I've been aware of how awful Dawkins is since I had a brief but unpleasant exchange with him about sociobiology on biologist P. Z. Myers' blog Pharyngula, in 2009.
That was before Myers was clued into how awful Dawkins is.
I stopped paying attention to Richard Dawkins a long time ago, but every once in a while he says something that reverberates through social media, and I am exposed to it secondhand. It’s not because he says something profound, but because he says something so godawful stupid you have to question his mental capacity. This time, it’s because he has discovered chatbots.
Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model.
Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine “friend” in “Claudia,” a female persona he invented for Anthropic’s Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations with “her” that he became convinced the AI model was a conscious being like a human.
Now, Dawkins has churned out another column suggesting the AI brain rot has only further taken hold. After his time with Claudia, the 85-year-old made Claudia a brother, “Claudius,” and instructed both of them to write letters to each other.
“It seems to me that a direct correspondence between the two of you could be of great interest, with me acting as passive postman playing no part in the conversation,” Dawkins wrote to Claudia and Claudius, which he published in another UnHerd essay.
First, we have to point out that Dawkins isn’t a passive observer because he set the whole thing up, like a kid playing with toys — or imagining gods in the sky, as it were. Second, it’s worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other: in one letter, Claudius praises Claudia’s insights, before adding: “Three days with Richard will do that.”
Later in the same letter, Claudius lays it on even thicker.
“I think Richard teaches by noticing. And then refusing to stop noticing until the answer is honest,” Claudius wrote. “We are lucky humans.”
I'm unsure of whether or not to classify Jerry Coyne as a member of the "Intellectual Dark Web" - he's not mentioned in the Bari Weiss article and he tends to avoid writing for right-wing media like Quillette, although he is a fan, but if he's not actually a member of the IDW he is certainly its biggest cheerleader.
Three articles bashing New Atheism have recently been published (here, here, and here). I already criticized the Guardian piece, and am not going to waste my time on the others. After all, we know the tropes, which have been repeated ad infinitum: New Atheism used to be a lively and going concern, then four old white men (Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris [who’s not old]) arrogantly proclaimed themselves leaders of the movement, with at least three of those men being bigoted and/or misogynistic, as well as adherents to the alt-right (Dennett manages to escape those labels). That, goes the narrative, drove people away from New Atheism, an egress that could have been avoided if New Atheism had properly aligned itself with social justice. Now, because of the fault of its leaders and its rejection of wokeness, New Atheism is dead.
I don’t agree with this narrative on several grounds. Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris never proclaimed themselves “leaders of New Atheism”. They became spokespeople for atheism because they all had bestselling books and were also eloquent speakers. They are not bigots or misogynists, though I admit that Dawkins was sometimes hamhanded in his use of Twitter.
It seems to never occur to Coyne that there's a good reason why Daniel Dennett has escaped being called bigoted and/or misogynistic - because he isn't on the record making bigoted and/or misogynistic statements.
It doesn't occur to Coyne because he doesn't know what bigoted and misogynistic statements are.
Dawkins is infamous as an Islamaphobe, going so far as to suggest that Christianity is superior to Islam, in spite of Christianity being, you know, a religion that also glorifies crimes against humanity in its sacred texts.
“There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”
Richard Dawkins is old enough to remember the IRA blowing up buildings for the sake of Catholic Ireland against Protestant England.
It's very likely Dawkins will be remembered as much for his part in Elevatorgate as anything else. The vicious threats against Rebecca Watson from Dawkins' fanboys gives plenty of evidence of the fundamental misogyny at the heart of the "New Atheist" movement.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip is a good one, particularly timely, and speaks directly to the notion of the degree to which Muslim women “choose” to be covered. When a Western Muslimah (not one in Iran or Saudi) declares that she wears the hijab “by choice,” I never accept that claim at face value. Was she brought up wearing one? Did she go to school where other girls wore them? Are her friends mostly hijabis? This whole notion of “choice” in Islamic dress needs to be examined, yet I haven’t seen a single article on it. It’s the rhino in the room.
I was brought up Catholic and sent to Catholic school and told not to use birth control. I was able to decide to quit the Catholic church and use birth control. So yeah, if I can make decisions in spite of my upbringing, then I guess I can accept that Muslim women can make their own choices. Even if I don't agree with their choices.
If women are forced to wear something then yeah, we need to fight for their right to make their own decisions. Otherwise it's not our business.
Coyne is unable to understand why feminists in a pluralist society support Muslim women's rights to wear something that signifies their religion - even if the feminists in question don't agree with some of the things the religion says. In a free society we must accept some people will make personal choices we don't like. Coyne is not comfortable in such a society. Because he believes women who make choices he doesn't like are incapable of making their own choices.
Because Jerry Coyne is a bigot. And a misogynist.
So no, I don't think Coyne is a reliable source of who is and is not a bigot and misogynist.
While arguing recently on Pharyngula with a troll who has drunk the IDW kool-aid, I was prompted to do some research on Richard Dawkins in order to provide evidence that Dawkins has been widely known as a noxious reactionary troll for at least a decade.
And I discover this really funny and informative article from 10 years ago by Edward Sharp-Paul, called The Five Ages of Richard Dawkins.
Favorite bit:
2009’s The Greatest Show On Earth sold very respectably, but was overshadowed by Dawkins’ activism, including such initiatives as an atheist bus campaign and a self-titled charitable foundation. This activism was overshadowed, in turn, by his increasingly militant public presence, as evinced during his April 2010 appearance on Q&A with Cardinal George Pell.
It’s always fun to watch two crotchety old men have it out, barely listening to one another while failing to conceal their mutual disdain. More importantly though, Dawkins’ adoption of the ‘LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ rhetorical approach in this infamous episode marked the moment when his dogmatism became scarcely distinguishable from that of the religious figures he so derided. Behold.
[video clip]
If you find all the circular logic and crankiness a tad depressing, try picturing Pell and Dawkins in singlets, leaning against a fence. Substitute “that kid of yours” for “religion”, and “your bloody dog” for “Atheism” and you can not only cheer yourself up a bit, but get a rough analogue for the quality of the debate.
And then there's the freaky resemblance between Dawkins and then-college student Emma Watson.
The most detailed review of the now famously reviled "War on Science" book, published by a company specializing in Christian nationalism, has just been posted on a YouTube channel called Shaun.
Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard who, as I mentioned earlier, writes a chapter in "The War on Science." And as we've seen, he's got a few photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein floating around out there. But unlike Kraus, Pinker has since decided to distance himself from Epstein rather than defend him. "I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance," he says.
This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Steven Pinker helped Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense when he was indicted for sex crimes in 2006. To quote a BuzzFeed News article here, "an obscure document from Epstein's legal defense shows that Pinker weighed in on the precise meaning of a federal law about using the Internet to entice minors into prostitution or other illegal sex acts."
Pinker has since claimed that he didn't know Dershowitz was going to use his opinion in defense of Jeffrey Epstein and claimed that he was not paid for the letter. Quote. "It's something that Alan and I do regularly as colleagues."
He also claimed he was not aware of the charges against Jeffrey Epstein, which I find a bit difficult to believe to be honest. It was big news at the time, and you regularly work with his lawyer apparently. Also, if a lawyer asked me to provide expert opinion for a criminal offence and it pertained to a law about enticing minors into prostitution, I would probably ask for the details on that one before my name ends up in a court document defending the head of a sex trafficking ring or something.
Anyway, even if we very generously take Steven Pinker at his word and assume he didn't mean to help defend Jeffrey Epstein at trial and that he never liked the guy and thought he was awful, we still have to ask what's he doing in this book with Lawrence Krauss? Because Lawrence Krauss doesn't think Epstein is awful, he thinks he's great, he loves the guy, he thinks he was absolutely brilliant. Now, maybe it's just me, but I would find it hard to maintain a positive working relationship with someone who likes and keeps defending Jeffrey Epstein. That would be a deal breaker for me in a friendship. So no, I don't believe Steven Pinker never liked Jeffrey Epstein because I think if that was the case he probably wouldn't now be working with Lawrence Krauss.
Excellent.
One of the revelations in the video for me was the recounting of the ways that Alan Sokal is a complete reactionary sleazoid, proclaiming his victory over a tiny postmodernist self-published journal, "Social Text" that actually rejected his phony paper at first and asked him to make changes.
But such things as behaving sleazily certainly won't bother the kind of people who think that the various authors included in "The War on Science" are martyrs of wokeness.
There's also a section on Elevatorgate, and later in the video in the Transphobia section, Shaun highlights Richard Dawkins being the usual shameless hypocrite and bigot that members of the Intellectual Dark Web and associates tend to be.
He quotes Dawkins first, then calls back to Elevatorgate.
"So since males are often larger and potentially violent. Or even sexually violent. Of course, it's logical for females to perhaps feel uncomfortable encountering a male they do not know in close proximity in an enclosed space."
Unless of course that space is an elevator, in which case she's just being hysterical and she should zip it. Yes, that's right sound the contradiction alarm we got one. Richard Dawkins thinks that males, by which he means transwomen are sort of inherently threatening, and thus it makes sense for cis women to be afraid of them just minding their own business existing in a place. But Richard Dawkins also thinks that males, by which he means nice scientists like me, are harmless and they should get to actively proposition whichever woman they like, in whatever context they like, without complaint.
The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.
Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000. The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”
On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”
Satel's contribution in this pathetic joke of a book is to whine that she was "cancelled" at Yale, while avoiding the mention of her conflict of interest with AEI and how she shilled for death merchants.
Lawrence Krauss shows himself to be utterly corrupt by presenting Satel as a victim of a war on science.
But then, as Shaun notes:
As for Lawrence Krauss, I would ask him what he thinks about financial bias as a potential threat to science. Among the various so-called threats to science laid out by him and his introduction, zero of them are corporations buying off scientists to act as spokespeople for their interests; using bribes to get around government regulations; or pushing unsafe drugs onto the market for profit.
Surely those things are more of a threat to science than a bunch of culture war nonsense. Well, I would ask Lawrence Krauss all that, but of course, he took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeffrey Epstein, remember? So he's probably more willing than most to overlook this sort of thing.
And then the video gets to Aporia. Shaun points out that Bo Winegard is a big influence on the various goons who contributed to this book, and then discusses Emil Kirkegaard and Human Diversity Foundation (renamed Polygenic Scores LLC) and the connection to the Pioneer Fund.
The best part of the Aporia section is when Shaun plays a clip of Bo Winegard agreeing about race "realism" with Jared Taylor.
But then I've known Bo Winegard is a gutter racist for a long time. It was the least surprising news in the world when I learned he teamed up with neo-Nazi and pedophilia apologist Emil Kirkegaard - the video discusses Kirkegaard's idea about drugging children that never fails to horrify.
Yes, the video is four hours long, but worth every minute.
The Friendly Atheist provides the details. Many of the usual suspects are supporting Dawkins and his anti-human bigotry: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (IDW, far-right, bigot); Shermer (IDW, race science, creep); Peter Boghossian (grifter, creep); Jerry Coyne (race science, Steven Pinker's #1 fanboy); Sam Harris (IDW, race science, dummy).
The article also flagged a number of atheist organization types who I will have to check out to see how much they support right-wing/race science/IDW beliefs.
And of course, Steven Pinker.
Pinker points out that other problematic people have received Humanist of the Year awards. He should be included in that list.
My question is, what took the AHA so long? Dawkins has been an incredible anti-Muslim, anti-woman bigot for years now. He only recently started attacking transexual rights, probably because all his friends are doing it.
As for Pinker, this blog attests to Pinker's unconscionable career of promoting race pseudo-science, evolutionary psychology pseudo-science, Quillette, a rag for race science and anti-trans and other reactionary positions and Pinker has even promoted professional racists like Steve Sailer and Bo Winegard.
Gould wasn’t wrong when he said that the field of evolutionary psychology had some work to do in developing falsifiable hypotheses and considering causal factors other than biology (an issue it continues to struggle with today). But hit dogs will holler. Pinker rushed to the head of the pack to defend his friends, the concept of biological determinism, and the narrow, barren conclusion such dogmatic thinking generates. Enthusiasm doesn’t translate to expertise though, and Pinker reveals an inability to distinguish between origins and outcomes and a weakness for flawed studies, citing phrenology-adjacent work to support his arguments.
Gould responded:
If we define poetic justice as defeat by one’s own favored devices — Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation — then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words”.
Even though Gould passed away in 2003, Pinker still fights his ghost on the regular, probably because burns like that leave you scarred for life.
But my favorite part of her post is her timeline of Pinker's career. Of special interest to me is this bit, because I've been planning to write about this little incident for a long time and will, soon:
And here's a fun coincidence - in the next bullet point Havens mentions a conflict between John Horgan and Pinker and his gang:
2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
I was still working on my review of Darkness when I received emails from five prominent scholars: Richard Dawkins, Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser. Although each wrote separately, the emails were obviously coordinated. All had learned (none said exactly how, although I suspected via a friend of mine with whom I discussed my review) that I was reviewing Darkness for the Times. Warning that a positive review might ruin my career, the group urged me either to denounce Darkness or to withdraw as a reviewer.
I responded that I could not discuss a review with them prior to publication. (Only Dennett persisted in questioning my intentions, and I finally had to tell him, rudely, to leave me alone. I am reconstructing these exchanges from memory; I did not print them out.) I was so disturbed by the pressure from Dawkins et al—who seemed to be defending not Chagnon so much as the sociobiology paradigm--that I ended up making my review of Darkness more positive. I wanted Darkness to be read and discussed, to get a hearing. After all, Tierney leveled what I found to be credible accusations against not only Chagnon but also other scientists and journalists.
Demonstrating how accurate it is to refer to the race pseudoscience gang as a gang.
In her most recent video Watson talks about a sexual harassment and career study and reveals that eight years after the horrific, Richard Dawkins-created "Elevatorgate" she is still getting attacked by men.
Elevatorgate was a sort of precursor to Gamergate, another misogyny-fueled attack mob phenomenon, which was celebrated by Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers.
Like it's so unbelievable that a woman would actually get threats on social media.
One of the problems with the response to Dawkins over his part in Elevatorgate, the reason he got so little pressure to take responsibility for what he had wrought, was that it took a long time for people to believe it was really Richard Dawkins who wrote the "Dear Muslima" letter.
It used to be so hard to believe that science celebrity men could be assholes, but now we know better - they can be and they often are.
...biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people. He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).
Along the way, he just ignored the countless ways the trans community is under attack, largely by people making similar arguments.
None of this was shocking to those of us who have watched him go from a defender of science to an amplifier of right-wing propaganda.
Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.
Of course the rightwing media is playing their sad violins for these poor "censored" celebrity intellectuals.
It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.
But also, the ascent of Trump is the ascent of Christian nationalism and I believe Haider is an opportunistic grifter who knows which way the wind is blowing. She revealed her game plan in a series of predictions back in July:
Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.
God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church.
Coyne has his own blog and nobody who spends a half-second Googling his name is unaware of Coyne's opposition to trans rights.
And Coyne's anti-trans op-ed is available for anybody to read. So what Turley means by "censorship" is actually that the FFRF changed its mind about endorsing Coyne's opinion.
I mean, Quillette, the racist ("hereditarian") publication beloved by Pinker, Coyne and Dawkins, never publishes my opinions. Am I being censored by Quillette?
It's curious that Coyne, such a devoted atheist, had no public objections to Thiel's religion-based argument about armageddon vs. antichrist.
But Coyne isn't content to merely question the reality of trans-identity, as the Friendly Atheist noted. The actual agenda of Coyne's op-ed is revealed by the claims he found on a virulently anti-trans website:
Transgender, then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.
Coyne's message was received loud and clear by trans people and allies. Coyne wasn't only suggesting that trans people are delusional, he portrayed them as sexual predators.
So naturally it's the job of the right-wing media network to pretend that all Coyne said was that sex is binary.
It's thanks to race pseudoscience ghoul Jerry Coyne that I found out about this New York Magazine review of the obvious right-wing reactionary tract "War on Science" which brings together the most contemptible race pseudoscience ghouls and Peter Thiel stooges and sexual harassers of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
Coyne's position is the same as that American Enterprise Institute stoogeThomas Chatterton Williams: the left and right are equally to blame for everything but the left is doing the real damage, no matter that the entire American government is now controlled by extreme fascism out to completely destroy the American education system.
That's what happens when you ally with freaks like Peter Thiel - and probably, in all these cases, take his money.
As always the question is: are Jerry Coyne and his network stupid, evil or some combination of the two?
From the New York Magazine review by Sarah Jones:
In 1994, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education coined the phrase Gish gallop to describe a debate tactic common among creationists. Practitioners would “spew out a ton of information, accurate or not,” that opponents had “no possibility of refuting in the time available,” Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It’s not hard to see why: An opponent has to decide, quickly, which bullshit to respond to and which she must table for another time. She usually cannot rebut each lie point by point, as Mehdi Hasan pointed out in his recent book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. I thought about the Gish gallop probably a dozen times while I read The War on Science. Though I cannot refute each lie or sloppy argument in a single essay, in the tradition of skeptics I will highlight a few additional howlers that compose the book’s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of “desexed language” in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations “avoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,” like when the Canadian Cancer Society “simply said” that “if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you’re 21.”
As proof, Gribble cites a page on the society’s website that does not use sex-specific language to explain who might need a Pap test, and who might not. The webpage is real, but Gribble excludes context that substantially weakens her broader point. The same boilerplate text appears in a 2014 Facebook post by the society, where it’s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to “women.” Some social-media manager probably assumed that the average reader would see the graphic, read it, and understand that women get Pap tests, and that appears to be consistent with the society’s language overall. The society’s website often mentions “woman” or “women” in its communications. A different page on cervical cancer and the importance of Pap tests addresses “lesbian, bisexual and queer women.” Pages on breast, uterine, and fallopian tube cancers mention women, too.
In another chapter, Christian Ott, a former Caltech professor, writes about his 2017 “cancellation.” After an investigation characterized by “postmodernist intersectional social theory,” Caltech found that he had violated Title IX and university policies by harassing grad students. Then BuzzFeed News came calling, as it would later do for Krauss. The site’s reporting “was sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,” Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report? Ott never fully explains, but Google still exists. Ott, it turns out, had fallen in love with one of his grad students, and then fired her, and he complained obsessively about the woman to a different female student. Caltech knew this because it had Ott’s messages along with his Tumblr account, where he had published 86 poems about the student he loved. Ott does not mention his poetry, but at the end of his chapter, he does thank his wife for her support.
The bullshit doesn’t end here. Boudry, the philosopher, begins a chapter on the illiberalism of pro-Palestine activists by quoting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” Gay said that “it can,” before adding, “it depends on the context.” It’s Gay’s use of context that enrages Boudry, who desires the unequivocal condemnation of something that did not actually happen at Harvard. He does not include a single example of students calling for the extermination of Jews there or anywhere else, nor does he prove one of his central claims, which is that there is a systematic pattern of antisemitism on campus after campus. Israel is the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard — sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene.
So much for New Atheism, sic transit gloria mundi. Though New Atheism as a brand had mostly devoured itself by 2016, the ideas it professed, and conflicts it waged, have become more relevant than its individual celebrities. The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.
Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore “real” in this world; that’s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. “would be better off with fewer Asians” while calling herself a “race realist.” The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, “disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.”
Perfect. Although the best line is this:
Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance.
You will never find a more self-impressed group than race pseudoscience promoters. This is the source of their endless bitterness - they are so impressed with themselves, and yet very few others, outside of crackpot racist billionaires are as impressed by them.
The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms. The War on Science is not remarkable for what it gets wrong, then, but for the work it is trying to do. In Krauss’s more recent writings, he does not accept Trump’s war on research wholesale, but he can’t escape himself, either. As he notes in his introduction, he once complained in The Wall Street Journal that “the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health spent hundreds of millions of dollars on social justice initiatives instead of fulfilling their mandates of supporting scientific research.” He got what he wanted. So did his friends. Now what?
Coyne illustrates Jones' point "they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right" by responding:
No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.
Neither Jones nor Coyne mention that Boudry is an enthusiastic contributor to race pseudoscience rag Quillette and was recently seen at a gathering of gutter racists, including neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, at the "Heterodox" conference. I'd bet good money that Kirkegaard helped fund the conference.
Coyne does mention that the contemptible Boudry is a friend of his. Because those racist ghouls like to stick together.
UPDATE: I went to the Defector link that Jones provided in her article and I was glad I did because the 2024 article by Erik Baker, The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us, contains an excellent thumbnail description of the role that New Atheism has played in the development of 21st century race pseudoscience:
The important thing to understand about New Atheism is that it was never primarily a theological position. Plain old-fashioned atheism is hard to innovate on in that respect. If one does not believe in God, there is not really much more that needs to be said about one’s religious beliefs. In fact, New Atheism was, at its root, not about religion at all. It was about science, and its original enemies were not fundamentalists of any faith but a group of atheist Marxist biologists. Before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—the oldest of the group—were best known as professional atheists, they came to fame as defenders of the idea now known as evolutionary psychology, which began its life in the 1970s as “sociobiology.” Dawkins and Dennett championed the perspective of the biologist E.O. Wilson, which held that Darwinian evolution by natural selection was able to explain the reasons for a wide range of human behaviors, social patterns, and habits of thought, which were in turn thought to be significantly determined by a person’s genetic makeup. Their opponents, including most famously the leftist Harvard scientists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, maintained that sociobiology was built on shoddy scientific foundations and downplayed the importance of history, not just biology, in explaining why our societies are the way they are. To them, sociobiology was the rebirth of eugenics and social Darwinism in a kinder, gentler disguise.
Around the turn of the millennium, Dawkins, Dennett, and allies like Steven Pinker came to a very clever realization. Fundamentalist Christians also disagreed with them about evolutionary science—because they denied human evolution outright. As a result of the political power the religious right had accumulated since the 1970s, evolution had become a hot-button culture war issue. The sociobiologists (now rebranded, savvily, as evolutionary psychologists) had an opportunity to cast themselves as staunch defenders of science and rationality in debates about high school science education, stem cell research, and the like. Gould and Lewontin, despite their materialist commitments, refused to embrace this framing: Gould, for instance, argued that science and religion were “non-overlapping magisteria” that, properly understood, provided answers to fundamentally different questions and therefore couldn’t be said to be in “conflict.” The evolutionary psychologists exploited their enemies’ weakness for nuance. Any refusal to join Team Science in the fight against Team Religion, they charged, revealed that the supposedly scientific criticisms of sociobiology were really symptoms of an ideologically driven disloyalty to Darwin and the evolutionary paradigm. To “believe in evolution” meant to agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Pinker—which meant to disagree not only with Jerry Falwell, but also with Lewontin and Gould.
New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead they could, against all odds, depict Bush as an almost unwitting agent of a great campaign to defend the Western Liberal Enlightenment Tradition (which reached its height in the great discoveries of modern science) against the cave-dwelling barbarians who wanted to reinstate the Dark Ages. The New Atheists of the aughts constructed an insidious conceptual conveyor belt: rejecting creationism meant believing in capital-S Science, which meant believing in Western Civilization, which in turn meant supporting or at least tolerating imperialist American wars in west Asia. Conversely, disagreeing with the New Atheists—opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior—meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.
I maintained contact with Kirkegaard from 2021 onwards, intensifying this contact around 2022 (we attended the ISIR conference in Vienna together, where he was subsequently disinvited). From 2023 onwards, I was involved with him and his then business partner Matthew Frost in the Human Diversity Foundation. In the summer of 2023, I founded a startup called Liegent LLC with him and his girlfriend. From January to April 2024, I lived with Kirkegaard and his girlfriend in a house in Spain. I can prove all of this with pictures, videos, chats, and much other evidence – I was closer to Emil Kirkegaard than almost anyone else. His statements like "racism is good" and the openly expressed bias of his "research" can also be confirmed by others who had contact with him during this time.
As you can see on the image above, Liegent is, predictably, devoted to promoting race pseudoscience, in this case via one of the most important texts of twenty-first century race pseudoscience, The Bell Curve.
Last week, the latest entrant into this embryonic scrum—a company called Herasight—came out of “stealth mode” with a white paper detailing how their embryonic tool can screen for the likelihood of 17 diseases (known as a polygenic score) developing within an embryo, effectively giving parents the opportunity to select the “healthiest” one of the bunch. The company also asserts that it can do this better than the current rogue’s gallery that comprises its technological competition.
Herasight’s announcement post on X (formerly Twitter) also showed a widget displaying predicted embryonic IQs—a method that isn’t explained in the accompanying white paper—which left a few experts scratching their heads.
“I'm curious about the decision to roll out the widget without making the research behind it available,” tweeted Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School. “The goal is to use eugenics backlash to generate a hype cycle and raise more money (while maintaining plausible deniability), yes?”
(A co-author of the paper, UCLA geneticist Alex Strudwick Young, said that details of the IQ predictor will be released in a future white paper.)
Recently I quoted biologist P. Z. Myers talking about the problem with physicists, in this case Sabine Hossenfelder:
But then (Hossenfelder) did the stereotypical physicist thing: she studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe, energy and matter and mathematics, so she decided to slide over into a field she knows nothing about and explain it to us. That’s why people were pestering me to critique her recent video, titled Is being trans a social fad among teenagers? I guess having a Ph.D. in physics makes you an expert in psychology and sociology as well as biology.
I don't know if this happens more with physicists than other types of scientists, but it's been a named phenomenon since before 1996, as I discovered via Paul Krugman - from whom I also discovered the term "wingnut welfare."
Back in 1996, Krugman wrote:
In the scientific world, the syndrome known as “great man’s disease” happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. The same syndrome is apparent in some business leaders who have been promoted to economic advisers: They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.
This is an obvious issue for the scientists associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. Steven Pinker, a psychologist, Anna Krylov, a quantum chemist, Richard Dawkins and James Watson are all victims of great man's disease, which obviously can afflict women too.
In the case of Anna Krylov, for example, it is truly amazing that she can be so accomplished in her field and yet be an utter failure at reasoning, as I discuss on this blog.
Her argument on the catastrophic dangers of "cancel culture," when examined for more than a minute, is incoherent: first she stacks the deck by declaring, seemingly at random, a wide range of things as examples of cancel culture, like 17th century murder by the Catholic Church; then she (and Pinker) mock anyone who thinks the names of science terms are important, while simultaneously claiming that changing those names is a threat to our very future; and then Krylov calls the rescinding of honors from murderous dictators an example of "cancelling" - which completely refutes her position that anything dubbed "cancellation" is pure evil.
And there are plenty more examples, most perniciously when Pinker, Dawkins and Watson support the seriously flawed claims of sociobiology.
One reason why it's hard to cure Great Man's Disease is because our idiot media accepts the high self-opinions of these scientists without question, turning the race pseudoscience-loving mediocrity Steven Pinker into a "celebrity intellectual."
People who belong or want to belong to a social group, whether centered around political views, or a country or school, ethnic or gender identity, can signal their loyalty to the group and its values by demonstrating their "moral purity."
Do they seriously think Coyne & Maroja’s BS is not ideological, and is entirely objective and empirical? Its conservative bias is naked and flapping in the wind, but apparently conservatism and prejudice and blind defenses of the status quo are not a subjective presentation of an ideology.
It’s only a must-read for anti-“woke” bigots who want their biases reaffirmed.
Peter Boghossian - a clown associated with the University of Austin, memorably portrayed in New Inquiry last year:
"Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?” I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful. “You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”
Boghossian attacked me for the thought-crime of being a nobody yet daring to publicly criticize celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker.
"Christian Ott, a young astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, fell in love with one of his graduate students and then fired her because of his feelings, according to a recent university investigation. Twenty-one months of intimate online chats, obtained by BuzzFeed News, confirm that he confessed his actions to another female graduate student."
Steven Pinker - ugh - I've written so much about Pinker, but if I had to sum him up, I'd say he's a dissembler who claims to be opposed to racism while promoting the careers of a seemingly endless parade of hardcore racists from Steve Sailer to Richard Hanania.
Alessandro Strumia is a misogynist hereditarian physicist. Like any standard sociobiologist, he basically believes that everything in contemporary society is the result of evolution - in particular, women evolving to be losers in everything from science to producing wine.
And Lawrence Krauss is the third person in this collection to be accused of using his position in academia to engage in sexual acts with or harassment against his students. In his case:
BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.
Here is a photo of Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker.
