Who is Gregory Cochran?

As discussed previously on Pinkerite, one of the authors of the untested hypothesis, promoted by Steven Pinker, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"(NHAI) is the late Henry Harpending who has his very own profile as a "white nationalist" in the Southern Poverty Law Center web site.

Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson seems to be one of the few academics who did a thorough critique of the NHAI, producing a paper How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence."

I have never found any scholarly response to Ferguson's paper, including from any of the authors of the NHAI paper.

I did find one of the co-authors, Gregory Cochran, insulting Ferguson multiple times.

On Cochran's blog, originally co-authored with Harpending called West Hunter Cochran mentions Ferguson three times. In 2014 he made a reference to Ferguson, who was quoted by the NYTimes arguing against the theory that chimpanzees are inclined to violence. Cochran snipes:

But none of these things can really be true – because although they by no means prove that war is biologically innate among humans, this kind of evidence does suggest that it might be – and that is obviously impossible, by the most powerful of all epistemological principles. It would hurt Brian Ferguson’s feelings.

Nothing Ferguson says in the article Cochran links to has anything to do with Ferguson's feelings.

And then there is Cochran's admiration for Robert E. Howard the fiction author famous for Conan the Barbarian. Cochran mentions him at least eight times on the blog and thinks his "priors" were more accurate than a bunch of scientists:

But Howard’s priors were more accurate than those of the pots-not-people archeologists: more accurate than people like Excoffier and  Currat, who assume that there hasn’t been any population replacement in Europe since moderns displaced Neanderthals. More accurate than Chris Stringer,  more accurate than Brian Ferguson.

Cochran compares Howard to Ferguson in another blog post about theories on Polynesians in 2016:

If you want to approach this kind of problem with reasonable priors, read Robert E Howard, not Brian Ferguson.

Cochran also insulted Ferguson on Twitter.

Cochran has published in the usual right-wing race science-swilling media, like the racist Taki's Magazine which also publishes Steve Sailer.

As you might expect, Sailer is a big fan of Cochran's work. You can see him in this tweet exchange saying the only reason the claims in the NHAI paper have never been supported in the fourteen years after it was published, is because of a conspiracy to squelch it because it might be true.

And of course Cochran is a contributor at race science central, Quillette.

On his own blog, Cochran reveals he is a fan of HBD Chick and The Bell Curve.

Like many of us who are fascinated with human diversity, she has little or no interest in what are called race differences. The original impetus for “HBD blogging” seems to have been the reaction of thoughtful knowledgeable people to the self-righteous squealing and outright lying that followed The Bell Curve and before that Jensen’s 1969 monograph. No one it seems cares much about that any longer.

It's amusing that Cochran claims that HBD has nothing to do with "race differences" - the term HBD was coined by Steve Sailer, professional racist, and it is always used to indicate a belief in the intellectual inferiority of Black people - and the "squealing" about The Bell Curve is because of its claims of race and intelligence.

We know something about Cochran and Harpending, but what about Jason Hardy, the third co-author of NHAI? It seems that Hardy was a student of Cochran and/or Harpending at the University of Utah, but there's no evidence he's had anything to do with race science since the NHAI paper.

Here's the weird thing about Cochran and the University of Utah - according to his LinkedIn profile Cochran was adjunct professor of anthropology there from 2004 - 2015. But the Education section of his LinkedIn profile shows he has no credentials in anthropology. He has degrees in mathematics and physics.

Nevertheless Cochran has made a much bigger impact as an anthropologist than as a mathematician or physicist. In 2009 the LA Times ran a profile on Cochran. It's since been removed from the newspaper's web site but is still available via the Wayback Machine.

They even have a photo of Cochran with a caption:

Gregory Cochran in his home office in Albuquerque, N.M. Cochran, a physicist and genetics buff, and geneticist Henry Harpending have developed a controversial theory that the presence of many lethal genetic diseases affecting the brain among Ashkenazi Jews may also be responsible for increased intelligence in the population.

According to the article...

...They wrote up their theory and sent it off to a journal. It was rejected. 

Harpending said he gave it to an anthropologist friend, editor of another journal, who asked to publish it there. That plan was called off. The friend, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the paper was clearly controversial and its extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence -- which was lacking. 

The paper found a home in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University, after its release online in 2005.

The theory quickly spread among anthropologists and geneticists.
Within a few months, "every academic I came in contact with knew about this," said R. Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. Many found it irresistible. A young colleague told Ferguson that the paper convinced him of the power of using genetics to study behavioral differences among people.

To Ferguson, that was a dangerous idea. There may indeed be versions of genes that are unique to Ashkenazi Jews, but it would be impossible, he said, to prove that those genes are responsible for higher IQs. 

"This is not a legitimate area of research," he said. 

Others are more receptive to the theory, despite its thorny implications.

Dr. Melvin Konner, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, said he's impressed by the theory's ability to explain why all the Ashkenazi diseases are clustered "on about five pages of a biochemistry textbook." But, he added, Cochran and Harpending still have to show that the genes play a direct role in brain development.
"There's evidence that some of them do," he said. "It's not a crazy idea. It's just not nearly a proven idea." 

It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: "See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings." 

Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test. 

"One criticism about our paper is 'It can't mean anything because they didn't do any new experiments,' " Cochran said. "OK, then I guess Einstein's papers didn't mean anything either."

I always find it annoying when anybody refers to race science as "dangerous" because the real problem is that race science is a collection of untested just-so stories, as the saga of the NHAI demonstrates.

And I think all these men love to be considered dangerous for promoting race science. Probably makes them feel strong and powerful like Conan the Barbarian.

I interviewed Ferguson about NHAI and he never said anything about the theory being "dangerous" - he said it was very bad scholarship and untested.

Steven Pinker believes NHAI would be easy to test. And yet where are the tests? Why aren't Pinker and Cochran pushing for, or even funding those tests? I'm sure Pinker could talk one of his plutocrat contacts - like his friend Bill Gates - into funding such tests. And Pinker is undoubtedly wealthy enough himself to afford to fund tests, if he really cared about the NHAI hypothesis. And why wouldn't he? It is a big part of his beliefs from his tweeting links to race science articles in Quillette, to defending Linda Gottfredson and Noah Carl to his promotion and defense of the NHAI hypothesis.

If he is so certain that ethnicity and intelligence are interrelated, and the NHAI is a testable hypothesis to demonstrate that, you would think he would do everything in his power to get the NHAI tested and proven.

For his part Cochran isn't interested in doing experiments, but he nevertheless thinks the NHAI hypothesis is so impressive he compares it to Einstein's theories.

So who is Gregory Cochran? Based on what I have found, he is a self-important former adjunct professor of anthropology with no academic credentials in anthropology, a "genetics buff" who writes for race science-promoting and even racist media, and responds to serious critiques of his untested hypothesis not with scholarly arguments but with insults. 

As a scientist, I'd say Cochran is closer to Robert E. Howard than he is to Albert Einstein.

Resources from anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson

Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson

Although many come to this site to read about the latest IDW/race pseudo-science idiocies, quite a few have visited to check out my interview with anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems Ph.D., Division of Global Affairs, Sociology and Anthropology, International Institute for Peace at Rutgers University.

Check out Ferguson's site at https://www.rbrianferguson.com

The interview is available in audio and transcript formats. The post for the interview also includes links to many excellent resources.

I heard from Ferguson recently that he will be publishing a new book this year. In 2021 he published Masculinity and War - this excellent paper includes a refutation of the evolutionary psychology approach to the issue - such refutations are always welcome here at Pinkerite. 

(Check out biologist PZ Myer's efficient and effective refutation of the entire evolutionary psychology research strategy here.)

And Ferguson pointed me to an excellent YouTube video, by Lewis Waller, entitled Steven Pinker is WRONG about the decline of violence - all critiques of the claims of Steven Pinker are very much welcome here at Pinkerite.

Ferguson also introduced me to the work of Douglas Fry, Professor & Chair Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Health and Human Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Fry's website is here. Both he and Ferguson are mentioned in the Lewis Waller video.

Brian Ferguson v Steven Pinker

I first interviewed anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson fifteen years ago when I was considering writing a biography about anthropologist Marvin Harris. Unfortunately I never did write it. I may still have the interview, on cassette tape, but no longer have the equipment on which to play cassette tapes.

But strangely enough, after I become a devoted critic of Steven Pinker I realized that Ferguson was also a critic of Pinker. This should not have surprised me though, since Marvin Harris was a critic of  sociobiology in general, and Harris had been Ferguson's anthropology professor at Columbia University, and then his colleague.

So I interviewed Ferguson again last week in a Manhattan diner, about his work and his critiques of Pinker. This time I used a Snowball microphone feeding into a Garageband audio channel. The audio quality is much better than the one on the cassette, although background noise from the diner can be heard. I will post the recording soon, with transcript, on YouTube.

Ferguson has written two papers debunking hereditarian theories that Steven Pinker has supported.

Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence

The first theory supported by Pinker was presented in a paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending entitled Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, which claims that Askhenazi Jews are innately more intelligent than other ethnic groups.

Ferguson wrote a response entitled How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"

Pinker's List

The second hereditarian theory was both more formally supported by Pinker and more formally refuted by Ferguson.

The theory, presented in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, was that our pre-historic past was extremely violent.

Ferguson's response is a chapter in a book, War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views edited by Douglas P. Fry. Ferguson's chapter, which he has made publicly available for free, is entitled Pinker's List, Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality.

I will be focusing on the Ashkenazi papers and the Pinker's List debates in separate posts.

Ferguson discusses Pinker's List issues and Pinker's name comes up in this interview with John Horgan.

The transcript can be found on Pinkerite here.

The Brian Ferguson Interview

I talked with Rutgers University professor of anthropology R. Brian Ferguson about Steven Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon, Marvin Harris, anthropology, chimps and gangs of New York.

The interview happened in a diner in Manhattan so there is background noise.

The video has a transcript available and you can read it here too.

PLAYLIST

• Introduction: 00:00
• Brian Ferguson, Marvin Harris & Cultural Materialism 00:49 
• Chimpanzees, War & History: Are Men Born to Kill? and arguments with Jane Goodall 04:27 
• Evolutionary Psychology v Napoleon Chagnon 09:31 
• Pinker's List 12:21 
• How Jews Became Smart: Anti-'Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence' 18:44 
• Origins of Gangsters in New York 23:09

Some links associated with this interview:

• Ferguson in the video "Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York"
• In June 2013 Ferguson was invited by Miramax to guest blog about historical gangs of New York

Papers by Ferguson

• How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"
• Pinker's List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality
• Materialist, cultural and biological theories on whyYanomami make war
• Infrastructural Determinism

Books by Marvin Harris

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

Others

• Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
• by Steven Pinker
• Jews, Genes and Intelligence - a lecture by Steven Pinker posted on Youtube promoting the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis
• Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors? Samuel Bowles et al.
• Napoleon Chagnon documentary Ax Fight

FAIR and "Neo-racism'

NHAI co-author Gregory Cochran expressing
his contempt for anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson
for daring to notice that NHAI is a bunch of BS.

According to Eugene Volokh, a Koch employee, the goal of FAIR, which I wrote about recently, is litigation. 

Volokh quotes the FAIR site:

FAIR supports students, teachers, and employees who are being compelled to affirm principles with which they disagree, who are stopped from expressing their true views, and who are being punished and silenced if they do not comply. To that end, FAIR is building a nationwide network of independent attorneys who can offer advice and, if necessary, pursue litigation. If you are a lawyer with civil litigation experience and would like to join FAIR's legal network, please contact letitia@fairforall.org.

As always with this kind of thing, the issue is how far they are willing to stand by people and the principles with which those people disagree. I think we can rule out Nazis - I doubt FAIR will come to the legal aid of a Nazi who was fired for publishing a manifesto on the company web site in which they declare that Jews likely can't do work for the company as well as non-Jews, due to biologically-innate tendencies. 

Although I suspect the FAIR Advisors - a right-leaning group that includes Trump supporters, Koch employees and race science supporters - would gladly stand by someone making the same claim about women, in place of Jews, as several of them did in the case of the James Damore memo. 

But some of the Advisors believe that there are innate biological differences between Jews and everybody else - Andrew Sullivan is clearly still a believer in the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis, as can be seen in a relatively recent interview published by the New York Times:

But he also can’t quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. “Let’s say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I’m just saying — there’s something there, I think. And I’m not sure what it is, but I’m just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over.” 

Steven Pinker also seems to be a fan, still, of NHAI as seen in his joining with other Koch-connected individuals to complain that Bret Stephens was criticized for citing NHAI as a reference in one of his NYTimes op-eds, and the citation was redacted.

The NHAI was presented as a paper written by Henry Harpending, a "white nationalist" and Gregory Cochran, a right-winger and Quillette author with a great love of Conan the Barbarian, who considers NHAI on par with the theories of Einstein. 

Anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson debunked the NHAI paper, a fact that Pinker and other NHAI supporters resolutely ignore. Although it did lead to Cochran insulting Ferguson on a few occasions, without, of course, any attempt to address Ferguson's points.

Racists believed in Jewish intellectual superiority long before Harpending and Cochran came along. As segregationist Henry E Garrett wrote in the notoriously racist Mankind Quarterly in 1961:

...By almost any criterion, the Jews have produce a disproportionate number of intellectually gifted persons and this despite the handicaps under which they have often lived and worked. Did "culture" alone produce these outstanding men or was there better native endowment to begin with?

Pinker gave a talk on NHAI around the time the Harpending/Cochran paper was published, called "Jews, Genes and Intelligence," in which he suggests NHAI is correct, commenting:

I think it's safe to say that the current approach at least the approach for in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence. I mentioned the Mismeasure of Man as the foremost example to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups. There is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever that there are that it's purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do this Nazis but on the other hand there is a quotation I don't know who's responsible for it: reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

I thought of that while reading the FAIR web site's glossary of terms which includes this FAIR neologism:

neo-racism noun

neo-rac·ism | \ nē-ō-ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm 

1a. : a belief that race is a real and inescapable social construct that determines an individual’s identity, agency, beliefs, ability, or culture, such that members of different race groups can never understand each other due to intrinsic and insurmountable cultural differences.

1b. : prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, or antagonism directed against a person or people based on this belief.

2 : discrimination, behavior or attitudes toward individuals or groups that reflect and foster the belief that members of some race groups are permanently subordinate to members of other race groups.

It's a curious insertion "a real and inescapable social construct." Why not write "...a belief that race determines an individual’s identity, agency..." What is the point of inserting a clause about social construct? Wouldn't the belief be racist without that inclusion?

Ah, but that's where the "neo" comes in. I think it's likely some number of FAIR advisors - foremost Andrew Sullivan and Steven Pinker - want to suggest that the belief in biological race has no negative implications - it's those who believe race is a social construct who are the real racists. 

If that is the case, it's truly sleazy, but sleaziness is the hallmark of race science, as discussed recently in the New Yorker:

In 2020, a paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science that examined how I.Q. was related to a range of socioeconomic measures for countries around the world. Unfortunately, the paper was based on a data set of national I.Q. estimates co-published by the English psychologist Richard Lynn, an outspoken white supremacist. Although we should be able to assess Lynn’s scientific contributions independently of his personal views, his data set of I.Q. estimates contains some suspiciously unrepresentative samples for non-European populations. For instance, the estimate for Somalia is based on one sample of child refugees stationed in a camp in Kenya. The estimate for Haiti is based on a sample of a hundred and thirty-three rural six-year-olds. And the estimate for Botswana is based on a sample of high-school students tested in South Africa in a language that was not their own. Indeed, the psychologist Jelte Wicherts demonstrated that the best predictor for whether an I.Q. sample for an African country would be included in Lynn’s data set was, in fact, whether that sample was below the global average. Psychological Science has since retracted the paper, but numerous other papers and books have used Lynn’s data set.

The last part is especially important - in spite of a retraction, in spite of the obvious problems with Lynn's data, his work is still being used. Just as NHAI is still being defended by Pinker and Sullivan.

And that's why race science is not actually science, but a blatant attempt to "biologize inequality" as anthropologist Marvin Harris said.

Brian Ferguson on Infrastructural Determinism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf erases Pinker's race science support - Steven Pinker approves this message part 2

Steven Pinker believes the same
hereditarian claims used by
race science promoters.

Part 1 here

So I did a little Googling on Friedersdorf and according to the American Prospect, Friedersdorf is a Koch man and long-time hawker of the right-wing free speech grift.

It's not just the IDW itself: Some of its key popularizers also get Koch funding. Bari Weiss and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf—who has been one of the most visible defenders of Peterson in the mainstream media—have both received cash prizes from the Koch-funded Reason Foundation, where David Koch himself sits on the board of trustees. And remember “The Coddling of the American Mind”? Well, one of its co-authors, Greg Lukianoff, is the head of that campus free-speech watchdog, FIRE. That organization is funded, of course, by the Koch brothers (for good measure, the Charles Koch Institute also did a laudatory write-up of the piece). 

Now that I know about Friedersdorf I have to wonder if he has an obligation to defend other Koch people because they all work for the same guy. Especially since it appears that The Atlantic is part of Team Koch:

The Atlantic is perhaps the worst offender. Last year it launched “The Speech Wars,” a reporting project that seeks “to understand where free speech is in danger and where it has been abused.” Even though the magazine had just been bought by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and was seeing all-time high circulation and web traffic, The Atlantic solicited funding for the project from none other than the Charles Koch Foundation (the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Fetzer Institute are also underwriters). 

When I asked The Atlantic for comment, a spokesperson replied that “editorial control for this series—as with every piece of journalism we create—rests solely with The Atlantic.” But the magazine refused to deny that reporters and editors with “The Speech Wars” are ever in contact with the Koch Foundation. Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg did not respond to my request for comment, and The Atlantic has not disclosed how much money it has received from the Koch Foundation.

So it is possible Friedersdorf isn't really a fan boy or a lazy, incompetent journalist, but rather a very partisan journalist.

In any case, Friedersdorf tried to erase Pinker's race science activities recently in The Atlantic. We discussed the Pinker tweet in part 1, now let's look at the other issue, per Friedersdorf:

...and to a 2006 article Pinker published in The New Republic reviewing the work of three researchers from the University of Utah who argued, per Pinker’s description of their Journal of Biosocial Science paper, “that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E.” 

Pinker reviewed evidence for and against their hypothesis at length, reached no solid conclusion of his own, highlighted the potential downsides of such research and the problems with banning it, and did all this in a context he understood as follows: 

The idea of innate Jewish intelligence is certainly an improvement over the infamous alternative generalization, a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. And attention to the talents needed in the middleman niche (whether they are biological or cultural) could benefit other middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Lebanese, Ibos, and overseas Chinese and Indians, who have also been targets of vicious persecution because of their economic success. And yet the dangers are real.

This seems rather far afield and easily distinguishable from favoring a revival of scientific racism.

As with the Pinker Bell Curve tweet, this doesn't prove what Friedersdorf thinks it proves.

Friedersdorf doesn't bother to give the name of the "work" or the  "three researchers" but I am very familiar with The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis, an untested speculation that was promoted by the NYTimes' Nicholas Wade, as well as Steven Pinker.

Anthropologist Brian Ferguson wrote a response to the paper called How Jews Became Smart: Anti-'Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. And I spoke to Ferguson about it a year ago:

FERGUSON:

The basic hypothesis was that Ashkenazi Jews have 18 inherited physical conditions that are bad for the health, some fatal, some just uncomfortable... And the argument... was that these may have been selected for because in heterozygotes - that means people who have one copy of the gene but not both copies of the gene - these genes confer higher intelligence and that in a period from about 800 to 1650 AD, Eastern European Jews were confined to high cognition occupations such a money-lending... And so having one copy of the gene gave them higher intelligence and that offset the deaths or other diminished reproduction from having two copies of the gene or otherwise. 

So this was a hypothesis and it was a pretty stark hypothesis because it was proposing that particular conditions would confer a five-point IQ increase. That's a lot. It's testable. It was proposed in the journal which was formerly called The Eugenics Review and it got a tremendous amount of attention. Nicholas Wade brought it to the readers of the New York Times twice. 

Now one question is why is an untested hypothesis getting so much attention? You would think that if they found evidence for it - but there was no evidence. This was an untested hypothesis. Steven Pinker helped legitimize this. Well what struck me was that him saying that it was good science and when you actually look at the science, it's not good science. I mean they get the wrong diseases in some cases, they, if you look at their proposition that these different diseases - just the idea that these diseases boost IQ - if you look the actual science of it, that’s not what it says...

Ferguson is very clear: Steve Pinker helped legitimize this.

And Pinker is still doing it right up to the present time as I noted in May:

Steven Pinker, as the Politico article fails to mention, is in the public record as a supporter of the NHAI paper. Some years ago he gave a speech, still available on Youtube, called "Jews, Genes and Intelligence." Although he never bluntly states that the NHAI hypothesis is correct, he begins the lecture by strongly defending a pillar of race science belief - that "race" is biological: 

Pinker then spends the rest of the lecture coming up with support for the NHAI hypothesis.

I think it's safe to say that the current approach at least the approach for in recent decades was to deny the existence of intelligence I. mentioned the Mismeasure of Man as the foremost example to deny the existence of genetically distinct human groups. there is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever that there are that it's purely a social construction and to call the people who don't do this Nazis but on the other hand there is a quotation I don't know who's responsible for it: reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

So contrary to his misleading self-presentation in the Politico piece, Pinker is not a neutral observer of a controversy about NYTimes "censorship" or simply a believer in free speech - he is a devoted partisan of the cause of race science. As is another co-author of the piece, Jonathan Haidt.

Pinker feels so strongly about race being biological that he says not believing it is the same as not believing in reality itself:

"reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it."

Although Friedersdorf doesn't name the paper's authors, Pinker does in the New Republic article Friedersdorf mentions:

The Utah researchers Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending (henceforth CH&H) proposed that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence...

Maybe Friedersdorf doesn't mention any names because if you Google the late Henry Harpending you will find he has an entry on the Southern Poverty Law Center web site under white nationalist.

From everything I've seen of Cochran, he is a piece of work too and I will be devoting a post to him one of these days. He has many insulting things to say about Brian Ferguson, but no counter-arguments that I have found. Cochran, naturally has written for Quillette.

What most interests me about Friedersdorf's defense of Pinker and the NHAI hypothesis is that he quotes Pinker not expressing disagreement with it, but rather expressing fear about what would happen if it turned out to be true:

The idea of innate Jewish intelligence is certainly an improvement over the infamous alternative generalization, a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. And attention to the talents needed in the middleman niche (whether they are biological or cultural) could benefit other middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Lebanese, Ibos, and overseas Chinese and Indians, who have also been targets of vicious persecution because of their economic success. And yet the dangers are real.

However "the idea of innate Jewish intelligence" is not new. I pointed out recently that the alleged innate higher intelligence of Jews appears - along with the inevitable flip-side of race science, the alleged innate lower intelligence of Black people - in an article by segregationist Henry E. Garrett, "The Equalitarian Dogma" published in Mankind Quarterly in 1961:



It appears to me that the NHAI paper didn't discover the possibility of innate superior intellectual ability of Jews, but was rather an attempt to find a "scientific" explanation for a long-held race science belief.

What's most disturbing about all this is that there is a group of race science promoters with high profiles, who are considered respectable compared to the obvious racists like Stefan Molyneux and Steve Sailer: Pinker, Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Haidt and of course the probably dozens of "biosocial criminologists" hoping to mainstream the idea that Black people are innately more criminal than other "races."

As I have documented, Steven Pinker promoted the career of racist Steve Sailer for years, even including a truly awful article by Sailer that as far as I can see has nothing to do with science or nature, in a collection of "the best" science and nature writing.

Pinker stopped acknowledging Sailer's existence some time after 2011. But Pinker has never stated it was a mistake to promote Sailer. It's possible Sailer has emails or even recordings of Pinker making blunt statements about race and has threatened to release them if Pinker ever denounced Sailer. 

Sailer himself will tell you he had an influence on Pinker.

But I think more likely Pinker has never denounced Sailer because Pinker agrees with Sailer, but Sailer became a liability to Pinker's career.

But the career of Steve Sailer demonstrates there are many old white right-wing plutocrats who are happy to support race science promoters - even those as obviously racist as Sailer. So why wouldn't a Koch or a Thiel do the same thing with "celebrity intellectual" Pinker?

And with all that money and all those Pinker fan boys in established media they might get away with it.

Happy birthday Pinkerite

This blog is now a year old. It went by so fast, it hardly seems possible.

Obviously it turned out not to be a podcast, in spite of the claim of the first post.

Which is not to say there has been no other media besides the blog - there's a Youtube channel on which is posted the biggest accomplishment of Pinkerite so far - an audio interview with anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson.

And the Pinkerite Twitter account has been an important way to share updates with others.

Other accomplishments of this blog:

• The third edition of Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections.
• Realization of how much "race riots" and fraud contributed to the destruction of black-owned resources and wealth by the white majority.
• Got Steve Sailer to testify to his influence on Steven Pinker

Biggest disappointment - did not complete my series on The Bell Curve.

Most popular posts for the year, based on Blogger analytics:

Entry	Pageviews
I Have a Nightmare: Steven Pinker, Quillette and t... Apr 2, 2019	2094
Yes, Kevin Drum, Quillette is defending phrenology... Jul 27, 2019	880
Quillette doubles down on race science: Bo Winegar... Jun 5, 2019	707
"On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Raci... Sep 8, 2019	408
Catty Persons Mar 3, 2019	364
Steven Pinker & Steve Sailer Nov 25, 2018	346
Heather Heying: "we’re now getting the chance to d... May 29, 2019	335
Michael Shermer is possibly the sleaziest member o... Mar 27, 2019	322
The Quillette - IDW - Rebel Media mob gang up on a... Mar 19, 2019	302
The Brian Ferguson Interview Sep 8, 2019	299

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source tweet

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

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

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


I have a few small gripes about the Guide:

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Pinker: "Jews, Genes and Intelligence"

I will be posting my interview with anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson very soon (finally) but while researching I found a recording, posted seven years ago on Youtube, of a talk Pinker gave to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the paper Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI), a paper which Ferguson debunked in his paper How Jews Became Smart: Anti-"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence".

Pinker's talk, entitled "Jews, Genes and Intelligence" reveals, not surprisingly that Pinker on the whole thinks it is likely that Ashkenazi Jews are intellectually superior, genetically, per the NHAI theory.

At the top of the lecture Noah Feldman explicitly warns the audience not to record the talk, and obviously somebody did anyway, but I expect the recordings - posted by at least two separate Youtube accounts by apparent fans of Pinker - to be removed from Youtube any day.

So I have the transcript here.

The video of the talk was posted in four parts because, I assume, when it was posted Youtube had a ten-minute maximum length on uploaded videos.

Ferguson discusses the NHAI theory and Pinker's boosting of the untested theory in the interview which I will post. Very soon.

And to nobody's surprise, Richard Lynn also jumped on the NHAI speculation to bolster his claims about race and IQ, in a talk posted on Youtube.

The transcript is after the cut.

Steven Pinker having it both ways as usual

Reviewers of Steven Pinker's work notice his logical inconsistencies, which is especially amusing when Pinker's work is about logic.

Back in September when Pinker's book "Rationality..." was released, Ted McCormick, writing in Slate, noted the inevitable Pinker logic fail, which has been characterized by other reviewers as Pinker "having it both ways":

Rather than argue for his own liberal, technocratic goals, however, Pinker lets their presumed superiority color his use of “rational” and “irrational” throughout. This creates a recurring dissonance, since what is irrational (or “cockamamie,” or “stupid”) from his perspective often turns out to be eminently rational by his initial definition: That is, it serves the purposes of those who hold to it effectively. 

I give other examples of Pinker's critics noticing Pinker trying to have it both ways here.

The article also notes Pinker's (inevitable) hypocrisy, combined with his inevitable support for far-right, race pseudoscience-promoting organizations:

Blaming universities’ “suffocating leftwing monoculture” for popular mistrust of expertise, Pinker mentions two examples in the text: University of Southern California professor Greg Patton’s removal from a course after using the Chinese ne ga, which can sound like the N-word, and testimony from unnamed personal “correspondents.” (In a footnote, he invites readers to look to Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Quillette—all of it—for further examples.) The very next paragraph warns of “illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.” Doctor, heal thyself!

And although Pinker, along with right-wing media, trumpeted the Greg Patton controversy far and wide, in the end, the university found in Patton's favor:

After weeks of an internal investigation by USC’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX), however, Patton was found to have acted appropriately, as Garrett announced to students and the rest of the Marshall School community in a September 25 email. The EEO-TIX found that “the concerns expressed by students were sincere,” the dean wrote, “but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.

One or more hyper-sensitive students made an absurd charge against a professor, the university investigated the issue, and the professor was found to have acted appropriately. 

So is Steven Pinker's right-wing fear-mongering an example of rationality? I suppose if your goal is to curry favor with the deep pockets of the racist right, then yes, it is rational.

But going back to Pinker having it both ways. I mentioned recently that anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson introduced me to the work of another anthropologist, Douglas Fry, who sent me a link to his review of Pinker's 2012 book "Better Angels of Our Nature." 

I enjoyed Fry's review especially because he also noticed Pinker's trait of having it both ways:

Pinker’s evident fondness for state-based solutions also seems to make for greater analytical confusion as he tries to supply an anatomy of peaceable instincts that may inhere in human subjects apart from the imposition of state control. Pinker proposes that along with self-control, a moral sense, and the capacity to reason, a fourth “better angel” in our nature is empathy. But Pinker can’t seem to make up his mind about empathy. On the one hand, he quotes Charles Darwin in his final chapter’s epigraph, thereby appearing to give a last word to the great natural scientist’s hopeful formulation: 

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

However, Pinker concludes earlier in the book, after much discussion, that it is actually rights, norms, and policies—not empathy—that are important for protecting people from violence. Pinker also concludes that “empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness.” If that’s the case, then why isn’t fairness promoted to angel status and empathy demoted? It’s hard to avoid the impression that Pinker is just jumping, halfheartedly, onto the empathy bandwagon in the wake of best-selling treatments of the subject such as Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization (2009) and Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy (2009)—both of which are far more thorough and lucid treatments of the subject than one finds in The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Whatever else you can say about Pinker, he's consistent.

Fry shared his review of Napoleon Chagnon's self-aggrandizing autobiography "NOBLE SAVAGES My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists." The autobiography was called "a lively and paranoid romp through the thick jungles of the Amazon and the thicker tangles of academic and religious intrigue" by the NYTimes.

Fry's review can be accessed via JSTOR here. Fry critiqued Chagnon's claim that Yanomami men who killed more also fathered more children, explaining why Chagnon's calculation is incorrect, which concurs with Ferguson's paper Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. 

The critique was enough to get Fry on Chagnon's enemies list:

I had begun to think that somehow I had escaped being put on the "detractor list" for my mathematical recalculation of Chagnon's unokai data (Fry 2006; Miklikowska and Fry 2012), but then I discovered that he cites a book I co-edited (Kemp and Fry 2004) as a supposed example of an ad hominem attack related to his 1988 unokai article (Chagnon, 2013: 278). However, Chagnon got the basic facts wrong. The only mention of Chagnon in the edited book involves his use of the label "fierce," has nothing to do with his 1988 article, and says nothing that could be considered ad hominem (Kemp and Fry 200422: 5). 

Regular visitors to this Pinkerite site will not be surprised to learn that Steven Pinker (and other supporters of sociobiology) is a big fan of Chagnon.

Fry also shared a link to an interview with Phillip Dwyer, author of The Dark Angels of Our Nature, which raises many of the objections that Ferguson did in his Pinker's List and adds a few more. Check it out.