Adam Rutherford, Richard Lynn and Michael Muthukrishna

Well it's been over a year since I finished my 9-part series about Adam Rutherford and his support for behavioral genetics. The focus was on the paper he co-authored with nine other individuals call Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford then proceeded to promote the paper via a cartoon, which made it clear that Rutherford and company believe that careers are based on genetics, and that we live in a meritocracy, so those who are not doing well career-wise or financially can blame their own loser genes.

One of the co-authors of the paper is Michael Muthukrishna. In part six of the series I discussed the connections that some of the co-authors had to racist individuals and organizations, but all I had to say about Muthukrisha was:"promoted his book by giving an interview to racist Quillette and racist Razib Khan."

I should mention here that Rutherford thanked Khan in his book The History of Everyone who Ever Lived, after Khan was booted from the New York Times for his long history of being a massive racist.

I see Khan is still hanging out with racist crackpot Curtis Yarvin.

What is it with hereditarians/racists and Western wear anyway?

Thanks to Rutherford, I have discovered more about Muthukrishna.

I don't regularly monitor Rutherford's Bluesky feed, but every now and then I check in and recently I saw that back on May 21, he was joining a reputable researcher, Rebecca Sear, in expressing disgust with researchers who cited the work of Richard Lynn.

But knowing about the connections of Rutherford's co-authors to racists and racist organizations as I do, I figured it wouldn't take long to find an example of one of his co-authors citing Richard Lynn. 

And ten minutes later, I found Muthukrishna's paper, originally published in 2021, called Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability, which cites Richard Lynn thrice, and not in the context of "you'll never guess what this racist said." 

This spectrum of localizability ranging from Mendelian to polygenic to “omnigenic” traits (Boyle, Li, and Pritchard 2017) has been discussed extensively, but its interaction with cumulative culture has not sufficiently been appreciated. We have known for a long time that increasing nutrition (Lynn 1990; Stoch et al. 1982), improving schooling (Ceci 1991; Davis 2014; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018), and removing parasites (Jardim-Botelho et al. 2008) have positive effects on IQ.

It's amusing that this paragraph, which cites so many true believers in behavioral genetics, discusses non-genetic influences on IQ. But the obsession with IQ is always there. I've mentioned two of the other names in this paragraph on this blog: Stephen Ceci gave the keynote at the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research (aka the Racist Rodeo.) Stuart Ritchie is an anti-transgender activist. 

One of the Lynn citations is from something published by Lynn's own "Ulster Institute for Social Research," which at that time was publishing the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Another Lynn citation:

In some countries in Northern and Western Europe including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, there is evidence that the Flynn effect has been slowing down and even reversing in recent decades (Dutton, van der Linden, and Lynn 2016).

Behavioral geneticists want to believe the Flynn effect has been "slowing down and even reversing" because it's one of the best-known indicators of the strength of environment on human development.

This citation is listed as: Dutton, Edward, Dimitri van der Linden, and Richard Lynn. 2016. ‘The Negative Flynn Effect: A Systematic Literature Review’. Intelligence 59 (November): 163–69. 

Edward Dutton currently works for Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, as Dutton's "Jolly Heretic" is owned by Kirkegaard's Human Diversity Foundation (aka "Polygenic Scores") which is the current owner of the ultra-racist Mankind Quarterly.

Dimiti van der Linden has far-right views of women and has published not only with Dutton but also co-authored several papers with Curtis Dunkel, who has written for Mankind Quarterly.

Apparently Michael Muthukrishna considers Dutton, van der Linden and Richard Lynn serious  researchers.

If that bothers Adam Rutherford, I haven't found any evidence for it.

But those are not the only racists listed in Muthukrishna's references. He quotes Charles Murray, a political scientist (and gutter racist), as if he is an expert on genetics:

Similarly, Murray declares: “By the end of the 2020s, it will be widely accepted that quantitative studies of social behavior that don’t use polygenic scores usually aren’t worth reading. More formally, it will be widely accepted that the predictive validity of polygenic scores gives us useful information about causes even though we still don’t understand the causal pathways.”

Hereditarians love Murray because he is one of the most famous hereditarians, and they don't much care that he doesn't have a life sciences background, he is useful for promoting the hereditarian cause.

The source of the Murray quote is his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class which promotes one of the favorite hereditarian beliefs, that women are genetically feeble in  STEM subjects, a belief most famously promoted 20 years ago by misogynist and sex pest Larry Summers.

And finally, the paper cites Michael A. Woodley of Menie, who achieved notoriety when the NYTimes ran an article about his works' influence on the racist mass-murderer of the Buffalo massacre, entitled A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting.

How long can Adam Rutherford continue to ignore behavioral genetics' serious racist problem? Does it bother him at all?

The Muthukrishna paper cites Robert Plomin seven times, the Rutherford paper cites him three times. Jay Joseph has an excellent post on Plomin's genetic determinism, including this passage:

The entire discussion in Chapter 8, where Plomin wrote that parents, schools, and life experiences “matter” but “don’t make a difference,” is confusing and contradictory. If something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t much matter. It certainly “mattered” and “made a difference to” American football coaching brothers Jim and John Harbaugh that they grew up with a father who was a career football coach. 

 

Plomin’s “blueprint” theory cannot explain countless other real-world and historical examples showing that the environment is massively important. To cite four examples, his theory cannot explain (1) why Australia has a relatively low crime rate despite having been founded and settled by convicted criminals, (2) why political and other types of behavior are very different in North Korea compared with South Korea, (3) why religious beliefs and practices have increased dramatically in Russia since 1991, and (4) the fact that IQ scores have risen “massively” during the past century (the “Flynn Effect”). Once again, the list is endless.

But it's a hallmark of behavioral genetics to avoid addressing such issues. Its proponents are convinced that genes determine everything and there are plenty of deep pockets out there - in Plomin's case, the British government, willing to fund that belief, unconcerned that there are major scientific problems with the belief.

Emil Kirkegaard and the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR)

David Lubinski of Vanderbilt University
and his pal Linda Gottfredson, 
racist extremist
---------------------------------------------------------

Nobody is too racist for the International Society
for Intelligence Research

The connection between Emil Kirkegaard and the International Society for Intelligence Research was made embarrassingly clear last year, when Kirkegaard was disinvited from the annual Racist Rodeo.

As Rational Wiki notes:

Emil Kirkegaard was a scheduled speaker at an International Society for Intelligence Research 2022 conference at University of Vienna, but was prevented from speaking after a keynote speaker at the same event complained, describing Kirkegaard as a "careless racist lunatic" and a "notorious individual".[41][42][43]

The keynote speaker, Abdel Abdellaoui, wrote on his Medium account:

Two weeks before the ISIR conference, the preliminary speaker program was shared with the speakers. I noticed that one of the scheduled speakers was a notorious individual, known for an unhealthy obsession for trying to prove that race differences in IQ and other social traits were due to inborn and immutable genetic differences. Besides a reputation for sloppy scientific work in dubious journals, he was also well known for an obnoxious social media presence, regularly posting messages and memes denigrating a wide range of marginalized groups. This behavior has garnered him a large following of, largely anonymous, online fans. He is a leading figure and major contributor to the bad reputation of intelligence and genetics research. On top of this reputation, this individual has never been part of any credible research program, PhD program, or university, which made it all the more surprising to me that he was invited to speak at the same academic conference as me. I decided to publicly cancel my talk, as I did not want to be associated with this individual. I did not want his reputation to negatively affect mine, or my reputation to positively affect his. I felt obligated, both as a scientist and a second generation immigrant (I’ve seen him specifically target my own minority group as well), to distance myself from this malevolent force. Eventually, my action caused multiple other complaints, including a student petition, after which the ISIR board decided to remove this person from the speaker list, after which I re-joined the conference.

Justin Ward at the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article WIKIPEDIA WARS: INSIDE THE FIGHT AGAINST FAR-RIGHT EDITORS, VANDALS AND SOCK PUPPETS writes:

One of the bedrock principles of Wikipedia is the assumption of good faith. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, edits are assumed to be made with the intent of improving the encyclopedia. Editors who attempt to insert their ideological bias but maintain the semblance of civility are given the benefit of the doubt until their disruption becomes apparent enough to warrant action by administrators. Civil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation.

Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. Often these are single-purpose accounts that exclusively edit on topics like race and intelligence, racial classification and bios of related researchers, like Linda Gottfredson or Helmuth Nyborg. Some have direct ties with racist journals or organizations, like Mankind Quarterly editor Gerhard Meisenberg. Emil Kirkegaard, who edits frequently under the username Deleet, is a research fellow at Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social research and the co-founder of the online pseudojournal OpenPsych. 

Now to understand how very comfortable the International Society for Intelligence Research is with someone like Emil Kirkegaard, consider that all the people named in connection with him: Gottfredson, Nyborg, Meisenberg and Richard Lynn have all been welcome at ISIR. Gottfredson won the ISIR Lifetime Achievement Award. Both Meisenberg and Lynn were on the editorial board of Intelligence, the publication of ISIR.

Speaking of Richard Lynn - he appears to be dead, finally. All the other racists are very sad.

Emily Willoughby is not mentioned in the SPLC article but she is very much one of the Wikipedia warriors, per RationalWiki:

Willoughby had made a lot of edits pushing race and intelligence pseudoscience (as 

Ferahgo the Assassin on) Wikipedia[37] In 2010, Willoughby opposed banning her boyfriend Jonathan Kane (alias Captain Occam) and the neo-Nazi editor Michael Coombs (alias User:Mikemikev) from the race and intelligence article, writing "they aren’t the ones causing a problem here" despite evidence to the contrary.[38] Kane and Mikemikev were both topic banned in June 2010 after arbitration found them to have edit-warred and caused disruption.[39]

Edits on her account reveal Willoughby is sympathetic to the controversial race and intelligence views of the white supremacist Richard Lynn:

The way it's worded makes it sounds like the article Wikipedia is expressing this point of view specifically (that Lynn's conclusions are incorrect, etc) instead of making it clear that these critiques are held by other professionals.[40]

Willoughby also complained about an article highlighting Lynn's connections to the eugenics Pioneer Fund[41] and took issue with critical sources being added to his biographical page.[42]

In October 2010, Willoughby was topic banned from editing race and IQ related articles.[43] The following month she was back to her old tricks removing critical sources about a eugenicist.[44] Willoughby and Kane were both "site-banned from Wikipedia for a period of no less than one year" on May 14, 2012.[45] The reason was for sharing an IP address.[46] Shortly before being site banned in a rant titled "Good riddance to Wikipedia", Willoughby admitted to being a proponent of hereditarianism and defended Mikemikev again.[47]

Willoughby was unbanned on Wikipedia on March 28 2014.[48] For the next five years, she avoided editing about race and IQ, but in January 2019 she appealed her topic ban which was still in place.[49]

Magnus Pharao (alias Maunus), an anthropologist who debated Willoughby and Kane on Wikipedia in the 2010s, noted on his Twitter account on August 12, 2022:

The two of them were pushing race and IQ "science" on Wikipedia for years, both being banned for doing so incessantly and deceptively […] That's also where I first met Emil Kirkegaard, he was working with them some of the time. Kirkegaard's username was Deleet. Kane and Willoughby worked a good cop bad cop routine, she more or less followed the rules and stayed civil, he didn't and was banned, and when he was banned he edited from her account, and when it was discovered they shared, she was banned too. Kane's MO was to contact as many "hereditarians" offline as he could and get them to weigh in in discussions to create a majority against the idea that Race and IQ research is considered fringe pseudoscience.[50][51]

Kane and Willoughby have defended Emil Kirkegaard and they all edited race and IQ related articles with overlapping edits as a sort of 'tag-team' with the same point of view.[52][53][54]

Emily Willoughby is currently a board member of the International Society for Intelligence Research. Demonstrating that, in spite of the 2022 banning of Emil Kirkegaard from the ISIR's conference, 

Nobody is too racist for the International Society for Intelligence Research.

I asked two ISIR bigwigs David Lubinski and his wife Camilla Benbow, both mainstream members of Academia, if Emil Kirkegaard would be returning to the 2023 conference but got no response. However, Kirkegaard being disinvited from the 2022 conference did not stop ISIR from publishing him in "Intelligence" in May-June 2023:

On group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A reply to Giangrande and Turkheimer (2022)
Intelligence

And in case you're wondering if the presence of Kirkegaard bothered Steven Pinker, both Pinker and Kirkegaard were represented at the ISIR Racist Rodeo in 2017 and not a word of complaint from Pinker.

The reliance of biosocial criminology race science on the Pioneer Fund

Just discovered that SAGE makes virtually an entire book of biosocial criminology race science available for free online: The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: On the Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality from 2014.

As always, John Paul Wright is the most blatant about his belief that not only is race a biological and not just sociological phenomenon, but "black" people are the worst race. And anybody who doesn't agree with John Paul Wright is a filthy leftist. From his chapter co-written with Mark Alden Morgan entitled Human Biodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction:

 Lynn (2002), in a comprehensive investigation of psychopathy, presents evidence that Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics score higher on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory's (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate scale compared to Whites, while East Asians score lower. Furthermore, Lynn argues that this racial trend extends to a host of related social outcome measures including childhood conduct disorder, ADHD, recklessness, aggression, criminality, the ability to delay gratification, marriage rates, and even moral understanding. Across the multitude of studies analyzed, a clear pattern emerges where Blacks score the worst on these measures, Whites intermediate, and Asians the best even when controlling for the effects of age and IQ.

Lynn is Richard Lynn, the godfather of race science. According to his Southern Poverty Law Center profile:

Lynn is the current president of the notoriously racist Pioneer Fund. Prior to becoming president in 2012, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer Fund grants, both directly, and through the Ulster Institute for Social Research. Lynn is the founder and president of the Ulster Institute, “a think tank for the support of research on social issues and the publication of works by selected authors in this field.” According to its website, “The Ulster Institute for Social Research specialises in the application of psychology to the analysis of social problems,” which translates to promoting racist research by Lynn and several of his colleagues and collaborators.

Lynn isn't the only Pioneer Fund associate cited by Wright and Morgan - they also cite J.P. Rushton. From SPLC:

Since 2002, Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund (Rushton died in 2012), which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the “science” of creating “better” humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to “improve the character of the American people” through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to “prove” inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.

Linda Gottfredson is also cited. From SPLC:

Following a long tradition of scientific racism, Gottfredson argues that racial inequality, especially in employment, is the direct result of genetic racial differences in intelligence. Relying heavily on money obtained from the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole.

And of course, inevitably, Charles Murray and "The Bell Curve":

Many criticisms of The Bell Curve, most notably Charles Lane’s thorough takedown in The New York Review of Books, have pointed out that Murray’s attempts to link social inequality to genes are based on the work of explicitly racist scientists. In an afterward to the book, Murray rejects criticisms that rest on the fact that “we cite thirteen scholars who have received funding from the Pioneer Fund, founded and run ([Lane] alleged) by men who were Nazi sympathizers, eugenicists, and advocates of white racial superiority.” Murray contends that the racist pseudo-scientists he cites “are some of the most respected psychologists of our time” and that “the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today’s Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today’s Ford Foundation.” 

In fact, the Pioneer Fund’s ties to eugenics and white supremacy are not nearly as historically remote as Murray would have his readers believe. The president of the Pioneer Fund at the time The Bell Curve was written was Harry Weyher, who was a personal friend of the Fund’s founder, Wickliffe Draper, and shared his supposedly archaic views on race; just two months after the initial publication of The Bell Curve, Weyher gave an interview in which he argued, among other things, that desegregation had “wreck[ed] the school system.” Another of the Pioneer Fund’s board members at the time Murray was writing, John Trevor Jr., was also an officer of Coalition of Patriotic Societies, which, during his membership, was indicted for sedition over “pro-Nazi activities” and called for the release of all Nazi war criminals. Despite Murray’s claims, the Pioneer Fund continues to support “research” into race differences conducted by outright white supremacists. 

In a similar vein, Murray whitewashes the individual people who provided the intellectual foundation for The Bell Curve. To take only one example, Murray and Herrnstein described Richard Lynn, whose work they relied on more than any other individual, as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.” In his many subsequent defenses of Lynn, Murray neglected to mention the many serious methodological criticisms of Lynn’s work, or his contributions to white supremacist publications including VDARE.com, American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly, the last of which Lynn also serves on the editorial staff of.

John Paul Wright constantly whines about the Left, but where would biosocial criminology be without racists and Nazi sympathizers?

Can Adam Rutherford and Kathryn Paige Harden have it both ways?

Bluesky screen cap of interest because it demonstrates that
(a) Rutherford was recently hanging out with Harden, (b)
Harden blocked my Bluesky account and (c) and the article
that Rutherford links to that discusses evolutionary psychology.

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

My nine-part series "What happened to Adam Rutherford?" was prompted by a paper Rutherford published with nine co-authors, called Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences.

Rutherford also promoted a cartoon based on the paper, which made its genetic determinism obvious.

Rutherford added a postscript to the Substack (ugh) post that displays the cartoon:

Post script: My involvement, apart from simply because this stuff is important, is also because it relates to my core interests, which include evolution, genetics, the history and unwelcome return of scientific racism and eugenics. 

Genomic data are often susceptible to misinterpretation, mis­understanding and misrepresentation. Galton was the first hereditarian, and his disciples today are a vocal crop of terminally online commentators, science cosplayers and activists who seek to amplify the role of genes over that of the social environment for many personality traits. Abdel and I have had many run-ins with them, and just this week, some are detailed in an article here.

 

Now Rutherford is not a fan of mine, as I documented in the first part of my nine-part series, so I'm pleased that he links to an article that includes a reference to this blog - this page to be exact. 

Rutherford continues:

As with their Führer idol, their focus tends to be in relation to race and intelli­gence, Galton’s lifelong obsessions. Some of them exist on and draw their salaries from Substacks which I won’t link to, but I will highlight their recently exposed secret plans, in stunning undercover work by Harry Shukman et al. and Hope Not Hate. (I’m in conversation with Harry at the Hay Festival, 28th May).

I’ve secretly witnessed their group meetings, which would be comical if they weren’t so ideologically driven. They often lean heavily on misunderstood, weak or even fraudulent data (such as the global IQ datasets, curated by the now dead doyen of scientific racists Richard Lynn). One of the things the Hope Not Hate investigation revealed were their political motivations: they are not truth seekers but aggrieved ideologues. In the new paper, we are striving to advance knowledge because that is what scientists do. As we say in the final paragraphs, we are not calling ‘…for genetic intervention, but rather a call for a deeper understanding and awareness that our social structures are part of an evolving environment that, over time, shapes both social and genetic outcomes.’

Rutherford criticizes dead Richard Lynn, but doesn't mention that a big focus of Harry Shukman's undercover work was documenting the racist network maintained by yet-living neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, who inherited Pioneer Fund money from Lynn.

Perhaps Rutherford does not mention Kirkegaard by name because there is a connection between Kirkegaard and Rutherford by way of racist Razib Khan, who has written for Kirkegaard's Aporia.  

Both Rutherford and his ally, Kathryn Page Harden, have thanked Khan in their books: "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" and "The Genetic Lottery" respectively. Khan testified that Harden was a friend of his. Harden promoted work by Emily Willoughby, a long-time ally of Kirkegaard. She received networking assistance from the International Society for Intelligence Research, an organization founded to promote and defend the race pseudoscience beliefs of white nationalists Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

Rutherford mentions Abdel Abdellaoui in his postscript. Abdellaoui is one of the Rutherford paper co-authors and he is also a friend of Razib Khan - Abdellaoui and Khan teamed up on X to defame me, lie about me and launch personal attacks against me while I was writing the series about Rutherford's paper. Racists and right-wing political operatives jumped in to support Abdellaoui and Khan, including Cremieux (Jordan Lasker) and Anatoly Karlin.

And although Rutherford criticizes Richard Lynn, another one of the co-authors of his paper, Michael Muthukrishna, cited Lynn three times in a recent paper, and several other racists were cited.

Now, do I expect Adam Rutherford to vet all his co-authors for racist connections? Well, to be fair, it would be a huge undertaking because the field of behavioral genetics is full of racists, and it might be hard to exclude anybody who has worked with racists, given interviews to racists, or signed petitions written by racists in defense of racists and still have a career in behavioral genetics. 

This refusal to discuss the existence of the racist spiderweb onto which Rutherford and Harden have plopped themselves is at best fecklessness, and at worst a deliberate effort to launder racist beliefs held by some promoters of behavioral genetics.

The article that Rutherford links to in the image at the top of this page is How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science by Sarah Jones. It's an interesting article for many reasons, including its criticism of the awful book, The War on Science, written by right-wing cranks, racists (Amy Wax!) and friends of Jeffrey Epstein, which I've written about here, several times, including quoting from the Jones article.

But what especially caught my eye in the article this time was its discussion of evolutionary psychology:

Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore "real" in this world; that's how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. "would be better off with fewer Asians" while calling herself a "race realist." The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There's something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry's one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, "disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital S Science, and maybe even rationality itself"

Now is my chance, yet again, to share this superb discussion of the scientific problems with evolutionary psychology in a video made by biologist P. Z. Myers. There is also a link at the top of this blog.

Meanwhile, Rutherford's article for the New Humanist, "A twisted breed" says:

In the early 2000s, Epstein did succeed in meeting Robert Trivers, who had a profound and positive influence as a young scientist on the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Trivers’ early work included exploration of a gene-centric view of human behaviours such as altruism, parental investment and adultery. He befriended Epstein and publicly supported him long after the 2008 conviction.

Trivers, who died while I was writing this article, was the type of scientist who did truly brilliant work for a time, but was often described in euphemistic terms like “eccentric”, in part due to later choices that were at best odd. He said of a research trip, “I took one look at the women [in Jamaica] and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it...”

It's interesting to note what Rutherford leaves out. Trivers didn't only decide to move to Jamaica for the women, he defended Epstein's crimes directly using a form of sociobiology logic:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers is also mentioned in the new tranche of emails. In 2015, he told Reuters that Mr. Epstein had given him about $40,000 for his research. And he defended Mr. Epstein, saying girls mature sooner than they used to. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

Rutherford also misrepresents Pinker's connection to Epstein.

Rutherford continues:

Evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories – attempts to explain complex human behaviours, especially about sex and power, with simplistic biological explanations. Epstein’s interest in eugenics, and his desire to propagate his own DNA, reflects another area in which proponents argue that nature trumps nurture. I am generally cautious about the use of this once popular, now toxic term in relation to contemporary practices. But the deliberate manipulation of human reproduction to spread the genes of people deemed superior is pretty much the definition.

Yes, evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories - but this did not stop Rutherford and co-authors from using an evolutionary psychology just so story to support their behavioral genetics argument. As I noted in my nine-part series:

On page 7 of the Rutherford paper there is a reference to an evolutionary psychologist - you might say the king of evolutionary psychology - David Buss and two references to a racist, Gregory Clark:

A collection of about 15,000 English men’s wills from the sixteenth to the twentieth century showed a positive relationship between men’s income and net fertility in England, with the wealthiest individuals leaving nearly twice as many offspring as the poorest individuals (97, 98.) This was probably influenced by higher child mortality rates in lower-SES groups (98,99) and greater mating opportunities for higher-SES male individuals, as women tend to prefer men with more resources across cultures with different mating systems, different levels of gender equality and different religions (100.)

Reference 100 is to David Buss. It's important to know that the claim that "women tend to prefer men with more resources" comes from the evolutionary psychology belief that women are adapted by evolution to be more sexually aroused by men with 'more resources.'

Harden, who is also cited in the paper, has an online CV from 2021 that reveals that she's done "Advising and Student-related Service" for three students in "Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology," David Buss is Area Head of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology.

It appears to me that Rutherford and Harden want to have it both ways: ally with racists and promote  evolutionary psychology when it is convenient, then denounce racism and evolutionary psychology when it is not. This is a failure of intellectual integrity that I, and several critics, have also noticed in Steven Pinker.

It was never going to work, for a behavioral geneticist to distance themselves from evolutionary psychology, because behavioral genetics is nothing more than an attempt to use genetics studies to support the genetic determinism at the heart of all forms of sociobiology. Which is why leading evolutionary psychology promoter David Buss is such a fan of behavioral genetics.

And the goal of all sociobiology, from Galton to the present, is to claim that the current socio-economic order exists because those at the top have the best genes. 

It's not surprising that the British are so comfortable with this concept, so much so that the British government funds the work of leading hereditarian Robert Plomin (cited in the Rutherford paper.) The United Kingdom still maintains an hereditary monarchy, which a majority of its citizens still support.

They even knighted Robert Plomin, so how's that for the monarchy stamp of approval?

But anybody can see how extremely average, at best are the members of the royal family. They are living arguments against the behavioral genetics claim that the most intelligent and industrious rise to the top through their superior genes.

But Rutherford, Harden, Pinker and Abdellaoui are so certain that SES - socio-economic status - is determined by genes that they cannot tolerate any questions about their belief, which is why they either insult or block critics of behavioral genetics.

Recently two prominent critics of behavioral genetics, Steve Pitttelli and Jay Joseph, joined me on Bluesky to point out that I'm not the only one that Kathryn Paige Harden, illegal drug user, has blocked.

I mentioned Steve Pittelli, MD in part nine of my series. He's made some excellent points on his Substack called Unwashed Genes, about the problems with behavioral genetics, including his excellent review of Harden's current book, Original Sin. He makes an argument that I don't think Harden nor Rutherford have ever addressed:

As noted, she devotes little time to making a scientific case for a genetic underpinning for vice, only briefly indirectly referencing a few studies. At one point she summarizes the results of a study as follows:

“We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group.”

I found myself smiling at this for a whole number of reasons related to what a paltry finding it is, but feel the need to address it for those who are perhaps not as familiar with the subject. For starters, Harden herself admits in the book that she had LSD illegally sent to her and then illegally used it and even acknowledges that others might be at greater risk of arrest than her for doing something like this. This speaks to what is called population stratification, wherein someone who comes from a (white), more privileged background and geographic location, would no doubt be far less likely to be arrested for the same actions as someone non-white in a poorer neighborhood. Such population stratification is a (perhaps fatal) weakness of behavioral genetics, wherein, instead of saying that Black people and poor people are more likely to be arrested for ostensibly the same crime, one could pedantically say that people with certain genes are more likely to be arrested in the same way that we can say that people with certain genetics are more likely to eat with chopsticks. In that case, the genes in question are little more than the kinds of genetic variation that is flagged by 23 and Me to identify Asian heritage. To claim that “vice” has a genetic component, one would need to get past these benign genetic markers or we could just make all sorts of claims, like people with Italian genes are more likely to enjoy spaghetti, or people in the Southern United States are more likely to eat grits, since in both cases, due to genetic drift and other issues, one could correlate these preferences to specific genetic markers that likely have nothing to do with taste buds. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason other than ideology to believe that the genetic markers used to identify “vice” or the likelihood of being arrested have any actual function. You can’t just call anything you can conjure from a questionnaire a phenotype by identifying genetic correlations.

But the behavioral genetics gang feel they don't need to address arguments - they just mute and block, mute and block, assuming their critics will remain unknown and unheard. After all, sociobiology is supported not only by the British government but by obscenely wealthy right-wing racist plutocrats, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, a funder of Substack.

Really, it's not surprising when someone of wealth and status supports the behavioral genetics view that people with wealth and status are genetically superior, just as wealthy, high-status Christians believed their wealth and status were evidence of God's favor, a connection noted by John Basile in his review of Original Sin.

You would think that Pittelli's being a doctor would count for something. After all, you need a considerable educational attainment (EA) to be a doctor, and behavioral genetics promoters equate EA with IQ. But they have no respect for Pittelli, nor for Jay Joseph, a clinical psychologist who has written books on genetics.

I referenced Joseph in my series on Rutherford's paper. Joseph has important things to say about twin studies, and can be seen on his Substack critiquing a study by Cremieux - in case you thought Cremieux was only a right-wing racist political operative who tried to hurt the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. Cremieux has co-authored many papers with Emil Kirkegaard, and is on friendly terms, as I discussed above, with Abdel Abdellaoui and Razib Khan.

Well, if Steve Pittelli and Jay Joseph can't get any respect from Rutherford and Harden, what hope do I have? I didn't even finish college, and it was art college at that. My SES is unimpressive and my EA is worse - so from the point of view of a behavioral geneticist, I am no better than the drug-addicted prostitute that Harden contrasts herself with in Original Sin; I am like the morons with bad genes who stayed in their old coal towns, as discussed in Rutherford's paper, and described by Gregory Cochran (co-author of Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence):

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

But at least Rutherford has posted not one, but two articles that have links to this website, which can only help my project of critiquing race pseudoscience and those who aid and abet race pseudoscience. And that is what Rutherford and Harden are doing, so long as they don't acknowledge the contemporary network of race pseudoscience promoters so fully embedded in the world of behavioral genetics, as I have demonstrated in my series "What Happened to Adam Rutherford?"

Most recently Rutherford reposted an article on Bluesky by Catherine Townsend, Epstein's Gifted Scientists. I've known Townsend - not personally but online - for quite a few years thanks to us both opposing race pseudoscience.

I was clued into this article when a Pinkerite post from 2019 suddenly started trending. Townsend writes:

(Pinker) has also boosted the profiles of ideologues who peddle in scientific racism and eugenics. For example, he has promoted the work of far-right blogger Steve Sailer, who mainly writes about supposed racial differences in intelligence. He re-published a Sailer essay titled ‘Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, originally published in The American Conservative, in an edited 2004 volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The article by Sailer argued that Arab societies are too inbred for the type of democratic reform that was a stated goal of Western politicians in the 2003 ‘regime change’ war on Iraq.

It's too bad she didn't also link to my series on Pinker's editorship of The Best Science and Nature Writing, where I go into detail about why the Sailer article is so bad. But I'm glad she did link to my post, The Racist Logic of Steve Sailer, and I'm grateful to Adam Rutherford for doing his part to help promote this blog, maintained by the lowly art school drop-out that I am.

How racist are Stefan Molyneux, Jared Taylor and Biosocial Criminologists?

Although Molyneux's been booted off YouTube, you can still find a small number of his YouTube videos on Archive.org.

This video, titled "An Honest Conversation About Race" Molyneux talks to infamous white nationalist Jared Taylor.

At minute 26, Molyneux says that successful Blacks are successful by countering "the narrative of insurmountable white racism" to which Taylor replies:

               Taylor
Well two points there. First of all, even when you do control for IQ, there are residual differences (between Blacks and whites). These can perhaps be attributed to differences in the willingness to forgo present satisfaction for future gain. There seems to be an independent variable along those lines as well. Blacks, have, I never can remember if there's a greater or lesser ti-... how that works out according to the lingo - 

               Molyneux
Less capacity to defer gratification I think would probably be the easiest way to put it. I have that problem too. 

              Taylor
They are less able to sacrifice now for future benefit. And this is found from childhood on. Even when you control for IQ. But I agree with you, IQ is really the fundamental differential...

Molyneux smiles and nods vigorously. I haven't watched the whole thing because  it is revolting to have to look at Taylor's smiling smug face while he peddles, with total self-confidence, mind-boggling bullshit.

Jared Taylor's publication, the white nationalist American Renaissance has republished several articles that first appeared in Quillette.

Now Taylor and Molyneux are infamous racists and not considered part of the mainstream. But what's important to realize is that Taylor is saying the exact same things as "biosocial criminologists" who hold positions in several American colleges. 

In the 2015 book published by Sage,  The Nurture Versus Biosocial Debate in Criminology: Origins of Criminal Behavior and Criminality, the chapter Human Biodiversity and the Egalitarian Fiction,  co-written by John Paul Wright and Mark Alden Morgan echoes Taylor (my highlight):

...Lynn (2002), in a comprehensive investigation of psychopathology, presents evidence that Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics score higher on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventorys (MMPI) Psychopathic Deviate scale compared to Whites, while East Asians score lower. Furthermore, Lynn argues that this racial trend extends to a host of related social outcomes measures including childhood conduct disorder, ADHD, recklessness, aggression, criminality, the ability to delay gratification, marriage rates, and even moral understanding. Across the multitude of studies analyzed, a clear pattern emerges where Blacks score the worst on these measures, Whites intermediate, and Asians the best even when controlling for the effects of age and IQ.

Important items to note about this passage:

• The Lynn cited is white nationalist Richard Lynn, the grandfather of 21st century race science and eugenics, and recipient of funding by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund.

• Although a major point of the essay is that "race" is a biological phenomenon and therefore test scores are genetics-based "racial" traits, the Lynn citation in fact demonstrates that race science and biosocial criminology claims are based on cultural race categories. 

As The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States notes, 

"Latinos across the Americas have differing proportions of Native American, African, and European genetic ancestry, shaped by local historical interactions with migrants brought by the slave trade, European settlement, and indigenous Native American populations."

The paper is co-authored by David Reich, whom race science supporters erroneously believe is one of them.

 So in effect the alleged biological race classifications per Lynn, Wright and Morgan are Black, White, East Asian, Native American, and (Black/White/Native American in unspecified combination who speak Spanish.)

But it's even worse than that. 

As Carl Zimmer (who used the Reich paper as a source) noted in the New York Times article White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier in 2014: 

The scientists also have been developing software that learns to recognize the origins of the short segments of DNA that make up our genomes. Recently they used their program to calculate what percentage of each subject’s genomes was inherited from European, African or Native American forebears. 

“This year we saw that we were in a great position to do the analysis,” said Joanna L. Mountain, senior director of research at 23andMe. 

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

So genetically, in Lynn's study, "black" does not mean 100% Sub-Saharan African it means a combination of African, European and Native American that varies from one person to another culturally identified as "black."

Although the Zimmer article references information from 23andMe, it doesn't mention what I think is the worst blow of all to race science claims of test scores and biological race: East Asians and Native Americans are close enough genetically that 23andMe groups them together as a single "global population" which is as close as 23andMe gets to race categorization. 

According to the 23andMe site:

The 45 Ancestry Composition regional populations are organized in a hierarchy, which reflects the genetic structure of global populations. For example, British & Irish is a part of Northwestern European, which is part of European.
In April 2018, we added over 115 new recent ancestor locations which reflect specific countries where your ancestors likely lived during the last 200 years. These recent ancestor locations are noted in each of the regional populations below. You can learn more about Recent Ancestor Locations here. Currently, there are over 150+ recent ancestor locations in the Ancestry Composition Report.
The global populations available in Ancestry Composition are:

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

What this means is that genetically, East Asians and Native Americans are as close to each other as Europeans are to other Europeans. 

So the biological racial classifications according to Richard Lynn are, in terms of 23andMe's global populations:

• White (European)
• Black (Sub-Saharan African, European and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual)
• East Asian (East Asian & Native American)
• Native American (East Asian and Native American)
• Hispanic (European, Sub-Saharan African and (East Asian & Native American) in various combinations per individual.)

Demonstrating that race "science" is a pseudo-scientific mess. It is an ideology pretending to be science, using science-sounding language promoted by biosocial criminology college professors.

I'm not the first to notice the scientific failures of biosocial criminology. The 2018 article Biosocial criminology and the mismeasure of race by Julien Larregue of Institute des Science Sociale du Politique and Oliver Rollins, Assistance Professor University of Louisville notes (my highlight):

...We focus on the way biosocial criminologists operationalize race to outline the sociological consequences of what we see as a renewed commitment to the bio-criminalization of race. Biosocial criminologists do not reject that race is socially constructed, but in practice they disregard the main consequences and raison d’être of this postulate. Though biosocial criminologists praise the incorporation of cutting-edge science into criminology, the research programme’s actual findings concerning race do not necessarily align with views from genetic and neuroscientific research. Instead, we argue that biosocial criminology solicits social constructionism as a shield to re-insert antiquated biologic notions of race through a guise of bio-sociality.

Richard Lynn in 2002 did not have access to genetic findings via 23andMe, but John Paul Wright and Mark Alden Morgan, in their 2015 article in an allegedly scholarly publication, certainly did - the Carl Zimmer article I cited is from 2014.

Now if Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor were hired by American colleges, there would be a  controversy. So why is there not a peep about the fact there are colleges employing people who are teaching criminology theories based on the same unscientific race theories that are peddled by people like Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux?

Biosocial criminologists who have endorsed the racist ideology also promoted by Jared Taylor and Stefan Molyneux includes:

• Beaver, Kevin M - Judith Rich Harris Professor of Criminology · Director, Distance Learning Program, Florida State College of Criminology

• Barnes, J. C. - Professor and Interim Director, College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services, University of Cincinnati

• Boutwell, Brian - associate professor of criminology and criminal justice, associate dean for Research and Corporate Partnerships,  Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice 

• DeLisi, Matthew - College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professor, Iowa State University Department of Sociology

• Morgan, Mark Alden - Visiting Assistant Professor, Miami University

• Schwartz, Joseph A - Criminology and Criminal Justice, Associate Professor, School of Criminology and Justice, University of Omaha Nebraska

• Walsh, Anthony - Professor Emeritus at Boise State University

• Wright, John Paul - professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati College of Education Criminal Justice and Human Services, as well as its director of the graduate program in criminal justice.

I can't help but laugh at the bitter irony of Brian Boutwell, a fervent believer in race science and a practiced denialist of environment in general and the impact systemic racism has had on Black Americans in particular, being associate dean of a "college for public health and social justice."

There are more race science-swilling biosocial criminologists which I will add as I confirm them. It is unknown whether these colleges endorse the race beliefs of their teachers, whether they don't think it's a big deal that their students are being taught by peddlers of pseudo-scientific garbage, or if they are completely ignorant of the situation.

The colleges:

• Boise State University
• Florida State University
• Iowa State University
• Miami University
• Saint Louis University
• University of Cincinnati

And of course there are other college promoters of race science who aren't officially biosocial criminologists - Ben Winegard has coauthored race science-promoting articles with Brian Boutwell, but is Professor of Psychology at Carroll College.

Charles Murray denies the influence of Richard Lynn and J. P. Rushton on The Bell Curve

Pinkerite's ongoing series on The Bell Curve will be looking at the connections between TBC and Richard Lynn and J. P. Rushton - or rather will be looking even more since the number of times Rushton is cited in TBC has already been discussed.





As mentioned earlier in this Bell Curve series, Richard Lynn (along with Arthur Jensen) was thanked in the acknowledgement section of the book. J. P. Rushton is cited eleven times, also mentioned in this series. But also, in chapter 13, it's clear that Herrnstein & Murray consider Rushton a serious researcher, not a crank. In the Appendix 5 "Supplemental Materials for Chapter 13" is a section on page 642 RUSHTON ON RACE DIFFERENCES AND REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES reprinted in full here:

Controversy unprecedented even for the contentious subject of racial differences has erupted around the work of J. Philippe Rushton, a developmental psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. Rushton argues that the differences in the average intelligence test scores among East Asians, blacks, and whites are not only primarily genetic but part of a complex of racial differences that includes such variables as brain size," genital size, rate of sexual maturation, length of the menstrual cycle, frequency of sexual intercourse, gamete production, sexual hormone levels, the tendency to produce dizygotic twins, marital stability, infant mortality, altruism, law abidingness, and mental health. For each variable, Rushton has concluded, the three races-Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids-fall in a certain order, with the average Caucasoid in the middle and the other two races on one side or the other. The ordering of the races, he further argues, has an evolutionary basis; hence these ordered racial differences must involve genes.

To reach his conclusion, Rushton starts with the well-established observation in biology that species vary in their reproductive strategies. Some species produce many offspring (per parent) of which only a small fraction survive; others produce small numbers of offspring with relatively high survival rates. The involvement of parents in their offsprings' health and development (which biologists call "parental investment") tends to be high for species having few offspring and high survival rates and low for those employing the other strategy (many offspring and low survival rates). Many other species differences are concomitant with this fundamental one, according to standard biological doctrine.

Rushton's thesis is that this standard biological principle may be applied within our own species. Rushton acknowledges that human beings are as a species far out along the continuum of low reproduction, high offspring survival, and high parental investment, but he argues that the ordering of the races on the many variables he has identified can be explained as the result of evolutionary differences in how far out the races are. According to Rushton, the average Mongoloid is toward one d of the continuum of reproductive strategies-the survival, and high parental investment end-the shifted toward the other end, and the average Caucasoid is in the middle.

Rushton paints with a broad brush, focusing on the major racial categories rather than the dozens of more finely drawn reproductively isolated human populations that might test his theory more conclusively. But beyond that, his thesis raises numerous questions-moral, pragmatic, and scientific. Many critics attack the theory on scientific, not just moral, grounds. They question whether Rushton has really shown that the races are consistently ordered in the way he says they are, or whether a biological theory that was meant to explain species differences can be properly applied to groups within a single species, or whether the evidence for genetic influences on his variables stands up. Rushton has responded to his critics with increasingly detailed and convincing empirical reports of the race differences in some of the traits on his list, and he cites preeminent biological authority for his use of the concept of reproductive strategies. He has strengthened the case for consistently ordered race differences, at least for some of the variables he discusses, since his first formulation of the theory in 1985. Nevertheless, the theory remains a long way from confirmation.

We cannot at present say who is more nearly right as a matter of science, Rushton or his critics." However, Rushton's work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot, as many of his critics are given to charging. Nor are we sympathetic with Rushton's academic colleagues or the politicians in Ontario who have called for his peremptory dismissalfrom a tenured professorship. Setting aside whether his work is timely or worthwhile- a judgment we are loath to make under any circumstances-it is plainly science. He is not alone in seeking an evolutionary explanation of the observed differencesamong the races.'33' As science, there is nothing wrong with Rushton's work in principle; we expect that time will tell whether it is right or wrong in fact.

Jerry Coyne and whoever JayMan is

JayMan and Jerry agree on so much -
like, apparently, that Italy has four distinct races
----------------------------------------------------------------------

I was just observing earlier this month:

(Anna) Krylov and her IDW pals are not even pretending anymore - they are just blatant about being far-right and racist ghouls.

 

I was certainly thinking of Jerry Coyne as one of Krylov's pals, since he teamed up with her to produce another right-wing sob story, but even so, I was still astounded that Jerry Coyne has sunk so low, he is using anonymous "human biodiversity" loser "JayMan" on his blog now.

Wow. Just when you think these freaks can't sink any lower.

JayMan's identity is unknown but he claims to be Black. I don't think there's any reason to believe the claims of whoever is behind their accounts until their identity is verified.

I assume Ron Unz knows JayMan's true identity since JayMan has worked for Ron Unz. Well, Unz's payments to Razib Khan, Steve Sailer and Gregory Cochrane showed up online one day, so maybe records showing his payment to JayMan will show up one day, with real name available.

Speaking of Gregory Cochran, here we can see him hanging with JayMan and the grubby pack of extreme racists and right-wingers like Razib Khan, Emil Kirkegaarrd and HBD Chick - another anonymous coward like JayMan. 

My theory is that HBD Chick and JayMan are both sock puppets of the same white nationalist man-baby.

But of course it is possible JayMan is Black. After all, Ron Unz himself, a Jewish holocaust denier, is a perfect example of an irrational self-hating weirdo. 

And then there are Claire Lehmann, Camille Paglia, Cathy Young and Christina Hoff Sommers, who have built careers on hating women.

There will always be some, of any ethnicity or gender, who will be happy to throw others under the bus for the right price.

By the way, if you ever doubt how much racist weirdos love Pinker, feast your eyes on JayMan's HBD Fundamentals - Pinker AND Judith Rich Harris, the patron saint of biosocial criminology - right Kevin Beaver?

So, while an extreme racist is posting on his blog, what is Jerry Coyne doing? 

He's touring Europe, stuffing his face and, I assume, spending all those Thielbucks.

And then... crickets

As we see in the exchange above with J. Farmer, JayMan, like Jonathan Haidt, mistakenly - or maybe deliberately - uses the term heritable when they mean inherited traits.

The second link goes to Scientific American which says:

The important thing to keep in mind is that inherited traits are directly passed down from parents to children, whereas heritable traits are not necessarily genetic.

Oh fun fact - JayMan confesses that Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate set them on the road to race pseudoscience!

Steven Pinker, a great academic, and whose 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature introduced me to hereditarian explanations for human behavior (and which is required reading for anyone with no familiarity with the role that genes play in human behavior) has recently sent a note to Ron Unz attacking his mischaracterization of Richard Lynn’s position in Lynn’s response to Unz.

Even better, on the same page, JayMan offers an explanation for why Pinker is such a gigantic weasel about race pseudoscience:

Pinker has been one of the great voices speaking for the importance of heredity when explaining individual and gender differences, but he skirts around the truth when it comes to differences between groups. I think that Pinker’s response to Unz and Pinker’s discussion of Ashkenazi intelligence shows that Pinker knows full well about genetic contributions to group differences. But, he doesn’t endorse any of these. Why? Why be obtuse about facts? I think that this is because he fears Watsoning. He is the “Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,” after all. One would imagine that this title at least provides him with an office with one of the really nice views. He doesn’t want to give that up, as his former university president Larry Summers was forced to do. Pinker’s own words about Richard Lynn to Unz tells us why:

You write as if Lynn were a well-respected psychologist whose findings have been widely accepted. This is very far from the case. Outside the circle of a handful of bloggers and behavioral geneticists he is somewhere between obscure and radioactive. (I believe several of his books are either self-published or put out by fringe publishers.)

Pinker doesn’t want this to happen to him.

This is a sad statement on the current state of intellectual discourse, and a great waste for a brilliant man like Steven Pinker. 

For clarity on heritability, I recommend The Heritability Fallacy  which includes:

Heritability statistics do remain useful in some limited circumstances, including selective breeding programs in which developmental environments can be strictly controlled. But in environments that are not controlled, these statistics do not tell us much. In light of this, numerous theorists have concluded that ‘the term “heritability,” which carries a strong conviction or connotation of something “[in]heritable” in the everyday sense, is no longer suitable for use in human genetics, and its use should be discontinued.’ Reviewing the evidence, we come to the same conclusion. Continued use of the term with respect to human traits spreads the demonstrably false notion that genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits. Instead, scientists need to help the public understand that all complex traits are a consequence of developmental processes. Without such an understanding, we are at risk of underestimating the extent to which environmental manipulations can have profoundly positive effects on development. Thus, the way ‘heritability’ is used in most discussions of human phenotypes not only perpetuates false ideas; it also blinds us to steps we might otherwise take to improve the human condition.

Although to be fair, I don't think JayMan and the people who fund him are especially interested in improving the human condition, but rather, in improving the prospects for white nationalism. Or in the case of Ron Unz, to get to the "real" truth about 9/11.

Oh cool - even better - on the right-hand sidebar of Jayman's blog, is a section called

HBD-AWARE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL COMMENTATORS

And the first two commentators are perfect. First there is Randall Parker:

ParaPundit Randall Parker’s blog making social commentary and discussing some of the implications of HBD

This tells you everything you need to know about how scientific "human biodiversity" is - Randall Parker, as I discovered when reviewing Sailer's "The Cousin Marriage Conundrum" is just some guy with a blog.

But Sailer cited him as if he was an important authority for his theory on cousin marriage and democracy.

The next commentator listed is Sailer:

Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog The man who (largely) started it all

Now the man who started it all has a background in marketing research. According to Pinker he's good with data, but as I noted in my review of the Cousin Marriage Conundrum (the CMC appears in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" thanks to Pinker) Sailer didn't look at available data on consanguinity around the world and compare it to available data on democracies around the world. I assume because it would have demonstrated that Sailer's theory was wrong - cousin marriage does not prevent democracy, as Sailer argued it would in Iraq.

So some right-wing racist marketing guy, who ignores inconvenient data, started the collection of crackpot speculations called "human biodiversity."

Because I guess actual scientists have always been too "woke" for people like JayMan.

Never forget that Pinker promoted Sailer's career for years, and according to Sailer, he's been a big influence on Pinker, as he testified on Twitter.

I assume I never saw JayMan's tweets on Twitter before because he blocked me, like the pathetic coward he is. But now that I no longer logon to Twitter, I am no longer blocked. And wow, JayMan sure likes the far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil. Who also blocked me, like the pathetic coward he is.

I will be very surprised if JayMan turns out to be anything other than a white nationalist man-baby.