Smart Answers to Stupid Comments About Slavery from Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie

Jamelle Bouie is indirectly responsible for this blog - he linked to my personal blog when he was objecting to Razib Khan being hired by the NYTimes - the NYT backed down after Khan's long history of racism (even longer now) was publicized. 

Although Khan at one point claimed his "cancellation" was no big deal, more recently he has expressed his hatred for Bouie. And again just a couple of days ago.

Khan's racist allies Jesse Singal and Steve Sailer are also still bitter.

And about Michael Tracey pretending he fears for his life from a remark by Bouie - Tracey has a history of downplaying fears over the violent insurrection attempt on January 6. 

Tracey is trying to dox the victim of the Cornell gang-rape but - and you knew this was coming:

In 2019, Tracey criticized an article by Kevin Poulsen in The Daily Beast, which revealed the identity and criminal history of a man who had allegedly created a modified video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made her appear drunk. 

But shameless hypocrisy is absolutely standard for the race pseudoscience and right-wing ghoul brigade, from Steven Pinker on down.

I'm happy to have a chance to provide a video by Bouie on a subject connected to the mission of this blog.

Kathryn Paige Harden and the race war manifesto of Nathan Cofnas

I hadn't paid much attention to racist Nathan Cofnas on this site prior to his Jason Arday campaign. So I wasn't aware, until recently, of Cofnas' race war manifesto "A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution."

"Hereditarian" is a term used for those who believe that an important aspect of human socio-economic hierarchies is genetics. So, for example if you have good genes, you're on top. 

Cofnas' Guide is a political manifesto justified by race pseudoscience, which is a major branch of hereditarianism. The Guide suggests that "woke" can be fought by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and re-segregating society. 

Yes, that would be completely impossible without a dictatorship of Nazi proportions. And if Cofnas was just some random kook with Fourth Reich fantasies it wouldn't matter much. But hereditarianism is not a belief only held by those on the far-right fringes. This is a belief that has been promoted by celebrity academics, most prominently by American author and psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden, described by Steven Pinker as a "left-leaning hereditarian;" and by British scientist and media personality Adam Rutherford. 

Celebrity hereditarians

Rutherford and Harden attempt to distance themselves from race pseudoscience, but it is built on hereditarianism. The pseudo-scientific belief that Black people are genetically inferior is known as the "hereditarian hypothesis."

Steven Pinker is also an hereditarian, but he is lower-key these days in his promotion of hereditarianism than Rutherford and Harden. Pinker published his own hereditarian manifesto The Blank Slate 24 years ago but since then his primary strategy is to claim he is opposed to racism, while simultaneously promoting the careers of an endless-seeming parade of rightwing political operatives who also happen to be extreme racists, from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania. And of course appearing on neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard'a Aporia podcast. 

Yesterday Pinker could be seen demonstrating his dedication to race pseudoscience by contributing yet again to the far-right racist Peter Thiel-funded shitrag Quillette.

Pinker, Rutherford and Harden are important nodes in the international hereditarian network because they use their respectability and celebrity to promote hereditarianism in the name of behavioral genetics.

And they will not respond to questions about their hereditarian claims nor their connections to race pseudoscience, preferring instead to block and insult critics.

Perhaps they are so hostile to critics because even Harden, Pinker and Rutherford are dimly aware that behavioral genetics is basically evolutionary psychology under a layer of genetic test "associations." I listed some of the problems the field has in the ninth part of my "What happened to Adam Rutherford" series. 

There are some who think the entire field is on the verge of collapse. Jay Joseph, in his essay Behavioral Genetics on the Brink says:

...DNA-based research failure provides additional evidence that the critics of twin studies, adoption studies, and the heritability concept were right all along. As the behavioral genetic paradigm unravels, the social and behavioral sciences should begin working on a new post-behavioral genetics developmental paradigm.

But Harden is such a true believer in hereditarianism that she compared those who refuse to accept the claims of behavioral genetics to criminals. She was praised in the white supremacist publication American Renaissance for that:

And yet, she denounces those who ignore genes in stronger terms than Dr. Murray is ever likely to have used:

It’s stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that will go nowhere. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations.

Bravo for Prof. Harden. Let her words ring out throughout the social sciences and in the halls of government.

Nathan Cofnas acknowledges Harden's usefulness to his cause by dropping her name into the last paragraph of his hereditarian race war manifesto (my highlight):

But race realism crumbles a central pillar of our moral–political system. Widespread acceptance of hereditarianism, especially among the elites, will undermine the reigning left–liberal order as we know it. Initially, many individuals will follow Kathryn Paige Harden’s lead and cling to the old value system even after the empirical claims that undergirded it are shown to be wrong. In the long run the Harden approach will be unsuccessful. When race realism is accepted, our cultural values will change. A new equilibrium will arise.

Cofnas does not mention Harden anywhere else in his manifesto. No doubt he assumes his target audience does not need an introduction: the race pseudoscience network celebrated the article written by Gideon Lewis-Krauss in The New Yorker, promoting Harden's first book "The Genetic Lottery. " Lewis-Krauss summarizes the book:

...Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort. She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.

But the social safety net alluded to here already exists in many countries, without the justification of behavioral genetics. So Harden's attempt at promoting compassion through hereditarianism is at best useless, and at worst, well we see how Cofnas considers Harden a fellow traveler, but who, unfortunately, ignores those allegedly empirical claims in order cling to the old "left-liberal order."

In an interview with the Belgian paper De Standard, Cofnas confirmed that he and Emil Kirkegaard were friends. And naturally Cofnas has appeared on the neo-Nazi podcast Aporia.

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and the top tier behavioral geneticists

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard explains the usefulness of mainstream hereditarians to the cause of race pseudoscience:

The extreme denialism of the old — recall they denied results from twins (together or apart), adoption studies, and everything else psychology related — has been replaced with a general acceptance of behavioral genetics, even enthusiastic. Here I am speaking primarily of Eric Turkheimer (who I have written about many times), and his former pupil Kathryn Paige Harden. These are both top tier behavioral geneticists... 

 

...But they have not given up their political convictions, well, they are toned down somewhat, but not given up. Now it is chiefly aimed at the target that was always the main worry: group differences, in particular, race differences. So a kind of trade has happened where the most of behavioral genetics is now mainstreamish science (e.g. published in Nature Reviews Genetics), but the race differences have been further taboorized. Big players like Robert Plomin and Ian Deary have wisely (for their careers) avoided the topics, with a staunch focus on individual differences, chiefly between Europeans. It is a sensible move. Thanks to them we now have good behavioral genetics and intelligence research departments at Universities of Edinburgh, Colorado, Minnesota, Kings College London, and so on. Progress!

Several academics at Kings College London are supporters of Nathan Cofnas.

Fortun vs Basile

The Kirkegaard article I quote above was referenced recently by Mike Fortun, in his attack on Jonathan Basile because Basile wrote a negative review of Harden's most recent book, "Original Sin."

It's clear, based on Kirkegaard's own testimonial, posted above, that Fortun is attempting to white-wash the hereditarian (Harden) connection to race pseudoscience (Kirkegaard) when he writes:

Are there actual white supremacist eugenicist scientist poseurs in today’s world? Yes. But outside the Fantasy Politics League of academia, a true Far Rightist like Emil Kirkegaard portrays Harden not as a fellow traveler but as a “woke behavioral geneticist” who, along with the likes of her teacher and sometimes co-author Eric Turkheimer, is among the cadres of “the psychometric left.”

I praised Basile's review lavishly so I was very curious about Fortun's attack, also printed in the LA Review of Books. And I do mean attack. For daring to criticize Harden's book, Fortun suggests that Basile is a misogynist:

Basile’s critiques of behavioral genetics do not tell us anything Harden has not already told us. Yet he figures her as a Scientific Calvinist, an ardent believer in genetic predestination engaged in what he calls “advocacy” for “pathologizing the behavior of every arrestee, restless schoolchild, and sexually active teen, and trying to eliminate it through medication or eugenics.” This grossly misrepresents Harden’s scientific and social arguments and contradicts what Harden writes in Original Sin. It is also at odds with what Harden has written on her Substack about eugenics and polygenic scores. It suggests that Basile is less interested in faithful representation than he is in the deliberate shaming of a woman scientist who has been shamed before.

Shamed before

The "shamed before" that Fortun mentions is a reference to Harden's mother:

Consider an arresting scene in Harden’s book, passed over by Basile. About to embark on a long-deferred vacation, a break after years of research on twins, Harden drops off her kids at her Evangelical mother’s house in Tennessee. She happens upon “an index card taped to the middle of the fridge, right above the ice dispenser,” with a “picture of White Jesus” and a note in her mother’s handwriting, “the top line underlined for emphasis”

undesirable unwanted
I am no longer grieving the loss of “what” Paige could have become -
Her choices—Her responsibility—Her consequences

“I feel humiliated,” Harden writes, “to be called out by name on my mother’s fridge. How many people have seen this scarlet index card”? She snaps a photo and texts it to a friend, who replies: “Oh holy FUCK. What do you even do with that?” Harden texts back, “I handled it super maturely by silently ripping it into tiny pieces and saying nothing.” Harden addresses her readers, asking: “What does it feel like for your identity to be collapsed into just one thing about you? For all your complexity to be flattened into one dimension? It feels wretched. Alienating, and bewildering, and sad.”

Lots of people have bad relationships with their mothers. Mine was a fanatical Catholic, so I have plenty of stories to tell. But nobody comes to this blog to read about my relationship with my mother, so why would I write about it here?

The reason Harden got a contract to write "Original Sin" is not because her personal life is so interesting, or that she's a great writer. She got the contract because she became famous for publishing a book that promotes hereditarianism and she got a glowing profile in the New Yorker out of it.

It's certainly odd that Harden felt so "humiliated" by her mother's refrigerator note, and worried about how many people saw the "scarlet index card," yet she decided to include it in her book, portraying her mother, to an audience far more vast than for a family refrigerator, as a massive bitch.

Talk about shaming.

It makes me wonder if this is a personality trait of Harden - playing the wronged innocent while getting the maximum payback possible.

Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard - again

The passage where Fortun claims that Basile was shaming poor Harden includes a link to an article on Harden's Substack, and that article says more about who Harden really is than anything she or her defenders can write.

In the article, Have Your Best Baby, Harden muses about eugenics. She includes this section portraying Diana S. Fleischman and Bo Winegard as legitimate researchers. 

Harden mentions a disagreement with Fleischman, but in doing so presents the opinions of Fleischman:  "reminds me of a criticism that Diana Fleischman..." as if they are of interest to non-racists. Obviously Harden considers Fleischman's opinions worth sharing.

Harden somehow fails to mention that both Fleischman and Winegard are long-time promoters of the most extreme forms of race pseudoscience and at the time of Harden's post, January of this year, both Fleischman and Winegard were working for neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard via Aporia:

HDF operates the online magazine Aporia.[2] Matthew Frost founded Aporia in 2021 and sold it to Emil Kirkegaard.[2] Frost has stated that the magazine should be read "by the elite, people aspiring to the elite".[2]

Diana Fleischman is its podcast host.[7] She attended the 2023 Natal Conference with members of the New Right.[8] Bo Winegard, Aporia's executive editor, stated that he believed racial stereotypes were "reasonably accurate" and requested that his readers embrace "white identity politics".[2] Winegard was dismissed from his position at Marietta College.[2] In 2020, Winegard published a retracted paper which drew on Richard Lynn's flawed IQ data.[2] Winegard's race and intelligence research was criticized for resembling pseudoscience.[9][10]

No, all Harden tells us about Fleischman is that she's "An evolutionary psychologist who is also interested in ethics and genetics." 

First, just the fact that she's an "evolutionary psychologist" is plenty to discount her views, even without the racism, since evolutionary psychology is utter bullshit. 

Fun fact: Fleischman's PhD advisor was David Buss, the king of evolutionary psychology.

Second, it's mind-boggling that a grotesquely conscience-deficient freak like Fleischman would be described by anybody, unironically, as interested in any kind of ethics: she works for a neo-Nazi organization.

There is no way that Harden was ignorant of the fact that those two were employed by a neo-Nazi when she published her Substack article. 

Naturally Fleischman is also a fan of Nathan Cofnas. 

This isn't the first time Harden has knowingly helped to give a racist career a boost:

Harden & Jensen

Basile wrote a response to Fortun's attack:

Fortun describes, with admiration, Harden’s handling of questions of nature and nurture as her attunement to the “questions, uncertainties, and ambivalence” surrounding her science. What he sees as nuance and profundity, I would describe as doublespeak. Harden claims to accept the most obvious and prevalent criticisms of her field, in order to pretend that she has advanced beyond them. Notably, Arthur Jensen pursued the same rhetorical strategy in his notorious 1969 essay on race, IQ, and scholastic achievement (see page 42). This rhetoric lays the groundwork for one to say, once these criticisms are raised anew, “Yes, yes, I know all that already.” Fortun has obviously been won over by this strategy.

For that reason, in my review, I did not focus on Harden’s assertions of the unsoundable depths of the nature-nurture problem (in fact, I felt that I was doing her a favor by not evaluating her work as philosophy). I focused instead on the strategic function her doublespeak serves, namely, to convince unsuspecting liberals of eugenic premises. Fortun happily accepts his role as one of those liberals.

More shame needed

For the sin of doublespeak I think that Kathryn Paige Harden absolutely deserves to be shamed even more.

But I fear, at the end of the day, she really has no sense of shame.

The international hereditarian network rallies around Nathan Cofnas

Professional racist Nathan Cofnas accused a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday of plagiarism, an Internet mob went after Arday, and the upshot is that Arday killed himself.

It was easy for Cofnas to lead a mob because the mob already existed as an international network of supporters of eugenics and race science: neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard's network was the subject of an investigative report by Hope not Hate,  Race Science Inc. But it isn't only that network -  there are mainstream individuals who support race pseudoscience and even align with Kirkegaard, like Steven Pinker. 

So the mob was not only on Elon Musk's X. 

Musk, by the way, supports German neo-Nazis.

Kirkegaard, naturally, is an enthusiastic promoter of Cofnas, as revealed in the Race Science Inc. article:

Describing his meeting with Thiel, Kirkegaard said:

“I went over there. And after that, he was so happy with the meeting, he asked me to suggest a bunch of other people. So I suggested also Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas. All these people have already gotten the Thiel treatment. And never got any money from Thiel, but certainly we know that he knows about some of the stuff now.”

And considering the Race Science Inc. article mentions there is an "underground research team" that is part of Kirkegaard's network, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Cofnas was on Kirkegaard's payroll. 

Nobody knows the identity of Kirkegaard co-author Seb Jensen - could that be Cofnas?

And in case you don't yet understand how deeply stupid Cofnas is - he is a Trump supporter. Although he cares more about his "Hereditarian Revolution."

Cofnas appeared on the podcast of Kirkegaard's racist magazine Aporia.

Cofnas also allies with Jonathan Anomaly, Richard Hanania and Curtis Yarvin.

I wonder about people like Cofnas and Steven Pinker - do they really believe that if Kirkegaard ever got the tiniest bit of political power, that they would be spared, just because they agree with him about the genetic inferiority of Black people? They should remember the Jews stupid enough to try to make common cause with the Nazi Party.

It's just like with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Tyson welcomed race pseudoscience promoter Michael Shermer onto his program recently. 

Shermer is a longtime ally of Cofnas. 

In the screenshot, Shermer supports his hereditarian beliefs
by linking to a New Yorker article about the work
of Kathryn Paige Harden
---------------------------------------------------

And yes, of course Shermer was defending the Cofnas campaign on X.

Does Tyson really believe that just because racists are polite to him it means they consider him an exception to the race pseudoscience belief that Black people are genetically prone to violence and are intellectually inferior? If Cofnas and Shermer had their way, it seems unlikely that Tyson would keep his job.

It's easy enough to find out who is part of the international racist network by watching who comes out to defend - or even praise - Cofnas. 

First there is Kirkegaard and the professional racist with the marketing background, Steve Sailer. Steven Pinker has a lot to answer for, in his promotion of Sailer's career in the early years of this century.

Two ghouls, famous for their extreme racism
proclaim hardcore racist Nathan Cofnas a "hero"
-------------------------------------

Quillette, allegedly funded by Peter Thiel, demonstrated its support for Cofnas, with at least two articles - one written by white nationalist Arthur Jensen fan-boy Richard Haier and another written by Jensen fan-girl Rosalind Arden.

In the Haier article, he gives a history of the long hereditarian campaign to promote race pseudoscience that leads directly to Cofnas and Kirkegaard:

The marginalisation of intelligence research began more than fifty years ago with a backlash against the hypothesis that average group differences in IQ scores might be influenced by genetics. In 1969, a paper by Arthur Jensen exploring this possibility produced attempts to prevent him from teaching at UC Berkeley and from speaking at academic conferences (including death threats). E.O. Wilson was condemned as a racist after he published Sociobiology in 1975. His Harvard colleague Richard Herrnstein had experienced similar treatment after he published I.Q. in the Meritocracy two years earlier. Undaunted, Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Murray in 1994, which discussed the important role that intelligence plays in stratifying modern societies...

I wrote an article for Rational Wiki about Charles Murray which was censored: evidence points to the censorship being the work of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard and his international racist network. Murray is a big fan of Kirkegaard.

This is the hereditarian-racist network that Nathan Cofnas represents - people who are still angry over the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Jensen's paper appeared five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His paper argued that Black Americans, during the days of Jim Crow, had lesser educational attainment than non-Blacks, and this therefore proved Blacks were genetically less intelligent than other "races." 

You can't be any more obviously racist - and stupid - than that.

Hereditarians still believe that educational attainment, as tracked by educational institutions, is evidence of genetically-endowed intelligence. One of these hereditarians is British science celebrity Adam Rutherford. 

Although Rutherford could be seen mocking Cofnas as an "IQ-obsessed wienie" on X/Twitter in 2024.

E.O. Wilson has been revealed to be such a devout racist that he promoted the career of racist crackpot  Jean-Philippe Rushton as much as he could without endangering his mainstream celebrity. 

Career-long racist Razib Khan is, predictably, a long-time supporter of Cofnas. Khan has also contributed to Aporia.

Infamous anti-trans campaigner Jesse Singal was given space by the NYTimes to use the Cofnas affair to campaign against universities - although Singal doesn't pretend that Cofnas is not a racist:

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the supposed correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Singal is a good buddy of career-long racist Razib Khan (they even teamed up to come after me) so I can't imagine that Cofnas' racist hereditarianism - by all evidence identical to Razib Khan's racist hereditarianism - would bother Singal at all.

In the article Singal promotes his ally, Benjamin Ryan, another right-wing political activist posing as a journalist:

The journalist Benjamin Ryan, meanwhile, documented the Orwellian efforts some of the institutions affiliated with Mr. Arday made to quietly revise or delete claims they published about him that now seem to be false. 

It was revealed last year that Ryan has a friendly relationship with Kirkegaard's ally - or possibly employee -  racist Jordan Lasker. Ryan was an enthusiastic member of the mob against Arday.

Cofnas expressed his gratitude to Singal, but wasn't entirely pleased by the article.

The allegedly non-racist mainstream media occasionally mentions Kirkegaard and other race pseudoscience promoters, but they rarely connect the dots and don't bother to mention - if they are even aware of - articles like Race Science Inc. I talked about this recently. 

And so the race pseudoscience network slithers along, with occasional publicity like the Cofnas affair, but it's mostly underground, just how they like it. All the better to promote hereditarian causes en mass without it being obvious they are all part of the same network.

The international hereditarian network considers Arday's death a victory. Here is Emil Kirkegaard having some fun over Arday's death.

We know the international hereditarian network is out there. The real question is how complicit is media like The New York Times in aiding their political goals.

UPDATE: of course Steven Pinker supports Cofnas.

Pinker is also an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi-sympathizer Richard Hanania.

I've always said that Steven Pinker is absolutely shameless. 

There is something seriously wrong with Pinker.

UPDATE 2: The infamous grifter Andy "too extreme even for Quillette" Ngo and Cofnas team up on X to attempt to smear a group of people attending a memorial.

News reports about the memorial don't mention anything about threats against Cofnas. But it's not like grifters and members of the international hereditarian network ever need evidence for anything. They just make shit up.

Quillette has published yet another piece about Arday, this time written by the conscience-deficient Jonathan Kay. 

The international hereditarian network seems to believe that the death of one troubled academic will spark the rise of the racist eugenics empire they dream of, so it's likely they'll be dancing on Arday's corpse for weeks to come.

LAST UPDATE: Byline Times has more details about the international hereditarian network that targeted Jason Arday for destruction.

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.

The Boot Boys ride for Steven Pinker!

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