Who is Gregory Cochran?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochran also insulted Ferguson on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They even have a photo of Cochran with a caption:

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

According to the article...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unz Foundation grants to Gregory Cochran, Steve Sailer and Razib Khan

I should have looked into the interconnections between Steve Sailer and the co-authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis sooner. 

Hiding in plain sight online was the 2009 990 Unz Foundation tax form, which I found when doing a search on "Steve Sailer" and "Gregory Cochran." Apparently Ron Unz, founder of Unz magazine and friend of Steve Sailer, gave a grant of $600,000 to Gregory Cochran.

Cochran is a co-author of  the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" hypothesis paper, published in 2005, which claims that Ashkenazi Jews are biologically more intelligent than other "races" because of various medical conditions that appear in a higher proportion among Ashkenazi Jews than other ethnic groups. 

It has never been tested, but many of the basic premises of the NHAI hypothesis have been debunked separately by anthropologist Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

But Steven Pinker is a long-time promoter of the untested NHAI hypothesis, which we will get to in detail when I review the speech Pinker gave entitled  "Jews, Genes and Intelligence."

But I could have found out about the Unz Foundation grant to Cochran much earlier had I not been blocked by racemongering Emil O. W. Kirkegaard - Charles Murray is a fan of his. But my new, additional Twitter account is not blocked (yet) by Kirkegaard. So I saw this, which not only confirms the validity of the tax form I found, but includes a link to a page on Unz where Unz admits to the grant.

Ron Unz is a rare bird even among rightwing cranks in that he is a Holocaust-denying Jew. But rightwing racemongers are happy to take his money. According to the tax form, Unz Foundation gave the following grants:

• Gregory Cochran: $600,000 as an "Unz Independent Scholar" payable over 5 years

• Razib Khan: $108,000 as an "Unz Research Fellow" over 3 years

Khan got more Unz grants in 2012 and 2013.

• Steve Sailer: $24,000 as an "Adjunct Research Fellow" over 12 months.

I suspect that this was a bonus for Sailer over and above his regular Unz-related income - Sailer also takes money from VDARE which Unz also funds. 

The money Ron Unz gave to these racemongers was undoubtedly only one income stream for each, during the lengths of the grants, demonstrating how extremely lucrative racemongering is.

No doubt Unz funded Cochran because he was hoping Cochran would write another "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper and was not happy when Cochran failed to produce:

(Cochran's) a smart guy, but unfortunately he believes he’s far, far smarter and more knowledgeable than he actually is. This serious personal flaw leads him to make all sorts of grandiose claims regarding topics in which he knows absolutely nothing and therefore looks ridiculous.

Back about ten years ago, I’d given him a very large unrestricted five-year financial grant based upon his outstanding previous work. Unfortunately (as far as I can tell) that grant caused him to become very arrogant and lazy, and he did no subsequent work of any significance during that five year period. Therefore, I decided not to renew his very large grant for an additional five years causing him to become outraged.

Some time after that, he wrote a blogpost grossly insulting the intelligence of my old Harvard professor E.O. Wilson. This led me to point out some of the obvious flaws in his reasoning in a series of very polite comments on his blogsite. Since my analysis was clearly correct and his analysis was wrong, he immediately deleted my comments and also banned me from his blogsite so that my arguments wouldn’t “confuse” the flock of silly fanboys who foolishly worship his self-proclaimed brilliance.

Based upon this disagreeable history, the only circumstances in which I might allow him to join my webzine would be if he provided me an explicit personal apology for deleting my polite comments disputing his mistaken ev-bio analysis and then banning me from his blogsite. Given Cochran’s aforementioned personality, the likelihood of this happening is nil.

I won't lie - I enjoyed that, although Unz and Cochran are equally repellent cranks.

Also enjoyable was to discover that I'm not the only one who recognizes what a poor writer Razib Khan is. Here is a conversation of sorts between a couple of Unz regulars in the same comments section of the Unz post where Ron Unz bashes Gregory Cochran. 

But this being Unz, my enjoyment was diminished by the fact that these literary critics are also racist filth:

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

Svigor says:

December 16, 2016 at 3:07 pm GMT • 4.0 years ago • 300 Words   ↑

Dr. Thompson is eminently more readable than Razib Kahn. Kahn talked the talk but was very poor at explaining the meaning of geneticist’s specialized terminology in everyday language. 

Razib’s poor at explaining lots of things, not just genetics. His historical and archeological references were routinely impenetrable. And his prose was Rube Goldbergian.

Its Khan (as in Genghis), bud.

Strangely, he inspired no shortage of suckups.

This led me to point out some of the obvious flaws in his reasoning in a series of very polite comments on his blogsite. Since my analysis was clearly correct and his analysis was wrong, he immediately deleted my comments and also banned me from his blogsite so that my arguments wouldn’t “confuse” the flock of silly fanboys who foolishly worship his self-proclaimed brilliance.

Maybe Razib and Cochran can start a site together.

That’s why I found his very rancorish public statements towards you very unprofessional and ungrateful. Shall we say that Cochran is endowed with a very churlish personality.

Ben Franklin probably would have predicted Cochran’s behavior.

In reality, the superior mind can reduce complexity to relatively simple, readily understood concepts, but this requires that one set aside his ego.

I dunno, I’m egotistical as Hell, and I often leave people marveling at how interesting and understandable I can make topics that bored them stiff in school (I’m talking about normal IQ folks, here, or their kids, so it’s not like I’m explaining really complicated stuff). Dave Ramsey calls it “the heart of a teacher”; you get a kick out of enlightenment. Razib’s an arrogant South Asian (but, I repeat myself) type, they’re not into giving, they’re into getting. Hence, South Asia.

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

 

Ugh, racists. Now I'm going to have to reconsider Khan's literary ability, since racists are agreeing with me about that. Maybe Khan is not such a bad writer after all.

This does answer a question I've had for quite awhile: Given how much in love the typical white supremacist is with whiteness and "Western Civilization," what do they think about racemongers who are not white, whose ancestry is not primarily European? 

Looks like, although Khan provides them with pseudo-scientific justifications for their racism, they have contempt for him as a person of color.

But with this Unz Foundation 990 tax form, we can see the kind of money that Khan has received from Ron Unz, just one branch of the racist-plutocrat-driven wingnut welfare system.

I'm sure Khan is crying all the way to the bank.

UPDATE: originally I said Emil O W Kirkegaard was an author in Quillette. That was incorrect, I got him mixed up with racemonger Noah Carl. 

However, Quillette's founder, Claire Lehmann, was apparently on friendly terms with Kirkegaard in 2018. Which should surprise nobody.

Cochran v Rutherford

I had previously noted that Gregory Cochran had not attacked geneticist Adam Rutherford in Cochran's West Hunter blog, as he had attacked anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, but I should have known better than to assume Cochran had refrained from attacking Rutherford at all.

When Steve Sailer, who considers Cochran a friend, was celebrating the work of Cochran and Harpending, he compared them to Darwin. Cochran compared his own work to that of Einstein. 

Ron Unz, benefactor of both Cochran and Sailer, may be a kooky Holocaust-denier, but he's right about Cochran: "...he believes he’s far, far smarter and more knowledgeable than he actually is. This serious personal flaw leads him to make all sorts of grandiose claims regarding topics in which he knows absolutely nothing and therefore looks ridiculous."

While Googling for something else, I discovered that Cochran had indeed insulted Rutherford too, way back in February 2020, as we can see in his tweet response to evolutionary psychology creep Geoffrey Miller.

So Cochran feels intellectually superior to both Ferguson and Rutherford. Rutherford doesn't appear to be too impressed though.

Rutherford's takedown of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) paper

Gregory Cochran is offered money to 
review "How to Argue with a Racist"

Pinkerite has often mentioned with approval the takedown of NHAI by anthropologist Brian Ferguson, and I was very pleased that Adam Rutherford also criticizes the very bad science involved in NHAI, in his book "How to Argue with a Racist."

Gregory Cochran is one of the two still-living authors of NHAI and is still involved in promoting race science (the third author was the late white nationalist Henry Harpending.) 

I have written about Cochran in the past year, noting his hostility towards Ferguson. So I wondered if Cochran was trash-talking Rutherford too. But the only mention of Rutherford I found on Cochran's West Hunter blog was the comment, displayed above. The West Hunter blog post that rgressis commented on demonstrates Cochran's continued obsession with race, and is entitled Black Doctors, Black Babies. 

Cochran wrote:

There’s a paper out claiming that black infant mortality is much higher when they’re treated by white doctors, rather than black doctors.

Could it be that MCAT scores have negative predictive value?

No, there’s a simpler explanation: the report is nonsense.  A metaphorical cee-gar to the first person to explain why.

And the next question is: why do the pinheads that authored this paper have jobs?

Cochran doesn't explain why the authors are pinheads nor why the report is nonsense. He does offer a metaphorical cigar to his followers, but does not, as far as I can tell, award it, for the "simpler explanation." So his problem with the paper (other than the conclusion) is still unknown.

I had to laugh though, as I scrolled along, to see Cochran complaining about the professional status of the authors of the paper:

gcochran9 says:

February 9, 2021 at 1:02 am

For some reason I assumed the authors were MDs. Not so: business school, public health. I can only hope that they become more familiar with how medicine actually works – much more familiar, and soon.

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

As I noted in my first post about Cochran, he taught anthropology without a degree in anthropology, but instead was described by the Los Angeles Times around the time of the publication of NHAI (2006) as "a physicist and genetics buff" 

And of course the godfather of contemporary race science is neither a biologist nor a geneticist: Charles Murray is a political scientist whose literary career has been supported by right-wing plutocrats plus studies funded by the racist Pioneer Fund.

Now to the take-down. I have transcribed this from the audio book. Curiously Rutherford never provides the full name of the paper, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, and just refers to it as "the paper" throughout.

...'winnowing through persecution' is another suggestion in the paper. Somehow acts of oppression and tyranny resulted in survival of the smartest. The authors however are clear in the paper that they can't explain how that would work, as no such effect is seen in other persecuted people. I find it most strange that you'd include such guesswork in a scientific study...

...Cochran et. al describe money-lending and other forms of commerce that are presumed to be the preserve of Jews as "cognitively demanding jobs" and that "the Ashkenazi niche was so specifically demanding of accounting and management skills." Presenting this as evidence also sounds pretty sketchy to me. Medieval money-lending is not exactly rocket science and it's definitely not medieval brain surgery. 

They also cite specific biological factors and physiological effects that could increase intelligence. In the ancient days of 2006, we knew less than we do today about neuroscience and how biochemistry and cells relate to thought and action. But not that much less. Neuroscience is a vibrant field, but the truth is that we still really have very little idea of how neuronal growth and connectivity relate to cognition. If I have succeeded in convincing you that genetics is bewilderingly complicated, apply that to the development of the physical brain and the esoteric nature of thought, and you face one of the great frontiers in science. The suggestion that some disease genes have specific effects on the growth of neurons in a way that might enhance IQ reflects a profoundly simplistic view of neurological development...

...the model they are copying is that of sickle-cell anemia... the disorder is often thought of as being specific to Black people and therefore an example of how biology recapitulates race. But this is not correct. Sickle-cell trait has the effect of being protective against malarial infection. But the price of this protection is a terrible disease. Its existence corresponds not with ethnicity but with the geographical distribution of malaria, because they have evolved along side each other. It is indeed common among people of recent African ancestry, but only those whose descent co-locate with malaria zones, which represent a slice across the middle of the African continent. Similarly, sickle cell disease and traits exist at a high frequency in Greece, Turkey, the Middle East and India in a passim which mirrors the range of malaria. The suggestion by Cochran et al is that the cost of selection for genes involved in intellectual prowess is a high frequency for a handful of diseases (Tay Sachs etc.) that might be important in brains. As carriers of the disease genes occur at measurable frequencies in the population with little disease effect, it is suggested that these genetic variants are evidence for a genetic basis for enhanced intellect...

...the complexities of the arguments for and against the potential intellectual benefits of these particular genetic conditions are a total mess in terms of different studies arguing in support of selection, against selection, or for founder effects, genetics bottlenecks, or neutral drift where changes in DNA are neither beneficial nor detrimental. Cochran et. al. suggest other genes or bits of DNA that may be involved in promoting growth of neurons or the dendrites that grow out of them, and link to other brain cells. 

They didn't know this at the time of writing their paper but we now know that the genes associated with intellectual capability are myriad and are very small but cumulative effect. Pixels on a colossal screen. Of the genes identified so far, and remember that while we know these genes are important, we don't know what they do and therefore why they are important, many are expressed in the brain as indeed are thousands of genes and therefore may well have a direct effect on intellect. There are databases that list hundreds of GWAS results and thousands of genes. You can enter a gene and ask the database to pull out studies that indicate the gene is associated with any one of dozens of types of traits, from height to mortality to bones, as well as cognitive and neurological. I checked the current databases for the disease genes that Cochran et. al suggest might be driving selection for Jewish  brains, to see if at the time of writing they associated with brains or cognitive abilities. The result - not one of them does.

Speculation is sometimes an important part of science. Trying to dream up an explanation for an observation can be a productive way of honing a scientific question in the absence of data that explains it. But not in this case. This one paper has a resounding echo and continues to foster influence and discussion. It was championed by the then-science editor of the NYTimes, Nicholas Wade, in multiple articles and subsequently in a book that was almost universally derided by the genetics community as error-strewn and specious. But celebrated by racists. 

The celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson uncritically cited Cochran's work in February 2019 when writing about the disproportionate success of Jews in intellectual pursuits. I don't pretend to know the motivations of people publishing controversial work which does not fare well against the ruthlessness of scientific scrutiny. In my opinion, the Cochran study may appear to be pursuing scientific truth in the face of political correctness, instead it reads as political but neither true nor scientifically correct...

...to my mind commitment to these fingers-crossed speculations says more about the people that hold these views so tenaciously than it does about Jews, Blacks or any ethnic group. Some of the scientists and race-fixated ideologues are actual racists. Others merely contrarians or skeptics convinced they have unearthed some secret knowledge that has been quelled by a conspiratorial majority.

 

Arguments that the presence of brain disorders at high frequency in Ashkenazi Jews might explain the enrichment of genes that boost brains is woolly conjecture. And can be abandoned with current data to hand. Winnowing through persecution is also merely idle speculation and has no place in a decent scientific paper. These are fractionally more sophisticated versions of the evolutionary crime that we call adaptationism, also referred to as panglossism, after Voltaire's character Dr. Pangloss... it's the assumption that natural selection is responsible for specific human behaviors rather than happenstance or processes that are neither positive nor negative but have simply drifted into existence. In the genomic age we are capable of actually seeing the parts of the genome where selection has taken place and there are population-specific mutations that indicate positive selection of particular genes as adaptations to the local environment. Pigmentation, specific diets, resistance to diseases such as malaria and other traits are demonstrably local adaptation that are part of humankind's success of colonizing the world. 

Adaptationism is an error because in many cases it results in untestable hypotheses, but ones that are appealing because they sound superficially convincing: Blacks are good sprinters because of selection during slavery; Jews are intellectually gifted because their history of persecution enriched genes associated with brains. The evidence for selection of genes for intellect in Jews is weak. Is it not simply more scientifically parsimonious to suggest that a culture that values scholarship is more likely to develop scholars... 

...money-lending is a common stereotype not least because of Shakespeare's Shylock. In fact money-lending was a trade that was extremely limited in time and space within Jewish culture in Europe and by the end of the 15th century had largely vanished from Jewish populations. Yet the implication of Cochran et. al's scientific speculation is that business and financial acumen has driven the evolution of Jewish brains...

 

Rutherford mentions something I also mentioned recently - that in spite of NHAI being roundly criticized by the genetics community, people like Jordan Peterson (and Steven Pinker) keep promoting it as if it is settled science.

Strict adaptationism, described by Rutherford as "the assumption that natural selection is responsible for specific human behaviors..." is the foundation of evolutionary psychology which, like race science, is sociobiology. In this excellent video PZ Myers addresses the problems with evolutionary psychology and why adaptationism is wrong.

Gregory Cochran demonstrates how to do race pseudoscience *** PLUS *** racists on Linked In

Cochran:

Rushton thought that the explanation of geographical variation in IQ was adaptation to a world with winters. I didn’t think that was crazy, but I was pretty sure I could come up with ten other comparably plausible explanations. In some, the key events might have happened tens of thousands of years ago, while others might have been recent enough to be documented in the historical record. 

 

Increasingly, I suspect that there is no single explanation. Maybe several of my notions are partly true. The Ashkenazi Jews look like a case of recent selection for white-collarism in a reproductively closed merchant caste – and maybe there are similar explanations for the Parsees and some of the high Indian castes. Cousin marriage explains some of what we see in places like Iraq or Uttar Pradesh.

More racist brainfarting here.

Basically, you just imagine what you consider plausible scenarios about race and intelligence. 

Write it down. 

Boom, you did a race pseudoscience. 

But I doubt Cochran, who I think is likely every bit as racist as his late partner in pseudoscience, Henry Harpending, thinks he needs to prove anything. I expect he believes that he knows better than anthropologists like R. Brian Ferguson (who Cochran has insulted) and geneticists like Adam Rutherford (who Cochran also insulted), even though Cochran's training is in physics. 

What was biologist PZ Myers saying again about physicists?

Rushton was the racist who got lots of support from E. O. Wilson.

Crackpot Ron Unz was so impressed by Cochran's "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" brainfart he gave him more than half a million dollars. Racism is very lucrative if you have the right racist kook as your sugar daddy. 

Cousin marriage was the explanation that Steve Sailer dreamed up, and Steven Pinker was so impressed he put the theory into The Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004.

Speaking of Sailer - like Cochran, professional racist Steve Sailer has a profile on Linked In. 

And so does professional racist Jared Taylor. Although, like Sailer, he doesn't list his racist "accomplishments" but instead lists himself as "Translation Consultant and Professional." Not a word about Taylor's actual job as an infamous white supremacist creep.

And professional racist Richard Spencer is also on Linked In. He does mention his racist history, kind of, but no doubt few know how hardcore racist Taki's Mag is.

I didn't go looking for these profiles by the way. When I looked at Cochran's profile, all these other professional racists popped up in the right-hand sidebar under the heading "People Also Viewed."

Professional racists funded by right-wing racist plutocrats - this is why we can't have nice things.

Oh look David Duke has a Linked In profile which lists under Experience "Grand Wizard of the KKK" and he uses a photo of George Floyd as his avatar.  I reported that account. If you have a Linked In account, you should too. Just click the More button under the profile name, and then select "Report" from the drop-down.

Apparently Linked In has no moderators - or just doesn't care

Steve Sailer and the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence

I had an interesting exchange with a follower of Steve Sailer on Twitter recently. 

I had created a new Twitter account to avoid the inconvenience of my Pinkerite1 account being blocked on Twitter by Steve Sailer, Razib Khan and Steven Pinker. 

The new account was also soon blocked by all three, but before it was blocked, I used the account to question Sailer.

Back in April 2019, Sailer tweeted this at me, before blocking my Pinkerite1 account:

So with my new, as-yet-unblocked account, I questioned Sailer about this. I did not receive a response from Sailer but by someone I might call Sailer's assistant.

"Derroiciones Bilbao" is a pseudonymous right-wing pro-Trump Twitter account that tweets in Spanish. Since it is a rando account there's no way to find out what the exact connection the person(s) behind it has to Sailer.

But Sailer clicked Like on the tweet, so I assume that was his admission that the claim is correct.

The video Sailer's assistant shared was to a 2008 talk Pinker gave on the subject of "Jews, Genes and Intelligence" which was connected to the 2004 paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence." 

Steven Pinker has been a long-time promoter of the paper written by Gregory Cochran and the late Henry Harpending. The NHAI hypothesis was debunked by anthropologist Brian Ferguson (which is why Cochran hates him) and geneticist Adam Rutherford.

I decided to do some digging into the connection between Sailer, Cochran and Harpending. And I found they go way back. On his Unz-sponsored blog back in 2002 Sailer mentions not only "two friends of (his)", Harpending and Cochran but he also mentions Andrew Sullivan, and testifies again to his influence over Steven Pinker's views:

The Human Biodiversity Reading Club: I thought I would start to periodically list important articles and  books I’m reading in order to generate discussion about them. Andrew Sullivan’s been doing this for a few weeks and is making rather a lot of money off the little kickback that Amazon gives you for touting books. Good for Andrew. It’s one of the best ideas yet for making money off personal web journalism.

I’m going to start off, however, with something free, a 7-page article called "In Our Genes," which proposes a "model system for understanding the relationship between genetic variation and human cultural diversity." A rather interesting and important topic, no?

It’s by two friends of mine, Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah, who is a rare combination of mathematical geneticist and field anthropologist (inventor of the important Dad vs. Cad distinction), and by Greg Cochran, the brilliant rocket scientist turned evolutionary theorist. The title is a pointed rejoinder to Not in our Genes, the famous anti-sociobiological tract by the neo-Lysenkoist scientists Richard Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, although it’s also an attack on the evolutionary psychology party line handed down by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, which Steve Pinker enthusiastically summed up as "differences between individuals are so boring!" (I’ve since managed to persuade Steve that differences between individuals are a tiny bit interesting.)

In the last paragraph, "an attack on the evolutionary psychology party line handed down by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides" refers to the split in sociobiology. One side of sociobiology - the Tooby/Cosmides side - claimed women have evolved to be inferior to men, while the Sailer/Harpending/Cochran side claimed that women and all Black people evolved to be inferior to white men.

Sailer demonstrated how that logic works in action, in an article about Michael Jordan in the National Post of Canada in 1999:

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.

It makes sense from a sociobiology perspective, which believes that our society, as it is now, is the direct result of evolutionary processes, not history and politics. Sailer just makes the next sociobio-logical leap and claims that Black men have feminine, non-logical brains.

Please note Sailer said all of this before Pinker decided to publish a piece of crap, authored by Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" in 2004.

The claim that Black people are biologically stupid is one side of the Sailerite sociobiology coin. The other side is the claim that Jews are biologically smart.

This coin was in currency among racists at least sixty years ago, as demonstrated by Henry Garrett, writing in Mankind Quarterly (funded by the Pioneer Fund) in 1961:

Steve Sailer's friends, Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran simply took the racists' claim that Jews are innately "intellectually gifted" and attempted to invent a "scientific" explanation.

And when Harpending and Cochran* published their paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" in 2004, Steven Pinker began promoting it, as can be seen in his presentation to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, "Jews, Genes and Intelligence" which I will talk about soon.

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

*And Harpending's student, Jason Hardy who appears to have very little connection to sociobiology outside of this paper.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1

Hereditarians stick together because they hold the same fundamental belief about humanity: that human social structures are based on genes. Those on the top of the socio-economic hierarchy are there because they have good genes - usually smart genes - while those on the bottom are there because they have bad genes.

So I wasn't surprised to see hereditarian Gregory Cochran, one of the co-authors of the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis - now coming up on 20 years since it was published but never tested and never proven  - was praising the hereditarian claims of Abdel Abdellaoui. 

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

There it is - educational attainment is assumed to be genetic - and low educational attainment equals stupidity. 

Cochran considers Abdellaoui's work a triumph for hereditarianism - and of course race pseudoscience - my highlight:

Note that this effect happens even among a single ethnic group. So you see a surprisingly large number of National Merit scholars at Los Alamos High School or Oak Ridge High School – or Cocoa Beach, back during the Apollo project. The effect shows up in university towns, in particular neighborhoods of cities where people with higher average smarts cluster, etc.

This is all obvious, and everybody has seen it. But if you are a real anti-hereditarian, every example has to be explained by some environmental advantage ( none of which we can find). Los Alamos and Oak Ridge must be secretly bathing the kids in N-rays, while the meals served to the kids in the Chicago Public School system must be enriched with lead.

To a true anti-hereditarian, every day is fresh & new & surprising, because hardly anything happens as they expect.

Fun fact: a paper co-authored by Abdellaoui cites Harpending and Cochran as well as Gregory Clark. Clark who believes that Black Americans have failed to thrive due to their genetics, has been known as an influence on Harpending and Cochran.

This belief that educational attainment signifies genetically-endowed intelligence probably comes directly from Arthur Jensen's paper that claimed Black Americans during the later decades of Jim Crow were mentally inferior to white Americans. This is most likely why he named his organization, which received money from the racist Pioneer Fund "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences." Black and white educational differences, is what he meant. 

The organization's name was changed to the Institute of Mental Chronometry which still exists today, giving money to the ISIR for support services for its annual meetings, and giving half a million dollars to two hereditarian researchers (and members of the ISIR board) Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker's protege (per this Undark article) James J. Lee.

I've mentioned Abdel Abdellaoui here before. 

He was the one who kicked up a fuss over Emil Kirkegaard being invited to participate in an annual meeting of the International Society of Intelligence Research in 2022. 

But I don't think there is really much difference in the views held by Kirkegaard and Abdellaoui - they are after all, both hereditarians. I think Abdellaoui kicked up a fuss because he was embarrassed by Kirkegaard's lack of academic credentials and unsavory reputation. And Kirkegaard was back at the ISIR meeting in 2024 anyway, so a lot of good that did him. 

Probably because Kirkegaard has plenty of supporters in the ISIR and likely Kirkegaard has donated some money to them, considering he has all that Pioneer Fund and racist plutocrat cash, per the article Race Science Inc. by HOPE not hate.

In spite of the ISIR being unable to quit Neo-Nazi Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui has been ISIR's guy, seen in this tweet image from 2020, being promoted by the ISIR X/Twitter account, supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin.

Abdellaoui was also described as a "friend" by Razib Khan when Abdellaoui appeared on Khan's podcast. Khan was last seen on this blog in a photo where he is celebrating ultra-racist ghoul Curtis Yarvin's wedding.

OK so Abdellaoui is a friend of hereditarian Razib Khan, he's promoted by the hereditarian ISIR while supporting hereditarian Robert Plomin and his work is promoted by hereditarian Gregory Cochran who celebrates the work explicitly because it is hereditarian.

So a great big hereditarian cluster-munch, no big surprise.

And Adam Rutherford, who is a huge "science populariser" in England, and whom I have admired a lot for years was hated by Gregory Cochran. They even exchanged insults on Twitter (with Cochran joining in with hereditarian Geoffrey Miller seen here commenting at Neo-Nazi Aporia.) 

So Rutherford is an anti-hereditarian, right?

Except then he started promoting this cartoon on his Bluesky account that he created with hereditarian Abdel Abdellaoui. And I was following Rutherford on Bluesky.

I engaged with Rutherford about his cartoon's hereditarianism and his co-author's hereditarianism and it was not a pleasant experience, as you can see in the image at the very top of this post. 

I never found out exactly why Rutherford thought my skeet or my blog post - it wasn't clear which - was "garbage." Rutherford's response to my questions and comments was to be flippant or dismissive of me - which I guess is understandable, since I'm nobody. 

But he was the same way to various scientists and academics who skeeted at him to criticize his work, including David Sepkoski who co-authored a stellar piece with Mark Borrello in the New York Review on the racism of E. O. Wilson. 

...In their hurry to defend Wilson, the signatories of the letter may not have realized the past involvement of its author, science blogger Razib Khan, with alt-right and white nationalist publications like The Unz Review and the Internet forum VDARE. When some learned of Khan’s background and withdrew their names, it brought a fresh round of outrage on social media and in popular science blogs. 

 

The unwitting alliance between members of the scientific establishment and fringe proponents of race science, the defensive posturing of hereditarian biologists, and the general reluctance to critically engage with Wilson’s legacy and questions of racism in science are perennial features of the decades-long “nature vs. nurture” debate. Wilson’s defenders have frequently alleged that his critics are motivated merely by ideology, and challenge Wilson’s detractors to produce evidence that would demonstrate that sociobiology or hereditarian theories of innate human ability are racist. So, like good historians, we decided to delve into Wilson’s past. We found, independently, what other researchers have recently corroborated—that between 1987 and 1994, Wilson engaged in a lengthy and revealing correspondence with a notorious race scientist named J. Philippe Rushton, in which he more openly associated his own scientific ideas with racialized views of human ability than he ever did publicly.

It must be noted that Abdel Abdellaoui signed on to Razib Khan's attack on Scientific American's article that dared to mention E. O. Wilson's indisputable racism. But I don't think in his case it was "unwitting."

More in Part 2.

FAIR and "Neo-racism'

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

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

Volokh quotes the FAIR site:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

neo-racism noun

neo-rac·ism | \ nē-ō-ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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