The Far Right & the International Society for Intelligence Research

The Atlantic published an article by Ali Breland yesterday, The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. Thanks to Maxine Margolis for the heads-up!

I have an issue with the title though. The far right has long been obsessed with Race and IQ. The important issue, which is what the article is really about, is that the Republican Party is being infected by race pseudoscience: 

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

And it's been going on since at least Bari Weiss's infamous glorification of several hardcore race pseudoscience promoters among the "renegades" of the Intellectual Dark Web including Michael Shermer, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Sam Harris and of course Steven Pinker.

I don't think the article really has a good handle on Steve Sailer's career though, whatever Sailer may claim:

In June, (Sailer) also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. 

I have long noted on this blog that 2012 was the last time Steven Pinker mentioned Sailer in public after a previous decade of promoting his career, so I assume that's why Sailer picked 2013 as the year he was allegedly pushed out of the spotlight. And 2023 was when stochastic terrorist Elon Musk took over Twitter and invited all the racist ghouls back on. 

But New York Magazine had an article all about Sailer in 2017, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right. So Sailer was hardly in hiding. 

The article does not mention the International Society for Intelligence Research, of course, but it does mention Stefan Molyneux, who had Linda Gottfredson, one of the most prominent members of ISIR on his show and together they ranked races with Black people on the bottom. 

The ISIR chugs along, year after year, almost completely unnoticed by the mainstream media, platforming many many proponents of race pseudoscience at its conferences. In 2023 it featured Michael Woodley of Menie, Gregory Clark, Rosalind Arden, Richard Haier, Emily Willoughby and Steven Pinker. 

This year they allowed one of the most extreme racists back in to make a presentation - Emil Kirkegaard.

There's a reference to "Bronze Age Pervert" in the Atlantic article and as outrageous as he is, his message per Breland is a perfect encapsulation of the ISIR ethos from Arthur Jensen to Linda Gottfredson to Richard Haier:

Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. 

I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of the participants of the annual Racist Rodeo - AKA the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

You can see the spreadsheet here.

Below are the top ten most frequent participants in the annual conferences since the first one in 2000. 

Note that participation is determined by mention in the annual conference program either for the inclusion of their work, or as an organizer or advisor or various administrative functions like interviewing the participants. But identification as a participant doesn't necessarily mean the individual was at the conference in person.

I haven't completed the 2024 conference since they haven't released the program yet, so these numbers are based on a timespan from 2000 to 2023. There was no conference in 2020. The right column is the number of times each has participated.

Lubinski, David	20
Bates, Timothy C.	18
Benbow, Camilla P.	18
Plomin, Robert	18
Deary, Ian J.	17
Haier, Richard	17
Johnson, Wendy	17
Detterman, Douglas K	16
Gottfredson, Linda	16
Colom, Roberto	14

So let's meet these most enthusiastic ISIR racist rodeo participants.

• David Lubinski is married to Camilla Benbow, and is currently at Vanderbilt University. In addition to being the most frequent ISIR conference participant, he received a "Lifetime Achievement" award from ISIR along with Benbow in 2019. Lubinski was one of the signatories of the Linda Gottfredson paper defending the race pseudoscience view in The Bell Curve, and as of 2022 was the director of the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which accepted money from the Pioneer Fund under the name Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. In 2023 the Institute of Mental Chronometry gave a grant of half a million dollars to two ISIR associates, Emily Willoughby and James J. Lee. 

Lubinski has not published anything directly about race, that I was able to discover so far, but his dedication to the cause of race pseudoscience seems certain via his various Jensenite associations and his apparently warm relationship with people like Linda Gottfredson and Steven Pinker. When Pinker was at the 2017 conference, Lubinski interviewed him and asked him, in effect, what made him come over to his side, the race pseudoscience side:

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."

"Human psychological diversity" is a term indistinguishable from Steve Sailer's "human biodiversity." And clearly Lubinski is using the term "individual differences" as a synonym for "human psychological diversity." 

Lubinski published an obituary for Jensen in American Psychologist that paints Jensen as compassionate towards Black people while failing to mention Jensen's alliances with hard-core racists like American Renaissance; that he was supported by the Pioneer Fund; and that he was on the board of the neo-Nazi publication Neue Anthropologie.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.  

• Timothy C.  Bates is a member of the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication associated with the ISIR. Bates' far-right, racist political views are apparent on his X/Twitter feed, where he retweets the likes of techno-fascist Trump-funder Elon Musk, Steven Pinker, and Razib Khan. He was the president of ISIR in 2017 and 2018.

On the Facebook page for the ISIR, Bates posts a reminder of how much the ISIR gang loves the incredibly racist Charles Murray. 

 

• Camilla P. Benbow, like her husband David Lubinski, underplays her race pseudoscience beliefs, but is clearly an enthusiastic participant in the ISIR race pseudoscience project. She is also at Vanderbilt. She's coauthored with extreme Jensenite Richard Haier and with extremist David C. Geary who has published in racist Aporia and racist "hereditarian" Quillette. I think that like Pinker, Lubinski and Benbow are too careful to make blatant racist statements, but they are clearly allies with those who do. They let those allies take the heat, while they continue to benefit from the financial legacy of the Pioneer Fund and who knows how many racist plutocrat donors.

• Robert Plomin - David Gilborn explored the perniciousness of Plomin:

‘… the idea of innate group inferiority is still on the table, despite all the progress blacks have made in this society … the last great battle over racism will not be fought over access to a lunch counter, or the right to vote, or even the right to occupy the White House; it will be fought in a laboratory, under a microscope, on the battleground of our DNA.’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. (2008) 

Why write a paper about racism and genetics in the second decade of the Twenty-First century? Surely arguments about race, intelligence and genetics are dead and buried? A Black man has been President and, in both the US and UK, bold assertions about racial minorities’ supposed intellectual inferiority have led to public condemnation for the speaker. Part of my answer lies in the main title of the paper, which quotes Professor Robert Plomin, one of the principal figures in contemporary writing about genetics and education. 

As I explain (below), Plomin has become something of a celebrity-academic in the UK; his claims make headline news, his views are sought by policy-makers, and he features in pop-science radio shows. In one such show, hosted by Jim Al-Khalili (Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey, UK) he was challenged on the topic of race. Plomin described his approach as follows:  

‘In general I’ve felt softly softly is a better way to go…’ (BBC Radio 4, 2015).[1]  

Until recently many in the field of behavioural genetics have been far less reticent about airing their views. The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is the most famous, but by no means the only, example of such work (see Eysenck, 1971; Gottfredson, 1986; Jensen, 1969; Lynn, 1991 & 2001; Rushton, 1997). This paper shows how, in recent years, a softly softly approach (that avoids explicit reference to race) has become more common. I argue that this inexplicitness should not be mistaken for an absence of racialized thinking and does not signal that the current work is free from possible racist consequences. Indeed, if anything, the new softly softly version of hereditarianism may be even more dangerous than the outspoken version of earlier periods. 

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

😱 Plomin published an article with Deary that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer. 

• Ian J. Deary - curiously, Deary is quoted for the anti-hereditarian side in the Guardian: 

No one has successfully isolated any genes “for” intelligence at all, and claims in this direction have turned to dust when subjected to peer review. As the Edinburgh University cognitive ageing specialist Prof Ian Deary put it, “It is difficult to name even one gene that is reliably associated with normal intelligence in young, healthy adults.” Intelligence doesn’t come neatly packaged and labelled on any single strand of DNA. 

So it's strange that he spends so much time with people convinced of the hereditarian hypothesis, and, let's be real, hard-core racists and neo-Nazis who show up at ISIR conferences. 

 

😱 Deary published an article with Plomin that was included in the manifesto of the racist Buffalo mass-murderer.   

 

• Richard Haier - I wrote the first iteration of the new version of the Rational Wiki article (NOT the one discussed here) exploring the extreme Jensen-infused racism of Richard Haier, the most devoted member of the Jensen race cult.

👉 Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.   

 

• Wendy Johnson - appears to be a Jensenite, but did not make a good case for racism when she appeared in an online interview. However, she has published with blatant racist Jan te Nijenhuis. And of course has no problem hobnobbing with all the racist extremists who show up at ISIR conferences.

• Douglas K. Detterman - according to his Wikipedia entry: "Among his achievements, Detterman founded the scientific journal Intelligence in 1977, and was editor in chief from 1977 to 2016 where it was taken over by Richard Haier. He also founded the International Society for Intelligence Research and was its president until 2011." 

The entry doesn't mention that Detterman is also vice president/director of the Jensenite, Pioneer Fund grantee organization the Institute of Mental Chronometry. It is likely that Detterman is just as racist as Gottfredson is and Jensen was, but is more careful to downplay the racism at the heart of his belief-system. 

 

👉Signer of the Gottfredson-authored defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence.    

 

• Linda Gottfredson is hideously racist, shamelessly so - possibly the equal of Jensen and J. P. Rushton. She can be heard ranking "races" with perfect confidence on white nationalist Stefan Molyneux's program. Her career is propped up by her lack of shame and the Nazi money of the Pioneer Fund. Gottfredson introduced Charles Murray to race pseudoscience. Of course this horrific racist ghoul is a long-time and highly admired member of the ISIR klan. They gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. 

👉Author of the defense of Bell Curve pseudoscience, Mainstream Science on Intelligence. 

• Roberto Colom is a huge fan and defender of the race pseudoscience of political operative and life-long recipient of wingnut welfare Charles Murray. He's also chummy with Murray on Twitter/X. Likes to cite all the biggest race pseudoscience ghouls in his work. Published in ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Five of the top 10 ISIR conference participants signed Gottfredson's "Mainstream Science" claim. 

Another signer was R. Travis Osborne - pro-segregationist, director of the Pioneer Fund. His article "Racial Differences in Mental Growth and School Achievement" was included in a collection of race pseudoscience essays edited by Robert Kuttner, another segregationist. That collection was a big influence on Arthur Jensen.

The race pseudoscience obsession with school achievement has continued from the days of segregationists like Osborne through the Institute of Mental Chronometry, which was originally called "Institute for the Study of Educational Differences" through to Kathryn Paige Harden and "behavioral genetics" arguing that educational attainment is the result of genes, to Richard Haier arguing for manipulating genes to raise IQ.

Racist Rodeo's a-coming - the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research is only weeks away

David Lubinski yukking it up with
Linda Gottfredson in 2016 - isn't racism jolly?
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The Racist Rodeo is coming up, July 26 - 29 in Berkeley California.

This is the twenty-third annual meeting of the race pseudoscience gang. 

Seems like only yesterday when extreme racists like J. P. Rushton, Linda Gottfredson and Arthur Jenson met for the first rodeo in Cleveland Ohio to discuss why those Blacks (and other "races" like Hispanics) are so damn genetically inferior. And look how quaint, their first program cover uses the Comic Sans typeface. 

I guess to present the casual, friendly side of "race realism."

The latest update for the upcoming Rodeo indicates that the timetable for the conference is still being finalized. But I see the "conference will feature a special symposium on giftedness with invited talks by giftedness researchers Michael Mhlolo and Camilla Benbow, among others."

Mhlolo is Black, so they now have two Black people attending this Racist Rodeo. But never fear, Camilla P. Benbow will be there to balance him out. Benbow is the wife of race pseudoscience hardcore David Lubinski, who is apparently the interview guy for the ISIR - here he interviews Charles Murray.

I discussed Lubinski conducting an interview with Pinker, asking Pinker why it took him a half-minute before joining the race pseudoscience true believers club. Or as Dubinsky calls it, "human psychological diversity."

It's clear that the push to legitimize race pseudoscience is not simply the project of weirdos like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard (will he show up at the ISIR this year now that Abdel Abdellaoui isn't there to chase him away?) This is a mainstream project with establishment people involved - Lubinski is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt, and Benbow is Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development, Office of the Dean at Vanderbilt.

We know their project is mainstreaming race pseudoscience because Lubinski signed Linda Gottfredson's race pseudoscience manifesto back in 1994, "Mainstream Science on Intelligence." This document is the Declaration of Independence of the ISIR - if you signed it, you are a founding father of twenty-first century race pseudoscience.

The ISIR's devotion to hereditarianism is obvious on its articles page. The fifth item down is "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" with the comment "The article is a classic. It’s one of the best overviews of intelligence, its causes, and its consequences."

The first two articles include incorrect definitions of the term "heritability." 

I've written on this blog about the misuse of the term. A great resource is The heritability fallacy by David S. Moore and David Shenk published in 2016, which states:

Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is.

Now they say "popular belief" which might indicate the general public. But the articles presented by the ISIR are written by people whose careers are staked on hereditarianism and should know better. 

And yet the first paper Genetics and Intelligence Differences by Robert Plomin and Ian Deary states:

For some areas of behavioural research—especially in psychiatry —the pendulum has swung so far from a focus on nurture to a focus on nature that it is important to highlight a second law of genetics for complex traits and common disorders: All traits show substantial environmental influence, in that heritability is not 100% for any trait.

They are using the term "heritable" as an exact synonym for genetically inheritable, and contrast that with "environmental influence."

The second paper in the list, Heritability in the genomics era - concepts and misconceptions states in its first key point:

Heritability, the proportion of variation in a particular trait that is attributable to genetic factors, is a fundamental parameter in genetics.

Now why would hereditarians so often mis-define the term heritable? Is it deliberate, with the goal of claiming that GWAS studies prove the hereditarian hypothesis? Or could it be that their belief in the ability of genes to control social outcomes is so reflexive that they can't imagine the term "heritable" could mean anything else?

Or could it be that the ISIR and fellow race pseudoscience travelers don't care so much about actual science - as long as their beliefs are presented in a way that sounds sufficiently sciencey to the lazy gullible media and the general public - as they do about political goals? 

The "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" paper, so essential to the ISIR and the race pseudoscience project ("a classic"), was written as a defense of The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve's co-author Charles Murray made it obvious, two years ago, that he would be happy to see a return to hiring discrimination, based on the beliefs of race pseudoscience.

Like Charles Murray, Thomas Bouchard, the twins studies guy and one of the ISIR's favorites, is the beneficiary of far-right racist funding:

 ...of the largest single beneficiaries of Wickliffe Draper’s generosity in the 20th century was the psychologist Thomas Bouchard, currently the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota, whose twin studies remain influential in intelligence research circles. Most recently, Bouchard’s work was cited in a 2022 paper in the Nature journal npj Science of Learning looking at genetic effects on cognitive performance as people learn over time. 

‍

In her 2012 book “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study,” the evolutionary psychologist Nancy Segal claims that Bouchard had never heard of the Pioneer Fund until its staff contacted him in 1980 or 1981. Despite concerns among his colleagues about accepting money from what was known to be a disreputable source, according to Segal, Bouchard admitted in 2009 that, “If not for Pioneer we would have folded long ago.” 

‍

Wickliffe Draper was a political activist and the Nazis were big fans - and vice versa.

Racists funding race pseudoscience for political ends. That's what the ISIR is ultimately all about.

Fun fact - of course like Bo Winegard, racist weirdo Emil Kirkegaard has a Substack account. That's because Substack is run by people with Peter Thiel connections who have no qualms about hosting racism.

Another fun fact: Charles Murray is a big fan - and funder - of Bo Winegard and Emil Kirkegaard.

Racist Rodeo 2023 begins ~ what is the Institute of Mental Chronometry?

Technically, Racist Rodeo 2023, aka this year's annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research starts July 27, but today there will still be festivities:

We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell! 

But what, you may ask, is the "Institute for Mental Chronometry"? The text did not include a link to any online presence for the Institute for Mental Chronometry (IMC) so almost the only information available online is via various organizations that track non-profits.

According to ProPublica, it is a Research Tax-Exempt Organizations with headquarters in Walnut Creek, California and "TAX-EXEMPT SINCE DEC. 1972."

And the name is not Institute for, it's the Institute of Mental Chronometry.

There are no tax records available on ProPublica before the 2001 tax year.

The latest tax record available is 2021 and its key employees and officers are DAVID J LUBINSKI, Pres/DIRECTOR; DANIEL J. LEVY (SEC/DIRECTOR) and DOUGLAS K DETTERMAN (VP/DIRECTOR.)

Detterman is the founder of the International Society for Intelligence Research and the Intelligence journal (which continues to publish Emil Kirkegaard as of 2023), and Lubinski I've mentioned several times already.

Daniel J. Levy doesn't appear to have any connection to intelligence "research" and appears to be an accountant.

The address given for IMC is 165 Lennon Lane #200  Walnut Creek  CA  94598, which is the address of Thomas Doll a wealth management company.

All three employees/officers received $31,890 in 2021.

Lubinski, Detterman and Levy are the only official names listed going back to 2012. 

In 2011 there is a fourth name - Arthur Jensen.

2010 appears to be the first year that Lubinski, Levy and Detterman were officers of the organization. In 2009 there was a whole different set, except for Jensen, who was working almost full time for the organization.

The same group goes back to 2005, when Barbara Jensen, his first wife, and Joe Moray, his son-in-law - are also included.

In 2004 the organization was not called Institute of Mental Chronometry, it was called Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. Same group of officers. In 2003 they got a donation of over a million dollars from the estate of Richard L. Bussman. In 2002 there was a donation of over a million from the estate of Bussman, and $50K from the estate of Dorothy Bussman. In 2001 and 2002 officers included C. C. Li and Ellis B. Page.

In 1990, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences was mentioned in a University of Delaware inter-departmental memo in which the UofD explained why it would be refusing donations from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund (includes a letter from Linda Gottfredson, Lubinski's buddy, whining that only racists agree to fund her "mainstream" race pseudoscience.) 

The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, like Gottfredson, was a recipient of money from the Pioneer Fund.

So that's probably why they changed the name to "Institute of Mental Chronometry" - to avoid the obvious connection to hardcore racists. 

It can't be because of mental chronometry's track record, which appears to be a complete failure for the race pseudoscience project:

Mental chronometry measures the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response by the participant. These studies have shown inconsistent results when comparing black and white populations groups, with some studies showing whites outperforming blacks, and others showing blacks outperforming whites.[179]
Arthur Jensen argued that this reaction time (RT) is a measure of the speed and efficiency with which the brain processes information,[180] and that scores on most types of RT tasks tend to correlate with scores on standard IQ tests as well as with g.[180] Nisbett argues that some studies have found correlations closer to 0.2, and that a correlation is not always found.[181] Nisbett points to the Jensen & Whang (1993) study in which a group of Chinese Americans had longer reaction times than a group of European Americans, despite having higher IQs. Nisbett also mentions findings in Flynn (1991) and Deary (2001) suggesting that movement time (the measure of how long it takes a person to move a finger after making the decision to do so) correlates with IQ just as strongly as reaction time, and that average movement time is faster for black people than for white people.[182] Mackintosh (2011, p. 339) considers reaction time evidence unconvincing and comments that other cognitive tests that also correlate well with IQ show no disparity at all, for example the habituation/dishabituation test. He further comments that studies show that rhesus monkeys have shorter reaction times than American college students, suggesting that different reaction times may not tell us anything useful about intelligence.

But what does Institute for Mental Chronometry do? It does not seem to generate any papers. According to an article in Intelligence (still publishing Emil Kirkegaard in 2023!) in a paper by Jensen published in 2011:

Jensen's Institute of Mental Chronometry commissioned a leading electronics firm to construct a state-of-the-art apparatus to administer, record, and analyze MC experiments.

So presumably the IMC is still working on developing this apparatus, although I haven't found any evidence yet.

Mainly, the IMC appears to be a service organization for the International Society for Intelligence Research. 

For this year's Racist Rodeo:

Travel support for graduate students and postdoctoral trainees: We are pleased to announce that enrolled Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers who have either an oral presentation or a poster accepted for the conference (as a presenting senior author) may be eligible for travel support, thanks to the generosity of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. Reimbursement will be available for documented transportation, lodging & meal expenses of up to $1,000 USD for travel within the United States or up to $1,500 USD for travel for all others. For students and postdocs with an accepted poster or talk, an additional $200 will added to your travel support so you can arrive a day early to enjoy the pre-conference event on July 26th, featuring talks by Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell. If you wish to apply for travel support, click “Yes” for this option when submitting your abstract.

And for last year's Racist Rodeo: 

The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to April 22, 2022. Please submit your abstract if you haven’t yet done so. Travel support is available for presenting graduate students and postdocs courtesy of the Institute for Mental Chronometry (IMC).

 Back in 2010, the ISIR was thanking the Templeton Foundation and Elsevier for student travel support:

We thank the Templeton Foundation for its generous support of student travel awards, and Elsevier Publishing Company for its generous contribution to the reception. 

According to SourceWatch:

The John Templeton Foundation tries to encourage the integration of religious beliefs and free-market principles into the classroom.

While researching this post, I found that Emil Kirkegaard runs a website devoted to Jensen. Maybe that's why the ISIR can't quit Kirkegaard, they both share a deep love of Arthur Jensen.

Lubinski wrote the obituary for Arthur R. Jensen for American Psychologist. I'll have more to say about that soon.

The Racist Rodeo 2023 Day One ~ the International Society for Intelligence Research and Arthur Jensen

The website of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) has not yet shared anything about its ongoing annual conference on its website. 

Presumably it will share info eventually, as it has done for its previous conferences, but I expect well after the conference has ended.

Steven Pinker was scheduled to speak at the Racist Rodeo yesterday, but he has had nothing to say about the ISIR on Twitter so far. 

Meanwhile Pinker was promoting racist garbage-rag Thiel-funded Quillette.

One of the co-authors of the piece he is promoting is Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Koch-funded AEI. 

Does Steven Pinker ever associate with anything or anybody that is NOT connected to race pseudoscience or the far-right plutocracy?

Meanwhile, the Twitter account for ISIR has been inactive since 2020, most recently retweeting something from Abdel Abdellaoui. 

Demonstrating that while Abdellaoui may detest Emil Kirkegaard, he is still firmly on the side of race pseudoscience. 

Not that I needed more evidence, he's a friend of Razib Khan, according to Khan.

Kirkegaard holds exactly the same pseudoscientific beliefs as Khan, so I guess Abdellaoui's real problem with Kirkegaard is that Kirkegaard doesn't have the right credentials and he's more blatant about his racism. I'm sure Kirkegaard and Khan agree that Black Americans, thanks to their genes, are an existential threat to the United States - but Khan manages to express that belief indirectly - by praising Charles Murray for the same beliefs. And we know how much Charles Murray agrees with Emil Kirkegaard.

Murray is not subtle about how he would like to see social policy adjusted to reflect his pseudoscientific beliefs in Black inferiority.

By the way, that is Francis Galton, notorious racist, the founder of contemporary race pseudoscience, eugenics and behavioral genetics chosen by ISIR as the avatar for their Twitter account.

ISIR loves to flaunt its connection to racists.

Anyway,  until more information is available about the 2023 Racist Rodeo, let's talk about a leading light of the ISIR, beloved by David Lubinski and Emil Kirkegaard, Arthur Jensen.

As noted yesterday, Lubinski is currently one of the officers of the Institute of Mental Chronometry. Jensen was originally one of the officers and the organization used to be called The Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which received money from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund. 

And Lubinski wrote the obituary for Jensen for the American Psychological Association and right from the beginning notes Jensen's debt to racists going back to Galton:

His intellectual ancestry traces back through his mentor Hans Eysenck to Cyril Burt, Charles Spearman, and, ultimately, Sir Francis Galton.

At the end of the first page of the obituary, Lubinski gets into the reason Jensen became famous:

Initially, Art wrote a chapter on how group differences in learning were likely traceable to deprivation– opportunity differences. Digging deeper into this literature, however, he was struck by how uncritically genetic influences were dismissed, and he began publishing articles on behavior genetics and individual differences in learning potential. His article “Social Class, Race, and Genetics: Implications for Education” (1968, American Journal of Educational Research [AJER]) attracted an invitation from the Harvard Educational Review to expand his treatment of the topic. The result, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” (1969), questioned the efficacy of extant programs designed to enhance intellectual development and hypothesized that individual and group differences in learning potential have both genetic and environmental components. The article ignited a firestorm across academe, the popular press, and the Berkeley campus.

His suggestion that genetic differences give rise to important psychological differences was anathema to prevailing academic ideology, but he also hypothesized that if traits run in families because of genes, they may also run in families of families (races) for the same reason...

Rational Wiki says Jensen:

...was arguably the father of modern day hereditarianism pseudoscience with the publication of an article in the Harvard Educational Review...

The Southern Poverty Law Center says:

Jensen promoted eugenics as the only practical solution to the problems facing the black community, arguing that they lacked the intelligence necessary for compensatory education programs to be successful. His ability to repackage fringe racial theories in the dry, dispassionate rhetoric of science made Jensen an instant celebrity in white nationalist circles, where he is still revered as “an intellectual pioneer comparable to Nobel Prize winners” and “a man of the highest distinction, not just scientifically, but also morally.”

Now at the time Jensen decided the problem with Black people was their own genetic insufficiencies, white nationalists were desperate for a hero. They had suffered a string of recent legal losses in the United States, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Loving v. Virginia ending all miscegenation laws in 1967.

White nationalists needed someone to reassure them that they were in the right after all. 

And there was Jensen to reassure them. Long before Ron DeSantis came along, Jensen was looking at the good side of slavery - suggesting that without all those slave rapes that caused "racial mixing" the Black American population would be even stupider, genetically, than Jensen and white nationalists already thought they were.

There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions, somewhat like the distribution of blood types. The number of intelligence genes seems to be lower, over-all, in the black population than in the white. As to the effect of racial mixing, nobody has yet performed experiments that reveal its relative effect on I.Q. If the racial mixture weren’t there, it is possible that the I.Q. differences between blacks and whites would be even greater. I think such studies should be done to lay this uncertainty to rest once and for all.”

—Quoted in “jensenism, n. The theory that I.Q. is largely determined by the genes,” The New York Times Magazine, 1969

David Lubinski was about 16 in 1969. The fight for civil rights for Black Americans is well within living memory. And the promotion of Jensen and his fellow racialists as "science" in 1969 shows how quickly the backlash came.

In the obituary, Lubinski tries to claim Jensen as a martyr for The Truth, which is absolutely typical of race pseudoscience promoters. 

When asked how he withstood the assaults, Art replied that he tried to live by Gandhi’s principle of correspondence between inner thoughts and public pronouncements. 

It could be even worse. In an article in Heredity in 2003, Chris Brand, one-time director of the Institute for the Study of Educational Difference, the same organization that Lubinski now leads (rebranded in 2011 as Institute of Mental Chronometry,) actually uses the word martyrdom:

Who were Jensen's friends in martyrdom and what was the organization of the London School of which he became the revered intellectual head? (The journal Intelligence recently devoted a Special Issue to him, calling him ‘A King among Men.’) What was the plan of campaign for dealing with the rise of political correctness which was making even discussion of race impossible? Miele's book has no index allowing tracing, but such crown princes of the London School as Phil Rushton (who first linked the Mongoloid–Caucasian–Negroid continuum to a wide range of psychological features, including sexuality – Rushton, 1985) and Richard Lynn (who first noticed evidence that Black African IQ was actually only 70 – Lynn, 1991) certainly do not loom large in Jensen's ‘conversation.’ Scrupulously aiming to avoid controversy, the man who first so sensationally attracted it now disdains any interesting propositions about the human condition. Jensen even says he does not feel either ‘inclined or properly qualified’ to think through the political implications of his work.

Brand was a first-class creepy misogynist racist weirdo.

Do martyrs who don't think about the political implications of their work usually receive thousands of dollars from racist organizations like the Pioneer Fund? 

It seems to me that race pseudoscience is spectacularly profitable thanks to the Pioneer Fund and Ron Unz and Charles Koch and Peter Thiel etc.,  but purveyors of race pseudoscience are so delusional they expect general adulation on top of all that easy money. 

Although lucrative, race pseudoscience is the easiest possible career. All you have to do is find new ways of restating the same speculations about race that were made in the 19th century. Often using the same exact speculations - Richard Lynn (RIH) took credit for a "cold winters" theory of Black inferiority, but that idea has been around since at least Schopenhauer, who died in 1860.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes:

Jensen’s ability to hide this radical agenda from the wider public stemmed in large part from his reliance on abstruse jargon to mask the crude racism of his underlying arguments. To take one glaring example, in his 1973 book, Educability and Group Differences, Jensen claimed that “[t]he possibility of a biochemical connection between skin pigmentation and intelligence is not totally unlikely in the view of the biochemical relation between melanins, which are responsible for pigmentation, and some of the neural transmitter substances in the brain. The skin and the cerebral cortex both arise from the ectoderm in the development of the embryo and share some of the same biochemical processes.” Stripped of its scientific affectations, Jensen’s statement boils down to the claim that dark skin causes stupidity. No biologist would ever take such a statement seriously, and indeed, none has—though it is now a widely accepted belief among white supremacists.

While Jensen was generally savvy enough to avoid the overt racism of some of his colleagues, the mask did occasionally slip. In 1992, he gave an interview to the white nationalist American Renaissance magazine in which he laid out his beliefs about black people in plain language, without hiding behind obfuscatory jargon. In this interview, Jensen ridiculed people, including his own mother, who believe “that blacks would be no different from the rest of us — the rest of the population — if they simply had the same education and all of that.”

The hiding of Jensen's radical agenda continued with changing the name of the Institute for the Study of Educational Difference to the Institute of Mental Chronometry. 

In examining the career of Arthur Jensen in depth, I found more confirmation that hereditarians are drama queens. In his 1969 essay Jensen wrote:

Much more thought and research should be given to the educational and social implications of these [dysgenic] trends for the future. Is there a danger that current welfare policies, unaided by eugenic foresight, could lead to the genetic enslavement of a substantial segment of our population?

Hereditarians are such true believers in genetic causation that they immediately jump from their speculations to dire warnings that public policy must be changed. I wrote about sociobiology hysteria a couple of years ago, first quoting Steven Pinker:

"Many misconceptions about behavior are harmless, but in these dangerous times some could lead to catastrophe. Steve Sailer's "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" correctly predicts that it would be unwise to try to graft a political system onto a society without understanding how the psychology of kinship and ethnic identification plays out in the local environment."

So if we don't listen to Steve Sailer and his prediction, it could lead to "catastrophe." 

What is it about sociobiology that makes its proponents such drama queens? We've seen Razib Khan and Charles Murray say that if we don't accept the sociobiological view of Black Americans we "face disaster" and Kathryn Paige Harden, in her recent book, compared the refusal to accept the conclusions of "behavioral genetics" (basically sociobiology) with armed robbery.

As with Jensen, political scientist Charles Murray let the mask slip, when he admitted he thought discrimination against any individual Black job applicant was acceptable because of hereditarian beliefs.

And the International Society for Intelligence Research continues this hereditarian political campaign. 

Aided and abetted by people like David Lubinski and Steven Pinker.

Steven Pinker at the 2023 Racist Rodeo (the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research)

Wheee it's the
Racist Rodeo!

The International Society for Intelligence Research is having its annual conference  and guess who's going to be there? 

We are delighted to announce the 23rd annual ISIR conference in Berkeley, California, USA! The conference will be held from Thursday, July 27 until Saturday, July 29 at the Hotel Shattuck Plaza, located at 2086 Allston Way, Berkeley, California. We will begin with a welcome reception sponsored by the Institute for Mental Chronometry on the evening of Wednesday, July 26, with drinks, refreshments, and guest speakers Steven Pinker and Frank Worrell! 

But this isn't Pinker's first racist rodeo, he was there in 2015, complaining about bad writing. 

I find it odd that Pinker is touted as some kind of language expert when he chose a truly rancid piece of dreck - poorly argued, poorly researched - written by professional racist Steve Sailer for "The Best American Science and Nature Writing." I think we should all have doubts about Steven Pinker's opinion on the subject of good writing.

But I don't think the primary reason for the speech is a concern for style so much as a chance to retaliate against Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, or as Pinker describes them in the most weaselly way possible: "critics of the value of intelligence research." Oddly he includes idiot David Brooks with them - Pinker and Brooks are now allies.

Pinker will never get over the fact that Gould humiliated him in the New York Review of Books. And he was mad at Malcolm Gladwell for daring to point out Pinker's cozy relationship with racist Steve Sailer, but Pinker - and Geoffry Miller - seemed to feel better about Gladwell after he signed the Harper's Letter. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist who gained notoriety through fat-shaming.

The audience chuckles when Pinker shows the slide of Gould, Gladwell and Brooks. Pinker says:

...three prominent critics of the value of intelligence research and of the major findings that I think are accepted by most people in this group...

This tells us two important things - "intelligence research" means race pseudoscience - and that Pinker is in agreement with alleged "major findings" that the pack of racists in the room believe in. Pinker continues:

What the three of them have in common is that they are all excellent writers. And what a lot of people who do research in intelligence have in common is, like most academics, they're not. And so in the battle for hearts and minds, I think many of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight. Namely, the people who are most vociferous in proposing the idea that intelligence doesn't matter, it can't be measured, it's all an artifact of socio-economic status, it doesn't matter above a certain low threshold and so on, they present their case very clearly and articulately. And so I think it behooves intelligence researchers to get their side of the story out in an effective matter...

What Pinker is proposing is nothing less than a coordinated political campaign by partisans of race pseudoscience.

But certainly Pinker's buddy Razib Khan demonstrates how badly race pseudoscience proponents write, so bad that even his fellow racists recognize it. Pinker tries to excuse the bad writing of his racist pals due to their being academics, but Khan is not an academic, he's a rightwing political operative posing as a scientist, so what's his excuse?

Pinker was also at the racist rodeo in 2017. He participated in the Distinguished Contributor Interview, available on YouTube. The audio is terrible. The interviewer, David Lubinski is:

...one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence",[8] an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to intelligence research following the publication of the book The Bell Curve.

I haven't had a chance to review the whole interview but this part is pretty fascinating at minute 3.40:

                        Lubinski

...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"

                         Pinker

It's true that at the end of "The Language Instinct" my first popular book, I commented on how one topic I did not cover in that book, that I never studied myself up to that point was just because the individual differences in the normal range just seemed a little ripple of noise on top of something interesting that we all have in common. Compared to the question of what makes the brain smart, how do we solve problems, how do we invent things, how do we discover things. What makes some of us a little better than others on a quantitative scale, struck me as less interesting. But then - as you pointed out I was not right back today(?) - individual differences are interesting in a number of ways. One of them is, if you're interested in human nature, what is innate, across the human species, what makes a human human, one of the ways to study it is to look at how something varies. Since you need some kind of independent variable in science to study anything. If you're interested in what do the (?) human nature. You can compare humans to chimpanzees, there are a number of ways of getting at it. But one of them has to be well, let's look at the differences in the genes and see how they correlate with differences in psychological abilities. Another was the fact that - I didn't appreciate until reading an article by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues in the late 80s in Science, that pointed out a problem that I had a deepening appreciation of, that behavioral genetics isn't just the study of the genetic influences but it leads to surprising discoveries about environmental influences, mainly the small contribution of the so-called shared environment, which I think came as a surprise to everyone, pointed out by Robert Plomin and Sandra Scarr, David Rowe and later Judith Harris. One of the profound discoveries of behavioral genetics is not so much that genes matter, though that still comes as a shock to many people, but that the part that isn't genetic isn't necessarily familial, isn't necessarily parental. That there's some profound source of variation in what makes us what we are that is neither genes nor families. That's a discovery that I find, even - almost 15 years after publishing The Blank Slate - it's very hard to get people to even understand it, let alone try to explain it. But that is a profound intellectual puzzle about what makes us what we are. I have my own favorite hypothesis about it, my own interpretation of the evidence. A lot of it seems developmental noise, and so non-shared environment as the name of the variable that counts for that chunk of variance may be somewhat dissuading. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression but in answer to your question, it is a highly interesting question what is it other than our genes that make us what we are and that's something that can only come to light through the study of intelligence and personality...

First, the notable use of the term "human psychological diversity" which I have no doubt is another way of saying "human biodiversity" a favorite euphemism for race pseudoscience promoters, as is, almost always, "individual differences."

I think the subtext for Lubinski putting Pinker on the spot here is "you used to be opposed to race pseudoscience, what made you decide to join our club?"

Second, Pinker is alluding to the theories of his protegée Judith Rich Harris when he talks about "non-shared environment." Basically what Judith Rich Harris meant was society:

What children learn in the context of their home may not, in fact, work in the world outside the home. Western societies demand very different behaviors in the home and outside the home; for example, displays of emotion that are acceptable in the home are unacceptable outside of it ( Dencik, 1989 ; Fine, 1981 ). A central assumption of GS theory is that socialization is a highly context-dependent form of learning. Children learn separately how to behave at home (or in the presence of their parents) and how to behave when they are not at home. The manner of learning, the reinforcement contingencies, may also be quite different: In the home they may be reprimanded for mistakes and praised when they behave appropriately; out of the home they may be ridiculed for mistakes and ignored when they behave appropriately.

What is so incredibly irritating about Pinker's amazement about this "discovery" allegedly made via behavioral genetics is that anthropologist Marvin Harris's entire career, since at least the mid-1960s, has been pointing out the non-family influences on human behavior, via his research strategy "cultural materialism." Specifically infrastructural determinism.

For a comparison of the research strategies of cultural materialism, sociobiology (which Pinker most often agrees with) and the "ideas control behavior" position, see R. Brian Ferguson's "Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why the Yanomami make war."

And Pinker is certainly aware of Marvin Harris, enough to dismiss him with this absurdly simplistic assessment: "But his view of human nature is too narrow — everything boils down to calories."

Apparently Pinker just can't or won't make the connection between Judith Rich Harris' shallow analysis of this "variable" and the decades-long body of work of Marvin Harris.

More about this interview later when I write about Pinker's progress in the exciting field of "human psychological diversity." 

Now back to Racist Rodeo 2023.

Frank C. Worrell is Black, but also takes money from Koch and other right-wing plutocrats, so can be relied on not to make a fuss about the core racist beliefs of many of those associated with ISIR. 

As Pascal Robert said (via F. D. Signifier) :

...the whole purpose of (Black) conservatives is to disabuse the notion that Black people are deserving of any policy that would transform their economic condition, because they are so culturally defective that capitalism can't save them. And they do this because their paymasters, like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute and other think tanks pay them to say this crap...

Black people willing to sign onto a race pseudoscience club are extremely valuable to organizations  like ISIR, so they can say: "see, even Black intellectuals agree with us about Black people."

For another example see JayMan - if they aren't actually a white nationalist man-baby.

So how racist is the ISIR? Glad you asked.

The current president, Rosalind Arden is a Quillette author who has also co-authored with hardcore race-ranking racist Linda Gottfredson, which is why I recognized her name on sight. Gottfredson was president of ISIR in 2012. 

Board member Emily Willoughby is a big fan of race pseudoscience. 

Earl Hunt, president in 2011, now deceased, liked to talk about "racial differences."

2016 president Richard Haier is a Quillette author and a defender of hard-core racist/neo-Nazi Quillette editor Bo Winegard. He's co-authored with  ISIR's 2020/2021 president and current secretary/treasurer, Rex E. Jung. 

Board member John Protzko wrote a paper on intelligence that cites Linda Gottfredson.

Board member Guy Madison is a sociobiologist who defends all the other promoters of race pseudoscience and has co-authored with white supremacist Edward Croft Dutton.

Board member Andreas Demetriou co-authored a paper that references Pinker, Gottfredson, Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen.

Board member Robert Colom is a big fan of the crackpot theories of Richard Lynn.

Board member Timothy Bates is a race pseudoscience ghoul who likes to retweet other race pseudoscience ghouls like long-time Bo Winegard associate and co-author Cory Clark. Bates was also ISIR president in 2017 & 2018. Co-authored a paper with right-wing racist kook Hans J. Eysenck.

The 2019 conference was a bumper crop of the hardest of hard-core racists featuring Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Greg "600K from Ron Unz" Cochran, Johnny Anomaly, Razib Khan, Stephen Hsu AND Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was finally banned last year because Abdel Abdellaoui complained about him.

Other racists were not happy that Kirkegaard was banned. 

The conference flyer for 2022 lists Abdellaoui, and also Emily Willoughby's advisor Matt McGue, a proponent of behavioral genetics (sociobiology); Jochen Paulus, a German journalist; Aljoscha Neubauer an Austrian psychologist; and Anna-Lena Schubert a psychologist with distinct sociobiology leanings, who co-authored a paper with Kirsten Hilger, an ISIR board member who won the Richard Haier prize. The local host was Jakob Pietschnig, who cited, as credible sources, in a paper on IQ: Edward Dutton, Herrnstein/Murray, three citations from J. P. Rushton and seven from Richard Lynn. That guy loves his race pseudoscience. Which is why he is part of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

I finally found the 2022 program online and it turns out that Steven Pinker was at this conference too, giving an invited speech called "Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters" which is part of Pinker's campaign to associate race pseudoscience with rationality.

Also featured - racists! Including Tobias Wolfram who likes to retweet Cory Clark; Heiner Rindeman, who co-authored with racist Noah Carl; and Damien Morris, author at Quillette. And the usual ISIR gang already mentioned.

Of course Richard Lynn and JP Rushton both participated in ISIR conferences. The 2012 conference program notes the passing of two leading promoters of race pseudoscience, Arthur Jensen and Rushton. Rest in hell, racists.

So many extreme racists have been associated with this organization I wouldn't be surprised if they made Steve Sailer their next president.

The ISIR has a Facebook page and they are NOT ashamed of all the racists associated with their organization. Their page banner is full of racists. This demonstrates how obsessed ISIR - and behavioral genetics, sociobiology and "human psychological diversity" is with race.

Top row, left to right: 

• Ronald Aylmer Fischer - huge racist
• Charles Spearman - inspiration for racists
• Cyril Burt - racist fraud
• Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr - behavioral geneticist racist twin studies guy
• Alfred Binet
• Arthur Jensen - huge racist - major thought leader of ISIR, along with Rushton
• Robert Plomin - promoter of race pseudoscience

Bottom row, left to right:

• Francis Galton - huge racist, founder of behavioral genetics and eugenics
• Illustration by Henry Thomas Aiken - I'm not sure its relevance to ISIR, when I asked Google to find the image source, the first hit was for some kind of presentation, no longer available except for the front page, called British History and the Census from the University of Glasgow
• Stephen J. Ceci - apparently not an hereditarian but took money from Cato (Koch) to defend them
• Charles Murray - huuuuge racist
• Charles Darwin as a young man
• Sandra Wood Scarr - Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, of great interest to racists like Emil O. W. Kirkegaard - writing in "Intelligence" the publication of the ISIR

So apparently "Intelligence" will publish anything as long as the author is devoted to race pseudoscience. According to its Wiki:

It has been criticized for having included on its editorial board biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg and psychologist Richard Lynn, both of whom are promoters of eugenics and scientific racism.[1][3][4][5] The editor-in-chief of the journal defended their involvement on the basis of academic freedom.[1] Lynn and Meisenberg no longer serve in the editorial board as of 2018.[2][6]

Currently Haier is the editor, associate editors are Thomas Coyle, right-wing fan of racists like Bo Winegard, and Sophie Von Strumm a proponent of behavioral genetics via her Hungry Mind lab, and a frequent co-author with Plomin. 

The editorial board includes Bates, Demetriou, Colom, Hilger, Jung, Neubauer, Pietschnig, Plomin, Schubert plus two names I recognized on sight, David C. Geary, an author at Quillette who co-authored a paper with the "human biodiversity" Winegard twins, and Heiner Rinderman, identified as a "human biodiversity pseudoscientist" in Rational Wiki. And there's Russell T. Warne, another Quillette author.

Probably not everybody associated with ISIR and "Intelligence" is a racist, but even if not, they are comfortable working with lots of racists.

Ooh - more YouTube videos from ISIR conferences:

Linda Gottfredson in 2016 for the "Distinguished Contributor Interview" - I haven't had a chance to watch it yet - I dipped in every now and then and there appears to be plenty of whining about how she's been treated with less than the adulation she expects, because she's a huge honking racist. I don't know if she repeats the performance she gave when she was invited onto racist Stefan Molyneux's show and together they ranked races by intelligence. 

Brian Boutwell in 2018 - "biosocial criminologist" and some time co-author with neo-Nazi racist Bo Winegard. Boutwell also appeared on Molyneux's show.

Gregory Clark in 2018 - hardcore hereditarian economist. White supremacist Douglas Murray was devastated when Clark was deplatformed.

Toby Young in 2017 - Young was a Quillette editor and comedian Stewart Lee had some amusing things to say about him and Emil Kirkegaard.

I will be reviewing more Racist Rodeo videos ASAP.