Steve Sailer and the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interestingly, while blacks tend to be more masculine in physique and personality than whites or East Asians, they are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Gregory Cochran?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cochran also insulted Ferguson on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They even have a photo of Cochran with a caption:

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

According to the article...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAIR and "Neo-racism'

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

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

Volokh quotes the FAIR site:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

neo-racism noun

neo-rac·ism | \ nē-ō-ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Pinker defends pseudoscience: what have we learned?

Another testimony about Pinker from
his (former?) buddy Steve Sailer
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John Tooby died recently. Tooby was one half of the evo-psycho wonder twins, along with Leda Cosmides. And the occasion of his death gave charlatan Steven Pinker the opportunity to defend the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology in Nautilus:

Belying the canard that evolutionary psychology is a bunch of post hoc just-so stories, John, together with Leda and their students, published many experimental findings that confirmed nonobvious predictions about a wide range of psychological phenomena. These included statistical thinking, the perception of race, the development of sibling feelings, and the emotion of anger.

It should be noted that none of their findings have proven that the specific phenomena they report on is evolved, other than the usual anodyne observation that humans are the result of evolution.

Tooby, Cosmides and Pinker were/are all psychologists, so of course they want to proclaim the Triumph of Psychology:

But John’s greatest accomplishment was bringing to fruition Darwin’s prediction that “psychology will be placed on a new foundation.” That foundation is natural selection, since it alone can carve nooks of beneficial organization out of a universe that relentlessly slides into disorder. As he and Leda put it in a paper title, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology.” 

Such self-importance for so little actual science! But Steven Pinker is nothing if not self-important. He's trained his stooges, like Jerry Coyne, to repeat that anybody who disagrees with Pinker is jealous of his fame. 

But this gives me a chance to promote the work of a biologist - not a psychologist - who has something to say about evolutionary psychology - PZ Myer's immortal YouTube video "The Problems with Evolutionary Psychology."

In other Pinker news, Pinker has a Substack, and considering the kind of people who created and are promoted by Substack (like Pinker's pal, the racist extremist Richard Hanania) I am absolutely not surprised. He's apparently had it since 2021, but I only became aware of it today because he promoted it on his Twitter/X.

And when I saw the post he was promoting, I had a hearty laugh: Linger over good writing.

Lest you are tempted to believe that famous (ooh they're so jealous!) celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker knows from good writing, be aware that Pinker, when he was tasked with editing "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" chose to include an absolute piece of garbage by infamous racist Steve Sailer called "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum." 

Now I'm not saying it's garbage just because it was written by an infamous racist - although the fact that he is a long-time infamous racist didn't bother Pinker at the time. 

No, it is a rank piece of garbage for many reasons as I explain in detail in my five-part series Steven Pinker, Steve Sailer and the Cousin Marriage Conundrum. 

In a speech that Pinker gave at an ISIR conference, he seemed to think that the reason the hereditarian racialism of the ISIR gang wasn't as popular as he wished was because it didn't have writers as good as Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladewell, opponents of hereditarianism.

Also both Gould and Gladwell had embarrassed Pinker - Gould in the letters section of the New York Review of Books and Gladwell by being the only person with a prominent media platform to point out that Pinker promoted the career of Steve Sailer.

But even garbage-people like Steve Sailer can have their uses (besides provide dreck for the undiscerning like Pinker) and Sailer is important for his testimony that belies Pinker's claim about Tooby. In the Nautilus article I linked to at the top of this post, Pinker claims:

(Tooby's) influence on me is retroviral, chimeric: so thoroughly embedded in my brain that I can barely distinguish his ways of thinking from my own. 

But as Sailer wrote 21 years ago in racist VDARE - so two years before Pinker included his dreck in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing":

...it's important to realize how far Pinker has come over the years. He started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

In the same year in his Unz blog Sailer wrote:

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

"Individual differences" is a standard hereditarian euphemism that always boils down to an intelligence hierarchy by race.  For more about Harpending and Cochran's big, yet still untested hypothesis, check out my article in Rational Wiki for Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.

In spite of the source of these claims about Pinker, I think they are credible - I think Pinker did reject the "there is no such thing as race" belief of early evolutionary psychology for the E. O. Wilson and Harpending/Cochran school of hereditarian racism.

Considering how many hereditarians and just plain-old racists Steven Pinker has defended, praised and promoted for over twenty years now, it's hard to reach any other conclusion. 

And it isn't just infamous racist Steve Sailer who noted Pinker's changing views. David Lubinski, less infamous but, I suspect, just as racist as Steve Sailer given his long-time association with the International Society of Intelligence Research, interviewed Pinker at one of the ISIR conferences and said (my highlight):

...How did someone with your background, someone who at one point in his career and I'm not putting him on the spot because Steven said this publicly, said early on, he found individual differences "uninteresting" how did someone at that stage of development become so interested in human psychological diversity that you developed expertise in individual differences and wrote a book like "Blank Slate"

And then there is Pinker's own direct refutation of evolutionary psychology's "there is no such thing as race" in 2013: "Every geneticist knows that the "Race doesn't exist" dogma is a convenient PC 1/4-truth."

This is standard Pinker bullshit - geneticist Adam Rutherford directly contradicts Pinker. Not that Pinker will ever acknowledge that. And he doesn't need to. He's cozy in his right-wing bubble and has no reason to ever leave it.

The Native American/East Asian "race"

Part 1: Cleanup on Aisle 88
Part 2: Race Science: wronger than ever

Race science considers IQ tests to be expressions of innate, genetic-based intelligence.

They believe that there is a Native American race which, as a group, has a genetic-based intelligence rating of 87. They also believe there is an Asian race - which they sometimes subdivide into South, East etc. But they believe East Asians are, as a race, of high genetic-based intelligence, with a group IQ score of 105 or 106.

So it's rather inconvenient for race science that 23andMe groups Native Americans and East Asians together into something 23andMe calls a "global population."

Race science proponents will sometimes claim that when they say "race" they are merely referring to the geographic location from whence distinct populations derived. So Asian, European, African, Australian, Native American.

Leading race science critic John Jackson explains:

So why did natural philosophers begin classifying people into races? Because of European colonialism. The idea that people could be classified into fixed races came from the colonies and filtered back into the European continent. Scholars like Suman Seth and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra show how the race idea was inextricably linked to European colonialism and the need to justify the domination of the conquered and African slavery. The very idea of “race” was tainted from the very beginning. It was and is no humble biological concept but one that arose because of the necessity of justifying inequitable social arrangements. Quillette would have us shrug all of this off claiming “Enlightenment philosophers also took to classifying human differences for the mundane reason that such differences actually exist.” This is not only begging the question but is empirically false. There is an ugly history here and by hiding it Quillette is being irresponsible. 

False premise 2. Racial divisions are principled scientific categories. “The claim that [racial] divisions are arbitrary” is false.
How does Quillette know this? Because:

 Noah Rosenberg and colleagues found that human genetic variation largely corresponds to broad geographic regions and, more compellingly, that it closely matches Johann Blumenbach’s 1781 classification of human morphological variation into five races: Caucasians, Americans (Amerindians), Ethiopians (Africans), Mongolians (East Asians), and Malaysians (Oceanians).

The Quillette passage he is citing is a race science primer disguised as a book review by Bo Winegard and Noah Carl. 

According to the Wayback Machine, 23andMe had a sample report, available to the public that displayed its classification of Native American and East Asian at least as early as January 2017. The Winegard/Carl article was published in 2019 and doesn't mention it, at all, because it's likely they didn't look.

This is from Ben and Bo Winegard and Brian Boutwell, in a paper from 2017 called Human Biological and Psychological Diversity:

One can begin with broad, continentally-based categories: Caucasian, East Asian, Africans, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines (Wade 2014) They are broad, general categories, but they have some predictive value.

(They cite Nicholas Wade's "A Troublesome Inheritance.)

But clearly they do not have "predictive value." They are dead wrong - East Asian and Native Americans are not genetically separate, in spite of being continentally separate.

These are the global populations listed by 23andMe, only one of which - European - aligns squarely with the traditional race science geographic scheme.

• European 
• Central & South Asian 
• East Asian and Native American 
• Melanesian 
• Sub-Saharan African 
• Western Asia and North African 
• Unassigned

23&Me explains this in a section of its website called 23andMe Reference Populations & Regions

The 45 Ancestry Composition regional populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, British & Irish is a part of Northwestern European, which is part of European.

These are all the populations listed by 23andMe for East Asian and Native American

Chinese & Southeast Asian

• Chinese
• Chinese Dai 
• Filipino and Austronesian 
• Indonesian Thai Khmer and Myanma 
• Vietnamese

Japanese and Korean
Native American
North Asian 

• Manchurian & Mongolian 
• Siberian

Here is what it says about Native Americans

Over the past few decades, researchers compared the DNA of indigenous Americans to populations from around the world, confirming a genetic link between the native peoples of Northeast Asia and the Americas.

Over 30,000 years ago, the ancestors of the first Americans began to form a distinct genetic population in Central Asia, and by ~25,000 years ago these ancient humans reached Beringia — a land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska — where they remained in isolation for millennia until the massive ice sheets covering North America began to recede near the end of the last Ice Age, 12,000 to 15,000 years ago. Upon reaching Alaska, these ancient voyagers became the first humans (not to mention, the first member of the hominid family) to set foot in the western hemisphere.

Near the top of this post I said: So it's rather inconvenient for race science that 23andMe groups two completely separate "races" per race science tradition, Native American and East Asian, together into something 23andMe calls a "global population."

Rather it would be inconvenient if race science cared about data. As we have seen, race science is dependent on 19th century - or even 18th century concepts and race classification schemes.

I mentioned how important Rushton and Lynn are to race science and that is demonstrated in the 2017 Winegard/Boutwell paper, when the paper describes the human biodiversity "Research Program" in the first paragraph:

Here, we will lay out six basic principles of this new Darwinian paradigm (see also, Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cochran and Harpending 2009; Laland et al. 2010; Lynn 2006; Rushton 1995; Wade 2014).

Note also "Cochran and Harpending" because of course Winegards/Boutwell present the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence hypothesis so well refuted by anthropologist Brian Ferguson as if it was settled science.

They aren't interested over-much in new information, for to practice race science all the information you need exists, virtually unchanged for hundreds of years.

Because in spite of claiming to care about genetics, humanbiodiversity, race science, etc. is a political project, not a scientific one. And it is lazy.

Yet just yesterday on Twitter, we see Ben Winegard claiming there are "many" of thousands of hereditarians doing excellent research. Pinkerite is blocked by Winegard, or course, and last time I checked nobody has asked him for evidence of this "excellent research" but it's pretty clear that Winegard is impressed by the likes of Richard Lynn, Jean-Phillippe Rushton, Nicholas Wade, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

People who do lazy, pseudoscientific politics and claim it's science deserve to be (verbally) attacked.

How conservative and white supremacist is Quillette? Part 2

As we discussed in Part 1, Claire Lehmann threatened via tweet to sue an Australian writer for opining that the publication she founded, Quillette, is a conservative website happy to publish authors known for promoting theories of white supremacy.

It was quick work to demonstrate that Quillette is widely considered to be a conservative website.

The white supremacy issue is a little more complicated.

The Anti-Defamation League has two similar but contrasting definitions of white supremacy.

One is white supremacy:

White supremacy is a term used to characterize various belief systems central to which are one or more of the following key tenets: 1) whites should have dominance over people of other backgrounds, especially where they may co- exist; 2) whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society; 3) white people have their own "culture" that is superior to other cultures; 4) white people are genetically superior to other people. As a full-fledged ideology, white supremacy is far more encompassing than simple racism or bigotry. Most white supremacists today further believe that the white race is in danger of extinction due to a rising “flood” of non-whites, who are controlled and manipulated by Jews, and that imminent action is need to “save” the white race.

The other is "traditional white supremacists"

Traditional white supremacists are one of the major segments of the white supremacist movement in the United States, as well as the oldest. The term is used to refer to a variety of groups and individuals whose white supremacy centers around or originated from the struggle to deny equal rights to African-Americans. Ku Klux Klan groups are the most common type of traditional white supremacist, but the movement also includes other groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, the League of the South, and others.

Quillette is devoted to race science, and the main focus of race science is the claim that black people are intellectually inferior to all other "races." Race science also believes Ashkenazi Jews are the most intelligent "race," a belief expressed in the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesis published in 2005, which has been promoted by Steven Pinker.

The intellectual inferiority of blacks and the intellectual superiority of Jews are also white supremacist beliefs as demonstrated in segregationist Henry E. Garrett's article "The Equalitarian Dogma" published in Mankind Quarterly in 1961.

However, race science promoters can defend themselves against the charge of white supremacy by pointing out that they either consider Jews to be separate from whites, and consider Jews the most intelligent "race" or, in the case of the race science intelligence rankings that don't separate Jews from whites, East Asians are claimed to be genetically most intelligent. And so they don't, theoretically, believe whites are supreme.

But because they share many core beliefs, it is easy to mistake race science promoters for white supremacists, and there are certainly cases where race science promoters are also white supremacists, as in the case of one of the co-authors of the NHAI paper, the late Henry Harpending.*

So it is correct to say Quillette is happy to publish those who promote white supremacist theories.

To get an idea of how strongly race science promoters believe in the genetic intellectual inferiority of blacks, here are two examples, both by Quillette authors.

The first is a couple of selections from John Paul Wright, professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Education Criminal Justice and Human Services, as well as its director of the graduate program in criminal justice. I've referenced these selections a lot on this blog because they are the plainest demonstration of the beliefs of race science.

In Biosocial Criminology: New Directions in Theory and Research edited by Anthony Walsh and Kevin M. Beaver (Quillette author) Wright said:

Page 149:
...Areas afflicted by crime and other social pathologies are more frequently black than white, and even less frequently Oriental. Part of the reason for these visible and dramatic differences may have to do with the differential abilities of races to organize socially. 

Page 150:
From the available data it would seem ludicrous to argue that "race" is a construct devoid of a biological or evolutionary backdrop. That evolutionary forces have produced biological variance across races is now scientifically undeniable. That many of the characteristics that define races appear to be universal and time stable is also undeniable. Evolution can produce many forms of adaptations, but it cannot produce equality. 

The connection between race and criminal behavior is clearly complex and involves a range of historical, social, psychological and individual variables. Evolution however, provides a powerful mechanism to understand the development of human races and the distribution of traits and behaviors within and across races. It helps explain why races would appear and under what conditions races would appear. It helps to explain why certain traits would be beneficial and why these traits such as higher IQ, would be unequally distributed across races. Moreover evolutionary theory helps explain why race-based patterns of behavior are universal, such as black over-involvement in crime. No other paradigm organizes these patterns better. No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths.

It's important to note that Wright is a "biosocial criminologist" so not only does he believe blacks are intellectually inferior, he believes they are more inclined, genetically, to criminal behavior than other "races."

On his blog, Conservative Criminality, Wright expressed his antipathy for Black Lives Matter:

So, I’m inclined to see BLM as movement that is largely immoral even if it contains individuals who are moral. I’m inclined to view their general claims as largely hollow even if the occasional case supports their view. And I see more and more how their rhetoric and their actions are brining (sic) harm to people.

The second example is by Bo Winegard, former assistant professor at Marietta college and currently on staff at Quillette and his twin brother Ben who is currently Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carroll College. Bo and Ben Winegard wrote a defense of The Bell Curve in Quillette called "A Tale of Two Bell Curves" in which they agree with John Paul Wright, in so many words that "No other paradigm explains these inconvenient truths" about the failure of African Americans to thrive, post-Emancipation:

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

Bo Winegard can be seen promoting the work of John Paul Wright here.

Quillette has published many supporters of race science, several of whom have been previously mentioned on this blog. 

1. Johnny Anomaly
2. Rosalind Arden (author, staff member & sometime co-author with Linda Gottfredson)
3. Kevin Beaver
4. Brian Boutwell
5. Noah Carl
6. Cory Clark
7. Gregory Cochran
8. Nathan Cofnas
9. James Damore
10. David C. Geary
11. Richard Haier
12. David M. Haskell
13. Lee Jussim
14. Razib Khan
15. Geoffrey Miller
16. Kathrine Jebsen Moore
17. Adam Perkins
18. Steven Pinker
19. Robert Plomin
20. Jason Richwine
21. Todd "T.K." Shackleford
22. Michael Shermer
23. Ben Winegard
24. Bo Winegard (author and staff member)   
25. Colin Wright (author and staff member)
26. John Paul Wright
27. Toby Young (also Quillette's London editor)

There are probably others. I will add them as I find them.

For those who are wondering why Andy Ngo, who is currently listed in Quillette as Sub-editor, Contributing Writer, didn't make the list, it's because although he is a grifter and a Trump flunky, I have not found anything written by him about race science or associated theories. On the other hand, Emil O. Kirkegaard, while very much a proponent of race science, and who would seem to be a natural fit for Quillette, hasn't had a Quillette byline.

Several on the list have appeared on the video channel of Stefan Molyneux, who is described as a white supremacist by Vice, and Media Matters: Beaver, Boutwell, Haier, Haskell, John Paul Wright, Shermer, Richwine, Perkins and Damore.

I will look at more white supremacist-race science connections in a future post.

---

* In a blog called West Hunter, which Harpending shared with Gregory Cochran and in which Cochran still writes as of June 2020, Harpending published a post in 2012 called My friend the witch doctor in which he shared a colleague's thoughts, with apparent approval:

A colleague pointed out a few weeks ago, after hearing this story, that if (the belief in witchcraft) is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World. Prominent and not so prominent talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like “institutional racism” and “white privilege”. 

Steve & Gregory & Henry & Steven: how racist Steve Sailer birthed "The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper that Steven Pinker loves so much

The far-right, race pseudoscience-promoting,
Thiel-funded trash-rag Quillette likes to
use Steven Pinker in its promotional materials -
presumably with his enthusiastic permission

Quillette is at it again, promoting race pseudoscience. 

(The link goes to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the article, not to Quillette itself.)

And given how much Steven Pinker loves Quillette, and vice-versa, it was appropriate that Pinker got a shout-out in the article, in reference to his promotion of the paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence":

Although they comprise only about 0.2 percent of the world’s population, the Jewish people account for a large portion of its top achievers in domains of intellectual success. For example, they have won between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s Nobel prizes, and comprise over half of its chess champions. Ashkenazi Jews are particularly noted for their high achievement, including their high average performance on IQ tests. In his textbook IQ and Human Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2011), Nicholas Mackintosh gives the following summary:

[I]t has long been known that Ashkenazi Jews have an unusually high average IQ (see Chapter 1); some of them also have the misfortune to suffer from a number of diseases, such as Tay Sachs disease, caused by the possession of two copies of particular recessive genes. One suggestion is that the two are linked: while homozygotes with two copies of the genes develop the disease, heterozygotes with only one copy develop higher than usual intelligence (Cochran et al., 2006). (Mackintosh 2011, p. 285)

Aside from its scientific importance, this topic of research is also an important part of the rebuttal to antisemitic explanations for Jewish achievements. In 2006, Steven Pinker wrote in the New Republic that “Jewish achievement is obvious; only the explanation is unclear. The idea of innate Jewish intelligence is certainly an improvement over the infamous alternative generalization, a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”

I've written many times of Pinker's support for the NHAI paper.

The paper, which is an untested hypothesis, debunked by, among others, anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson and geneticist Adam Rutherford, was written by Gregory Cochran, a one-time recipient of over half a million dollars from Holocaust-denying kook Ron Unz, and who has written for Quillette and the racist Taki's Magazine; and Henry Harpending, who has his own white nationalist profile at the Southern Poverty Law Center site. 

But that's not all. I've written about this before but it doesn't hurt to underline it - the "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" paper so beloved by Quillette's favorite public intellectual, Steven Pinker, was not only written by a couple of racists, it was facilitated by professional racist Steve Sailer.

2012 was the year Steven Pinker abruptly stopped mentioning Sailer in public, after spending years promoting Sailer's career (that promotion was resolutely ignored by the media until very recently.)

In 2012 Sailer made this claim in proudly racist VDARE: (The link goes to the Wayback Machine snapshot of the article, not to VDARE itself.)

On a rather less epochal note, the publication of The 10,000 Year Explosion marks the tenth anniversary of my invitation-only Human Biodiversity email group, which I started in 1999.

And that's where Greg and Henry got to know each other! Peter Brimelow [note: founder of VDARE] recently called to my attention that the inscription on the Westminster Abbey tomb of concert impresario J.P. Salomon reads, "He brought Haydn to England …" Perhaps my gravestone will read, "He introduced Cochran to Harpending."

VDARE is currently funded by wealthy conservatives, including Charles Koch, via Donor's Trust. 

If anybody doubts the United States is in the grip of systemic racism, mention this fact to them.

Considering how many racists were involved in the creation of "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" - and considering how much race pseudoscience promoters like Quillette and Steven Pinker love the paper, it looks to me like the whole project was simply an attempt by racists to give "scientific" credence to an old racist trope, expressed 60+ years ago by infamous segregationist Henry E. Garrett, writing in infamously racist Mankind Quarterly, funded by the infamously racist Pioneer Fund.

The article by Garrett is entitled "The Equalitarian Dogma." This term, "Equalitarian," used by  segregationists against their critics, is sometimes revived by Quillette-associated race pseudoscience promoters like Bo and Ben Winegard and Michael Shermer who are certainly aware of the term's use by segregationists. I assume the segregationist connection is precisely why they use the term.

What happened to Adam Rutherford? Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've mentioned Abdel Abdellaoui here before. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Rutherford is an anti-hereditarian, right?

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

More in Part 2.