made with the separate and now defunct New Mexico organization. 

The only possible hitch was that Board members from the New Mexico organization would have to resign from the Oregon organization, before the censorship could end, presumably because they would still be bound by the settlements made with the New Mexico organization.

But there seems to be some doubt about this now, which has made the people running the Oregon-based RationalMedia Foundation quick to censor and threaten to ban anybody on RationalWiki who discusses the censored topics, or the lawsuits, or the secret agreements, or even speculating on how things might be handled differently if the censorship was ever lifted.

And so RationalWiki is now at the mercy of a group of people - all or most of whom have connections to Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard - who can yank RMF's chain whenever they are displeased.

Jonathan Kane yanks the chain

And it appears that one way to yank RationalMedia Foundation's chain is via Jonathan Kane. Using his RationalWiki account, "Tetrapteryx" Kane can be seen on this RationalWiki page in September 2025,  speaking for the secret parties. He writes:

The parties to RW's settlements have seriously considered taking further legal action against RW for its hosting of these images, but they appear to have decided against it, because now that their articles are deleted RW isn't causing them a lot of harm anymore. However, if [redacted] gets Jason Wilson to publish an article attacking them over their lawsuits, there is a possibility that situation could change. The people calling for a new round attacks on the plaintiffs don't seem to have an understanding how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is with respect to this issue, and I think their actions are extremely risky.

The images specified by Kane were a Twitter screen cap of journalist Tom Scocca highlighting Charles Murray's racism (which has been available on this blog since 2021) and another Twitter screen cap of an exchange between Pinkerite and Ben Winegard, brother of Emil Kirkegaard employee Bo Winegard. (That image has been on this blog since 2020.) The images were insignificant and no longer connected to any articles, and apparently had not yet been removed only because there was a technical glitch, but Kane made sure to use them as an excuse to yank that chain anyway. 

Jason Wilson appears to be this reporter at the Guardian, while [Redacted] refers to Oliver Smith. We'll talk about him soon. 

But how does Jonathan Kane know what the litigants are considering and deciding, and how does he know "how precarious RationalWiki's situation currently is"? 

Well as Kane tells it, he is getting his information from Emily Willoughby, board member of the ISIR:

I'm pretty sure know I more about what the litigants are up to than any other user here. I know about this because I'm close friends with a person who is involved in ISIR. I think I'm not supposed to name her, but she's a woman, which narrows down who it could be. This is public information; I've mentioned it several other times, and she and I collaborated on an anti-creationism book a few years ago.

Willoughby and Kane collaborated on an anti-creationism book published in 2017.

A RationalMedia Foundation Board member commented on the same page as Kane:

That woman was one of the 28 people who wanted to take legal action against, even though the article about her had been deleted months before...

So the article about Emily Willoughby on RationalWiki had been removed months before the lawsuits began. It's curious then, that she was involved at all in any legal actions against the RationalMedia Foundation.

How we know that Emil Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi

It's clear that Kirkegaard is a neo-Nazi. According to the Hope not Hate exposé Race Science Inc:

• The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) 

[NOTE: HDF is owned by Kirkegaard and recently renamed "Polygenic Scores LLC."]

• Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
• Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
• HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
• HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS

In addition, the Anti-Defamation League has noted the connections between Alternative für Deutschland and Nazi ideology.

In 2023 a German publication noted the connection between Kirkegaard and AfD supporter Mathilda Huss, who also appears to have a connection to Trump.

Kirkegaard was seen attending the Neo-Nazi Scandza Forum conference in 2023 with Edward Dutton and Helmut Nyborg.

Kirkegaard became the beneficiary of Nazi legacy money when he "inherited the assets of the Pioneer Fund from its former long-time president, the white nationalist Richard Lynn before he died in July 2023." 

Kirkegaard owns the pseudoscientific journal Mankind Quarterly, originally funded by Nazi sympathizer Wickcliffe Draper.

In January of 2025, Kirkegaard endorsed AfD on Twitter.

Emil Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki

Kirkegaard attempts to falsely connect
RationalWiki to "antifa"
------------------------------------------------------

I first became aware of Kirkegaard's hatred of RationalWiki thanks to a City Journal piece written to attack a legal opponent of Kirkegaard, and endorsed by Steven Pinker and Charles Murray, called "The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past."

The "troll" was Oliver Smith, whom Kirkegaard had sued for defamation - and lost. At the time of the article's publication, Kirkegaard owed Smith £35,972 and was in contempt of court for refusing to pay.

The City Journal article appears to be Kirkegaard's - or an ally's - attempt to conflate RationalWiki with Oliver Smith, a former RationalWiki editor.

Prior to the publication of the article in City Journal, blackmail was attempted against Smith by someone who appeared to be associated with the Substack "CancelWatch."

Smith successfully sued the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the parent of City Journal, to have the article removed.

Undaunted, Kirkegaard posted a video on Aporia in 2024, attacking RationalWiki as "Antifa."

Captain Occam, Ferahgo the Assassin and Deleet

Jonathan Kane, Emily Willoughby and Emil Kirkegaard are long-time contributors to wikis.

According to testimony on Twitter, Kane and Willoughby:

"...were pushing race and IQ "science" on Wikipedia for years, both being banned for doing so incessantly and deceptively." 

"I spent literal years trying to counter their wikipedia work when I was in grad school." and 

" That's also where I first met Emil Kierkegaard, he was working with them some of the time." and

"Kirkegaard's username was Deleet. Kane and Willoughby worked a good cop bad cop routine, she more or less followed the rules and stayed civil, he didn't and was banned, and when he was banned he edited from her account, and when it was discovered they shared, she was banned too."

Another Twitter account testified: 

"Like I said before, I remember her advocating that stuff on Livejournal back in the 2000s, but to see she still subscribes to it…yeesh."

Kane used the name "Captain Occam" on Wikipedia and in 2010 the Captain Occam account received a topic ban on Wikipedia over race- and intelligence-related articles and in 2018 the account was indefinitely blocked by Wikipedia.

Willoughby used the name "Ferahgo the Assassin," on Wikipedia, a name taken from one of the characters in the Redwall children's fantasy novels. The character is "an evil weasel who heads up a large band known as the Corpsemakers."

Ferahgo the Assassin can be seen promoting a claim in support of race pseudoscience for an article on race and intelligence in 2009:

After perusing this article, I've got to say that the current version looks fairly unbalanced. If there is a significant body of scientists out there that support a partially genetic basis for racial differences in IQ, then that proportion of scientists should be accurately represented in the article, and the article should not be written under the assumption that this conclusion is false. -[[User:Ferahgo the Assassin|Ferahgo the Assassin]] ([[User talk:Ferahgo the Assassin|talk]]) 04:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Ferahgo the Assassin was interaction-banned on Wikipedia over race and intelligence.

Kane and Willoughby are likely authors of an article published in 2020, "The left-wing bias of Wikipedia," for the conservative British magazine "The Critic" under the pseudonyms Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear. 

Tezuka published an article in 2020 in "Journal of Controversial Ideas" called Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism. The article mentions both Kane and Willoughby.

In July 2022 Tezuka published an article in Quillette called Cognitive Distortions - How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence which mentions Ferahgo the Assassin. 

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales called the article "silly." 

I documented Shuichi Tezuka promoting the right-wing wiki Justapedia in 2023. The "Tetrapteryx" on Justapedia is likely Jonathan Kane, since he uses "Tetrapteryx" on RationalWiki, which was confirmed by a RationalWiki moderator.

In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented the Wikipedia race pseudoscience wars and Emil Kirkegaard's role in them, writing:

Editors who attempt to insert their ideological bias but maintain the semblance of civility are given the benefit of the doubt until their disruption becomes apparent enough to warrant action by administrators. Civil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation.   

Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. Often these are single-purpose accounts that exclusively edit on topics like race and intelligence, racial classification and bios of related researchers, like Linda Gottfredson or Helmuth Nyborg. Some have direct ties with racist journals or organizations, like Mankind Quarterly editor Gerhard Meisenberg. Emil Kirkegaard, who edits frequently under the username Deleet, is a research fellow at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social research and the co-founder of the online pseudojournal OpenPsych.

Kane & Willoughby: "A Troublesome Inheritance"

In May 2014, Willoughby and Kane co-authored a review of Nicholas Wade's race pseudoscience book "A Troublesome Inheritance," a book so bad that not even Jerry Coyne liked it. It was generally trashed by reviewers. 

The first half of the review is full of regret that Wade did not write a better book in support of race pseudoscience and the second half is an attack on one of Wade's critics, using hereditarians' favorite Equalitarian bullshit.

In the review they link to that great intellectual of our time, the pseudonymous racist blogger "HBD Chick" to argue that sure, Nazis were bad, but crimes have been around since before Nazis:

The science blogger HBD Chick@ makes an important point about this idea. Genocide, racism, and xenophobia all predate human history, and it's foolish to think that beliefs about biological differences between races are to blame for these millennia-old practices. The Nazis misused race differences as an excuse for their genocide of Jews, but crimes of similar scale have been committed without any need to invoke this excuse...

And to support the notion of "public health benefits from research about the effects of race differences" they link to a New York Times op-ed, I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor, by Sally Satel. I was just talking about her last month, in the context of her contribution to the embarrassing "The War on Science" book, and her role as a Purdue Pharma shill.

Willoughby shares her thoughts about
Institutional Review Boards
with Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter 
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Emil Kirkegaard's "OpenPsych" hereditarian hypothesis chat

In September 2014 an individual named Emily and another named Tetrapteryx can be seen participating in a discussion about the "hereditarian hypothesis" in an archive of a discussion board on Emil Kirkegaard's OpenPsych. Other participants in the discussion include John Fuerst and Emil Kirkegaard.

This discussion board Emily appears to know Steven Pinker and mentions Steven Pinker's protegé James Lee and in the last paragraph responds to Kirkegaard: 

 

...I admire your idealism, and I think the research that you, Piffer and others are doing is really important. I'd like to try and support it however I can (I would not have sent my genome and IQ scores to just anyone!), and if all I can do for now is send your research along to important people I know, then I will continue to do so.

The Piffer mentioned is likely Davide Piffer, a frequent contributor to OpenPsych, and known for at least one incredibly racist tweet.

Kirkegaard responds to Emily:

Perhaps you can convince Pinker to get others to examine the method and results. After all, they are public. Since he has a lot of influence, perhaps he can set up an academic group of anonymous scholars (so they can be honest) that can examine it.

Kirkegaard's current organization is known to have an "underground research arm" per the Hope not Hate article "Race Science Inc."

Emily Willoughby expressed her admiration for Steven Pinker in this undated Tumblr post. Pinker returned the favor in this 2024 tweet.

In the same discussion, Tetrapteryx thinks Kirkegaard and Piffer are "so idealistic."

...Part of why this bothers me is because I think you and Davide Piffer do have the potential to make a difference in this area, if you weren't so idealistic about your opposition to legacy journals. You care about both that and educating the world about psychometrics, but I don't think it's possible to pursue both goals at once without compromising the second one, and I also think the second one is more important.

Emily Willoughby's "cancellation"

In 2022, a controversy erupted over Willoughby and her connection to race pseudoscience. And around that time it was discovered that she had published an image online of two raptors in Nazi uniforms, playing chess. I have blurred the image on the tweet out of concern for copyright, although the image is available online.

On Twitter, Willoughby addressed the issue of her connection to race pseudoscience, claiming her work is on "cognitive ability and genetics" which has nothing to do with race, and references Kathryn Paige Harden as a "progressive geneticist." Harden has promoted the career of Razib Khan, and the work of Willoughby. 

And the field of behavioral genetics is full of racist connections.

Willoughby tweeted the work of Linda Gottfredson to support her views. Linda Gottfredson is a gutter racist who could be heard ranking races by intelligence with "alleged cult leader" Stefan Molyneux.

Gregory Cochran's Twitter handle is included on Willoughby's Gottfredson tweet. Cochran is a co-author, with white nationalist Henry Harpending, of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence and a recipient of $600,000 dollars from Holocaust denier Ron Unz, although Unz later complained bitterly that Cochran did not respond to the grant by doing the kind of work Unz wanted. 

Willoughby appears to be friendly with Cochran, posting a link to a better image-quality version of a cartoon that Cochran shared on his blog while discussing the article he wrote for Quillette. The cartoon attacks evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin by showing a man with a dog sled team composed of poodles. The caption reads: "Richard Lewontin creates a dog sled team to test his theory that small genetic differences are irrelevant." 

Willoughby was defended by several online individuals including Jerry Coyne and Kiwi Farms apologists Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog.

Emil Kirkegaard was not happy about Willoughby's "cancellation." 

The post-"cancellation" career of Emily Willoughby

In May of this year a Dutch website published an article titled What is the relationship between intelligence research and racism? (English version via Google Translate) which includes this passage (my highlight):

In early 2018, Richard Lynn (chairman of Pioneer Fund) and Gerhard Meisenberg (chairman of Mankind Quarterly) were editors of Intelligence. After an article in The Guardian, they left the editorial board (Guardian 2018). Richard Haier, Thomas Coyle, Timothy Bates, Heiner Rindermann, and Woodley of Menie remained (Intelligence 2018). Russel Warne was a staff member for a time. The organization behind the journal, ISIR, also includes Emily Willoughby, Roberto Colom, and Guy Madison (ISIR 2025). All are sympathetic to the ideas of race science. Haier consistently defends Arthur Jensen. Timothy Bates calls ethnicity “the least socially constructed variable in social science.” Colom, Rinderman, Warne, and Madison have published in Mankind Quarterly. Woodley of Menie was expelled from the VUB after his work (“Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications”) was cited in a terrorist manifesto. Willoughby defends Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

I haven't seen evidence of Willoughby defending Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), but she is on friendly terms with its co-author Gregory Cochran, and in their review of "A Troublesome Inheritance," she and Jonathan Kane mention Cochran twice and cite his other work (co-authored with Harpending) "The 10,000 Year Explosion."

From all appearances, Emily Willoughby has a thriving career. Since her "cancellation" in 2022:

• Willoughby has been a frequent participant in ISIR annual meetings.

• During her "cancellation" she shared on Jerry Coyne's website that for the annual ISIR meeting in 2022, when Kirkegaard was disinvited: "I WAS on the board that made the decision to redact Emil’s talk from the conference. I had no part in any sort of “private hotel room." Former neo-Nazi/Kirkegaard associate Eric Ahrens discussed that "private hotel room" recently. 

• However, Willoughby was also a Board member in 2024 when Emil Kirkegaard was seen participating in the annual meeting. Although probably not coincidentally, the ISIR did not post its annual meeting program on its website for that year, as it has done every other year since the beginning of the organization in 2000.

• In 2023, along with James Lee, Willoughby received a half a million dollars from the Institute of Mental Chronometry, an organization connected to the ISIR. This is Nazi legacy money, since the Institute of Mental Chronometry received at least $332,000 from the Pioneer Fund under its original name, "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences." (The money was given in the late 1980s, so would be worth about $800,000 today.)

• In 2024 Steven Pinker tweeted that she was a "rising star."

• Her dinosaur art was published by the Science Museum of Virginia in 2025.

• Willoughby has co-authored about twenty papers since 2022 as seen on Google Scholar. A frequent co-author is Alexandros Giannelis, mentioned in the Hope Not Hate investigative report called Superbaby Factory:

...Alexandros Giannelis, a behavioural geneticist at the University of Minnesota, is one of them. He was also described as a “one of our colleagues” by Anomaly in a call with our undercover reporter in November 2023. When the Nazi music website Midgård was hacked that same year, leaked customer data revealed that Giannelis made two purchases from its shop: Invasion, a book by Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the white supremacist group Blood and Honour. He also bought four Nazi propaganda posters. In an email to HOPE not hate, Giannelis confirmed that he had been a research consultant at Heliospect, and has since stepped down.

 Giannelis could be seen defending Willoughby on Twitter. 

• She sells dinosaur merch on Zazzle.

Yet in spite of all this, Willoughby managed to find the time to keep up with the secret parties who censored - and continue to censor - RationalWiki, and to share information from them with Jonathan Kane, who used that information to threaten additional litigation against the RationalMedia Foundation.

UPDATE

I posted a link from my RationalWiki user talk page to this Pinkerite blog post and immediately a RationalWiki moderator deleted the link, and then removed most of my user privileges. I asked why and was told because one of the names of a censored individual was in the link name. And then I was blocked from contributing to RationalWiki until January 6, 2026. 

Not that I had any plans to contribute, RationalWiki has been completely de-spined. It's the Gimp in Maynard and Zed's dungeon now.

UPDATE 2

I find that on RationalWiki I've been accused of lying by a RationalMedia Foundation Board member, in response to Jonathan Kane (aka "Tetraptryx.") I have scrupulously documented every single claim in this post, but since I am banned from RationalWiki, I can't respond there to the claim. 

Then someone from CancelWatch came to gloat about my ban. 

UPDATE 3

The claim was retracted, which I very much appreciate. I certainly mean no harm to the editors of RationalWiki - although I do think they need to be honest with themselves about the possibility of running a wiki that can contribute to the public good, while having their chain yanked whenever it looks like they might violate the terms of agreements made with a now-defunct organization. 

And of course I am very annoyed that my Charles Murray article was censored. To be fair other RationalWiki editors contributed so it's not exclusively mine, but in any case I think it's a good piece of work. Murray has been a public figure for decades and the article was carefully sourced and there was nothing tortious or defamatory about it.

The bad guys here are not (most of) the RationalWiki editors and RMF Board members, but the people who twisted the American legal system, via SLAPP lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, into a weapon to censor free speech.

UPDATE 4

When I asked Bongolian, one of the RationalWiki moderators why he revoked my rights, somebody else jumped in to say "you're all pathetic fascist boot-lickers" - and for that, Bongolian, without any evidence, falsely claimed that " Pinkerite has engaged in block evasion."

Of course since I'm already blocked, I have no way to defend myself there, which is just how Bongolian likes it, I suspect.