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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Rutherford continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The DEA is clear about the legal status of LSD:

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's funny 'cause it's true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This passage is revealing:

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-transgender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral genetics to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.

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.

Pretty decent article about Pinker in Boston Magazine

Pinker can be seen on Facebook, this February,
promoting the website of racist and
Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.
---------------------------------------------------------------

I mean, as usual the author didn't push Pinker very hard but the article is about as critical as you can hope for from the mainstream media, which until recently rarely did anything except fawn over Pinker and his twinkling blue eyes.

Robert Huber's article Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard? actually raises the issue of Pinker's long-term alliance with race pseudoscience promoters, while somewhat down-playing how much Pinker is involved in promoting race pseudoscience by proxy.

For example:

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve in 1994, which linked IQ differences among races to genetics, has since cited The Blank Slate to support his views. Last year, Pinker appeared on the Aporia Podcast, an outlet that supports a revival of race science. In 2024, the Guardian reported that one of Aporia’s cofounders, Matthew Frost, once said that he’d been recruiting mainstream writers to give the podcast “legitimacy via association.” Pinker gave them an hour.

I should point out here that it's been a dream of Emil Kirkegaard (who owns Aporia) for a long time to team up with Pinker for the cause of race pseudoscience, as documented here.

To continue the Boston Magazine article from where we left it...

After the Guardian chastised him for appearing on Aporia, Pinker told the newspaper he only agreed to be interviewed after the outlet “attacked” his views on human progress. He also said he believes it is vital to persuade audiences one disagrees with, which is why he appears in media with diverse political orientations.

Pinker likes to say he manages his “controversy portfolio carefully.” But that means the trouble he might get into—not the trouble he creates for others by lending his credibility to people like Murray, with whom he engages rather than dismisses. Late last year, he and Murray had a back-and-forth in the Wall Street Journal about Murray’s views on “terminal lucidity” proving the existence of the soul; Pinker, ever skeptical of faith, chastised Murray for reaching beyond the data. But the debate itself was the point: Whether Pinker won the argument didn’t really matter—Murray got the platform, a serious intellectual exchange with a Harvard cognitive scientist.

Then a little later:

I put this to Pinker directly: You insist on following evidence wherever it leads. Do you take any responsibility for who has followed your work—and where they’ve taken it?

“If I have been misleading or unclear in a way that would egg on deplorable actors, I would take responsibility for that,” Pinker says. “But if I express things perfectly clearly—there’s a huge world out there. I can’t take responsibility for how some random person out on Twitter interprets a paper or an interview if there’s no content in the interview that would actually egg on or encourage them. And I can’t boycott every forum whose members hold some opinion that some third party finds repugnant.”

I guess we can infer from Pinker's response that he doesn't think Aporia (owned by neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard) holds repugnant opinions, only that third parties think Aporia's ideas are repugnant.

It's good that the article mentions Pinker platforming Murray - but Murray is not the only racist whose career has gotten a boost from Pinker. As I have documented since I started this Pinkerite blog (and before on my personal blog) Pinker has aided and abetted racists for the past quarter century, from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Bo Winegard to Emil Kirkegaard.

As recently as February of this year Pinker could be seen promoting the website of racist Richard Hanania.

The problem is that the media, even well-meaning writers, are too respectful of celebrity intellectuals to really dig into what Pinker has been up to for the past twenty-five years.

Which is why I have to keep doing this blog. So the information will be here for when a journalist decides to get serious about Pinker's pro-race pseudoscience activities.

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.