More on Harden & Behavioral Genetics - still no there there

Steven Pinker expressing his enthusiastic
support for rightwinger Claire Lehmann
and her race-mongering rightwing
rag, Quillette

Well this is my fourth blog post about the New Yorker piece on Kathryn Paige Harden. 

The other three:

• The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker
• You and Your Racist Friend
• Behavioral Genetics and the Underpants Gnomes

In the one with the Underpants Gnomes, I quoted Tom Scocca, Slate's political editor. He made the point that Harden's behavioral genetics, which Scocca calls phrenology, is built on a foundation of quicksand:

Harden does not, in fact, study the question of how genes produce social outcomes. Frustrated by the slow progress of assigning clear social results to scientists' ever-more-complicated understanding of how genes operate, the behavior geneticists have simply skipped over the whole "how" business. 

In a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books of Harden's book, titled Why DNA Is No Key to Social Equality: On Kathryn Paige Harden’s “The Genetic Lottery”, four academics, in population genetics, anthropology, science & technology studies, and philosophy, make the same point:

...in her effort to convince readers that genes matter, Harden overstates the degree to which they matter. She tells readers that, “in samples of White people living in high-income countries, a polygenic index created from the educational attainment GWAS typically captures about 10–15 percent of the variance in outcomes like years of schooling, performance on standardized academic tests, or intelligence test scores.” She compares this figure to that for household income, which accounts for 11 percent of the variance. What Harden doesn’t tell readers is that much more of the variance is explained by parental education: about 17 percent when only one parent is considered and over 20 percent when both are. The polygenic index for educational attainment therefore captures an underwhelming amount of variance in educational attainment and other socioeconomic outcomes — certainly not enough to justify putting it at the center of policy solutions.

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

There is much more in the piece, go read it.

A disturbing angle the LA RB review does not address is mentioned by John Jackson in his review of the book. 

In spite of the weakness of Harden's claims, she advocates for them with the evangelical fervor of Charles Murray.

In July of this year, in Quillette, Razib Khan wrote a favorable review of Charles Murray's latest book, in which Murray claims that Black Americans are genetically inferior and their failure to thrive as a group is not due to racism - or as Khan calls it: nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” 

And refusing to go along with race pseudoscience is dangerous according to Murray, as Khan wrote, in agreement:

The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race...

(Steven Pinker, as shown in the tweet above, is a big supporter of race-mongering Quillette.)

But Harden is also appalled that anybody might fail to accept her claims. As Jackson says:

Social scientists, Harden warns, “have been trained to view the results of behavior genetics with fear and loathing” (p. 277). Indeed, they are guilty of committing a violent crime:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences…is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It is stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that go no where. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it. (p. 186)

Well, anyone accusing their colleagues of being the moral equivalent of a stick-up artist must have good grounds to do so. Moreover, they must come from a research tradition that has never been guilty of “churning out critically flawed scientific papers!” Unfortunately, Harden misrepresents the fields the criticizes. She shifts standards of evidence to suit her pre-conceived goals. Most importantly, she fails to show that behavior genetics is at all relevant for the values and policies she endorses.

So Charles Murray believes we face disaster if we don't accept hereditarianism, Harden believes that it is the same as armed robbery. 

This isn't the only time Harden sounds like Murray. As Scocca noted:

But Harden's message, the theory behind hereditarian leftism, is that there is no reason to believe that the effort to find inborn inequalities between people should lead to greater social inequality. Kraus-Lewis wrote, "Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort."

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

At least Murray and Herrnstein knew they were being cynical about this. Harden and her fellow hereditarian leftists seem to believe in phrenology as a neutral tool, an absurd position for self-styled empiricists to take. We have a long, detailed record of what happens when the skull calipers come out, and it's never an advance in equal treatment of all. As the UPenn professor Dorothy Roberts told Lewis-Kraus: "There's just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize, control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued traits."

So is Kathryn Paige Harden really this feckless? Does she really think she's helping anybody except the hereditarian right, by publishing her speculations on the utility of GWAS to root out the genetically defective? 

She has no problem citing the hereditarian right. Jackson:

• One reason Harden thinks (Jared) Taylor is an extremist is that he “was a recent recipient of Pioneer Fund money” (p. 15). But so was Thomas Bouchard, the leading behavior geneticist whom Harden cites as an authority. Bouchard’s acceptance of that money lent his credibility, that of the University of Minnesota, and that of behavior genetics to the leading funder of scientific racism in the the post-World War II world.

The racist slimepit and Koch beneficiary American Renaissance (they like to reprint excerpts from Quillette for obvious reasons) cheers for Harden and even says with admiration she's more full of moral panic than Murray:

...she denounces those who ignore genes in stronger terms than Dr. Murray is ever likely to have used:

It’s stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that will go nowhere. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations.

Bravo for Prof. Harden. Let her words ring out throughout the social sciences and in the halls of government.

But let her also consider another kind of stealing: the theft of the moral legitimacy of the entire white race. Let her at least consider the possibility that, just as the rise or fall of individual whites is influenced to some degree by their genes, so are the achievements of races as a whole.

This is the kind of person Harden is helping - and nobody else.

Do Kathryn Paige Harden's genes make her use illegal drugs?

Oh, yes, and Harden promoted the career
of Razib Khan after he was known
far and wide as a huge racist.
-------------------------------------------------

I was prepared to critique the behavioral genetics beliefs in Katheryn Paige Harden's new book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness like I did with her last one, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality, but there's really no point.

In the opening chapter of the book, Harden talks about her illegal drug use:

It was a sweltering, tedious summer, the first summer of the pandemic, when Travis and I decided to go to the West Texas desert to drop acid. Our itinerary did, of course, include things other than taking drugs. We plan a day hiking in Big Bend. We book a Donald Judd–esque gray concrete casita with a view of the Chisos Mountains. We look forward to drinking Modelo and doing crossword puzzles and having morning sex. But lovely as all of that will be, our main purpose is to take LSD.

The DEA is clear about the legal status of LSD:

LSD is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I substances have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

 

And Harden herself considers LSD to be a potential instrument of manslaughter:

Imagine two women, equally bored by life, equally restless. One gives her boyfriend LSD and he has a bad trip inside the safety of their hotel room. The other gives her boyfriend LSD and he, in the throes of paranoid delusion, runs out of the hotel room into the surrounding West Texas desert, where he rapidly suffers from heat exhaustion. Only one woman would be blamed for contributing to a man’s death. Consider: When in your life have you gotten lucky and so were spared from blame?

Realize: “You are poised on fortune’s razor-edge.”

In the chapter, she talks about how a prisoner in the US penal system was murdered through horrific jail conditions:

Powell was serving a twenty-seven-month prison sentence for offering a blowjob to a police officer. Powell was doing sex work to get money for drugs. She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. She had, according to court reports, a serious polysubstance addiction that was complicated by untreated disorganized schizophrenia and mild intellectual disability.

Harden admits that she has privilege and so doesn't suffer the consequences of doing illegal drugs like Powell. But what about the causes of the illegal drug use?

The alleged focus of her book is vice or crime or sin or, I guess, some combination. So I expected Harden to provide a behavioral genetics explanation for how it came to pass that Kathryn Paige Harden, respectable soccer mom and public intellectual ("one of the world's leading scientists" according to her publisher) and Marcia Powell, a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability both became illegal-drug-using criminals.

But what follows is a poorly-organized combination of Harden's life story, her personal feelings and her musings on the texts of various philosophers, famous public intellectuals, and religious leaders.

Many reviews of the book are utterly clueless, written by reviewers who don't understand or don't care about Harden's place in the genetic determinism network. Fortunately I found the LA Review of Books review by Jonathan Basile, who is hip to the scene:

...Original Sin distinguishes itself by a far more personal tone; it features a series of anecdotes, not always thematically transparent, about Harden’s abusive childhood, her departure from the church, her divorce, her struggles to raise her children, her experiences taking LSD and having sex in the desert, and her arc of becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church. None of this deepens our understanding of the scientific or religious questions posed, and again, that may not be the point. The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy.

"Not always thematically transparent" is such a diplomatic way to describe the disorganization. 

And such a great line: "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting..."

It's funny 'cause it's true.

Harden promotes genetic determinism in her interviews, even as she misrepresents the words of her PhD advisor Eric Turkheimer:

...but my PhD advisor from graduate school is very famous for a paper called “The Three Laws of Behavior Genetics.” The third law of behavior genetics is: everything is heritable—which means that everything that differs between people, when you look at it scientifically, tends to show some influence of the genes that you were born with. I’m a scientist; I’ve been working in this field since I was 18. It’s important to me because I think it’s a scientific fact that is incontrovertible at this point: genes influence behavior.

So does this mean, per her own scientific expertise, that Harden believes she and a schizophrenic, drug-addicted prostitute with a mild intellectual disability share genes that influenced them both to become illegal-drug-using criminals? 

She does claim that polygenic scores can predict the likelihood of an addiction to drugs, but I haven't found anything in the book where she addresses the urge to try illegal, potentially manslaughter-inducing drugs - after all, you can't become addicted if you never try the drugs in the first place.

...my colleagues and I have developed a polygenic score that is correlated with the likelihood of developing conduct disorder and ADHD, of becoming addicted to alcohol and opiate drugs, of being convicted of a felony crime. The correlations are small but meaningful; they are about the same size as correlations with lead exposure or child maltreatment.

We know Harden is less likely to be convicted of a felony crime from her illegal activities not because of polygenic scores but, by her own admission, due to her social privilege. But I assume a behavioral genetics proponent like Harden will argue that the fact that she deliberately took an illegal drug considered dangerous by both the US government and herself - as a middle-aged adult and with all the knowledge that "one of the world's leading scientists" presumably has, makes it more probable that her genes made her do it.

Turkheimer chided both Steven Pinker and Robert Plomin in 2024 for the same misunderstanding that Harden has (my highlight):

But the real reason I am irritated by the way Pinker and Plomin talk about the three laws is more fundamental. Given that they both disagree with much of what I have said over the years, why are they so interested in the three laws in the first place? The reason is that a superficial reading of the first law, “Everything is heritable” sounds like it might be an endorsement of the kind of “genes make us who we are” hereditarianism that they both endorse. But if you actually read the paper (available here) you see that the theme of the paper is exactly the opposite. The paper is an explanation of why the quantitative genetic statistic called heritability, when applied to humans via twin studies, does not lead to any kind of deterministic hereditarianism, or to a contention that families don’t matter, or any of the other things that Plomin and Pinker have argued for over the years.

Harden justifies her claims with "I'm a scientist," but I think her poor literary organization and her misinterpretation of her own PhD advisor's views indicate she's not a very good one. I wonder if maybe she's better-suited to another career. Basile seems to wonder the same thing, in his review, if she might be more successful as an inspirational writer, or perhaps as a political operative:

In The Genetic Lottery, (her first book) Harden claimed that progressives seeking a more egalitarian system of education need to take account of students’ innate genetic differences in educability. I’ll examine, below, the reasons we may remain skeptical of any such claim to distinguish nature from nurture. Harden’s tenacious commitment to such methods, despite her familiarity with many of these criticisms, might lead us to suspect an ulterior motive: the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse, which is sometimes called shifting the Overton window.

 "...the positioning of eugenics within the boundaries of polite society and public discourse" is also the goal of the racist, Peter Thiel-funded publication Quillette:

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

Certainly Harden's work is a favorite of racist hereditarians who appear to have right-wing views and motives for shifting the Overton window. In 2016, the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) helped Harden and her team search for a research fellow. The ISIR was founded to promote and defend the views of gutter racists - or "white nationalists" if you prefer - Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Harden has participated in two ISIR annual meetings, in 2009 and 2015. The ISIR 2016 post for Harden mentions Harden works with Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob, who has participated in nine ISIR annual meetings, in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2023. 

And it just so happens that my previous post mentions Tucker-Drob - he has co-authored work with Stuart Ritchie, who appears to be a political activist working against transgender people.

In spite of Harden's genetic determinism beliefs, I actually doubt she thinks she shares any drug-taking DNA with the poor murdered prostitute. 

This passage is revealing:

She didn’t get her drugs conveniently mailed to her house from overseas, and she wasn’t using them to dissipate her bourgeois ennui. 

This is the key, I think to what Harden is really on about. The issue for her isn't that she and Marcia Powell are similar for taking illegal drugs, but rather, the manner in which they obtained the drugs is what makes them so different. Harden obtained them calmly and decorously and only to relieve boredom, not as a desperate attempt to cope with an impossible life.

And that is why Basile is right to accuse her of Scientific Calvinism:

In religious terms, this is Scientific Calvinism or Evangelicalism, the insistence that we must be punished for our predestined sinfulness. In political terms, it is the fever dream of neoliberalism, a state that individualizes responsibility for the forms of life it predetermines, and spares no expense punishing those it relegates to wretchedness.

It doesn't matter that Harden also broke the law - the important thing is that she did it in a state of privilege that comes from having superior genes.

Why Biology is not Destiny

Great review of Kathryn Paige Harden's book "The Genetic Lottery" in the New York Review of Books: Why Biology is not Destiny by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin.

You can tell Harden is a complete hereditarian, in spite of her denial, by the way rightwing racist political operative Razib Khan likes to promote her work.

The entire piece is what good science writing should be, unlike the garbage written by Steve Sailer (and promoted by Steven Pinker) or the ineptitude of Khan. It holds together cohesively by playing off the "frog boiling" metaphor used by Harden herself. 

It begins:

You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a similar experience, as the author ingenuously points out. “Like a frog being slowly boiled alive,” she observes, readers follow her argument “from an uncontroversial premise to a highly controversial one.”

Continues

Harden is a dedicated frog boiler. She introduces many comfortably room-temperature premises: measurement is essential to science; people differ genetically; genes cause conditions such as deafness; a recipe for lemon chicken produces variable results but never leads to chocolate-chip cookies. Lulled to complacency by such anodyne and often homey observations, we soon find ourselves in a rolling boil of controversial claims: genes make you more or less intelligent, wealthier or poorer; every kind of inequality has a genetic basis.

And concludes:

Back finally to frog boiling: this practice, it turns out, is directly, not just metaphorically, related to arguments for a biological hierarchy of intelligence. The first experiments testing the reflexes of frogs in gradually heated water took place in the mid-nineteenth century, around the same time as the first theories of the biological basis of intelligence. Experimenters also lobotomized frogs, severed their spinal cords, heated and chilled their brains, and subjected them to strychnine poisoning, among other forms of torture, to see how these affected their reflex responses. Spencer cited these experiments in support of his theory that intelligence arose by infinitesimal degrees from the rudimentary reflexes of lower animals, through higher animals, “the inferior human races,” “the villager,” and “the man of ordinary education,” to “the advanced man of science”—i.e., Spencer himself.

Harden was right to compare her reasoning to the reasoning of the frog boilers. Both the logic and the experimental program of frog boiling exemplify the essentialist tradition in which she is a participant. But the theory doesn’t hold up in experiments: the frog, if intact and in a vessel it can escape, will actually jump out rather than be boiled alive. Our message to you, reader, is accordingly simple: jump out.

Beautiful literary styling combined with excellent logic and science points unencumbered by technical terms that only statisticians can understand:

Among other phenotypes associated with “educational attainment” for which Harden cites genome studies are “grit,” “growth mindset,” “intellectual curiosity,” “mastery orientation,” “self-concept,” “test motivation,” and especially “a trait called Openness to Experience, which captures being curious, eager to learn, and open to novel experiences.” Harden doesn’t reveal just who calls this important trait “Openness to Experience” or how they measure it. Surely, there must be disagreement among researchers about what constitutes this phenotype or others in the list, such as “grit.” More so, at any rate, than about what constitutes macular degeneration.

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

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

This alphabet soup in the passive voice implies that no one actively does all this estimating, measuring, counting, weighting, correlating—or that these are such technical processes that any human presence in them is irrelevant. But people are making interpretive decisions at every stage: how to define a phenotype and select people to represent it, how to count these people, which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate them. Interpretive decisions are of course essential to all science, but here there are a great many opinions dressed up in facts’ clothing. 

Including this fascinating bit, a possible explanation for why so many find "heritability" so hard to express in plain language and always resort to statistics-talk:

The confusion between correlation and causation in fact first arose in connection with arguments for the biological, hereditary basis of intelligence. The mathematical concept of correlation—a measure of the degree to which two variables are associated—came into existence as a linchpin of the conjoined sciences of statistics and eugenics in the 1880s. Galton developed fundamental concepts of statistics, including correlation, deviation, and regression, to provide the mathematical basis for a new “science of improving stock,” for which he coined the term “eugenics.” This mathematics of heredity, Galton believed, revealed evolutionary patterns in “human qualities and faculties”—for example that they naturally followed a “normal distribution,” or bell-shaped curve.

And most important to the mission of this blog, Harden's support for race pseudoscience, which makes her work the darling of racists, which is either sneaky or feckless, depending on how deliberate Harden's weasel words are:

Having distinguished genetic ancestry from race, however, Harden continually elides the two, as when she says that genomic research has so far been based almost entirely on “people whose recent genetic ancestry is exclusively European and who are overwhelmingly likely to identify as White.” Harden mentions this fact about genomic research in order to explain that her claims about the genetic basis of differences in intelligence apply only to differences among white-identifying people rather than to differences between whites as a group and people of other racial identities.

Here again Harden echoes her predecessors: Galton wrote in 1869, “The range of mental power between—I will not say the highest Caucasian and the lowest savage—but between the greatest and least of English intellects, is enormous.” Social class, as much as race, provided the focus of Galton’s eugenic writings; he too argued for an innate biological hierarchy of intelligence among white people. Harden’s assertion that “genetics can be causes of stratification in society” accords well with Galton’s view that social classes were based in biology.

Regarding race, Harden’s message is to relax: She has nothing to say about genetics and intelligence in nonwhite people, so how can her argument have racist implications? Moreover, she writes that the genome studies of white people will likely not be “portable” to other races, which will differ in frequencies and co-occurrences of genetic variants, precluding interracial comparisons based on such studies. What happened to the idea that races aren’t natural kinds? Once again Harden elides the crucial distinction between genetic populations and races when she writes that genome studies will probably not apply across “genetic ancestries or socially defined races.” Her use of italics seems to emphasize a distinction between ancestry and race, yet she continually treats them as equivalent, offering no explanation for why race would pose a significant barrier to applying genome study results across populations defined by genetic ancestry.

I had hoped that Adam Rutherford or Eric Turkheimer would have written this kind of response but wonder if their affection for Harden has prevented them from doing so. I understand they are both busy but the book was published last September.

When I saw this review I tried to share it with Harden on Twitter, only to discover she had blocked me, probably for disagreeing with her claim she's not an hereditarian. I have found that blocking is the standard way that hereditarians deal with critics.

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

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

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

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

Oops, I did it again. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Kirkegaard approves, you've done something wrong.

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

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

Which is why my work here is never done. 

*** sigh ***

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

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

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

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

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

Here is hereditarian Abdul Abdelloaui using the same tactic.

Two things about the Undark quote I highlighted above:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SES means "Socio-Economic Status."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Harden's message, the theory behind hereditarian leftism, is that there is no reason to believe that the effort to find inborn inequalities between people should lead to greater social inequality. Kraus-Lewis wrote, "Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about Tobias Wolfram: (my highlights)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haier:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Left, the hereditarian Right and the New Yorker

I've spoken admiringly in the past of the work of Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in particular his in-depth look at the work of David Reich.

Lewis-Kraus has recently published an article in the New Yorker along a similar theme - left-leaning hereditarian whose work has provided some comfort to purveyors of race pseudoscience.

In this case it's an article about Kathryn Paige Harden entitled Can Progressives Be Convinced that Genetics Matter? which, as some on Twitter pointed out, is a bullshit question.

Something that really jumped out at me in the article (my highlights):

Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right. In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” ​(Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)

With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”

But Razib Khan isn't just a race science guy who thought Harden's book was good. Razib Khan considers Kathryn Paige Harden to be his friend:

My friend Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters For Social Equality is a well-written book that presents a somewhat tendentious position, at least to many of a progressive bent, that genetics must be considered when we design a liberal order. You can read my review over at UnHerd, though if you are subscribed to the paid version of this newsletter I’ll eventually be posting a much longer version of the review on this Substack.

How merciless can Harden be, if Razib Khan considers her a friend? I found that when I have been merciless towards the race pseudoscience of Razib Khan, he blocked me on Twitter. 

The New Yorker article mentions Quillette, Razib Khan and Charles Murray, but somehow neglects to mention that in July of this year, Khan wrote a positive review of Charles Murray's latest book for Quillette. 

And by the way, Khan declares Charles Murray to be his friend too. Is that how it works in the world of race-mongering? Friends always review the work of friends? 

The New Yorker piece demonstrates, contrary to its main theme, how much more extreme and politicized the hereditarian right is in comparison to the hereditarian left. 

Lewis-Kraus writes:

Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care.

As one Twitterer responded:

Meanwhile this is what the hereditarian right is saying. In his review of his friend Charles Murray's book, Razib Khan writes:

But why read a book on this topic when you can discover these facts within a few minutes? Tables on SAT scores by race are available in the Journal of Blacks In Higher Education, which pointed out in 2005 that “whites were more than seven times as likely as blacks to score 700 or above on the verbal SAT.” Wikipedia, meanwhile, has an entry entitled “Race and Crime in the United States,” which plainly states that a bit over 50 percent of victims and offenders in homicides are African American. The same website tells us that African Americans are about 13 percent of America’s population. Would you also be surprised to face the reality that the perpetrators of homicides are overwhelmingly young and male as well? These dots are there for anyone to connect if they like.

And yet very few choose to do so. Indeed, the failure—refusal, even—to connect the dots has become a vaunted feature, not a bug, of 2021’s regnant culture. Acknowledging unambiguous patterns of this kind will often result in the rebuke that some beliefs are divine mysteries, to be accepted on faith rather than analyzed more deeply. Which is precisely why Murray wants to inject these taboo realities into the intellectual bloodstream of our society. Despite being a brisk read, Murray’s short book lays out all the inferences and conclusions that remain lacunae in our public discourse. Without these facts on the table, the contemporary American debate has had to rely upon the ether of social science and nebulous theoretical explanations of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer has remarked that “theory is information for free,” and these are theories which purport to explain everything in American history.

How can this be interpreted in any way but "as long as we believe Black Americans are the victims of systemic racism and white supremacy we will not "connect the dots" about them and therefore fail to arrive at the truth: their real problem is their genetic inferiority"?

And this conclusion is not just something we can all agree to disagree about, according to Murray. As Khan writes earlier in the review:

The book’s thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race—Murray has described it as a cri de coeur.

 

So according to the hereditarian right, we face DISASTER if we don't face the truth of Black American genetic inferiority.

That's quite a bit stronger than: "if genes are important then everybody should get healthcare."  

But for some reason, Lewis-Kraus, who has already acknowledged the existence of Quillette, Murray and Khan doesn't mention the review. Instead, when he mentions Quillette, it's part of a both-sides theme:

In Quillette, the researcher Richard Haier compared Harden and Turkheimer’s repudiation of Murray to climate-change denial—the second time in a year that Harden had been thus indicted, this time from the right.

Quillette published a review that says unless we acknowledge the genetic inferiority of Black Americans we face disaster. 

You would think that would be of some interest in an article that includes discussions of the dangers of race pseudoscience.

Richard Haier, it must be noted, writes for the far-right Federalist. In this tweet he reveals that Charles Murray is a political operative on the payroll of the Koch-funded AEI.

But of course this entire Pinkerite blog has demonstrated again and again how very well-financed the hereditarian right is by right-wing plutocrats. This is a hugely important issue in discussions of the political impact of hereditarianism, and one that Lewis-Kraus ignores. 

I'm very disappointed, New Yorker.

Behavioral Genetics and the Underpants Gnomes

Gotta go to work
Work all night
Search for underpants hey

Tom Scocca is Slate's politics editor.  His response to the Gideon Lewis-Kraus New Yorker profile of
Kathryn Paige Harden is so good it compelled me to subscribe to his Substack, called Indignity.

Scocca gets at the biggest issues with the whole damn Paige Harden business. The first being whether there is really a difference between "evolutionary psychology" and "behavioral genetics":

The phrenologists don't like being called "phrenologists." Even the archaic ones would tell you they were doing "anthropometry" or "craniometry," and the modern ones prefer to call themselves things like "evolutionary psychologists" or "behavior geneticists."

The more I learn about Harden style "behavioral genetics" the less difference I see between that and evolutionary psychology. 

In my email exchange with Lewis-Kraus, I suggested that Harden was one of many "evolutionary psychology-based researchers." 

Lewis-Kraus was not happy with my description:

Paige has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology, which she agrees is nonsense.

But I had recently found Harden on a page of the University of Texas at Austin website under the heading "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology" and her profile was directly under one of the most prominent advocates of evolutionary psychology, David Buss.

Buss is such a reflexive believer in hereditarian explanations for human social phenomena he once suggested an example of female sexual slavery was a case of female sexual preference, as David Buller described in his book "Adapting Minds."

Scocca went farther than me, calling Harden a phrenologist.

At one point in my exchange with Lewis-Kraus, he wrote:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them. Otherwise, I think I'll hold my own counsel on the stories that I do, but thanks for the totally unsolicited and unwelcome advice. 

I hadn't offered him advice, I had expressed disappointment he didn't focus more on how politically-focused and well-funded race science is. But I don't think Lewis-Kraus was reading my emails carefully - his tone was hostile from his first response, seemingly appalled that I would dare to question his choice of framing at all.

Scocca was just as unhappy with Lewis-Kraus' framing as I was (my highlight):

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

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

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

Behavioral genetics is an "unclear mechanism" being used to generate just-so stories.

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

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

So behavioral genetics can be more succinctly, if less elegantly, expressed by the Underpants Gnomes.

Where Phase 1 is GWAS and Phase 3 is social outcomes. 

What bothered me most about Lewis-Kraus' email response was his belief that unless I can come up with personal correspondence between Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer, there's no point in writing about the politics behind contemporary race pseudoscience. 

But that's a general problem for mainstream media - their understanding of issues like Steven Pinker's promotion of race pseudoscience is hobbled by the fact that they are not in it for the long term. They dip into an issue, make shallow assessments (pretty young behavioral geneticist thinks leftists are anti-science!) and then move on. 

As long as Steven Pinker doesn't actually come out and say "I think that Black people are innately less intelligent" the cultural gatekeepers will yawn and look away, no matter how many race-mongers like Razib Khan and Linda Gottfredson, and race-mongering publications like Quillette, and racists like Sailer, Pinker has supported, in his role as respectable public intellectual.

Speaking of promoting race mongers, I see Julia Ioffe, a GQ correspondant, is also doing it. 

Have the New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Paige Harden made phrenology the hip new thing?