What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 2 - the NHAI and ISIR connections

I was a big fan of Adam Rutherford in part because he is a harsh critic of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost 20 years.) 

The NHAI paper, published by racist Gregory Cochran and white nationalist Henry Harpending, basically said that Ashkenazi Jews became smart because they were selected for intelligence through their work as money changers. Or as hereditarian Nicholas Wade put it: "The adaptation of Jews to capitalism..."

Rutherford's paper that this cartoon is based on, Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences, has a different methodology from the one described in the NHAI paper but the claims are strikingly similar: the intelligence of a group of people is connected to their way of making a living. And as the illustration explicitly states, success and status is clustered through their genes.

Rutherford would not explain how his paper's brain->business conclusion was different from the one in the NHAI even though his business is "science popularizer." 

Now as we saw in What happened to Adam Rutherford Part 1, an underlying belief of hereditarians, in this case "behavioral geneticists" is that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence, a belief that has been around since at least the days of Arthur Jensen.

So let's look at who wrote the Rutherford paper. 

There are ten authors: Abdel Abdellaoui, Hilary C. Martin, Martin Kolk, Adam Rutherford, Michael Muthukrishna, Felix C. Tropf, Melinda C. Mills, Brendan P. Zietsch, Karin J. H. Verweij & Peter M. Visscher. 

Out of those ten, three of them have participated in annual meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). 

The ISIR was founded to promote the hereditarian - and racist - beliefs of Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray. Each year it has an annual meeting and each meeting always includes presentations by racists and even neo-Nazis like Emil Kirkegaard.

Abdellaoui attended two ISIR meetings, in 2021 and 2022. His presentation in 2021 was Socio-economic status: A social construct with genetic consequences, which appears to be a version of the current Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper under discussion. His presentation in 2022 was Gene-environment correlations across geographic regions affect genome-wide association studies.

Also at the meeting in 2021 was Michael A. Woodley of Menie who became notorious the next year thanks to the New York Times running an article about him entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting. It seems that the racist Buffalo mass-murderer had cited Woodley's work in his manifesto. 

Although it was really unfair to single out Woodley - several participants in ISIR meetings were cited by the killer, including Thomas Bouchard, Robert Plomin, Ian Deary, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Donald Temple, Tatu Vanhanen and Charles Murray.

The 2022 meeting Abdellaoui attended, while it did not officially platform Emil Kirkegaard thanks to Abdellaoui, it did platform Gregory Clark who believes black American failure to thrive is due to inferior black American genes, and Heiner Rindermann, who has written for Kirkegaard's Mankind Quarterly and co-authored a paper with Michael Woodley of Menie, as well as other racist activities.

Felix C. Tropf gave a presentation at the 2023 annual meeting with Tobias Wolfram called 250 words written at age eleven predict intelligence and final educational attainment close to expert assessment. 

I told you these hereditarians are obsessed with "educational attainment." 

Great big racists who gave presentations at the 2023 meeting included Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Richard Haier and Gregory Clark. And then there was Steven Pinker. 

I remember how excited people associated with the Neo-Nazi Substack Aporia were about that conference, held in Berkeley - Aporia even published videos about it. Many hard-core racists show up in these videos including Razib Khan, Gavin Tredoux, Edward Dutton and Gregory Clark.

Peter M. Visscher has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2015 and 2021. In 2021 Visscher presented with many others "Polygenic prediction within and between families from a 3-million-person GWAS of educational attainment."

There's that educational attainment again.

One of the contributors to the paper was the "23andMe Research Team," in case you were wondering whether 23 and Me was run by hereditarians.

I've already talked about the racists at the 2021 meeting, so let's talk about the racists at the other meeting Visscher attended in 2015. His paper was "THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND LIFESPAN IS MOSTLY GENETIC." Several of the co-authors are ISIR bigwigs: Ian J. Deary and Matt McGue and Rosalind Arden,  who defended Linda Gottfredson in far-right racist Quillette. One of the authors of the Abdellaoui/Rutherford paper, Hilary C. Martin, co-authored a paper with Arden.

Hardcore racists that year included Alice Dreger (also known for her anti-trans views) Aurelio Jose Figueredo, Linda Gottfredson Richard Haier (Gottfredson and Haier are also ISIR bigwigs) and yes, Emil Kirkegaard. 

And Steven Pinker.

So besides the fact that some authors of the Rutherford paper share the belief that "educational attainment" represents intelligence, and have a very high tolerance for rubbing shoulders with Neo-Nazis, right-wing political operatives and racists, what is actually wrong with their paper?

I'll talk about that in Part 3.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 5 ~ racists, evolutionary psychologists and the meritocracy

Donald Trump declares war on civil rights
because "meritocracy"
--------------------------------------------------

So in part 4 we talked about how hereditarians misuse the term "heritability." Now lets talk about how they promote the belief that we live in a meritocracy.

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.' 

This belief is most clearly demonstrated by Buss's claim about Turkmen women, described by David Buller in his book Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. The first paragraph is a quote, the next is Buller's commentary. (My highlights)

..in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

During most of the period from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, English men did not buy women, but since most women had to choose a husband - or have a husband chosen by parents - in the hope that he would financially support her for the rest of her life, a woman (or sometimes just a girl) did not have the luxury of choosing a man primarily for his sexiness or great personality. She had to consider his income level. This is the socio-economic reality that evolutionary psychologists ignore. 

But then, evolutionary psychology is pure pseudoscience as demonstrated by biologist P. Z. Myers.

The fact that the Rutherford paper uses pseudoscience to argue anything is reason enough to consider it a scientific failure.

Evolutionary psychology is a rebranding of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology, as Wilson himself admitted, with one important difference: evolutionary psychologists removed considerations of race. 

Kathryn Paige Harden also claims to remove race from her work, in her book "The Genetic Lottery." 

Harden is a colleague of David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology. 

There are three references in the Rutherford paper to the work of economist Gregory Clark, seen here writing for neo-Nazi Aporia. Two of the references are in the passage above, 97 and 98. 

Clark can be seen hanging out with the neo-Nazi Aporia gang in a video they made about their visit to the 2023 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

Clark also proudly declared himself an hereditarian in racist Quillette.

Charles Murray and "Crémieux" - revealed to be Jordan Lasker who writes for racist Aporia magazine - are big fans of Gregory Clark.

In his review of Clark's book "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World", economist Robert Solow writes (my highlight):

Clark infers that before the Industrial Revolution, there must have been a substantial amount of downward mobility from the higher-income groups. They could more than reproduce themselves, but they could not reproduce the same positions of status for all their offspring. Primogeniture would see to that; and in its absence, division of inheritances would have the same effect. Younger sons would have moved into somewhat lower strata of the English income distribution, not into poverty, of course, but below the very upper crust. Along with that inference goes the hypothesis that capacities and dispositions characteristic of upper-income groups became diffused into English society along with their bearers. Among these was the ability and willingness to respond to economic incentives. Clark writes: “Thus we may speculate that England’s advantage lay in the rapid cultural, and potentially also genetic, diffusion of the values of the economically successful throughout society in the years 1200–1800.” 

 

Notice, by the way, that “and potentially also genetic.” It, or something like it, recurs throughout successive references by Clark to this key hypothesis. I have no idea whether pecuniary aptitudes and attitudes have a genetic basis or are simply passed on in family and social settings as acceptable norms of behavior. It does not matter a bit for Clark’s argument, but that is a reason to avoid insinuating a possible biological basis for this story without any evidence at all.

"Without any evidence at all" is the basis of hereditarian claims about genetic influence on human social hierarchies. All they have is speculation based on "correlations" none of which prove causation.

But that doesn't stop hereditarians from making bold claims anyway. 

Hereditarians refuse to acknowledge the reality of non-genetic causes for human social hierarchies unless it's screamingly obvious. We see that in the case of women's education. Even hereditarians acknowledge that women's educational attainment and careers were once impeded by "societal barriers." But as this cartoon based on the Rutherford paper shows, hereditarians believe that as of 1980, any woman's ability to attain higher education or not is due, more and more, to "genetic influences."

This inability to detect less-obvious sources of environmental impact was on full display in 2005 when Lawrence Summers told the attendees of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project (SEWP) conference, a conference devoted to diversity in the workplace, that the reason women have less successful careers in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) relative to men was due to their evolutionarily-endowed, genetic tendency to be worse at STEM than men.

Summers' reasoning was that men and women now had equal opportunity and so the most important thing holding back women's careers was their own girly genes.

This is my chance to mention physicist Angela Collier's Youtube channel again. She has an episode Sexual harassment and assault in Astronomy and Physics in which she explains how easy it is for professors to sexually harass their students and get away with it. The harassment has been going on forever but only in the last 10 years has it gotten serious attention and as Collier says, it has driven women out of STEM careers. 

But it wasn't obvious, not the way prohibiting women from attending some colleges was, so hereditarians chose to downplay it and many other possible causes for lesser STEM careers. 

Misogyny often goes hand in hand with racism, and so in 2022 Summers could be seen on Twitter promoting an article from racist Quillette written by white nationalist Bo Winegard, who is currently executive editor of neo-Nazi Aporia.

Gregory Clark's view is that we currently live in a meritocracy, evident in the Economist review of his book "The Son Also Rises" (my highlights.)

Oddly, Mr Clark judges the world to be “a much fairer place than we intuit.” He explains this by stating that the rich acquire their wealth because they are clever and work hard, and not because the system is rigged. The world is less corrupt and nepotistic than people might think.

This conclusion gives the book a cheery tone, but there are also plenty of nasty conclusions to be drawn. One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

That is a weakness. Mr Clark is too quick to write off the promise of recent social changes. The oldest Americans born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act are barely 50. Impressive work on the effect of good teaching or well-targeted poverty assistance suggest such programmes make a difference.

The Rutherford paper fully buys into Clark's reasoning on page 2 (my highlight):

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, bringing increased production, economic growth and social change, a modern, more merit-based socio-economic system began to emerge, transitioning to a new social order that could accommodate an ever-expanding population, while also increasing a visible underclass.

Compared with many pre-industrial socio-economic orders, merit-based hierarchies increase opportunities across the population, allocate talent more efficiently and stimulate progress through competition between people and between firms. The term ‘meritocracy’, however, was originally coined in a negative light in the 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young(24.) This book describes a dystopian future, in which meritocracy has led to a newly stratified society, replacing an aristocracy of birth by an aristocracy of talent, with a disenfranchised lower class of the less meritorious. If behaviours associated with merit (for example, intelligence, persistence and creative talent) are partly heritable, variation in genetics within families could still facilitate social mobility. The enduring accumulation of resources within families, however, could limit this mobility, gradually reverting meritocracy back towards an aristocracy of birth.

A review of the Charles Murray book "Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010" summarizes it like this (my highlight):

 Since 1960, two new classes have formed in America that are fundamentally shifting the nature of the society: 1) A New Upper Class, larger than that which preceded it, that is the product of an cognitive meritocracy and increased returns on brains; and 2) a New Lower Class that is the product of—well, he never says....

Like Clark, Murray does not have to explicitly say "this is why Black Americans have failed to thrive since the Civil Rights movement" but the inference is obvious: if we live in a meritocracy now, which rewards the most intelligent, the most diligent etc. therefore the unrewarded - which includes Black Americans - are less intelligent, diligent etc. And of course we know that is exactly what Murray believes about Black Americans.

A great example of the hereditarian inability to detect any but the most obvious inequality is shown in the letter that a man wrote objecting to his daughter's school being too anti-racist. It was strenuously promoted by Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and other members of the racist Intellectual Dark Web 

The man wrote (my highlight):

I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism,
properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters. It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades. Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they have spent up to 13 years of their life, and you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not. We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years. To state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues. If anything, longstanding and widespread policies such as affirmative action, point in precisely the opposite direction. 

That is what American hereditarians believe: ever since civil rights reforms, there is no systemic racism in the United States of America. In spite of easily obtainable data that says otherwise.

Abdel Abdellaoui's friend Razib Khan mocked the idea that systemic racism exists.

White nationalist Henry Harpending  - one of the authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis (still untested and unproven after almost twenty years) - compared believing in systemic racism to believing in witchcraft. 

So how could it be that Black Americans are doing poorly compared to Whites if "We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s" 

Hereditarians have the answer: they have bad genes. It makes perfect sense according to the logic of the hypothesis of survival of the smartest and most diligent.

And the hereditarian assumption has always been that once DNA testing is sophisticated enough, it will prove that Black people have deficient genes. And hereditarians never doubt DNA testing will prove it one day even in spite of the missing heritability problem.

 Charles Murray was mocked on Twitter for all the times he has predicted hereditarian victory.

Hereditarians don't expect they might be surprised by genetic evidence. This is best illustrated by the exchange between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris, when Harris was defending "The Bell Curve" (my highlight):

Ezra Klein 

 

James Flynn just said to me two days ago that it is consistent with the evidence that there is a genetic advantage or disadvantaged for African Americans. That it is entirely possible that the 10-point IQ difference we see reflects a 12-point environmental difference and a negative-two genetic difference.

Sam Harris  

 

Sure, sure, many things are possible. We’re trying to judge on what is plausible to say and, more important, I am worried about the social penalty for talking about these things, because, again, it will come back to us on things that we don’t expect, like the Neanderthal thing. That comes out of left field. Had it gone another way, all of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.

Klein is pointing out that according to James Flynn, it is possible that the environment has been so hostile to Black Americans that it has reduced a two point Black genetic advantage over whites.

Harris' response is that it's not "plausible." He was roundly mocked by the late Michael Brooks of the Majority Report for that.

It's worth noting that Klein tells Harris he doesn't consider Andrew Sullivan a racist. This is because the bar for an hereditarian to be declared a racist is very high, no matter how strongly their views come from racists or a racist tradition nor how much they personally promote the careers of racists. 

Steven Pinker - the very raison d'être of this blog - is living proof of that.

Sam Harris does not think it's plausible because the hereditarian tradition for hundreds of years has been to assume that Black people are intellectually inferior to White people and at the very least, White people are a little bit genetically smarter than Black people. This is the founding premise of all hereditarian research, very much including behavioral genetics. They absolutely expect to discover a genetic underpinning for Black socio-economic inferiority. They consider it plausible.

On April 23, 2025, Donald Trump used the argument of "restoring meritocracy" in an attempt to kill civil rights laws, stating (my highlight): 

...a pernicious movement endangers this foundational principle, seeking to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement.  A key tool of this movement is disparate-impact liability, which holds that a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practice or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.

But Adam Rutherford is British and the co-authors of the Rutherford paper are all associated with institutions in Europe, Australia or the UK. Critics of the Rutherford paper wondered on Bluesky if there were specific cultural influences - a different sensitivity and a blindness to classism - when discussing the cartoon version of the paper.

It should be noted that Adam Rutherford is a product of the British private school system, according to his Wikipedia bio.

But Rutherford is aware of racism and certainly pays attention to American politics. He combined both in his piece for the BBC just a few days ago, entitled 'Biological reality': What genetics has taught us about race, writing:

This is why genetics has played such an important role in the dismantling of a scientific justification of race and understanding racism itself. And it's why the latest statement from Trump's White House is troubling many in the scientific community. 

 

Trump frequently speaks about aspects of genetics to make political points. One view that he has expressed repeatedly is that some people, and predictably himself, are genetically superior. "You have good genes, you know that, right?" he said in September 2020 to a rally in Minnesota – a state that is more than 80% white. "You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota." 

 

Similarly, in the successful 2024 campaign, he denounced immigrants as having "bad genes". It's hard for someone who studies genes – and the strange and sometimes troubling history of genetics – to understand even what might constitute a "bad" or "good" gene.

Ours may be a pernicious history, but the trajectory of genetics has been one that tends towards progress, and equity for all, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

But as we have seen, it's not as simple as that. 

Hereditarians maintain that once we have removed official discriminatory policies therefore we are now living in a gene-expressing meritocracy and therefore:

a.  once women have unhindered access to college after 1980, their educational attainment is primarily due to their genes; and 

b. if people don't move out of their old coal mining town it's because they have the wrong genetic variants. 

Per the Rutherford paper's claim: "People with genetic variants that make it easier for them to get a better education are more likely to move to better neighbourhoods, whereas the people left behind are in worse living circumstances with higher mortality rates and greater risk for health problems such as obesity, diabetes (87) and infectious diseases. "

It's impossible that Rutherford & company could fail to see how easily this could be applied to Black Americans, since there are no longer official policies keeping them from moving to better neighborhoods.

I think I've established that if it isn't official, it doesn't count to hereditarians. Yet it still happens.

Incidentally, I have yet to see an hereditarian make the case that because men are having increasingly worse educational attainment compared to women therefore women must have genetically-enabled intellectual superiority over men. 

I think it's because the other pillar of hereditarian thought, along with the assumed intellectual superiority of Whites over Blacks is an assumption of the intellectual superiority of men over women. I predict that hereditarians will not write papers on the genetic influence of the educational attainment of women compared to men, because they don't consider it plausible. 

So you will never see this cartoon explaining an hereditarian paper.

But if socio-economic status and/or educational attainment are genetic why do the Rutherford hereditarians only apply it to some groups, like women or the British underclass. Why not race? And after all, several of the Rutherford paper references are racists and some Rutherford paper authors have worked with racists.

I think it's a public relations move, every bit as much as it was for E. O. Wilson's sociobiology when it was rebranded as evolutionary psychology and its leading advocates declared "there is no such thing as race."

And it's important to note that this no-race brand of evolutionary psychology did not last for some adherents.

Steven Pinker, referred to as an advocate of evolutionary psychology on his Wikipedia page, and better known than David Buss (although these days Pinker's real portfolio is international Great Man of Science and Politics) migrated from standard evolutionary psychology to race-based hereditarianism, although he is sly enough to avoid declaring it outright, preferring instead to spend the past quarter century promoting a parade of hereditarian racists from Steve Sailer to Razib Khan to Richard Hanania.

Pinker certainly believes that race is a biological fact, giving a speech in around 2013 in which he declared that to deny biological race was to deny reality itself.

The change in Pinker's attitude was noted both by David Lubinski of the International Society for Intelligence Research and by Steve Sailer, who has claimed to be an influence on Pinker.

So for some there is no conflict with being an advocate of evolutionary psychology and believing in the biology of race. And as we have seen, the Rutherford paper has no problem using evolutionary psychology to support its claims.

Kathryn Paige Harden, whom Rutherford admires, and whom Razib Khan considers a friend, acknowledged Khan in her book "The Genetic Lottery," saying she benefitted from conversations with him.

I think it's clear that hereditarians cannot be disentangled from racists. 

In part 6 I will summarize how much Rutherford and all his co-authors are soaking in racism.

UPDATE: since I published this post, I found an excellent response to Gregory Clark's claims. Here is the abstract for the paper, Confounding Fuels Hereditarian Fallacies:

Scientific literature has seen a resurgence of interest in genetic influences on socioeconomic outcomes. Such investigations are often limited by confounding between signals of genetic and non-genetic influences. An illustrative example is Clark (2023), which considers the similarity in socioeconomic status between relatives, drawing on genealogical records spanning four centuries in England. Based on the fit of a quantitative genetics model, it suggests that social status is largely determined by one’s DNA; and that, for that reason, contemporary English people “remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England.” These conclusions are based on a conflation of genetic and non-genetic transmission (e.g., of wealth) within families. We demonstrate that additional errors and statistical artifacts influenced inferences in Clark (2023). In reality, Clark (2023) provides no information about the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic factors to social status. We discuss how lessons learned from the failure to account for confounding generalize to contemporary studies that claim to establish genetic underpinnings to social outcomes. 

Steven Pinker promoting racist goon Gregory Clark

The Economist was too polite to call Gregory Clark a racist. 

I'm not so polite.

The Economist:

One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

This is who Pinker is promoting. Via Razib "you're a subhuman retard" Khan.

James Lee is a member of the racist gang, which is why he is funded by the white nationalist Arthur Jensen-founded Institute of Mental Chronometry.

Pinker, Clark, Khan and Lee attended the most recent racist roundup - that is the annual meeting of the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research.

Fun fact: Clark was inspirational to racist goons Cochran and Harpending.

Can there be any doubt, with all the racists Steven Pinker has promoted and befriended in at least the last twenty years, that Pinker himself is a racist?

Very good video: "You Are Not Your Genes: The Hereditarian Fallacy"

It's by Zach B. Hancock, Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology and  it appropriately places Steven Pinker in the center of the hereditarian fallacy, with mentions of Charles Murray, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Gregory Clark.

The best part is his pointing out that self-described hereditarian Gregory Clark uses the "classic" heritability (as opposed to "molecular") method invented by racist Francis Galton to make claims about social success and genes.

I will point out again that the Adam Rutherford co-authored paper cites Clark three times to make its arguments.

In case there is any doubt how extreme are the hereditarian claims being promoted by Adam Rutherford, Abdel Abdellaoui and their eight co-authors.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 3 ~ the nice kind of calipers

This should have been a clue about Rutherford
Kathryn Paige Harden has promoted the career 
of hereditarian racist Razib Khan, seen here celebrating
the wedding of extreme racist Curtis Yarvin.

As I've already discussed in Part 2, three of the ten authors of the Rutherford paper have given presentations at the racist/neo-Nazi-founded and infested International Society for Intelligence Research.

I'm sure if I continued to look I'd find even more connections between some of the authors and racists. 

Oops, I did it again. 

Tobias Wolfram,  who co-authored a paper with Rutherford co-author Felix C. Tropf   (mentioned in Part 2) - actually multiple papers - is a member of Jonathan Anomaly's genetic business (discussed further below and in the HOPE not Hate article The Superbaby Factory.)

I'm pretty good at spotting hereditarian racist names on sight, as a benefit, if you can call it that, of spending the past six and a half years tracking them, especially since I created a spreadsheet of attendees of ISIR annual meetings.

So I can't help noticing, just scanning down the References section of the Rutherford paper, the many hereditarian and even racist names there are, including David Buss, Kathryn Paige Harden, Francis Galton, Robert Plomin, Thomas. J. Bouchard, James J. Lee, R. A. Fisher and Gregory Clark. Clark is cited twice. The Economist noted:

One inescapable judgment is, as Mr Clark says, that “a completely meritocratic society would most likely also be one with limited social mobility.” He does not say that American blacks are poor because they are black. His work implies, however, that poor blacks remain so because they are descended from people with low social competence; discrimination is irrelevant, except to the extent that it limits intermarriage with other groups. “The Son Also Rises” may not be a racist book, but it certainly traffics in genetic determinism.

Clark "may not be a racist" - but I don't know how you could fail to understand that racism is the foundation of Clark's beliefs. 

As I've demonstrated in the many years of tracking them, you can't swing a dead cat in a group of hereditarians without hitting some racists.

The recent article in Undark, In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views subtitled In an era of open data, genome-wide association studies have become entangled with efforts to prove Black inferiority noted (my highlights):

...when the educational attainment GWAS published in Nature Genetics in 2018, with Lee as the first author, it created a stir. At a website run by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, the authors shared detailed data known as summary statistics that allowed anyone with enough technical savvy to calculate polygenic scores for the datasets of their choosing. Scholars from an array of disciplines took notice, repurposing the data to see how well educational attainment polygenic scores predicted not just academic prowess, but related characteristics such as social mobility, political participation, and intelligence. 

(According to a recent report, at least one company is now using polygenic scores to screen IVF embryos for intelligence.)

If Kirkegaard approves, you've done something wrong.

I was somewhat disappointed in the article (in spite of getting a shout-out) because the author leaves out important hereditarian-racism connections. The article even fails to mention, directly, Kirkegaard's Neo-Nazi and racist network Human Diversity Foundation so well-investigated by HOPE not hate.

The article was so kind to Kirkegaard, that Kirkegaard expressed his approval of the article on Twitter.

Which is why my work here is never done. 

*** sigh ***

Kirkegaard can also be seen mocking Abdel Abdellaoui for saying that Kirkegaard is not on his team, but is that really true? I think hereditarians have more in common than not. 

We know that Abdellaoui has appeared on Razib Khan's podcast, where Khan referred to Abdelloaui as "a friend" and we know that Razib Khan has worked for Emil Kirkegaard's neo-Nazi network. 

So as much as Abdellaoui would not like to be embarrassed by being connected to a neo-Nazi, his friend Razib is not embarrassed. 

Hereditarians go through some impressive mental gymnastics to disassociate themselves from racists.

A favorite tactic of hereditarians, when you point out that they are soaking in racism, is to claim you are using the logical fallacy "guilt by association." It's an absolute favorite of Steven Pinker. No matter how many racists and racist organizations - even Neo Nazi organizations Steven Pinker has promoted for at least the past twenty-five years,  and no doubt will continue to promote, I expect he will go to his grave screaming "guilt by association."

Here is hereditarian Abdul Abdelloaui using the same tactic.

Two things about the Undark quote I highlighted above:

The first highlight demonstrates how certain hereditarians are that "educational attainment" is directly connected to intelligence. I know the passage mentions "social mobility" and "political participation" too. But for hereditarians, those things are related to intelligence, because everything is related to intelligence and intelligence is always genetic, in spite of the reflexive "of course the environment matters a bit" admission of the less shameless hereditarians. 

The reason they are so obsessed with "educational attainment," I believe, is because it's much easier to get data on the educational attainment of large groups of people, than to get data for intelligence test scores of large groups of people, since in many countries educating children is mandated by law, while intelligence tests are not.

And the belief that educational attainment is related to intelligence has existed in hereditarian-land since at least Arthur Jensen and The Bell Curve - and the International Society for Intelligence Research was founded by people who agree with Arthur Jensen and The Bell Curve.

And the second highlight demonstrates that even though hereditarian claims about intelligence genes are still unproven, racist hereditarians are not waiting for proof, thanks to the over-confident claims of the allegedly non-racist hereditarians.

The second highlight goes to an article about Johnny Anomaly and his eugenics business.  Anomaly is a long-time racist hereditarian seen here co-authoring an article with white nationalist Bo Winegard in Quillette. The article makes it clear that Anomaly and Winegard consider Kathryn Paige Harden's claims in her much-publicized book The Genetic Lottery proof of racist-hereditarian beliefs:

It is worth pointing out, however, that equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve. We can move in the direction of equalizing opportunities with carefully crafted redistributive policies. But even egalitarians who understand human nature, such as the behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, know that we cannot truly equalize opportunities because people are born with unequal traits that are at least partially caused by different outcomes in a “genetic lottery.” We can make society open to talent, but we cannot distribute talent equally.

One of Bo Winegard's ideas to "equalize opportunities" is to have national race-based quotas to "preserve a country's (racial) demographic composition."

Jonathan Anomaly is one of five associates of Emil Kirkegaard currently suing Rational Media Foundation (RMF) with SLAPP suits because RMF's Rational Wiki articles about them have high-ranking search results which makes it easy to find all the racist beliefs and actions of Anomaly and the other plaintiffs: Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Russell T. Warne, Jan T. Nijenhuis and Jonatan Pallesen.

Like the article written by Anomaly and Winegard, the Rutherford paper refers to the work of Kathryn Paige Harden. Note 8 cites Harden (my highlight):

Social inequality is an inherently societal phenomenon driven by cultural, structural, economic, political and technological forces, although, as we show here, it is also associated with genetic variation. Although behavioural genetics research is actively examining the relationship between genetics and SES (8), most studies within the broader social sciences aiming to understand social inequalities tend to focus on societal factors (6,9.) By not including genetic effects, these studies omit a substantially contributing force that may be increasing in importance due to recent societal changes. When acknowledging these genetic effects, however, it is important to tread with caution. Recent history has shown that attempts to control the genetic make-up of populations—in the form of eugenics—can result in serious violations of human rights, including limiting access to edu-cation and labour markets, involuntary sterilization, infanticide, and genocide (10–12.)

SES means "Socio-Economic Status."

The line "By not including genetic effects, these studies omit a substantially contributing force that may be increasing in importance due to recent societal changes" has a faint echo of Harden comparing skeptics of hereditarianism to bank robbers:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences… Is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong.

A writer in the white supremacist American Renaissance approved of that comparison.

A curious thing about the reference to eugenics, in the Rutherford paper, as pointed out by clinical psychologist Jay Joseph - it says nothing about the fact that the eugenicists were wrong, scientifically.

I think journalist Tom Scocca did a good job of cutting to the heart of the problem with Kathryn Paige Harden's claims in particular and behavioral genetics in general in his Substack post The nice kind of calipers. 

Scocca is referring to a pro-behavioral genetics piece in the New Yorker  about "The Genetic Lottery" written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (my highlight):

It is important to note here that Harden does not, in fact, study the question of how genes produce social outcomes. Frustrated by the slow progress of assigning clear social results to scientists' ever-more-complicated understanding of how genes operate, the behavior geneticists have simply skipped over the whole "how" business. Harden's work, Lewis-Kraus explained, relies on the use of the GWAS—genome-wide association study—in which computation is used "to identify hundreds or even thousands of places in the genome where differences in our DNA sequence could be correlated with a trait or an outcome." 

"[E]ven if researchers don't fully understand what they're learning, this is how the genome is used now," an unnamed population geneticist told Lewis-Kraus. 

Here's how Lewis-Kraus described Harden's own account of the tool she uses to address the most loaded social questions of our time:

GWAS simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular society at a particular time.....GWAS results are not "portable"; a study conducted on white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria.

That is, the genome makes people unequal, but it does so by an unclear mechanism, the effects of which are contingent on a person's social position in a particular time and place. Yet the reader was supposed to share Harden's regret or bafflement that Darity, a scholar of the material processes of racial inequality, would be hostile to her work.  

Meanwhile, here was Harden, in an email to Lewis-Kraus, putting a precise number on the effects of visible discrimination:

Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we've only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.

Those numbers may sound low to those of us who attended underfunded public schools. Is three quarters of the difference in educational outcomes between my Aberdeen (Maryland) High School Class of '89 and the Phillips Andover Academy Class of '89 really due to our lower-quality germ plasm? 

But Harden's message, the theory behind hereditarian leftism, is that there is no reason to believe that the effort to find inborn inequalities between people should lead to greater social inequality. Kraus-Lewis wrote, "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." 

This is the disclaimer that Murray and Herrnstein attached to The Bell Curve, in a pose of political neutrality. If we decide we know that some people are naturally disadvantaged at school and in our education-based system of economic opportunity, who is to say that our society won't decide to help those people out more, to make up for it? 

At least Murray and Herrnstein knew they were being cynical about this. Harden and her fellow hereditarian leftists seem to believe in phrenology as a neutral tool, an absurd position for self-styled empiricists to take. We have a long, detailed record of what happens when the skull calipers come out, and it's never an advance in equal treatment of all...

Although it's not helpful to publicly fret over whether phrenology, as Scocca prefers to call behavioral genetics, is bad for society. Doing so only convinces the hereditarians they are right and reinforces their image of themselves as Brave Pioneers of Science, unbowed by concerns that behavioral genetics will prove that the underclasses are on the bottom of the SES through no fault of the upper classes but their own genetically-endowed stupidity. A thing hereditarians believe, in all confidence, they have already proven, which is why Jonathan Anomaly's company, PolygenX:

...offers polygenic embryo screening and is a more advanced statistical analysis of the genomic sequence of fertilised embryos before they are implanted during IVF. In effect, it lets parents — who might typically generate 10 embryos during IVF treatment — select which one will be the likeliest to have certain traits. Of all the traits that PolygenX can identify, IQ was described by Tobias Wolfram to our undercover reporter as “basically the starting point of the company”.

In their review of Harden's book, Anne O'Connor (PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology), Brenna M. Henn, an associate professor of population genetics, Emily Klancher Merchant, assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies, and Tina Rulli, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC Davis note the connection between Harden's and Jensen's views on educational attainment (my highlight):

DNA PLAYS A major role, indeed a starring role, in generating socioeconomic inequality in the United States, according to Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas. In her provocative new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, she contends that our genes predispose us to getting more or less education, which then largely determines our place in the social order. This argument isn’t new. It has appeared perhaps most notoriously in Arthur Jensen’s infamous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review (“How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?”) and in The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, published in 1994.

They also identify the slippery divide between genes and environment as described by behavioral geneticists (my highlight):

Harden expects that, as GWAS samples grow, the polygenic index will become more predictive, but exactly how it predicts educational attainment is not at all straightforward. Consider how Harden chooses to present the 10–15 percent figure, making it account for educational attainment through biological mechanisms. She tells her readers that the genes involved are expressed preferentially in our brains, where they increase the bearer’s intelligence, executive function, grit, and perseverance — the cognitive and non-cognitive skills rewarded in our educational system and labor market. What Harden doesn’t tell us is that these genes are also “expressed” in our environments. People with higher polygenic indices for educational attainment are both more likely to be raised by parents with higher socioeconomic status and to go to well-funded schools. A study of adoptees suggests that about half of the effect of the polygenic index operates through these indirect mechanisms. Harden acknowledges this complex causality, demonstrating that small differences early in life lead to children being placed into environments that magnify those differences. For her, these are all genetic causes because, with different genes, we also would experience different environments. By identifying social mechanisms as “genetic,” Harden is naturalizing them, attributing the inequality they produce to the individuals who benefit from or are harmed by them rather than to the policies and practices that privilege some genotypes over others.

A favorite tactic of hereditarians since the days of Henry E. Garett is to claim that critics of hereditarianism only care about moral/political issues not scientific ones. In their New York Review of Books piece, M.W. Feldman, Professor of Biology and Jessica Riskin, Professor of History note Harden pulling the same tactic with the hereditarian bête noire (along with Stephen Jay Gould), the late Richard Lewontin:

Such talk of entanglements and braids is misleading, implying that genetics and environment are discrete strands, when in fact living things are in continual interaction with their environments in ways that transform both at every level. The late Harvard evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin used the concept of the “reaction norm”—a curve expressing the relation between genotype and phenotype as a function of the environment—to describe this interaction and its implications. Lewontin showed that since the relationship between genotype and phenotype depends on the environment in which the phenotype is measured, one can’t infer genetic causes from correlation and regression calculations. Harden mentions Lewontin as a critic of behavioral genetics, but she implies that he didn’t approve of the field simply on ideological grounds. She never mentions or engages with his substantive refutation of the core assumption that genetic and environmental causes of behavior are separable.

The review describes the weakness of GWAS-based hereditarian claims (my highlights):

Explaining how social scientists make genome-wide association studies and polygenic scores, Harden writes:

Correlations between individual SNPs and a phenotype are estimated in a “Discovery GWAS” with a large sample size…. Then, a new person’s DNA is measured. The number of minor alleles (0, 1, or 2) in this individual’s genome is counted for each SNP, and this number is weighted by the GWAS estimate of the correlation between the SNP and the phenotype, yielding a polygenic index.

This alphabet soup in the passive voice implies that no one actively does all this estimating, measuring, counting, weighting, correlating—or that these are such technical processes that any human presence in them is irrelevant. But people are making interpretive decisions at every stage: how to define a phenotype and select people to represent it, how to count these people, which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate them. Interpretive decisions are of course essential to all science, but here there are a great many opinions dressed up in facts’ clothing. “This polygenic index will be normally distributed,” Harden continues, now disguising an assumption—that there are intrinsic cognitive and personality traits whose distribution in a population follows a bell-shaped curve, a founding axiom of eugenics—as an objective fact. Harden then tells us that “a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes.” All these trappings of scientific objectivity notwithstanding, a polygenic index “captures” differences in educational outcomes the way Jackson Pollock’s Summertime painting captures the season: as a reflection of its creator’s radically subjective view of things (which is just fine for abstract expressionism).

If you find a magical hammer that, whenever you swing it, rewards you with funding and professional advancement, you look at your research area and see nothing but nails. Genome-wide association studies are the social sciences’ new magical hammer. Macular degeneration seems plausibly to be a nail: genomic analysis revealed two sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that were importantly associated with having the disease. Schizophrenia appears not to be a nail, though it might have some structural features a hammer could help with. The things social scientists have been swinging at aren’t just non-nails. They are to nails as ships to sealing wax, as cabbages to kings. To suggest that macular degeneration has genetic causes is to make an empirically testable proposal; to suggest that “grit” or “openness to experience” has genetic causes is to make a category mistake. These are interpretive descriptions, made of ideas, opinions, and practices, not molecules.

But as we've seen with the Rutherford paper, the weakness of their claims does not stop hereditarians from promoting the hell out of the "magical hammer" in exactly the same way that Steven Pinker and Nicholas Wade did not wait for the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" hypothesis to be proven - or even tested - before promoting it via the New York Times and through lectures.

Hereditarians have plenty of motivation to claim to wield the nice kind of calipers: it could damage their careers if they are found to be too racist, as Razib Khan discovered (probably why he hates NYTimes op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie so much) and as Jonathan Anomaly complains in his SLAPP lawsuit against the Rational Media Foundation for their Rational Wiki entry on Anomaly:

131.In October 2021, Dr. Anomaly was under consideration for a teaching position at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Dr. Anomaly underwent a series of job interviews for the position, over the internet via videoconference. Faculty members responsible for making a hiring determination regarded Dr. Anomaly as an outstanding candidate, and he was advanced to the final round of interviews.

132.During the final interview, one of the faculty members conducting the interview began searching Google for Dr. Anomaly’s name, and was exposed the RationalWiki article about him. Despite the other faculty members responsible for the determination all wishing to hire Dr. Anomaly, the faculty member who was exposed to the RationalWiki article objected so strongly that Dr. Anomaly was withdrawn from consideration for the position.

133.Dr. Anomaly’s business and academic opportunities continue to be placed in jeopardy (exactly as they were when he interviewed with Lingnan University) as a result of the RationalWiki article and its appearance in Google search results, causing Dr. Anomaly ongoing financial damages as well as mental anguish and suffering.

Like I said, you can't swing a dead cat...

According to the HOPE not Hate article: (my highlights)

In late 2023, HOPE not hate’s undercover reporter posed as a potential customer in the process of beginning IVF with his partner, and was quoted a price of $50,000 to use PolygenX. He was referred by Malcolm and Simone, the American pronatalist couple and had several meetings with company leaders. Our infiltrator met Jonathan Anomaly, who is described in one of his books as the company’s co-founder; the CEO Michael Christensen; and Tobias Wolfram, who was introduced as the Chief Science Officer. They told our reporter that at PolygenX, they had invented an extraordinary product.

More about Tobias Wolfram: (my highlights)

We can reveal that Wolfram has been a member of the closed Telegram chat of Martin Sellner, the Austrian far-right activist who leads the Identitarian Movement (Identitäre Bewegung). In January 2024, Wolfram posted the anti-immigrant slogan “we were never asked” in the channel, which is closed to members of the public. He posted again in the same chat in April to criticise a leaflet organising a counter-protest against Martin Sellner in Steyregg, Austria.

In response to HOPE no hate’s findings, Wolfram’s representatives told us that he “vehemently denies being associated with the ‘far-right’, rather he considers himself a libertarian”. His representatives furthermore told us that Wolfram was unaware that he had been posting in Martin Sellner’s private chat group on Telegram. They added: “Immediately upon realising that the post was on Mr Sellner’s channel, Mr Wolfram removed it.”

So why do hereditarians, the ones who sincerely consider themselves anti-racist, work with and aid and abet racists so often? 

Is it because they don't care that their weak, but confidently-promoted speculation that educational attainment signifies intelligence leads to the conclusion that those who achieve higher education have done so primarily through genetic superiority?

Maybe that's why they rarely have a serious response to criticisms of hereditarianism, and instead are often flippant and contemptuous as both Adam Rutherford and Abdel Abdellaoui have demonstrated. 

To understand how far hereditarians are willing to take their belief that genes are everything, here is Richard Haier, devotee of Arthur Jensen, explaining to racist Stephan Molyneux that we can improve intelligence through genetic manipulation, which is basically what Jonathan Anomaly thinks he is doing.

Haier:

Well, unfortunately now in our country we're living in a time that's profoundly anti-science. We have many government heads and important agencies who are overtly anti-science. I don't understand it, but it's not good. And it's not good in general for for many scientific things and for the kind of things we're talking about here, which are kind of far out. Not many people are talking about manipulating genes that raise IQ. This is not really a public conversation, and to the extent it is, it's usually framed in some negative context of eugenics or or racism or or or or something like that.

Abdel Abdellaoui can be seen on Twitter promoting Richard Haier's work.

So Abdellaoui promotes Richard Haier, but he's tried to impede Emil Kirkegaard. Yet both Haier and Kirkegaard admire Arthur Jensen whose claim to fame is his racist hereditarian beliefs. Kirkegaard created this website to honor Jensen. Haier described Jensen as one of his heroes. 

It's impossible to avoid the inference that Adbellaoui's problem with Kirkegaard is not due to his racist hereditarian beliefs.

Perhaps the conclusion we can draw from these feckless hereditarians, all of them very well-educated, is that educational attainment is correlated with incredible self-certainty and extreme stupidity.

So what is this heritability that hereditarians are always talking about? That's in Part 4.