Now we are seven ~ happy birthday Pinkerite

In the past year the biggest stories were: Jesse Singal and Razib Khan teaming up to come after me on Bluesky; Steven Pinker going full neo-Nazi, my disappointment with Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics (now as one long article on Medium); and the crazy lawsuits and secret agreements with RationalWiki thanks to people associated with Emily Willoughby and Jonathan Kane.

Last year was the exposé of Emil Kirkegaard and his racist machinations from Hope not Hate, and since then one of Kirkegaard's co-conspirators, Erik Ahrens, has come over to the good guys' side. The exposé's undercover reporter published a book about the experience.

And both Bari "Jerry Maguire moment" Weiss and Peter "I know about the antichrist" Thiel have been discussed and mocked in the mainstream media.

Other topics:

• I discovered physicist Angela Collier - yay -
• - and Zohran Mamdani and enjoyed voting for him, knowing how much billionaires and courtiers of billionaires hate him. AND HE WON! LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!
• CBS goes full fascist and fires Stephen Colbert.
• Charlier Kirk taken down by our insane gun laws.
• I got a copy of the program for the 2025 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research although they did not post it on their website. 
• The "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" is still an untested and far-fetched paper authored by racists, now 20 years old.
• This blog got a shout-out in Undark.
• The Murderbot TV series, based on the book series, is also gloriously woke.
• I discussed all the people who worked for Emil Kirkegaard's publications, people who knew they were neo-Nazi publications.
• I published an updated version of EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK.

The top most-visited individual posts this year:

• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - #1 for the second year in a row. And well deserved - 1.43 K views.

• That gloriously woke Murderbot - first published over two years ago, but undoubtedly benefitting this year from the Apple TV+ show - 1K

• Three more race pseudoscience ghouls SLAPP Rational Wiki - 871

• The great New Yorker article with the bad title ~ "What Did Men Do To Deserve This?" - 873 - only recently posted, but hugely popular, which I did not expect.

• The Maxine Margolis interview - 732

• EMIL KIRKEGAARD'S RACE PSEUDOSCIENCE AND NAZI NETWORK (updated) - 675 

• The War on Science - thirty-nine infamous reactionary grifters, racists and transphobes edited by creepy Lawrence Krauss - 644

• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 630

• New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism - 619

• What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1 - 582

The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

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

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations Dr. Adam Rutherford!

Doing this Pinkerite blog can be depressing sometimes, necessitating as it does that I wallow in the mud with Koch flunkies and race-mongers.

So it's nice to get to applaud one of the good guys for a change.

I've been a fan of Adam Rutherford for awhile, and in particular for his habit of speaking out against race pseudo-science.

As I said last April:

...I am very glad Rutherford is explicitly critical of race science, he is performing a very important service to humanity.

The best part of Rutherford getting the Royal Society David Attenborough Award and Lecture is that both on the web site and in this tweet the Royal Society says he is getting the award "in particular for challenging racist pseudoscience."

More scientists should get this award, like PZ Myers, Maxine Margolis, R. Brian Ferguson and others who fight the good fight.

But uh oh, remember what happened when Rutherford was given the Voltaire Award and Lecture by Humanists UK? He called Voltaire a "hideous racist."

Will Rutherford call David Attenborough a racist? If he does, I'm sure it will be because Attenborough deserved it.

UPDATE: when I wrote this post, I assumed Attenborough had never been accused of racism. Turns out I was wrong.

The Human Strategy: How Green the Revolution

The Pinkerite mission requires focus on the race science swillers of the Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette and related organizations like the ironically named Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism  (FAIR) which includes as Advisors two of the most prominent race science promoters, Steven Pinker and Andrew Sullivan, plus Megyn "Jesus was white" Kelly.

But sometimes it's good to focus on the good guys, like anthropologists who offer alternatives to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology which are the bases of the IDW belief system. In particular anthropologists who are influenced by "infrastructural determinism" which is the key to cultural materialism, a research strategy developed and promoted by anthropologist Marvin Harris, a huge influence on Pinkerite. I've interviewed two of his former pupils, anthropologists R. Brian Ferguson and Maxine Margolis. 

Marvin Harris died almost 20 years ago now, but his work is hugely important and I refer people to his books whenever I can. Last year another former Harris student, anthropologist David Price organized a guide to Harris' papers at the Smithsonian and through that I discovered that Harris had written a column called "The Human Condition" for Natural History Magazine in 1972. The column entries are available on Archive.org but are hard to find so I'm finding them and posting them on this web site. I've shared three so far:

• Warfare Old and New
• A Trip Through Ma Bell's Zoo
• Women's Fib

It's been awhile since I posted one and so figure it's time.

"How Green the Revolution," published in the June/July issue, discusses the problems of industrial farming associated with the Green Revolution, which led not only to pesticides poisoning the environment and the dangers of monoculture, but also economic changes that drove farmers off their land and into cities. Harris focuses on the Philippines which was in the early years of the disastrous reign of corrupt dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Pinkerite's second anniversary

Pinkerite's second anniversary was November 17 and it seems that very little has changed in the world of Steven Pinker, the Intellectual Dark Web and Race Science in the past two years. 

The first Pinkerite blog post was about Steven Pinker defending race science promoter Linda Gottfredson.

The most recent post is Steve Pinker having kind words for the far-right, race science promoting Quillette.

But a few things have changed since Pinkerite's first anniversary:

• Quillette staff member Bo Winegard has proven to be a hard core bona fide racist.
• Quillette staff member Andy Ngo went from a right-wing grifter on the fringes of the political world to a right-wing grifter at the center of the Republican/Trump party's bogus "law and order" campaign.
• Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Guiffre's testimony provides details that seem to point to Steven Pinker spending time on Epstein's island.

Some Pinkerite accomplishments this year:

• Interview with Maxine Margolis.
• Added race science info to infamous race science promoter John Paul Wright's Wikipedia page.
• Begun adding Natural History column "The Human Strategy" written by anthropologist Marvin Harris in the 1970s.

Top posts of the second year:

• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 1: Race essentialism - 2.24K
• I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "biological reality of race" - 1.58K
• The Brian Ferguson Interview - 1.4K
• Stephen Jay Gould v The Bell Curve - 608
• PZ Myers dissects evolutionary psychology: brief, sharp and fabulous - 584
• The Native American/East Asian "race"  560
• The mind of a racist, part 1: Steve Sailer, promoted by Steven Pinker - 535
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 2: She broke US labor law and bragged about it - 522
• Meet the IDW's rightwing Christian extremist sugar daddy Michael O'Fallon - 454
• James Lindsay and his allies - more shameless IDW hypocrisy - 422
• Four Koch toadies defend race science - 360
• The Maxine Margolis Interview - 315
• Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology - 247
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 3: She supports micro-revenge - 239
• How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 1 - 218
• The mind of a racist, part 3: Steve Sailer and the Unz Review - 215
• Quillette, Phrenology and Biosocial Criminology - 201
• Quillette, Andy Ngo and the Trump campaign - 201
• Reasons why Robin DiAngelo is bad Part 4: Her easily debunked claim about Jackie Robinson - 191
• The Bell Curve Part One: there goes the ball game - 184

I was surprised that my series on Why Robin DiAngelo is Bad, published in June 2019 suddenly became popular in 2020. It seems that bigger media hitters than Pinkerite had discovered how wacky DiAngeloism is and began to criticize the concept of "white fragility." 

It's nice that I'm not a lone voice howling in the wilderness about DiAngelo any more. I will be writing a follow-up on DiAngelo soon.

Checking out the Guide to the Marvin Harris papers, 1945-2001

Source tweet

Marvin Harris died on this day, nineteen years ago, and today anthropologist Brian Ferguson (I interviewed him in 2019) happened to email me with a link to the Guide to the Marvin Harris papers, 1945-2001 at the Smithsonian Institute Virtual Archives. 

Ferguson reports that the Guide was arranged by anthropologist David Price.

Price shared this photo of Harris on Twitter - wow I didn't realize Harris went through a hippie stage.


I have a few small gripes about the Guide:

The name of anthropologist Maxine Margolis (who I also interviewed) is misspelled "Margoline" in the Sources Used section.

Harris's article for The Nation is written as "Big Busts on Morningside Heights" but the original article was Big Bust - singular. The article with original title is available on archive.org.

I also think the biographical notes should at least make a reference to Harris's appearances on the Charlie Rose show and in a video by Hazel Henderson. I have provided excerpts from both here on Pinkerite. 

A less minor issue is that the Biographic Notes section should, in my opinion, include a mention of Ferguson's role in Harris's refining the emic/etic concept to include the mental/behavior dimension, which I discussed with Ferguson in the interview.

But Price deserves credit for arranging this, it's an important addition to Harris's legacy. Harris is a huge influence on Pinkerite, especially concerning Steven Pinker's race and gender essentialism.

Brian Ferguson on Infrastructural Determinism

I posted my interview with anthropologist Maxine Margolis recently and included a link to the book she co-edited with Martin F. Murphy, Science, Materialism and the Study of Culture.

I also interviewed anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson last year, and he has a chapter in the Margolis/Murphy book called Infrastructural Determinism, which he has posted on the Academia web site and which can be read in PDF format here.

Infrastructural determinism is the most important concept of cultural materialism, a research strategy most prominently championed by anthropologist Marvin Harris. It is summed up very nicely by Ferguson in his chapter:

The principle of infrastructural determinism begins with a simple premise: the physical world conforms to physical laws that must be accommodated by a society's infrastructural organization. This interface with nature is what gives the infrastructure causal priority within socio-cultural systems. In simplified form, the principle of infrastructural determinism holds that changes in the infrastructure probabilistically determine changes in the rest of the sociocultural system.

It seems common sense, and Karl Marx acknowledged the importance of the means of production, an infrastructural aspect, which Harris considered an important intellectual breakthrough. But Harris notes the infrastructural insights of Marxism were rendered virtually useless by the primacy of the quasi-mystical Hegelian dialectic inserted into Marxist theory.

Meanwhile infrastructural determinism is essentially denied by other research theories like postmodernism, which holds the primacy of thought as the determinative factor as opposed to material conditions, and which denies the possibility of objective standards; and sociobiology which holds that biological differences among humans is the causal factor in human social differences, and which is the ancestor of contemporary hereditarian theories such as evolutionary psychology and race science.

Pinkerite holds that cultural materialism is the most useful and even predictive approach to human culture. And even Steven Pinker has expressed admiration for Marvin Harris, although he apparently never really understood what Harris was saying.

The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 1

Bo Winegard, fired for "science"
The image above shows Winegard
promoting one of his favorite terms, 
"Equalitaranism" also a favorite term
of Southern segregationists.

I've been thinking about the randomness of race classification systems quite a bit lately thanks to recently posting my interview with anthropologist Maxine Margolis.

Margolis has studied Brazil for decades and discussed the race classification there, which is very different from the system in the United States. In the interview she said: 

Brazil never had a history of legal segregation, the way of defining race in Brazil is very different from the US, there is no "one drop rule" in Brazil.  

Brazil has always classified people by two things: how they looked, so that full brothers and sisters could be classified differently in terms of race, if one was lighter skinned and the other was darker skinned. So how people look. Not who their parents no less grandparents, but also socioeconomic status. Darker people tend to be poor in Brazil, lighter people tend to be wealthier in Brazil. People who are mulattos, who are mixed-race tend to be seen as lighter if they are educated and of a higher social class. 

And Brazil has many, many racial categories not two, like in the US. And there is something like forty different racial terms in use in Brazil, based on how people look, their features, their hair type, their skin color, their lip type, etc. There are all kinds of combinations.

So various cultures have various folk classifications of "race." And nobody claims folk classifications are science. Except of course the proponents of race "science."

Bo and Ben Winegard and their biosocial criminologist pal Brian Boutwell promoted folk classification schemes as useful to science, as I discussed in my post I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and the "Biological Reality of Race." They wrote in their article for Quillette, "On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism" (my highlight):

Race, then, is not a platonic essence and racial groups are not discrete categories of humans. Instead, race is a pragmatic construct that picks out real variation in the world (which corresponds to shared ancestry) and allows people and scientists to make useful inferences.

The term "platonic essence" they most likely got from professional racist Steve Sailer. But notice that they say that "pragmatic" race categories allow people and scientists to make useful inferences.

This is the kind of sleaze you can expect from race science proponents: equating the understanding of race by non-scientists with scientists. And they expect their audience will be easily gulled by a simple conflation like that.

And considering their article was written for a Quillette audience, they were probably right.

And it must be noted that for all the Winegard brothers claiming that race is not "a platonic essence" and can be mixed and matched in any way, it does not stop them from promoting the notion that there are "black" people and that these "black" people are less intelligent, evolutionarily, than non-black people. Or per Winegard's favorite weaselly euphemism, "human population variation."

Bo Winegard is a race science stooge, so Marietta college did the right thing by declining to renew his employment with them. But there is no actual evidence that's why they declined.

An article at Inside Higher Ed, by Colleen Flaherty, basically pushes Winegard's side of the story calling on race science promoters to weigh in on poor Bo's plight, including Lee Jussim, Richard Haier and Nathan Cofnas. All Flaherty got out of Marietta was:

Marietta declined comment, saying Winegard’s case was a private personnel issue.

Which race science supporters interpreted as their free pass to claim virtually anything they wanted about the case.

Winegard published an article declaring his free speech martyrdom in the Right's favorite race science rag, Quillette. Breitbart promoted Winegard 's Quillette article and Areomagazine, (Quillette's twin sister) said:

Those progressives who consider the firing of Winegard to be a victory, might consider the precedent this sets for conservative policy makers empowered to make decisions about university funding and policy.

Ignoring the fact that what Winegard promotes is pseudoscience. But you can't outdo Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, whose article Hounding The Heretic Bo Winegard is illustrated by someone being burned at the stake.

The idea that this teratoma Bo Winegard promotes, a grotesquerie composed of 18th century belief, contemporary folklore and segregationist defenses, is actual science would be funny except that so many people on the Right believe it is science.

Or as some fool of a lawyer named Scott H. Greenfield put it: Bo Winegard, Fired for Science.

Unfortunately for Bo, the Right's plans to celebrate him as a martyred saint were foiled by the coronavirus. And by the time the pandemic is over the Right will probably have moved onto another grift.

But don't cry for Bo, he is still the house race science promoter at Quillette, and Charles Murray is pretty old. Once Murray is gone, Bo might have a chance at an even more lucrative slot in the generous world of wingnut welfare,  as resident race science promoter at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Right is willing to pay well for anybody who can put a veneer of science, no matter how transparent, on their racism.

Probably because Winegard wants to keep all avenues of potential income open, he recently wrote in Medium claiming race doesn't mean anything to him.

Unfortunately for him, you can still find him and his brother Ben in Quillette, claiming that The Bell Curve was correct about innate African American intelligence and they explicitly rule out the legacy of slavery:

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

Bo Winegard is as sleazy as he is an intellectual failure. But to truly understand how unscientific, how shameless and how utterly stupid race science is, we must return to Steve Sailer, who has been a big influence on the Winegard brothers and their promotion of "human biodiversity" a term Sailer coined. We'll talk about Sailer in the Part 2 of the race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard.

The Maxine Margolis Interview

I spoke with anthropologist Maxine L. Margolis about her research topics: gender and society and Brazil, with a focus on Brazilian immigrants, race classification schemes of Brazil vs. the US, and her association with Marvin Harris.

Dr. Margolis is Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Florida, Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Columbia University.

• Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, elected 2009
• Lifetime Contribution Award, Brazilian Studies Association, 2014

Maxine Margolis' Wikipedia Entry

The video has a transcript available on YouTube and also available on Pinkerite here.

Some links associated with this interview:

Books by Margolis

• Women in Fundamentalism
• Goodbye, Brazil: Émigrés from the Land of Soccer and Samba
• Little Brazil
• An Invisible Minority: Brazilians in New York City
• True to Her Nature: Changing Advice to American Women

Books by Marvin Harris

• The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture
• Patterns of Race in the Americas 
• Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
• Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Culture
• Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (my all-time fave)

Others

• Video interview in Portuguese with Maxine Margolis from Editora Contexo
• Radio interview in Portuguese with Maxine Margolis from Editora Context
• Maxine Margolis inducted into the American Academy
• Margolis author page on Amazon
• Life without Chiefs, work by Marvin Harris, presented in Youtube video
• Margolis cited in the NYTimes: Trading Status for a Raise
• Science, Materialism and the Study of Culture (co-edited by Maxine Margolis and Martin F. Murphy - introductory chapter co-authored by Margolis and Murphy

Charles Murray and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard

Here we see Charles Murray promoting the work of right-wing crackpot Emil O. W. Kirkegaard on Twitter.

The paper can be found here.

Kirkegaard gets a mention at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Emil Kirkegaard, who edits (Wikipedia) 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.

Although according to RationalWiki:

He is permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia,[21] having misused the wiki to spread his racist nonsense. He has since whined about Wikipedia deleting his pseudoscientific writings on race.[22] 

Kirkegaard gets his own profile on RationalWiki which notes:

As well as running Openpsych, Kirkegaard is the current domain owner of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.[23][24]

Kirkegaard is also an author in Mankind Quarterly, listed as the author or co-author of fourteen articles, although some with the most interesting titles like Race Differences, a Very Brief View returned a 404 error. Although those articles that were available only provide an abstract without logging in to see the entire PDF. And I'm not about to pay $68 for a membership to Mankind Quarterly.

I confess I didn't read the Kirkegaard paper promoted by Murray past the abstract because the abstract makes clear that it is a standard specimen of race "science" -

Our sample (k = 16) comprised 84,897 Whites, 37,160 Blacks, and 17,678 Hispanics residing in the United States. We found that White, Black, and Hispanic heritabilities were consistently moderate to high, and that these heritabilities did not differ across groups. At least in the United States, Race/Ethnicity × Heritability interactions likely do not exist.

As I have mentioned many times, the term "Hispanic" has little to do with ancestry. Kirkegaard & co. appear to try to handle that by using the term "race/ethnicity" which is typical of the imprecision of race science. The term Hispanic refers to language. Anthropologist Maxine Margolis (I will have her interview online here ASAP) who specializes in Brazilian culture, mentioned to me that Brazilians don't consider themselves Hispanic because they speak Portuguese. But of course based on US demographic categories they would be counted as Hispanic or Latino, terms that are used interchangeably in practice.

If the Kirkegaard paper tells us anything it tells us about people grouped by United States demographic categories. In other words, politics, not science.

Notice that in his tweet Murray states: "...until we have large genomic databases from the principle populations."

But genetic testing services like 23andMe and other commercial enterprises already are building up genomic databases, and the response of race science to the information discovered by all that genomic testing is to ignore it because it is not what race science wants to hear, as discussed in the NYTimes by Carl Zimmer:

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.  

Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African... 

In spite of Murray's expression of interest in "large genomic databases" I think it's unlikely that race science will ever bother with testing subjects for genetic ancestry because it would be exponentially more work than the typical race science "study" and as we know:

race science is lazy

Fun fact, Kirkegaard linked to Pinkerite back in November:

People keep asking me about the state of the art re. evidence for physiognomy, so here’s a brief review. 

Phrenology used to be considered legit, and then eventually people realized it was all bogus. Since then, it is usually brought up an example of how science goes wrong in terms of stereotyping, and references to it are used to attack people who don’t agree with Aristotle that the brain is mainly used to cool blood — which is to say, to attack people who study brain size, shape etc. and relate this to differences in human psychology, chiefly intelligence. Some examples of such attacks can be seen here, here and here.

The link is to Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology and the main focus of the article is described in the title.

Kirkegaard suggests that critics of hereditarianism believe that "the brain is mainly used to cool blood" and this is funny because it is race science which harkens back to previous centuries for its foundation, including phrenology.

Kirkegaard has of course blocked Pinkerite on Twitter because race science proponents' cowardice is second only to their laziness.

Another fun fact: according to the RationalWiki entry on Kirkegaard:

Kirkegaard was born in Denmark in 1989,[26] but in 2018 moved to the US. A pseudointellectual he has described himself as a "polymath", "scientist", "geneticist", "philosopher" and "psychologist",[27][28] when he isn't any of these things and his only qualification is a BA Linguistics from Aarhus University. In 2019, Kirkegaard moved back to Denmark.[29]

At the present time, Kirkegaard describes himself on his blog as "Scientist etc."