The League of Race Pseudoscience Ghouls, Evolutionary Psychology Goons and Rightwing Grifters publishes a paper

This tweet from Bo Winegard not only 
tells you everything you need to know about 
that racist neo-Nazi dirtbag, but all you
need to know about the people who 
agree to co-author anything with him.

Jerry Coyne and the "Journal of Controversial Ideas" are promoting a paper written by the most 
contemptible gang of right-wing grifters, racists and race pseudoscience promoters who ever took money from Charles Koch and Peter Thiel.

This paper appears to be a pretentious version of another race pseudoscience coprolite, "Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias" by Bo Winegard, Cory Clark, Connor Hasty, Roy Baumeister. Winegard, Clark and Baumeister are listed as authors in both.

Just looking at the list of authors makes it clear this has nothing to do with science and everything to do with a rightwing political campaign.

The good news is that the fact that so many evolutionary psychologists are participating in this political campaign probably indicates that evolutionary psychology is being greeted increasingly with skepticism by real scientists. 

And since evolutionary psychology is indeed a pseudoscience - see biologist P. Z. Myers' explanation for exactly why - they have no option but to try to salvage their bogus wrong-side-of-science-history careers by aligning with Koch grifters and race pseudoscience ghouls.

As you might expect, professional racist Steve Sailer is thrilled that so many of his fellow racists have banded together.

Here's the gang:

Cory J. Clark https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3083-9179 cjclark@sas.upenn.edu, Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9433-7402, Karl Aquino https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0710-4120, J. Michael Bailey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4756-1705, NicoleBarbaro, Roy F. Baumeister https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1413-3296, April Bleske-Rechek https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3578-2105, David Buss https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4467-7019, Stephen Ceci https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2835-9707, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3029-6343, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6529-130X, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-6110, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0024-5027, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6026-5372, PamelaParesky https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0691-9811, Steven Pinker https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2319-4085, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0144-5207, Steve Stewart-Williams https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8568-6846, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M.Williams https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6666-4000, Anne E. Wilson https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7954-6038, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5591-6604, and William von Hippel 

Let's break down the list of ghouls, goons and grifters:

• Cory J. Clark - race pseudoscience ghoul and frequent co-author with racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard.
• Lee Jussim - loved by racist American Renaissance,  his entire career appears to consist of ranting over and over again "stereotypes are real." Was a presenter at crackpot Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists
• Komi Frey - Koch employee via FIRE
• Sean T. Stevens - Koch employee via FIRE - author at racist Quillette
• Musa al-Gharbi - Koch employee via Reason - author at racist Quillette
• Karl Aquino - evolutionary psychologist, marketing ghoul division, previously produced evo-psycho garbage with Baumeister
• J. Michael Bailey - infamous anti-trans crusader
• Nicole Barbaro - Koch employee via Heterodox Academy - public supporter of racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, joining the far-right effort to portray him as a poor beleaguered martyr of science
• Roy F. Baumeister - race pseudoscience ghoul who has published with Cory J. Clark and Bo Winegard
• April Bleske-Rechek - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette
• David Buss - the king of evolutionary psychology, especially now that Tooby is dead, confuses female sex slavery with female choice, like you do when you're an evolutionary psychologist
• Stephen Ceci - evolutionary psychologist,  beloved by the gang at the International Society for Race Pseudoscience Intelligence Research 
• Marco Del Giudice - evolutionary psychologist
• Peter H. Ditto - evolutionary psychologist - has teamed up with Bo Winegard before
• Joseph P. Forgas - evolutionary psycologist - author at racist Quillette
• David C. Geary - evolutionary psychologist and Quillette goon, coauthored with the Winegard twins
• Glenn Geher - evolutionary psychologist - referenced Winegard as if he isn't a right-wing political operative who has devoted his life to promoting race pseudoscience
• Sarah Haider - rightwinger reactionary and ally of racist Razib Khan
• Nathan Honeycutt - Koch employee via FIRE - Lee Jussim was his Ph.D advisor
• Hrishikesh Joshi - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette
• Anna Krylov - culture war reactionary hysteric who compared changing scientific terms to being burnt at the stake and the worst crimes of the Soviet Union. Helped organize crackpot Peter Thiel's CPAC for racists 
• Elizabeth Loftus - defended Harvey Weinstein
• Glenn Loury - Koch employee via the Manhattan Institute - author at racist Quillette
• Louise Lu - "I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Behavioral Marketing at Stanford Business School." So I'm gonna say "grifter in training"
• Michael Macy - evolutionary psychologist - takes racist ghoul Satoshi Kanazawa seriously
• Chris C. Martin - evolutionary psychologist who likes to retweet extremist Diana Fleishmann who works for racist rag (even worse than Quillette) Aporia
• John McWhorter - right-winger and longtime Koch employee - author at racist Quillette
• Geoffrey Miller - creepy evolutionary psychologist and racist, husband of extremist Diana Fleischmann
• Pamela Paresky - rightwing grifter, former (or possibly still is) Koch employee via FIRE and fan of the incredibly ghoulish Gender Wars cards 
• Steven Pinker - the world's most annoying man and in my opinion one of the public figures, along with Andrew Sullivan, most responsible for mainstreaming race pseudoscience - he's so pernicious I named this blog after him
• Wilfred Reilly - rightwing political operative and defender of the Proud Boys who would like to see the word  "retard" back in circulation
• Catherine Salmon - evolutionary psychologist - co-author with notorious crackpot and racist Michael Woodley
• Steve Stewart-Williams - evolutionary psychologist
• Philip E. Tetlock - evolutionary psychologist, coauthored with Cory Clark
• Wendy M. Williams - evolutionary psychologist - coauthored a paper with Ceci boo-hooing over student protests that cited the Winegard twins' Quillette article defending The Bell Curve.
• Anne E. Wilson - evolutionary psychologist 
• Bo Winegard - infamous for his promotion of race pseudoscience, as well as his belief that there should be race-based national quotas. Currently part of the racist Aporia Substack, likes to retweet racist Steve Sailer and is a holy cause for racism apologists like Jerry Coyne
• George Yancey - appears to be a Christian nationalist or at the very least a Christian nationalist apologist -  a crackpot who opposes gay rights and pushes the idea that "support for sexual minorities is strengthened by hatred of conservative Christians"
• William von Hippel - evolutionary psychologist - author at racist Quillette

What a collection of rightwing political operatives, reactionaries, racists, evolutionary psychologists and Quillette authors - and there is a lot of overlapping among those categories.

I don't think there's any reason to doubt that every damn one of them knows how extreme Bo Winegard is, and they either don't care because they agree with his extremism, or they are getting paid too much by their rightwing patrons to object to publicly working with a stupid, racist neo-Nazi.

Is Bo Winegard ready to teach at Williams College? What about the University of Chicago?

Bo Winegard has a Substack, dedicated to racism, called Aporia

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

Naturally Aporia is on Substack because Substack is run by a bunch of Thiel-connected ghouls who find racism perfectly acceptable to publish.

***

Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago and Luana Maroja, of Williams College recently co-wrote a reactionary political screed in the Skeptical Inquirer, in which they presented racist neo-Nazi Bo Winegard as a victim of Marietta College - although they don't mention the college by name:

But the central question about genetics in the culture wars involves behavioral characteristics of different populations and ethnic groups, with differences in intelligence being the subject deemed most taboo. In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry. Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.

They must both be aware of Winegard's long career of supporting "race realism." So why would they dishonestly present him as "merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups"?

Marietta College never released a statement on why it declined to invite Winegard back, but it seems that Coyne and Maroja are convinced Winegard was a victim of political correctness. 

So here's my theory: Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja want "race realism" taught at University of Chicago and Williams College and they'd like Bo Winegard to do the teaching.

I assume neither Coyne nor Maroja would agree to work for their respective colleges if they believed they were too woke to teach race realism. And Coyne, in particular is obsessed with any signs of wokeness. 

As P.Z. Myers noted, Coyne and Maroja are academic insiders:

It’s somewhat peculiar to read the complaints about a dogmatic stranglehold from these people. Coyne is a well-known, established, and successful scientist — he is a graduate of Harvard, and is now an emeritus professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious institutions of evolution research in the country. Maroja is a full Professor of Biology, and Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. I don’t see how they can complain that their careers have been “strangled” by the Left.

Coyne and Maroja are the establishment.* Their careers are built on convincingly supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.) They have immense amounts of academic power and influence, and have far more potential to be the strangler, rather than the strangled. Yet somehow they have the idea that science is being politically purged by progressive social justice, which they claim doesn’t care about truth.

I am no expert on the politics of academia, but it appears to me that both of them have the clout required to get Bo Winegard a job at their colleges. Much like Steven Pinker manages to hook up his fellow proponents of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology.

And after all, if "race realism" is good enough for Marietta, it must be good enough for Williams and UChicago.

Along with multi-decades-long professional racist Steve Sailer, Bo Winegard is an absolute true believer in the essential inferiority of Black people. Which is why he's a defender of The Bell Curve's claims about the innate inferiority of Black people. And why Sam Harris used Winegard's article in racist shitrag Quillette to defend Murray. Sailer and Winegard are in perfect harmony with racist troll Amy Wax.

Of course Bo Winegard has "demographic concerns." You know, like the Nazis.

As long as Bo Winegard promotes the notion of white superiority himself, he will refute the notion of white superiority. What a pathetic racist loser.

UPDATE Bo Winegard is very chummy with Emil. O. W. Kirkegaarrd, who was too embarrassing, finally, even for the International Society for Intelligence Research.

Emil Kirkegaard and his racist club: Substack, City Journal and Steven Pinker

The Koch-funded City Journal ran a hit piece by "David Zimmerman" on Oliver Smith. 

But who is David Zimmerman? According to his byline in the City Journal:

David Zimmerman is an independent writer who has worked as a producer in conservative talk radio.

When you click on the name it leads to this page, which lists Zimmerman's email address as the (also Koch-funded) Manhattan Institute's press communication email. And when you go to the Manhattan Institute's web site, there is only one reference to Zimmerman - and it's a link to Zimmerman's single piece at City Journal. Googling "David Zimmerman" and "conservative talk radio" was a bust. It seems that "David Zimmerman" prefers to remain anonymous.

I first became aware of Oliver Smith back when I had an active Pinkerite Twitter account. Smith alerted me to the fact that I was being attacked by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard and his gang of racist and misogynist goons. They lied about me, claiming I was responsible for some rando Twitter account. A lie also promoted by Steven Pinker's good buddy Razib Khan.

It's likely Emil Kirkegaard had a lot to do with the "David Zimmerman" article - I would not be surprised if Zimmerman was Kirkegaard's pseudonym.

In the article, "David Zimmerman" cites a hate site on Substack (of course) called Cancel Watch, which attempts to intimidate virtual nobodies, who happen to be critics of race pseudoscience, into silence

This must be the "free speech" that Pinker and the rest of the Intellectual Dark Web have claimed to care so much about.

And in his little Substack celebration of the City Journal hit piece, Kirkegaard thoughtfully linked to my site:

Taking the broader picture, we can hope that this piece in City Journal helps people understand one of the bad aspects of the internet: The internet is fueled by obsessive people. Your influence on the internet is to a substantial degree a function of how much time you spend on it. And who has the most time to spend on the internet? Losers. They don't have jobs (Oliver is unemployed, living at his parents house), or families to spend time on. So naturally these people can spend all of their time on socially destructive behavior, akin to the Spiteful Mutant theory of Michael Woodley (naturally, Oliver Smith hates this theory). Cat lady Nancy McClernan who runs Pinkerite (a hate site against Steven Pinker) is another example of this unfortunate tendency. Historically, the response of civil society to such losers would be to excommunicate them, or send them to the nut houses. As these options no longer exist, they are essentially allowed free roam on the internet to everyone's detriment.

Although I don't think Kirkegaard has many real followers, the page on Pinkerite that he linked to barely got a bump.

It's too funny that someone who has devoted his entire life to promoting racism would claim other people are "obsessive." If racist freaks like Kirkegaard and Winegard weren't promoted and supported by miserable plutocratic monsters like Koch and Thiel, and "celebrity intellectual" idiots like Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker, the rest of us could do other things. 

Much like if the South had simply given up slavery, without invading the North, my great-great grandfathers would not have had to fight for the Union.

I discovered the Kirkegaard-defending, Koch-funded, pseudonymous hit piece via a tweet by Steven Pinker. Of course. Pinker loves to help out his low-life racist pals.

The main tactic of "David Zimmerman" is to smear Smith by mentioning Smith's right-wing past. The article is entitled The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. 

First of all, good for Oliver Smith for changing his mind and quitting the far-right ("David Zimmerman" should consider it) and deciding to oppose race pseudoscience and racism.

But I admit, I am confused, because Bo Winegard is a neo-Nazi right now and that doesn't seem to bother "David Zimmerman" who moans:

In October 2019, when Smith’s article about Winegard had existed for about three months, Winegard presented a lecture about the evolutionary basis of human genetic variation for an evolutionary-biology group at the University of Alabama. Though the lecture itself went without incident, Winegard’s troubles began the following day, as he explained in an article about his experience:

[Winegard's blather, you can read it at the source.]

Following this incident, the University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson White, published an article attacking Winegard, claiming that his research “has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists.” This statement apparently referred to Smith’s writings about Winegard at RationalWiki, because at the time when the student-paper article was published, Smith’s writings were the only other place that Winegard had been described in those sorts of terms. As Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University, commented: “This claim was unsourced: who, exactly, has claimed this about Winegard, other than the author of the Rationalwiki article?”

The Christopher Ferguson citation is in Areo, run by race pseudoscience true believer Iona Italia.

Now the most important point here is that Smith did not lie about Winegard. Apparently the easiest way to smear Bo Winegard's reputation is to TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT HIM.

I was unaware of the Crimson White article. I enjoyed reading that. I loved this bit:

“We might disagree on what’s racist,” Winegard said after addressing McAlpin’s comment about his work, to which a student responded, “That’s because you’re racist.” 

“OK, that’s fine,” Winegard said in response. 

Good to see Winegard owning his racism, for once. 

I also liked this bit:

Earl was referring to a student in the crowd who compared Winegard’s research with Hitler’s racist ideology, to which Winegard responded: Hitler’s regime was not informed by science. 

“That’s definitely not true,” Earl said. “Hitler was certainly informed by science, and a lot of the race scientists were Americans. The Germans admired the American caste system, the racial system that we had.”

The students were not as stupid and ignorant as Winegard expected them to be. The Nazis were informed by the exact same "science" that Bo Winegard believes in. 

But that isn't where the similarities between Bo Winegard and the Nazis end. Like the Nazis, Bo Winegard would like to see national racial quotas. 

"Zimmerman" is so sympathetic to Winegard that he bullshits about the Crimson White article:

...the University of Alabama student newspaper, The Crimson White, published an article attacking Winegard, claiming that his research “has been criticized for resembling the pseudoscience employed by eugenicists.” This statement apparently referred to Smith’s writings about Winegard at RationalWiki, because at the time when the student-paper article was published, Smith’s writings were the only other place that Winegard had been described in those sorts of terms. 

The Crimson White article was published November 7, 2019. Prior to that, the last iteration of the Winegard article at RationalWiki is August 2019  and it doesn't mention the word eugenics except in reference to Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

And what about me? I was talking about Winegard's love of race pseudoscience in 2018. Like "David Zimmerman," Claire Lehmann was furious when I dared to tell the truth about Bo Winegard.

Speaking of that ninny, "David Zimmerman" is outraged that RationalWiki honestly describes race pseudoscience-loving Claire Lehmann. 

But this City Journal article has so much that is idiotic, I will have to continue in another post. 

But just remember three things about Emil Kirkegaard, besides that he's obsessive, racist filth:

• Kirkegaard sued Oliver Smith and lost. And now Kirkegaard won't pay up.

• Kirkegaard was called "a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil" by comedian Stewart Lee

• Charles Murray, who has been supported by Koch funding for decades, loves Emil Kirkegaard and Bo Winegard

Next: Did City Journal and Cancel Watch hatch a scheme to blackmail a critic of race pseudoscience and censor RationalWiki?

Bo Winegard really is a racist

I never believed "race science" was anything more than an attempt to, in the words of anthropologist Marvin Harris, "biologize inequality," but the Winegard brothers have been as careful as Steven Pinker not to say anything obviously, viciously racist, like using the N word, no matter how vigorously they defended the race science of The Bell Curve. They always maintained a little bit of plausible deniability, which could be convincing to those who haven't been tracking their careers for many years.

But a couple of tweets by Bo Winegard, a contributing writer and a member of Quillette's team, from July 30 of this year are about as racist as they come.

Bo Winegard thinks it isn't racist to "want to preserve a country's racial demographics."

But national race quotas is the essence of racism.

Just think for a moment what it would mean to attempt to "preserve" a country's racial demographics.

Once you determined the correct racial demographic mix you would have to restrict immigration by race. But what if a race increased or decreased too much via childbirth? Would the excess members of a race be expelled from the country? Or would the women of the decreased demographic race be forced to have more children? 

I'm sure the people who want to have an "honest negotiation in the political sphere" about racial quotas would have plenty of ideas for the final solution to that problem. 

Bo Winegard admits in his tweet that race quotas "can take ugly forms" - but when has such a race-based quota social policy ever not taken an ugly form? It's impossible for a race-based quota to be otherwise.

Then there is the issue of who counts as which race. As Bo and Ben Winegard and "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell wrote in Quillette:

 ...racial categories are like film categories (e.g., drama, horror, comedy)...  The amount and the granularity of film categories depend upon the interests of the people using them. Your friend might use four (horror, comedy, drama, and science fiction), whereas Netflix might use an apparently limitless and startlingly specific supply 

In other words, anything goes, because racial categories depend on "the interests of the people using them." No matter how much people like Steven Pinker claim that race is a biological reality, there is no empirical race classification system. Even race science promoters can't agree amongst themselves which race categories are "real."

We can easily imagine the kind of interests of people who agree with Bo Winegard. Both he and his brother Ben consider "Western Civilization" and "the West" to be important enough to mention them as things they care about, in their Twitter profiles. Those terms are usually used to mean Europe, in other words, white people.

I've demonstrated many times how incoherent race "science" is, on this blog, and the Winegards' worship of "the West" is another case in point. Race science claims that "East Asians" are the smartest "race" although sometimes race science breaks Ashkenazi Jews into a separate race and then declares them to be the smartest race. You can watch white supremacist Stefan Molyeux and race science professional Linda Gottfredson defining and ranking races by intelligence in a Molyneux interview.

So why do Bo and Ben Winegard love Western Civilization so much, since by their own race science belief system, white people are at best the second most intelligent "race?" Why don't they align with Eastern Civilization, the civilization created by a smarter race? 

It doesn't make sense. But then, neither does race science, and people who promote it will inevitably be revealed as racist. As Bo Winegard has been revealed as a racist.

The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The race crackpottery of Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard part 2

PART 1

Steven Pinker has not, as far as I have been able to discover, acknowledged the existence of Steve Sailer since 2011, although prior to that Pinker promoted Sailer's career, using him to support his position in a dispute with Malcolm Gladwell and even included him in a collection of "the best" science and nature writing.

But since 2011, no acknowledgement, and I have looked. Although Steve Sailer will tell you that he has had a big influence on Pinker.

Sailer has certainly been a big influence on the thinking of "human biodiversity" proponents like Bo and Ben Winegard.

The Winegards together with the Koch-supported Johnny Anomaly, can be seen promoting "human biodiversity" in this 2020 paper, which cites many of the biggest names in scientific racism including Linda Gottfredson, J.P. Rushton and Richard Lynn. No mention of Sailer though, even to mention he coined the term human biodiversity.

The Winegards like to use a Sailer term "platonic essence" to justify how, although they are certain that a category of humans called "black" exists, and that this category has special evolved traits, at the same time they deny the existence of clear-cut races. How nice to have things both ways, without being conscious of the logical disconnect.

But Pinker, who has also promoted the work of the Winegards, has pioneered the use of equivocation as a career choice.

The Winegards, in their A Tale of Two Bell Curves, included the results of a survey of, they claim, "expert opinion" on intelligence testing and Sailer was deemed to be the most reliable source.

However there isn't much else online linking the Winegards with Sailer. Which is not to say there is no evidence of a relationship. Last June Bo Winegard can be seen having a friendly exchange with Sailer, on Twitter, about movies.

Winegard must have a pretty friendly relationship with Sailer, not only because he engages in casual conversation with him in public, but because Winegard is aware that Sailer is radioactive, since Sailer is infamous as a racist.

Sailer himself acknowledged this recently on his Unz blog (also double-dipping at VDARE) by quoting someone else saying Winegard claimed in his Quillette podcast interview:

one of the triggers to his being fired was him liking a tweet by Steve Sailer…

Pinkerite has discussed the professional racist career of Sailer, in depth in a series of posts but I kept meaning to come back to one particular thing that Sailer said, which demonstrates the utter failure of race "science" as a science.

In my post The racist logic of Steve Sailer, I quoted Sailer from a VDARE article:

Q. But I see all these black people on TV being highly entertaining. They look pretty lively upstairs. Could IQ tests be missing something? 

A. Yes. IQ test questions, by their nature, must have fixed, objective answers. If African Americans are better at subjective, improvisatory responses than they are at objective problem-solving, then IQ will fail to predict fully their patterns of success in the real world. And, indeed, we see much evidence for that every time we turn on the TV (e.g., Oprah).  

Unfortunately, there aren't nearly as many jobs being entertainment or sports superstars as black youths seem to assume, so, overall, IQ remains a quite accurate predictor outside of the tiny sliver of celebrities.

The link to support Sailer's claim that African Americans have a "subjective, improvisatory" kind of intelligence is an article by Sailer himself from 1999 in the National Post of Canada available via the Wayback Machine.

The article contains gems of science such as:

Interestingly, while blacks tend to be more masculine in physique and personality than whites or East Asians, they are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Jordan's brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent's every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it. It's not easy.)

So Steve Sailer has a problem, which he presents as a frequently asked question, about his racist theories. The problem is that many black people seem very smart indeed.

So Sailer invents a special kind of intelligence for African Americans - "subjective and improvisatory" as opposed to "objective problem-solving." And Sailer declares in his 1999 article that blacks are better at "feminine, more subjective cerebral skills."

There is no scientific evidence that the abilities Sailer claims are black and female are mutually exclusive with objective problem-solving, never mind evidence that women and black people are innately less able to solve problems.

But the absence of evidence will never stop a bigot. Steve Sailer needed a "scientific" justification so he pulled one out of his ass.

And that's where Bo Winegard gets his science - from Steve Sailer's ass.

Although we don't know for sure the reason why Marietta College declined to keep Bo Winegard on its payroll, it has every right to regard Winegard as a crank and a charlatan who dresses up 18th century beliefs and the crackpot theories of Steve Sailer as "science" to try to make a buck.

He might be able to make a buck, but like the career of Steve Sailer, he won't make a buck from people who value intellectual excellence and serious scientific work. Bo Winegard's hope for a career as a race monger rests on the right-wing racist eco-system funded by the same wealthy, cranky, old white men who have supported Steve Sailer for decades. 

And from Winegard's perspective, why not? Shilling the contents of Steve Sailer's ass as "science" sure beats working for a living.