Another Steven Pinker - Razib Khan love fest

Racemonger Razib Khan, like professional racist Steve Sailer, has benefitted by having his career promoted by Steven Pinker. 

But unlike with Sailer, whom Pinker has refused to mention since about 2011, Pinker is not afraid to be linked in public to Razib Khan, which is why he granted Khan an interview to promote his book Rationality. Khan first interviewed Pinker in 2006.

Khan recently wrote a review of Charles Murray's book "Facing Reality," in which Khan agreed with Murray that we need to "connect the dots" about Black Americans or face "disaster." It was published in Quillette, which is probably why almost nobody outside of other racemongers has read it, but it's still a blatantly racist and menacing thing to say and nobody besides me seems to have written about it. 

Instead, people with establishment media platforms keep on promoting Khan, people like Noah Smith,  Lindsay Beyerstein and Julia Ioffe and most recently the New York Time's Nathaniel Popper.

I asked Popper via tweet and direct message if he agreed with Khan about the incipient disaster of refusing to accept the "reality" about Black people, but Popper refused to respond. I was blocked by Beyerstein and Smith on Twitter, and ignored by Ioffe. Their refusal to acknowledge the awfulness of Khan's lucrative racemongering career opens the question of whether Smith, Beyerstein, Ioffe and Popper either didn't know about Khan's racemongering career (very unlikely in Beyerstein's case); don't care that he's a racemonger and want to play nice with Khan in case he can benefit their career somehow; or agree with him, but don't want to admit it. 

And now there is the Albany Public Library.

I hadn't listened to the Pinker/Khan interview because as far as I knew it was only available via Khan's substack behind a paywall and I was not about to help support Khan's career. 

But while doing various Google searches recently I came across the interview available for free, and even better, because both Pinker's and Khan's voices get on my nerves, a transcript.

Pinker and Khan avoid politics for much of the interview, but they couldn't help themselves for long and eventually bemoan the fact that their evolutionary psychology and racemongering crackpottery is being called to account now, far more than it was when Pinker published his very political "The Blank Slate" in 2002:

Yeah, it's interesting that a number of the Catholic abuses of the scientific and public intellectual reasoning arena that I documented in "The Blank Slate" in '02 all of the elements of what we now call cancel culture, there were there were threads of it then going back even to the 70s in the reaction to E.O Wilson's, sociobiology But it has, it has exploded, you say the last 10 years, we've probably even more so in the last five years and still more so in the last two years, I think. After, I think a period following "The Blank Slate" in which there was a bit of a window, but it has, I think it has gone in the other direction certainly with with the whole set of movements that are sometimes called critical social justice and wokeism, it has taken a... an extreme form the denial of human nature, particularly when it comes to sex differences. And it is... I did luck out with that Nation review. Because, as I explained in a chapter at "The Blank Slate", there is a kind of historical alignment between the left and the blank slate and the right and somewhat dark vision of human nature. Although I pointed to a number of counter examples, even back then, like Peter Singers book a "Darwinian Left", like Noam Chomsky, like some of the behavioral economists, who use research on human nature as a justification for interventions in the economy. But the that alignment has, has reasserted itself, and a lot of the canceled culture that existed prior to '02 has really exploded since.

Of course social media was virtually non-existent outside of discussion boards in 2002. Pinker and Khan wish for the days when they could promote their pseudoscience-justified political beliefs with very little pushback. Blogger, which I use for Pinkerite.com was created in 1999, but didn't start to become big until Google bought it in 2003. Facebook was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.

Another important aspect of social media is that it reveals who Pinker and Khan really are, and gave a chance for Steve Sailer to testify what a big influence he is on Pinker's beliefs. This only happened because I had direct access to Sailer, via Twitter, at least until he blocked me.

But the really interesting aspect of this interview is how it begins:

"This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch the generosity of listeners like you..."

I have to look into that. 

The endless hypocrisy of Steven Pinker

The endless hypocrisy of Steven Pinker - to whine about science being politicized while being a long-time ally of the racist right, from Steve Sailer to - currently - the appalling Razib Khan - both of whom are financial beneficiaries of Holocaust denier and some time Republican politician Ron Unz.

Pinker often relies on his fanboys, like Michael Shermer and Jerry Coyne to present his views, which he did again recently, when he complained about Science magazine via Coyne.

In his letter, Pinker wrote:

Science magazine appears to have adopted wokeism as its official editorial policy and the only kind of opinion that may be expressed in the magazine. An example is the recent special section on the underrepresentation of African Americans among physics majors, graduate students, and faculty members. This situation is lamentable and worthy of understanding. But the six articles in the issue assume as dogma that the underrepresentation is caused by “white privilege”: that “the dominant culture has discouraged diversity,” and “white people use their membership in a dominant group to assert political, cultural, and economic power over those outside that group.” Though Science is ordinarily committed to open debate on scientific controversies, no disagreements with this conspiracy theory were expressed. And though the journal is supposedly committed to empirical tests, no data were presented that might speak to alternative explanations, such as that the cause of the under-representation lies in the pipeline of prepared and interested students. If we want to increase the number of African Americans in physics, it matters a great deal whether we should try to fix the nation’s high schools or accuse physics professors of white supremacy. Yet Science magazine has decided, without debate or data, to advocate the latter.

Most interesting to me was this part:

And though the journal is supposedly committed to empirical tests, no data were presented that might speak to alternative explanations, such as that the cause of the under-representation lies in the pipeline of prepared and interested students.

Pinker is very aware of alternative explanations for Black American under-representation in science, because he has been promoting the career of Razib Khan, for two decades, as recently as October 2021. 

The main focus of Razib Khan's career is to represent Black people, especially Black Americans as essentially separate from the rest of humanity. Much like his early influence, J. P. Rushton did.

Pinker avoids mentioning the race pseudoscience explanation directly, probably because that would link Pinker too obviously to what he has been indirectly - but indisputably - promoting for twenty years. 

Steve Sailer, a steadfast supporter of Pinker even ten years after Pinker stopped mentioning Sailer in public, has wondered at Pinker's ability to hold the same racist views as James Watson without suffering a career set-back:

How does Pinker avoid getting in trouble like DNA researcher James D. Watson or Pinker’s friend Larry Summers, former president of Harvard until he gave a Pinkerian talk on sex differences in IQ? I’m not sure, exactly. Perhaps it’s that the lithe, long-haired, soft-spoken Pinker seems like the archetype of the liberal college professor.

If anybody would know about Pinker's actual views on race, it would be Steve Sailer, who is very confident he has been a big influence on Pinker.

But for once I agree with Sailer - it is surprising that Pinker has gotten away with promoting race pseudoscience for so long with almost no impact on his career as celebrity intellectual. 

The likely answer - the media is too lazy and stupid and respectful of celebrity intellectuals.

The media's attitude towards Pinker's hiding-in-plain-sight pattern of promoting race pseudoscience is pretty well summarized by an email exchange I had with Gideon Lewis-Kraus who wrote:

If you have emails between Pinker and Sailer, I will gladly review them... 

With the implication that anything less than direct correspondence is not worth talking about.

That's why I was so amazed when, last autumn, the Guardian, once seen publishing dreamy love letters to Pinker's twinkling blue eyes and silver hair, published an interview in which Pinker was asked about his connection to Steve Sailer, for the first time, as far as I am able to discover, in twelve years:

Many critics allege that Pinker’s recent remarks are part of a longer history of comments and behaviour that have come dangerously close to promoting pseudoscientific or abhorrent points of view. To take a single example: the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has called Pinker out for sourcing information from the blogger Steve Sailer, who, in Gladwell’s words, “is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people”. Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science, told me that “for many people, Pinker’s willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale”. When I put these kinds of criticisms to Pinker, he called it the fallacy of “guilt by association” – just because Sailer and others have objectionable views, doesn’t mean their data is bad. Pinker has condemned racism – he told me it was “not just wrong but stupid” – but published Sailer’s work in an edited volume in 2004, and quotes Sailer’s positive review of Better Angels, among many others, on his website.

 

Pinker has expressed regret for his connection to Jeffrey Epstein. And this Guardian interview could have been his chance to express regret for promoting Sailer, but instead he denied promoting Sailer at all, preferring to mischaracterize his connection to Sailer as mere "guilt by association" as if Pinker simply bumped into Sailer at a student pageant at a school where they both had kids enrolled, and some dastardly woke person took their photo together and published it.

And of course Pinker would not express regret for his promotion of the career of Razib Khan, since he's continued to do it. Razib Khan's view is that Black Americans are innately morally and intellectually inferior, a position revealed most recently in his review of Charles Murray's latest book "Facing Reality." 

Khan presents the hereditarian view he shares with Murray as no big deal:

At a mere 168 pages, it is considerably shorter than the 500-plus pages of Murray’s previous book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. That’s because there are only two big ideas being forwarded: that different races in America “have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.” That’s it. Though there is more reasoning and analysis between the covers, the whole work rests on these two pillars.

"That's it." Two pillars: 1. "races" in America have different violent crime rates and 2. "races" have different cognitive ability.

This appears early on in the review. Everything Khan writes after this is based on the assumption of a biological reality of "race" and how it creates differences in violent crime rates and cognitive ability - Khan especially focuses on the race differences of being a Black American:

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

The presumption of innate Black inferiority makes everything so simple. And Razib Khan likes simple, which is why he once suggested we "remove all the history we take for granted" in our understanding of race in America.

So I have to take issue when The New York Times posts articles with headlines such as White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier. What genetics is showing is that in fact white Americans are shockingly European to an incredibly high degree for a population with roots on this continent for 400 years. If we removed all the history that we take for granted we’d be amazed that the indigenous peoples had so little demographic impact, and, that the larger numbers of people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general “white” population. 

The mystery of why "people of partial African ancestry did not move into the general white population" is solved by knowledge of the history of slavery and miscegenation laws. The only reason you would suggest removing all the history, the key to understanding the issue, is either because you're an idiot or you have a racist agenda.

To see how much Khan still denies Black history, check out this paragraph from the Quillette review:

For instance, to understand “white flight” in the 1960s and 1970s, all you need is to know that American culture and history has always been bathed in systematic racism and white supremacy. Never mind the massive crime wave of the late 1960s and 1970s that might have driven white residents out of dangerous neighborhoods in search of safety. 

Khan seeks to disconnect the "massive crime wave" from the historical record - the empirical facts - that demonstrate that yes indeed, "American culture and history has always been bathed in systemic racism and white supremacy." 

He's able to "connect the dots" that he thinks prove biology-based Black inferiority but not the dots from systemic racism to poverty to crime.

Steven Pinker did not address Khan's blatantly racist views when Khan interviewed him last October, a few months after Khan published his review in Quillette. 

Steven Pinker is a fan of Quillette, which is such a booster of race pseudoscience that its articles on race are reprinted by the white supremacist American Renaissance.

Khan's view of race is an extremist one, promoted by the (Koch-funded) American Renaissance and VDARE. How could Pinker possibly ignore something so extreme? 

What other reason can there be, except because Pinker agrees with Khan?

Pinker reveals his agreement with Khan in the interview:

Yeah, it's interesting that a number of the Catholic abuses of the scientific and public intellectual reasoning arena that I documented in "The Blank Slate" in '02 all of the elements of what we now call cancel culture, there were there were threads of it then going back even to the 70s in the reaction to E.O Wilson's, sociobiology...

The reaction to Wilson's sociobiology was because of its racist implications. Here Pinker seeks to equate that reaction with religion-based, anti-science irrationality.

We know now exactly how racist Wilson was, thanks to Wilson's exchange of letters with hardcore racist J. P. Rushton - and since it is correspondence, it is evidence that even Gideon Lewis-Kraus would find significant. 

But Steven Pinker tries to pass it off as no big deal, and then claims that using Wilson's correspondence - which Wilson chose to make available to researchers - is "slander."

The sociobiology/race pseudoscience view of Black Americans as a "race" more innately violent and having lesser cognitive ability than other races does not conflict with Pinker's suggested alternative to Science magazine's alleged wokeness:

"though the journal is supposedly committed to empirical tests, no data were presented that might speak to alternative explanations, such as that the cause of the under-representation lies in the pipeline of prepared and interested students..."

The "pipeline of prepared and interested students" could be explained by the sociobiology view, that Black American students are unprepared and uninterested in physics because they genetically lack the cognitive ability to become prepared enough, and are not interested in science due to their essential nature. 

The sociobiology view of women and science used to emphasize "intrinsic aptitude,"expressed so succinctly by Larry Summers, acting as Pinker's mouthpiece back in 2005, a year after Pinker published a bad piece of work by Steve Sailer in a volume of "the best" science and nature writing.

More recently the sociobiologists are emphasizing a belief that girls are just naturally not as interested in science as boys, as expressed by Steven Pinker's sister, Susan, in 2018.

When you already believe that racism and sexism are no big deal, all roads lead to sociobiology. Including for the pipeline problem.

Pinker mentions a possible source of the pipeline problem:

 ...it matters a great deal whether we should try to fix the nation’s high schools or accuse physics professors of white supremacy. Yet Science magazine has decided, without debate or data, to advocate the latter.

So what exactly is wrong with the nation's high schools? Well as the The Century Foundation study on the issue notes:

Inequality begins in childhood: The United States is underfunding our public schools by nearly $150 billion annually, robbing millions of children—predominantly minority and low-income children—of the opportunity to succeed.

So why is it that public schools for minority and low-income children - often in the same category - are underfunded? Could it have something to do with systemic racism?

Well not according to Steven Pinker, he's already ruled out systemic racism as "dogma" -

 But the six articles in the issue assume as dogma that the underrepresentation is caused by “white privilege”: that “the dominant culture has discouraged diversity,” and “white people use their membership in a dominant group to assert political, cultural, and economic power over those outside that group.” 

So if it isn't systemic racism what's left? If the legacy of slavery, followed by anti-Black terrorism (like Tulsa), and Jim Crow and the unequal distribution of government grants and funding for schools and redlining and the home appraisal gap, etc etc etc.  - "all the history that we take for granted" - are ruled out, what is left to explain Black failure to thrive?

Steven Pinker's long-time ally, Razib Khan, has the answer - genetic Black inferiority. They have failed to thrive because they are born that way. That's what Khan means by "connecting the dots."

Khan revealed his contempt, for those who think history holds the key to Black American failure to thrive, in his interview with yet one more IDW-related media outlet:

Ultimately like I know people in Academia who talk about like systemic racism and prejudice and all this stuff, I just say like it's really easy, all you need to do is minorities that you think should have these jobs, you guys just need to like draw straws and one out of five of you resign and free up the positions, hire somebody of color, and we're all good, right, it's a simple thing to do, but they never do it, do they? They don't make the hard decision, I told an acquaintance of mine who wanted to talk to me about racism and I just got sick of it, and I was just like, well what you need to do is give your son's inheritance to a Black family. If you're talking about wealth and equality right now, he needs to be poor, and make his own way, and they need to have money, so just do it. And the person flipped out at me. Cause they just wanted to talk. And I'm just not super interested in talking. I am a non-white person. I don't need to be talked to about racism all the time. It's not interesting to me.

"give your son's inheritance to a Black family"

Problem solved. No big deal. Now don't bother Razib Khan with talk about racism. It's not interesting to him.

The alternative to "wokeness" is a vicious, right-wing, biology-is-destiny point of view with serious political ramifications, or as Khan said in his Quillette review: 

(Murray's) thesis is that American society faces disaster if it is not prepared to confront certain politically uncomfortable facts about race.

And if people like Murray had their way (Murray is also funded by Koch via AEI), it would be perfectly legal to discriminate in employment, on the basis of race.

But sure, let's listen to Steven Pinker and his rightwing goons whine about how politicized Science magazine is.

Steven Pinker and Razib Khan - still buddies pushing race pseudoscience

This past January I noted that Pinker hadn't been seen publicly associating with race pseudoscience promoting sociobiologist Razib Khan for awhile. 

I thought Pinker might be in the process of ghosting Khan like he did to racist Steve Sailer after a decade of promoting Sailer's career, but apparently not. I recently saw that Khan's Substack - which I guess I should monitor more closely than I have been - has an interview with Pinker on March 16. 

But the full interview is only available to Khan's subscribers and I'm not about to give money to Razib Khan - who do you think I am, Ron Unz?

So as usual, Pinker is preaching to the racist choir about his "Blank Slate" claims, with no need to worry he might receive any inconvenient questions or pushback about his views.

Based on the summary, it appears the interview is the usual combination of sociobiology and whining about the failure of American society at large to express admiration for Pinker and his Deep Thoughts (now shamelessly monetized) the way the lazy gullible media usually does.

Despite extraordinary advances in genome-wide association analysis and the application of cutting-edge computational biological techniques to understand how the brain and behavior work at the scale of DNA, much of American society remains wedded to the blank slate, and indeed widely applied policies have taken the implications of the assumption still further than a generation ago. Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

First of all, genome-wide association analysis (GWAS) has not proven sociobiology beliefs correct, as Pinker, Khan and people like their pal Kathryn Paige Harden like to claim.

But also this sentence reveals the sociobiological thinking of Pinker and Khan:

Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

"Group differences" is sociobiology-speak for different socio-economic levels of success by race. It's right next door to "human biodiversity."

According to this paper from 2021, How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics - my bold.

The public face of human biodiversity includes, on one side, writers for the far right, White nationalist outlets like Steve Sailer of the Unz Review and Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, and, on the other, people who are not ostensibly political but willing to write provocatively about topics like race and eugenics like Razib Khan of Discover magazine and Steve Hsu, physicist and entrepreneur of the company Genomic Prediction (Eror, 2013; Feldman, 2016; MacDougald & Willick, 2017; Schulson, 2017) or centrist liberals like Steven Pinker (2006) who legitimates human biodiversity ideas like the evolution of Jewish intelligence. There is also a large set of less well-known and especially anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers and tweeters in the human biodiversity orbit. There is an effort to conceal or deny how organized human biodiversity is. The humanbiologicaldiversity.com website’s design is attributed to the generically named “James Wilson” though no contact information is offered. Blogger @hbdchick recently tweeted “human biodiversity isn’t a movement” it’s “simply the diversity found among and between human populations that has a biological basis.”10

We know that Pinker discounts racism and poverty as drivers of crime. So what does Pinker think drives crime, especially "group differences" in crime? 

Well he doesn't come right out and say it, as usual, but it's easy enough to infer, and not just because he's been supporting race pseudoscience hawkers for at least twenty years - like Sailer, Khan, the Quillette gang, Linda Gottfredson, etc.

In Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" he wrote:

...The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause.

So according to Pinker it's people deciding not to get married that is the problem. Unfortunately for him, Pinker is completely wrong about the magic of marriage preventing crime, as I discussed here.

The marriage is magic theory he is promoting reverses the causal arrows to claim that low marriage rates cause crime rather than that people who can't afford to get married or support a family might have stressors - like poverty - that cause the crime.

Pinker and his right-wing,
plutocrat-funded, Republican & IDW pals
on the board of Fair-for-all
__________________________________

When Jon Stewart interviewed Andrew Sullivan, (Pinker's fellow member of the board of advisors of the anti-CRT grift organization Fair for all) Sullivan claimed that the struggle for Black people in the United States had everything to do with "Black culture."

Sullivan is notorious for promoting racist Charles Murray's sociobiological claims in The Bell Curve.

So why exactly have Black people had lower marriage rates? What makes "Black culture" the way it is, if you completely discount socio-economics and history? 

Stewart didn't force Sullivan to give an answer to that - but Pinker gives an answer:

Pinker points out that arguments for cultural variation driving group differences are now taboo, on top of the earlier wariness around exploring any genetic basis of these differences. 

It's obvious here that Pinker believes the "cultural variation driving group differences" is due to the "genetic basis of these differences."

So hawkers of sociobiology like Pinker, Sullivan and Khan believe the ultimate cause for why Black people in the United States don't get married as often as other "races" ...is because they are Black. 

They believe there is some special genetic component of Blackness that makes Black people avoid marriage, and because they don't get married as often, therefore are more likely to commit crimes. And they think that GWAS studies will identify genes in Black people that cause this reluctance to get married. That is what sociobiology is all about.

Of course all "groups" in the United States are getting married less often now, but I've never seen contrary data cause sociobiologists to change their minds.

A curious coincidence, none of the three was born in the United States. Pinker was born in Canada, Sullivan was born in England and Khan was born in Bangladesh. But they seem to share the mission of coming to the United States to support racist claims (and take money from right-wing plutocrats to do it) about Black Americans, based on sociobiological beliefs.

The term sociobiology was popularized by E. O. Wilson, who, like Pinker, mostly avoided making blatant racist statements, while at the same time encouraging racist extremists. 

Wilson encouraged the career of a racist, Jean-Phillipe Rushton - who was a big influence on - you guessed it - Razib Khan. 

Because many people reacted negatively to E. O. Wilson's sociobiology claims, the term sociobiology is almost never used by those who promote sociobiology. The preferred terms are evolutionary psychology, something Pinker is closely associated with, and behavioral genetics, most recently connected to Kathryn Paige Harden but invented by extreme racist Francis Galton. 

Never forget that the people promoting GWAS as evidence of genetic "group differences" have political agendas and they are not afraid to advocate for making those agendas public policy while claiming they don't have political agendas. 

Like the time Kathryn Paige Harden, a friend and promoter of Razib Khan, compared people who refute sociobiology-based political solutions to bank robbers.

Sociologist and criminologist Callie Burt:

Harden argues that there are others who support genetics research on social outcomes, include a eugenics right, which has and will put this to use in the service of inferiorizing racial/ethnic and other disadvantaged groups. Harden positions herself as occupying the rational (ostensibly non-ideological) middle: In contrast to this ‘eugenics view’, Harden states that “[w]hat I am aiming to do in this book is to re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality.” She asks, “[c]an we peel apart human behavioral genetics … from the racist, classist, and eugenicist ideologies it has been entwined with for decades? Can we imagine a new synthesis? And can this synthesis broaden our understanding of what equality looks like and how to achieve it?” (p18-9).

To this she answers not just ‘yes we can’, but ‘we must’. Indeed, in a surprisingly aggressive section of the book, which departs somewhat from her tone elsewhere, she argues that to do social research without considering genetic differences between individuals is the moral equivalent not of jaywalking but bank robbery(!!). Specifically, Harden writes about an asserted (but not demonstrated) “tacit collusion in social science to ignore genetic differences between people.” She states such ‘tacit collusion’ (which I dispute exists, more on that below), “is not wrong in the way that jaywalking is wrong…. It’s wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It’s stealing.” 

Yikes. For the non-criminology readers, robbery isn’t ‘stealing’. Robbery is the use of force or threat of the use of force to take something from others; in bank robbery, this would be money. Perhaps if she mentioned this offhand or in a talk, I may let it go, but in a book this was clearly a thoughtful, albeit absurd and unjustified in my view, moral comparison. How does she get here? And, are her arguments sound? [Foreshadowing: no idea and no.] 

The journey is interesting, especially with the relatable personal examples, but the logic and evidence presented is partial and tendentious. Harden battles with straw men, overlooks nuance and contrary or complicating evidence, and deftly avoids several of the longstanding critiques of behavior genetics, which now apply to sociogenomics: these include the population specificity and, therefore, incomparability of heritability studies across groups (defined, for example, by social class), the social construction of the outcomes, and downward causation, as well as a host of methodological issues, including assumptions and limitations, in current GWAS and other sociogenomics studies.

 I do think there is much to discuss on these issues (in fact, I’m writing a book about it myself), but charitable engagement with different views and thorough engagement with existing scientific evidence and theory is not found in this book, in my reading. She’s selling a view, in part by curiously denigrating her opponents while ignoring their critiques.

Unsuprisingly, the Peter Thiel-funded Big Think promotes behavioral genetics and Harden. Although the page for the interview is branded:  IN PARTNERSHIP WITH John Templeton Foundation.

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

Miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for backup from racist Razib Khan

This is a repost from my personal blog originally posted November 2011

---

Since the earliest days of this blog I've had my eye on Razib Khan, the bigwig at Gene Expression the web site devoted to the "science" of evolutionary psychology. The very first time I mentioned Khan was to point out that he is a blatant racist and a big admirer of Steven Pinker - and it was obvious to me even then that Pinker returned the admiration. Here's Khan talking about aptitude:

I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.

Now what Khan means by "aptitude" is intelligence and what he has in mind is that infamous work of racialist science "The Bell Curve." Predictably, Khan is a huge fan of the Bell Curve and featured this interview with author Charles Murray.

Another time Khan clarified further on the "aptitude" issue:

right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional. conservatives excoriate underclass social structures and cultures and encourage their own rival social engineering programs (vouchers, enterprise zones, privating public housing). if some aptitudes were genetic on average between groups, then we have an even harder task: identify the points in the genome that effect “g”-general intelligence, and figure out ways to manipulate these segments of the genome (gene therapy).

There is no question, Razib Khan believes that non-whites, especially Africans, have evolved to be less intelligent than whites. He is a full-on racist.

Here Khan lays out his theories of intelligence of various national/ethnic groups and the desirability of blondes.

UPDATE DECEMBER 14:
In the link above Khan presents the race science belief that Native Americans are a separate race from East Asians. Pinkerite has recently discussed the why that is genetically incorrect.


The proudly racist American Renaissance likes to republish the work of Razib Khan.

But Khan is careful not to make his racism too blatant these days. Instead he lets you draw your own conclusions about Black Americans as in this Discover Magazine column he writes:

Here’s a case of inversion: in the early 20th century ideologues turned the roots of all civilizations into examples of Aryan/Nordic superiority. Today from what I can tell the mainstream sentiment is to not comment or inquire too deeply into the Afrocentrist fiction that St. Augustine, Hannibal or Cleopatra were black. A fiction which from what I can tell has spread widely within the African American community. How the pendulum has swung!

So how does he know that the fiction "has spread widely within the African American community"? He says it right there: "from what I can tell."

In other words, the Aryan/Nordic superiority myth, which was widely disseminated and believed and acted upon in the Holocaust, is equivalent to the myth-making of the African American community - from what Razib Khan can tell.

According to his online bio he is an "Unz Foundation Junior Fellow." The Unz Foundation was created by Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative.

Now it's not surprising that Pinker has a hissyfit over the New Yorker review of his most recent book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." - Pinker is not accustomed to analysis by someone who is not baffled by his bullshit - and legions in the media are. Pinker is accustomed to being lionized and revered.

So who does Steven Pinker turn to for a reply to The New Yorker? Razib Khan:

But aren’t you just being defensive? Authors always think that negative reviews of their book are wrong. Has anyone else replied to Kolbert?

Razib Khan has a response in the Gene Expression blog on the Discover magazine Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20111012170040/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/10/relative-angels-and-absolute-demons/

The funny thing is, both in the link above and here, Khan admits he hasn't even read the entire book, estimating he's read about 20% as late as November 28.

A racist who doesn't do his homework. That's who Steven Pinker cites in defense of his work against the New Yorker.

Steve Sailer, a buddy of Khan's and an even more blatant racist, is a huge fan of Pinker's book and gives the book a rave review in - where else - The American Conservative.

The continuing non-celebrity career of Razib Khan

Jesse Singal and Razib Khan enjoy the bootlicking together after 

Singal posted a photo of grifter Bari Weiss and her grifter wife Nellie Bowles.

Weiss herself has to lick the boot, which is why she gives interviews to Peter Thiel and lately, fascist Marc Andreessen. It's very likely that both Thiel and Andreessen fund The Free Press, considering that Andreessen already funds Nazi-friendly Substack and Thiel has spent his entire career since college funding right-wing media and has been accused of funding Quillette. Thiel even went so far as to have a meeting with international man of douchebaggery Emil Kirkegaard, as reported in the essential-reading "Race Science Inc." by the organization Hope not Hate.

The Free Press is so devoted to racism it employs and expresses admiration for the white supremacist Douglas Murray.

Khan and Singal have been allies for years and recently Singal appeared on Khan's podcast.

I assume Khan is team-licking with Singal on Bluesky in an attempt to get a gig with the Free Press, which is basically the American Quillette. To be fair, the Free Press is a good fit for Khan, who has made a career of promoting far-right extremism and race pseudoscience, which has been quite lucrative for him.

Holocaust denier Ron Unz paid for Khan's education, per the excellent 2017 Undark article Race, Science, and the Continuing Education of Razib Khan:

Around 2000, (Khan) joined a private email discussion group about human biodiversity organized by Sailer. (More mainstream academics, including Steven Pinker, were also in the group).

Not long after that, Khan helped a geneticist friend start a blog about science. They called it Gene Expression — GNXP, for short. Its writers discussed technical topics, as well as issues with a more political edge, like gender and racial differences.

A few years later, Khan went on the payroll of Ron Unz, a libertarian who ran for governor of California in 1994. Unz, who made a fortune in software development, offered Khan something that Unz describes as “a sort of fellowship or junior fellowship” to further his scientific career. Both Khan and Unz are vague about the reasons for the fellowship, but the gift was contingent on Khan leaving his job in software to focus on a scientific career. It was a big part of why he got on a graduate school track and ended up at UC Davis.

The article is from 2017 and since then, Khan has continued to be a promoter of race pseudoscience, working with Quillette and the Emil Kirkegaard-owned Aporia Magazine. I wrote an overview of Khan's career in 2022.

I haven't been talking about Khan much in the past year but when he teamed up with Jesse Singal to attack me last week he got my attention.

I have to laugh about Singal's calling me an internet microcelebrity. Singal and Razib Khan are allied with the much more famous Steven Pinker, but although Pinker was called a "celebrity intellectual" by the NYTimes, even he is barely known outside of the very online. 

I had lunch with a writer friend not long ago and I told her about this Pinkerite blog. I explained why I selected the name Pinkerite and her response was "who is Steven Pinker?" I went through a list of the names of other IDW-related people I've written about here, and the only name she recognized was Bari Weiss.

Although more often than not when I've mentioned the name Bari Weiss, most people hear Barry White, the music legend who died over twenty years ago.

One of the reasons this blog is so obscure is that except for Thiel, Musk and Trump, virtually all the people I write about on Pinkerite are not well known by the general public nor even by smart people who pay attention to politics and current events. 

So by microcelebrity I assume Singal means that he and his IDW friends have Googled their names and found this blog. And since someone, anyone, is writing about them, they feel like celebrities - which makes me therefore a microcelebrity.

Among Razib Khan's smears on Bluesky is the claim that I'm "scaring even woke journalists."

Which "woke journalists" could Khan possibly mean? Matt Yglesias? Yglesias is another name known among pundit-types and the very online, but almost nobody else. Although an acquaintance mentioned to me that he was a counselor at a camp Yglesias attended as a child.

Razib Khan is not well known by the general public, but that's worked out for him since it means that he gets jobs and support from the clueless now and then. In 2013 even Ta-Nehisi Coates promoted Khan's career.

But then people Google Khan. Like when the NYTimes canned him, or when people changed their mind about signing Khan's petition in defense of racist E. O. Wilson. 

And sometimes when people Google his name they find this blog, which is why Khan is so mad and making unsupported claims about me. 

But I'm not even a microcelebrity. I'm just an American citizen, keeping tabs on people taking money from fascist plutocrats to promote race pseudoscience and other rightwing bullshit.

The appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan

Razib Khan, an atheist, compares
the belief in systemic racism to religion 

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

The purpose of this site is to get the word out about all the people in the media, in science and in academia
who promote race pseudoscience - which often bleeds into racism, and especially, in the United States, into anti-Black racism.

Although I am occasionally contacted for background info by professional journalists - as with the Undark article about Razib Khan by Michael Shulson and the Quillette article by Donna Minkowitz, sometimes it feels like I am not making any progress getting the word out about the individuals and organizations promoting race pseudoscience. 

Which is why it was nice that Razib Khan put together a political campaign attacking a Scientific American article about E. O. Wilson: not only did the letter help to show who people like Nicholas Christakis are, it created a controversy, which led to more people learning about the appalling race pseudoscience career of Razib Khan. Probably way more, in one swoop, than I reach in a year.

Fun fact - Stephen Jay Gould, the great Satan of race pseudoscience promoters, was attacked by Khan in a way characterized by biochemist Larry Moran as "childish" - but you didn't see Moran writing a protest letter about it and getting all his friends to sign it. Maybe because Moran is an actual scientist while Khan is a political operative.

The SciAm letter controversy revealed many people in science and academia were utterly clueless about Khan's career as a pseudoscience-monger, and there's really no excuse. In addition to the Undark piece, there was the controversy in 2015 when the New York Times hired then dumped Khan when journalists pointed out Khan's history of race pseudoscience claims. I had a small part in that, because Jamelle Bouie had linked to my personal blog, among other sources, to reveal Khan's race obsession.

Although according to Khan's own testimony, "getting cancelled" was no big deal for him.

I became aware of Khan and his race pseudoscience blog, Gene Expression around 2005. I had basically dismissed him as yet another racist crank, until I realized in 2006 that Steven Pinker was helping to promote his career. Something I later discovered Pinker had done for racist Steve Sailer in 2004.

I've written about Khan on my personal blog and on Pinkerite several times, including:

• His relationship with the Insitome Institute

• The ongoing relationship with Steven Pinker.

• Khan's desire to erase American history in favor of genetics

• His Quillette authorship, including with "biosocial criminologist" Brian Boutwell

His latest Quillette piece, December 2021, is entitled "The Aristocracy of Talent" and if we are talking the aristocracy of literary talent, Khan ranks as a peasant. He's such a bad writer even his fellow racists recognize it. 

• The financial support he's gotten (along with Steve Sailer and crank Gregory Cochran) from rightwing, anti-immigration Holocaust denying Ron Unz, publisher of The Unz Review

And what should be the best known thing about Razib Khan, his 2021 review of Charles Murray's "Facing Reality" in which Khan says in so many words, in agreement with "his friend" Murray that American society must do something about the fact that Black Americans are innately, genetically pre-disposed to being stupid and criminal and if America does not do something about those genetically-degraded Blacks we "face disaster."

Only in America - someone born in Bangladesh moves to this country and makes himself a lucrative career dehumanizing a group of Americans whose roots in North America and the United States go back centuries. 

That's nothing against Bangladesh: European immigrants have been rising in the social pecking order on the backs of Black Americans for a long time, although admittedly, not all Europeans all at once. The Irish have about the palest skin around but it took them awhile, as most of them were impoverished and fleeing famine, to become respectable enough to be truly white. As this caricature from 1876 makes clear.

Razib Khan is a pioneer in that respect, pushing the boundaries so that all you have to do to get a leg up in the American nativist hierarchy these days is to portray Black Americans as subhuman and deny the existence of systemic racism. You don't even have to have European ethnicity anymore. 

Khan's family must be so proud of him.

We can see this new system in action from the very beginning of Razib Khan's appalling career. The anti-immigration, white supremacist hate organization VDARE gave immigrant, non-white Razib Khan his start on the road to race pseudoscience fame and fortune.

In May 2000, right around the time he received his BS in biochemistry from the University of Oregon, Khan can be seen sharing his thoughts on race and intelligence with racist Steve Sailer on the VDARE web site (the link goes to the archived version of the page.)

If by "intelligence" one means analytic reasoning skills, it seems that the Northeast Asians —Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans — are somewhat more intelligent than the white norm. (I believe the I.Q. difference is generally listed as somewhere between 2-8 points, depending on the study). Most of the evidence also seems to point to New World Indians' scoring slightly below whites.  Thus, Mestizos (white-Indian mixes) would have slightly lower IQs than whites, while Eurasians (white-East Asian crosses) would have slightly higher IQs.  The correlation between the increasing blondeness of high I.Q. Eurasians would be somewhat mitigated if the less intelligent Eurasian men happened to import intelligent East Asian women to make up for their competitive disadvantage on the marriage market, while the more intelligent Eurasians would marry less intelligent blondes (i.e., European derived females).  The key is how much more intelligent the high status Eurasian males are, and how much more intelligent Asian females are vs. European females

In addition, the most intelligent Eurasian men might also be the most "nerdish" as Mr. Sailer would say. [See Steve Sailer's essay "Nerdishness: The Great Unexplored Topic" at http://www.iSteve.com/nerds.htm ]. This would make it rather more difficult for them to attract high status "blondes."  What I am saying is that there is a difference between the macho Mestizo and black men, who attain high status in most likely extroverted fields (say entertainment, sports, law, politics, and business) while highly intelligent Eurasians might be funneling into scientific fields, making their values, and their possible mates, a bit different.  Melinda French Gates for instance, to use the classic example of a nerd-wife, is attractive, but not blonde.

Sailer must have been impressed. By March 2002 he was praising Khan and referring to him as a geneticist. Although if Khan's Wikipedia page is to be believed, his only credential at that point was for biochemistry.

Khan then got a column at Unz Review and started his own website, Gene Expression, which has archives available here. 

June 2002, the first month archived, is full of racist gems:

Khan discusses Steve Sailer's views on race and asks when Sailer will write a book on the topic. In a different post he refers to the "race realist project" and "politically correct scientists like Cavalli-Sforza who deny the reality of race." Khan recommends the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, infamous racist and crappy scientist: "read Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective and you get the same data interpreted in a rather different manner."

The June 30 post again acknowledges his debt to Rushton and he uses the term "human biodiversity" coined by Sailer.

...here is something that I want to look at from the prism of human biodiversity: 21% of Asian-Americans, 11% of Hispanic Americans, 10% of white Americans and 6% of black Americans describe themselves as "Secular." This tends to map onto Rushton's Rule rather well (blacks at one end-Asians at the other).

The "Rushton's Rule" link goes to Steve Sailer's website.

In a post from June 27, Khan writes:

How much more social science data do we really need to convince people about race differences? We've had decades of a consistent 15 point gap between blacks and whites-spanning Jim Crow, desegregation and the rise of the black middle class. And yet the dominant position still remains that the gap is an artifice of social discrimination and oppression. What will really convince the opposition-what they'll have a harder time dismissing-are genuine structural differences (neurological) between races on average in the neocortex itself. 

Khan's view here in 2002 is identical to the one expressed in his positive review of Charles Murray's book in 2021. 

And Khan's view of race isn't merely "scientific":

Now, it is true that I believe that races are different. I also believe that private organizations-individuals or corporations-should be able to take race into account in their everyday decisions.

Another view Khan shares with his friend Charles Murray.

Clearly Razib Khan's two decades-long job of smearing Black Americans has been extremely easy. He simply repeats the same J. Phillippe Rushton/Charles Murray talking points year after year, with some slight changes to the wording. But the message is always the same: "Black" people are portrayed as completely separate from the rest of humanity, and claimed to be genetically inferior both intellectually and morally. 

And he's been paid well to promote this message, by Unz, Quillette, Taki's Magazine, and who knows what or who else. We know that Charles Koch along with other rightwing racist plutocrats give millions via Donors Trust to white nationalist organizations like American Renaissance and Khan's original mentor, VDARE. It wouldn't be surprising if they gave money directly to Khan. And Khan has already written for the Koch-funded City Journal

But Khan hasn't written exclusively for racist organizations. For a time Khan was even pushing race pseudoscience via Discover magazine.

But it's not all fun, Khan will have you know. Sometimes he has to venture outside the race pseudoscience bubble and answer questions about his race beliefs and he finds it just so tiresome, as he told one of these (likely astro-turfed ) pro-IDW organizations the "New Liberals":

Ultimately like I know people in Academia who talk about like systemic racism and prejudice and all this stuff, I just say like it's really easy, all you need to do is minorities that you think should have these jobs, you guys just need to like draw straws and one out of five of you resign and free up the positions, hire somebody of color, and we're all good, right, it's a simple thing to do, but they never do it, do they? They don't make the hard decision, I told an acquaintance of mine who wanted to talk to me about racism and I just got sick of it, and I was just like, well what you need to do is give your son's inheritance to a Black family. If you're talking about wealth and equality right now, he needs to be poor, and make his own way, and they need to have money, so just do it. And the person flipped out at me. Cause they just wanted to talk. And I'm just not super interested in talking. I am a non-white person. I don't need to be talked to about racism all the time. It's not interesting to me.

Not interesting to him. But interesting enough to monologue about race in the most flippant, offensive way possible. "give your son's inheritance to a Black family." See, systemic racism solved. Why didn't those stupid Old Liberals think of that?

Recently he was bemoaning his job along with neo-Nazi Bo Winegard, another Quillette author.

So why doesn't Khan get a real science job, doing what he has credentials for: biochemistry and biology? 

Kathyrn Paige Harden promoted 
Razib Khan's career in 2017. 
In 2021 Khan testified she was his friend

My theory is that over the past 20 years he has become addicted to the easy money of being a right-wing political operative. I suspect biochemistry is much harder than writing (badly) his Substack articles or a letter of protest to Scientific American. 

And as long as the feckless - or worse - like Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis and others keep defending and promoting him,  while Ron Unz (and/or whoever else) keep paying him, what incentive is there for Razib Khan to get a career that is not appalling? 

Khan will likely spend his entire career, like Charles Murray, on wingnut welfare.

Razib Khan and the curious Insitome Institute part 2

Razib Khan & Spencer Wells.
Observe Wells ignoring Khan's well-known, decades-long
career as a promoter of race pseudo-science.

Continued from part 1

So Razib Khan, in spite of his long-term involvement in race pseudo-science, has found support for his career from the Insitome Institute. 

Khan is their "Director of Scientific Content."

Reminds me of the days when "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker supported the career of Razib Khan, going so far as to use Khan to respond to a negative review of The Better Angels of Our Nature in the New Yorker. Which was a seriously unequal match in terms of literary ability alone - Razib Khan vs the New Yorker. 

Pinker also promoted the career of the blatantly racist Steve Sailer, before dropping him, at least in public.

Khan and Sailer are buddies. Here we see Sailer, in the infamously racist VDARE, promoting Khan's review of "Facing Reality".

In 2019, Donor's Trust, a funding vehicle for right-wing plutocrats like Koch and the Mercers, gave over $1.5 million to the VDARE Foundation in 2019, according to tax records obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Razib Khan has been associated with VDARE for at least twenty years, and he is mentioned there often by Steve Sailer and especially too-racist-for National Review John Derbyshire. Derbyshire described Khan as "my old friend" in December 2019 and gives some insight into the Khan-Sailer relationship:

Blog post of the week comes from my old friend Razib Khan at the Gene Expression website. Razib is a close competitor with Steve Sailer for the title Smartest Gink I Know. Indeed, it was at Steve's original HBD listserv twenty years ago that I first got acquainted with Razib.

"HBD" stands for "Human Bio-Diversity" and is a code word for anti-Black racism.

So who are Razib Khan's new friends at the Insitome Institute think tank?

The Team consists of Spencer Wells, Ph.D; Gareth Highnam, Ph.D; and Khan. 

Wells has worked for National Geographic and is on the record saying things like:

WHEN ASKED about the question of race, Wells’s answer was unequivocal. “Racism is not only socially divisive, but also scientifically incorrect. We are all descendants of people who lived in Africa recently,” he says. “We are all Africans under the skin.” The kinds of differences that people notice, such as skin pigmentation, limb length, or other adaptations are “basically surface features that have been selected for in the environment. When you peer beneath the surface at the underlying level of genetic variation, we are all much more similar than we appear to be. There are no clear, sharp delineations.”

So Wells believes the exact opposite of what Razib Khan believes.

Meanwhile Gareth Highnam doesn't have much to say about race in the media, although I did notice him liking a tweet by Amy Harmon, that was critical of hereditarian Nicholas Wade back in 2014. 

Needless to say, Khan is a fan of Wade because of his hereditarian beliefs.

Also, Highnam does give a shit about the World Health Organization, at least in 2018.

So that's the Team. There is also a Board of Directors which consists of Spencer Wells and Carlos D. Bustamante, Ph.D. 

Everybody has a Ph.D except Khan, who has two Bachelors of Science degrees, in Biochemistry and Biology, according to his Wikipedia page, as well as some graduate work. Although Khan is described as a "geneticist" on the Insitome site and many other places, his Wiki page describes him, more accurately as a "writer in population genetics and consumer genomics."

Bustamante is interviewed in Technology Review (my highlight):

Many genetic researchers have long argued that race has no basis in science. But the debate doesn’t seem to go away. 

 

In a global context there is no model of three, or five, or even 10 human races. There is a broad continuum of genetic variation that is structured, and there are pockets of isolated populations. Three, five, or 10 human races is just not an accurate model; it is far more of a continuum model.

Humans are a beautifully diverse species both phenotypically and genetically. This is very classic population genetics. If I walk from Cape Horn all the way to the top of Finland, every village looks like the village next to it, but at the extremes people are different.

But as a population geneticist?

I don’t find race a meaningful way to characterize people.

In 2017 Razib Khan published an article in Skeptic, founded by hereditarian (and creep) Michael Shermer. It's co-written with "biosocial criminologist" and frequent Quillette contributor Brian Boutwell and titled "Is race a useful concept."  It ends this way (my highlight):

Here is perhaps the most important point and one on which we will end. Injecting bluster, rhetoric, and anger around this topic is an entirely pointless exercise. We have the tools necessary to answer this question: Are racial classifications meaningful? The answer is "yes."

So Bustamante believes the exact opposite of what Khan believes. 

And Bustamante knows exactly who Khan is because in February of this year he blocked someone on Twitter for daring to ask about Razib Khan's connections to Ron Unz and Richard Spencer.

Khan, for his part, is happy to use Bustamante's much more impressive attainments to legitimize his work.

So what is going on here? Khan is the only non-Ph.D at the Insitome Institute and his beliefs are the opposite of the others associated with the Institute. He's not really a geneticist, he's a writer, and he's not even a good writer. 

In June of this year Khan made a big discovery, which he announced in the science magazine Nautilus: The Human Family Tree, It Turns Out, Is Complicated.

Adam Rutherford has been talking about this topic for years. And Rutherford is a much better writer than Khan.

Let's start with the last sentence of the Nautilus piece: 

The first 20 years of this century have been the most exciting decades of paleoanthropology since the emergence of the field, in large part due to the rise of paleogenetics. I see no reason to assume that wave has crested. I for one, can’t wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020’s unfold.

The last sentence is awkward: I for one, can't wait to continue constantly updating my priors on humankind as the 2020s unfold. But even more awkward is that his priors are not mentioned anywhere else in the article - Khan never tells us what his prior beliefs are. I guess we are supposed to assume they aligned with the orthodoxy of all science guys in the year 2000, since for most of the article he uses the first person plural:

Finally, we need to acknowledge that our long-standing and intimate interest in Neanderthals may have misled us when it came to Denisovans. Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archaeology. But it turns out they may not be typical “archaic” humans. The best genetic work indicates that Denisovans were not one homogeneous lineage, as seems to have been the case with Neanderthals, but a diverse group that were strikingly differentiated.17 The Denisovan ancestry in modern populations varies considerably in relatedness to the genome sequences from Denisova Cave. It is clear that the Denisovan ancestry in Papuans is very different from the Siberian Denisovan sequences. The most geographically distant Denisovan groups, those in Siberia and those from on the far edge of Southeast Asia into Wallacea, were likely far more genetically different from each other than Khoisan are from the rest of humanity. Depending on the assumptions you set your “molecular clock” with, the most distant Denisovan lineages probably separated into distinct populations from each other 200,000 to 400,000 years before their extinction.

He seems to be implying that "we" have somehow refused to acknowledge that our "long-standing" interest in Neanderthals has misled us about Denisovans. Denisovans were discovered in 2010 and Neanderthals were identified as such in the mid-1800s. So I don't see how anybody was "misled" - we've just known about Neanderthals a century and a half longer than Denisovans. 

Is there some contingent of scientists who are refusing to acknowledge the significance of Denisovans compared to Neanderthals? (Maybe some dastardly "woke" scientists?)

If there are, Khan doesn't say who they are. And I absolutely cannot figure out what he thinks is the significance of "Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, the continent with the longest and most well-funded tradition in archeology." Nothing in the rest of the paragraph explains why it matters where Neanderthals were discovered.  

The point he appears to be making with the paragraph is that Denisovans had a wider range than Neanderthals, but it's confusing since the fact that Neanderthals were discovered in Europe, and that Europe is the continent with the "most well-funded tradition in archeology" do not contribute to the issue of difference in ranges. 

This article was originally posted on Khan's "Unsupervised Learning" blog. But Khan has a Wikipedia page that describes him as a writer. He presumably gets paid to write. And parts of Unsupervised Learning are behind a paywall. Did Nautilus have any editors look at this when they decided to reprint it? Or did they just figure, well, Khan uses big science-y words and footnotes so that's good enough? I hope they didn't pay him for this rambling mess.

In Khan's review of "Facing Reality", discussed in Part 1, he accuses the "regnant culture" of refusing to "connect the dots" about Black people. But he never says explicitly what it would mean to connect the dots. It's hard to tell if this vagueness is intentional or not. It probably is, but on the other hand, he really is a terrible writer.

So he's not a geneticist; not a Ph.D; he believes the exact opposite of what the other people at the Insitome Institute believe about race; and he's not even a good writer. 

And on top of that he has a career checkered with connections to horrible racists and has an obnoxious right-wing personality on social media and can't even restrain himself from publicly disparaging one of the Institute's partners.

Why would the Insitome Institute want him?

Adam Rutherford, who is only two years older than Khan, is more their kind of guy: an actual geneticist - with a Ph.D in genetics - an opponent of race pseudo-science and a great writer as well as a charismatic and funny presenter. I realize the Insitome Institute probably couldn't afford Adam Rutherford and anyway he's busy with his own projects, but there is surely a range of science writers between Razib Khan and Adam Rutherford, so that the Insitome Institute could have found someone better qualified and less likely to embarrass them.

So why have Khan? I have some theories. Razib Khan must want a career as a legitimate science explainer, not as a sleazy race pseudo-science promoter, aiding and abetting disgusting racists like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire and Charles Murray. I could be wrong of course. It's possible Khan is such a devoted racist he can't image ever forsaking his career of race-mongering. But I think it's about the money.

I think it's likely that he's been getting paid through the wingnut welfare system for years, like so many people associated with the IDW and Quillette. We know Ron Unz gave Khan a total of $31,000 as a "research fellow." And we've seen how Koch and other right-wing plutocrats will throw big money even at a blatantly racist organization like VDARE - 1.5 million dollars in one year. Who knows how much they might give to Quillette or other right-wing race-mongers who maintain even a thin veneer of respectability? 

Khan has been associated with VDARE, Unz and Taki's magazine - all founded by wealthy racist kooks - for years. It's hard to establish a career as a science writer. It's a competitive field and neither Khan's educational background nor his literary abilities are impressive. Getting a boost from wingnut welfare is likely his only option to have a career as a writer. 

So maybe one of Khan's sugar daddies offered the Insitome Institute money to take him on, to help white-wash Khan's career, in expectation Khan will continue to further the Koch/Mercer/VDARE cause of making "scientific" racism acceptable.

This is purely speculation of course, but it seems far more plausible to me than a scenario in which an organization of Ph.Ds, opposed to race pseudo-science, would freely choose Razib Khan of all people to be their Director of Scientific Content.

Part 3: blocked by Spencer Wells