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.

Racists, led by Trump's FBI, come for the Southern Poverty Law Center

Pinker hates the SPLC because it 
refuses to accept race pseudoscience
------------------------------------------

I've noticed before that although Steven Pinker claims to dislike Trump, Trump has a habit of making Pinker's anti-woke dreams come true.

Pinker is among many, even on the right, who have doubted the Trump administration's reasons for going after the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Per the NYTimes:

The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries. The S.P.L.C. has certainly been adversarial toward the president: In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.”

Nevertheless, Steven Pinker can't help but reveal how much he hates SPLC because it refuses to accept Pinker's brand of race pseudoscience.

Pinker doesn't name the "ordinary academic behavioral geneticists" (another name for sociobiologists) he claims have been unfairly targeted in Hate Watch, but I will make some guesses:

• Linda Gottfredson
• Henry Harpending
• Arthur Jensen
• Richard Lynn
• Charles Murray
• Jean-Phillipe Rushton

Every one of them a gutter racist.

Bari Weiss herself identified Pinker as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web and that network of grifters and clowns has hated the SPLC for a long time, as I have documented on this website. For example, in 2019 Quillette founder Claire Lehmann suggested Sam Harris sue SPLC for publishing an article that presented evidence for Harris' being a conduit to the far right.

The "Quillette Editorial Board" was railing against SPLC a few years ago, this time because of SPLC's support of transgender rights.

Other members of the IDW, or member-adjacent who have attacked SPLC include Michael Shermer, Gavin McInnes, Jerry Coyne,  and Christina Hoff Sommers.

The New Republic says:

The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.” He did not specify which, if any, acts of violence the organization’s research had inspired.

That brings us back to Blanche’s claims that the organization was “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” A cynical observer might suspect that the Trump Justice Department’s goal is to blame the work of white nationalist groups on the civil rights groups that oppose them. There is a long history of Klan denialism in this country that minimizes the actions of violent white supremacists, often by blaming their actions on their victims and opponents.

It is horrifying to see the Justice Department, whose original mission was to fight the Klan, engage in similar denialism. At least some conservative commentators appear to be buying it too. “Given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups,” McLaughlin wrote.

In reality, there has been an alarming resurgence in white-supremacist organizations since Trump first captured the presidency in 2016. White-nationalist rhetoric, which was once politically fatal ten years ago, is now regularly espoused by Trump administration officials and even by official government publications. Now the Justice Department is throwing its full weight behind a flimsy prosecution in an effort to destroy one of the Klan’s greatest opponents. There is no subtlety about what is happening here.

Lawyer Joyce Vance weighs in:

Unfortunately Vance's blog is on Substack, funded by techno-fascist Marc Andreessen.

Speaking of whom, Andreessen has been using Grok - aka "MechaHitler" - to promote hatred against SPLC, while at the same time spitting on the grave of Charles M. Shulz by using Charlie Brown as his X avatar.

And Elon Musk, MechaHitler's creator, is a long-time hater of the Southern Poverty Law Center, probably because the organization is pro-democracy and anti-racism, and Elon Musk, a stochastic terrorist, is the exact opposite.

Jamelle Bouie completely understands Elon Musk.

Speaking of techno-fascists, techno-racists and all around techno-nutjobs, there is an excellent New Republic article out now, How the Tech World Turned Evil, about these insanely wealthy freaks. And it does raise the question - has their insane wealth rendered them all insane?

The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

Professional gutter racist Steve Sailer testifies to his influence on Steven Pinker
-------------------------------

So several members of Steven Pinker's fan club have rushed to defend their hero's honor against Boston Magazine's relatively mild critique of Pinker.

Jerry Coyne, the hereditarianism-loving grifter and coiner of the term "Boot Boys," comes harrumphing along with his grievance about the article's reference to cowboy boots:

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

Coyne defends Pinker's hereditarianism in the most hereditarian way possible: by claiming Pinker's critics are a bunch of Marxists.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized. 

 

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.

Although I do appreciate that Coyne confirms Pinker's devotion to hereditarianism. 

Speaking of Pinker and Marx, a recent story in Current Affairs is titled: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism.

The article is co-authored by Ben Burgis & Matt McManus. They don't mention Pinker's hereditarianism - but since they have both written for Quillette, I expect race pseudoscience is the least of their concerns. Their work for Quillette appears to be a kind of philosophy 101 for the racist masses who read Quillette. More recently McManus has published in Areo Magazine, which is a kind of Quillette lite, and was edited by Iona Italia, who is just as much an hereditarian as Quillette's Claire Lehmann.

In his post, Coyne provides a link to Jesse Singal's defense of Pinker. Coyne is perhaps returning the favor.

Jesse Singal is an infamous anti-trans podcaster who is also an apologist - at best - for the psychopathic Kiwi Farms. And like Coyne, Singal is a long-time defender of Pinker. I first became aware of him in the context of his article in the New York Times after Pinker was caught praising members of the far-right in the defense of race pseudoscience. P. Z Myers had an excellent response to Singal.

Singal's most recent defense of Pinker is mostly behind a pay wall, but I will address one of the paragraphs that is available for free:

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

Since Singal provides no names for "adherents of sweeping anti-Pinker views" or those who believe that "people are more or less blank slates" it's impossible to independently evaluate his claims about these boogeymen.

But both Singal and Pinker are weasels. When Singal and his professional racist pal Razib Khan came after me on Bluesky there was no chance to address their vicious claims about me directly - they both blocked me. When Singal disparaged trans-person Jude Doyle, it was from the safety of his paywalled podcast. Pinker famously blocked anybody on Twitter who mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. In the Boston Magazine article Pinker defended his warm relationship with Epstein on the grounds that the convicted child molester was giving money to Harvard:

The only one from Pinker himself—to an Epstein assistant in March 2012, four years after the conviction—said he’d be “delighted to meet with him” when Epstein visited Harvard. “I probably shouldn’t have said yes,” Pinker says now, “but I was being polite—he was a donor to Harvard.”

I think that Pinker, Singal and Khan make money, directly or indirectly by saying things right-wing plutocrats want them to say, and so there is no reason why they would actually debate anybody about their positions. It's so much easier to just claim nameless opponents have "done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position." How would Singal know? He exists in gated right-wing spaces, just as Pinker does.

But no defense of Steven Pinker would be complete without Steve Sailer weighing in. Pinker's decade-long support for Sailer is one of those topics that Pinker refuses to address. He always uses his tired "guilt by association" dodge when journalists ask him why he promoted Sailer's career. But there's no advantage to Pinker to talk about Sailer, and so he doesn't and journalists never hold his feet to the fire. 

Sailer's piece,  Is Steven Pinker A Bad Guy Like Charles Murray? is a few sarcastic lines and then he just posts most of the Boston Magazine article.

I should mention that Sailer is a fan of Jesse Singal. And of course has a mutual-admiration society with Charles Murray.

Sailer was much wordier in his defense of Pinker  another time the mainstream press decided to peek under Pinker's racism rug, five years ago, and he made sure to double-down on his own extreme racism - my highlight:

Therefore, it was ironic but hardly surprising that The Guardian last week attempted to cancel Pinker by repeating Malcolm Gladwell’s complaint that Pinker had humiliated him in a 2009 book review in The New York Times by citing data I’d compiled debunking Gladwell’s knuckleheaded assertion that the NFL performance of college quarterback prospects “can’t be predicted.” The Guardian whoops:

…the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people.”

Other beliefs of mine include that Reno is west of Los Angeles, the Holocaust happened, and the sun comes up in the east...

But Sailer should save his time, because his warm feelings for Pinker and his history with Pinker say more about Pinker than any defenses Sailer could write.

As I was saying, John Oliver is a national treasure

John Oliver makes an excellent case for the fecklessness of Elon Musk, but he also mentions Harmeet Dhillon a lawyer who loves Trump and his fascist administration and was once (or still is?) the lawyer of far-right looney-toon grifter Andy Ngo. 

Claire Lehmann's Quillette used to promote his grift all the time.

Because we are living in Bizarro World, thanks to morons voting for a felon/rapist/traitor/psychopath, Dhillon is now "assistant attorney general for civil rights."

The fact that she promoted a bunch of monsters including the equally awful stochastic terrorist account Libs of TikTok tells you how horrible she is.

But the most important aspect of Oliver's piece is how utterly poisonous Twitter is - a force for pure evil. 

Oliver discusses the way that Twitter is apparently fiddling with its algorithm to push right-wing content. I hope those still on Substack - looking at you, Paul Krugman - are aware that Marc Andreessen is just as right-wing extremist and just as capable of tweaking the Substack algorithm.

And speaking of horrible people, Jesse Singal is promoting his anti-trans obsession while promoting his book in the NYTimes. He is an awful person, part of the race pseudoscience gang and an apologist for those other stochastic terrorists, Kiwi Farms.

The New York Times has a lot to answer for, over its campaign against trans-people.

Erin Reed has a response to Singal which is, unfortunately, on Substack.

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files: "Steven Pinker is also a friend."

Steven Pinker praising "bad boy" Alan Dershowitz
in the October 2013 Harvard Law School video on
Youtube titled: "Celebrating Alan Dershowitz: teacher"
--------------------------------------------------------------

If you do a search in the Justice Department's Epstein files on the name "Pinker" you will see the name is mentioned 416 times. 

In a few cases the name is not connected to Steven Pinker - his sister Susan appears a few times and at least one other person named Pinker is mentioned, but the vast majority of mentions are Steven Pinker.

The most important information about Pinker's connection to Epstein has long been known:  Pinker helped Epstein's lawyer Alan Dershowitz defend Epstein in 2007.

The phrase "had sex with Dershowitz" appears 53 times in the Epstein files, as in:

• "This makes [redacted] the second woman to allege that she had sex with Dershowitz at the behest of Epstein..."

• The second time that I had sex with Dershowitz was at Epstein's house in Palm Beach. During this encounter, Dershowitz instructed me to both perform oral sex and have sexual intercourse.

• I had sexual intercourse with Dershowitz at least six times. The first time was when I was about 16, early on in my servitude to Epstein, and it continued until I was 19.

A lot of the documents in the Epstein files are duplicates or at least the information is duplicated across many documents. And to be fair, I only did a half-assed job of searching every file in which Pinker's name appears. So I could have missed something. But still, I did find some items of interest:

On March 28, 2012 Pinker received an email from Epstein's assistant:

Hello Steven. Jeffrey Epstein will be making a trip up to Harvard on Sunday April 15th. He is wondering if you might be around and available to meet with him?

To which Pinker responded:

Unfortunately I'm out of town that day, but if Jeffrey is around on Monday the 16th, I'll be back and would be delighted to meet with him.

This was five years after 2007, when Pinker had helped Dershowitz defend Epstein, and four years after Epstein pled guilty to state charges: one count of solicitating prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18.

In his response to Jeffrey Epstein's request, on June 23, 2015, to give Pinker's email address to Stephen Hawking, infamous sex pest Lawrence Krauss (his full name appears 5,209 times in the Epstein files) wrote:

Thanks. I don't normally give out email addresses, even to friends... but I guess since Jeffrey flew stephen on a plane it is ok.

An article published in the NYTimes a couple of months ago discusses Krauss's and Robert Trivers's connections to Epstein. They sound like a delightful couple of guys:

In 2018, Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Krauss a list of attendees for the Women in the World Summit, a convention of female leaders and activists. Mr. Krauss responded, “Let’s do a men of the world conference,” and listed men accused of misconduct: Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Woody Allen.

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.

John Brockman, the guy who edited the Epstein-funded Edge, wrote to Epstein on June 2, 2011:

Strangely, the usual billionaire crowd is not showing up for this one, so I am running hard to revision it as a serious science event, inviting more third culture intellectuals and also the global press (NYTimes, WSJ, NYorker, Economist, etc.) Ultlimately it will be a much stronger and more important event, but it's not the one advertised to you. The list status is below. (Btw, I hope you will come (Martin and Pinker would be very happy if your showed up) but will understand if you want out.

I believe Martin refers to Harvard professor Martin Nowak.

Brockman sent this email to Epstein on May 3, 2015:

I saw your boys, the Dersh, and Larry Summers, at a dinner Pinker had for Rebecca's birthday. Poor guy, he's going out for his wife, and then, the day before the event, Ilarry, his father dies. And while his whole family was in Montreal and in mourning, he persevered with smile on his face and only his close friends knew.

I talked to the Dersh - what a story! David Boies!! What's going on? Didn't talk to Summers.

Summers is a well-known good buddy of Epstein. "the Dersh" is of course Alan Dershowitz.

On February 8, 2012, Epstein wrote to Brian Boyd:

i look forward to sponsoring your dream work . 75k. we will work out the details.. Steve Pinker is also a friend. ( since you seemed to hold him in high regard )

Boyd is a University of Auckland professor  who "met disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for breakfast, and later discussed the fee that Epstein offered to pay him to write about Nabokov’s novel Lolita."

Epstein acknowledges his "colorful past" in this letter to Bill Gates on December 4, 2013:

1. I remembered I did speak to your cfo in the past , but I believe he thought at that time that my colorful past could become an issue . the time is now ripe. 2. the event in April 4-6 0 will be with Pinker, venter . sr martin rees frank wilcek, . 6 or 7 nobel prize winners. lawrence krauss. richard dawkins...

Perhaps the most pathetic figure out of all the celebrity intellectuals collected by Epstein is Stephen M. Kosslyn, who wrote to Epstein on January 3, 2013:

Dear Jeffrey:

Thank you very much for your note, which means a lot to me. You are probably not aware of this, but I consider you one of my only real friends -- you don't want anything from me, don't try to push any agendas on me, and you care about me. The feeling is mutual.

Imagine having a rapist psychopath as one of your only real friends.

Of course you knew there would be a connection between Kosslyn and Pinker, evident in an article that is included in the Epstein files:

...Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker credits Kosslyn, his former graduate adviser, with breathing new life into another venerable institution. "The Harvard University psychology department had been a backwater, coasting on its reputation, before Steve reinvigorated it in the 1990s with an aggressive program of hiring young mid-career scientists, which vaulted the department into the front ranks," says Pinker, who joined the department in 2003. Pinker also cites Kosslyn's leadership through the financial crisis as evidence that he's the right peron to turn around the Stanford center: "I'd be surprised if Steve didn't make the center financially viable and intellectually vibrant within a few years:'

What damn fools these self-impressed academics are. 

I have not spent much time on this Pinkerite blog discussing Pinker's connection to Epstein, although most people are far more interested in that than in Pinker's 25 years - at least - of promoting hereditarianism and professional racists like Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, and writing for the racist publication Quillette and appearing on the Neo-Nazi podcast Aporia (owned by Emil Kirkegaard, a pedophilia apologist.)

But it's clear that Epstein pleading guilty to raping kids did not bother him at all. I noted in the last post that Pinker's racist ally Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring about pedophilia and is a huge fan of Camille "North American Man/Boy Love Association" Paglia.

Pinker is a fan of Paglia too, mentioning her in his Blank Slate as one of the good (i. e. misogynist) "feminists."

I think that Pinker, like many in his wealthy "celebrity intellectual" cohort, believes that moral and ethical concerns don't apply to him. That's why he screams "guilt by association" whenever anybody mentions the awful people he allies with.

So why wouldn't he be delighted to meet with Epstein in 2012? 

Why wouldn't Jeffrey Epstein consider him a friend?

UPDATE: 

Great article in The Verge by Elizabeth Lopatto that mentions the connection between Epstein and his friends and the Intellectual Dark Web:

Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved. 

 

Recall the great many pronouncements about the limits and dangers of #MeToo — hilariously, Bari Weiss wrote an entire article in The New York Times about “iconoclastic” members of the “intellectual dark web” who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Included in this group was a correspondent of Epstein’s: Sam Harris, to whom Epstein suggested he use “more charm and less argument” in debates. Several of the names mentioned in the article would later join Weiss’ abortive attempt at an “independent” school, the non-accredited University of Austin. Much like the group Weiss profiles itself, the University of Austin would become a tool of the far right.

UPDATE 2

Here's something I missed - Pinker was paid $10,000 for helping to defend Epstein.

Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web, Race Science and the Jeffrey Epstein files

Well that didn't last long. I called Claire Lehmann the voice of reason last month, but now, the woman who won the International Society for Intelligence Research's Constance Holden journalism award is ho-humming her way through one of the biggest stories of the year, if not the decade.

Claire Lehmann has a history of not caring if someone is pro-pedophilia as can be seen in her praise of Camille Paglia, who loves pedophilia so much she bascally declared it one of the pillars of Western Civilization.

Lehmann's circle of ghouls and grifters jumped in to agree with her about the lack of entertainment value from the Epstein files.

So who are these people who find underage rape by famous men so terribly tiresome?

Well there's Cathy Young, who mostly doesn't find underage rape interesting but she found it absolutely fascinating when a creepy guy published his ex-girlfriend's personal information in order to harm her as much as possible. Young seems to have a real fondness for Eron Gjoni, to the point where she appears to be trying to rehabilitate him, even though at the same time she got him to admit that he had no regrets about his grotesque and indefensible invasion of privacy.

I am convinced that Young has a serious case of internalized misogyny, right along with Lehmann, Paglia and Young's based Gamergate comrade, Christina Hoff Sommers, which is why, I believe, Young gets the maximum enjoyment out of seeing women, especially young women, in emotional pain.

She's also chummy with professional racist Razib Khan.

I've also mentioned Damon Linker on this blog. He's a thinktank creature who was mad that Trump was brought to justice, if only temporarily a few years ago. He's written for Lehmann's own gutter racist publication Quillette and signed the Harper's letter with the rest of the grifters and race pseudoscience promoters.

But let's not forget Matt Taibbi, who also finds stories about rape such a chore. Which is surprising, because apparently Taibbi used to find tales of rape hysterically funny and entertaining enough to write about in detail. 

Taibbi is part of Lehmann's far-right racist gang these days, which, considering all the misogyny in this crowd, is a perfect fit.

To most everybody's amazement, Lehmann was yeeted from X of all places, apparently for being bored with underaged-rape. Lehmann can be seen on Linked In complaining about it.

I find it amazing, all the people whose real names and jobs are displayed on Linked In, going public with their awfulness by supporting a gutter racist like Claire Lehmann. 

The suspension did not last long, and Lehmann is back on X now, which is the right-wing safe space, most of the time, and so a perfect home for her.

But what about Steven Pinker and Jeffrey Epstein?

I will be writing about that soon.

Republican Party - the party of cold-blooded murder

Trump is evil, but he couldn't have the power to do his fascism without being aided and abetted by the Republican Party, the party of pure evil. VOTE THEM ALL OUT!!! 

Ice Agents Can Be Charged with Murder

 On Wednesday afternoon, ICE agents carrying out an operation in south Minneapolis were briefly obstructed by a car blocking traffic. ICE agents approached the female driver, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, yelling, “Get out of the fucking car,” and one of them attempted to open the driver’s-side door. After the driver backed up to turn around and move, another agent drew his gun and unloaded three shots into the car. The car barreled into a light pole about 100 feet down the road, and the driver was quickly pronounced dead.

The Majority Report: 

ICE Kills Woman With Gunshots To The Face

And of course the psychopathic puppy-killer Kristi Noem immediately smears the dead woman.

ICE even refused to allow medical personnel through for 15 minutes - MURDER!!!

Killing of Renee Good

ICE agents also prevented a bystander who identified themselves as a physician from providing medical aid to the driver. No medical aid was provided for about 15 minutes and when medical first responders arrived, their vehicles could not access the site because of the ICE vehicles and they had to walk to the driver.^[16] One witness also reported seeing the shooter walk away from the scene and get in an ICE vehicle.^[9][10] United States Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem stated the ICE agent who fired the shots was treated at a hospital and later released.^[17]

UPDATE: the ICE agent is identified as Jonathan Ross. 

More evidence that Ross is a cold-blooded killer.

UPDATE 2: wow, gutter racist Claire Lehmann as the voice of reason - these are strange times.

Happy Mamdani New Year!

This goes out to all the reactionaries and hysterics and race pseudoscience promoters like Claire Lehmann and Bari Weiss, freaking out over Mamdani.

The vocal track comes from Mamdani schooling Andrew Cuomo during a debate. It is magnificent.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here it is:

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

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

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

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

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

Coyne took to his blog to agree with Robinson:

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

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

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

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

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

• when fellow celebrity intellectual Malcolm Gladwell called him out in 2009 for using data from professional racist Steve Sailer;  

• when the British liberal newspaper the Guardian asked him about Sailer in 2021; 

• and when the Guardian wrote about his appearance on the Aporia podcast this year. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The series is now one whole story on Medium.

Shermer's hero Rushton
------------------------------------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUICK, ROBIN! To the Boot Mobile!
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