Razib Khan and the race science project to deny history

Although Razib Khan posted this article on Medium on July 4 of this year, I didn't see it until today. It confirms exactly what I have been noticing about proponents of race science - they think that genetics tells us more about human culture than the historical record:

And yet genetics can shed light on historical patterns. Unlike written text genetics is neutral. It does not present a particular narrative or agenda. 

That's his bold emphasis in the original. This is the underlying justification for the erasure of history that allows Khan and Sam Harris and Charles Murray to assume that failure of blacks to thrive in the US has nothing to do with 300 years of slavery, a hundred years of apartheid and fifty years of discrimination but rather their own genetic inferiority.

As usual with Khan his essay is a combination of no-duh ("Much of the wealth of the kingdom which the planters were building unfortunately consisted of slaves") and ideas he either is unwilling to express clearly, or lacks the literary ability to express clearly:

While Indiana was settled mostly from the South, there were far more Yankees who founded towns in Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Ohio and Illinois were both divided between a northern portion settled from New England, and a southern expanse dominated by Scots-Irish “Butternuts.” 

All this seems clear in the genetic results. Now we can quantify the differences. Illinois is tilted a bit to the northern migrants. Ohio somewhat to the southern ones. Historical debates can be resolved through genetic analyses!

Nowhere does he say what "historical debates" he thinks are resolved through genetic analyses. Is that oversight a deliberate dog whistle for other race science proponents? Or is it just the output of a lousy writer who lacked a professional editor?

At the end of the essay, Khan is all enthusiasm for the Triumph of the DNA Test:

Over the next few years tens of millions of more Americans will obtain direct to consumer genetic tests. The database will grow larger and larger. Many demographic questions related to the history of this country will not need to be explored through reconstruction of texts and laborious perusal of letters and court documents. Rather, scientists will simply scan through the pedigrees they construct from human genomes, and synthesize their results with the rich assortment of resources already available from the fields of genealogy and history.

This time the bolded emphasis is mine. To realize the silliness - or the hidden agenda - of that bolded sentence one needs only reflect for a moment: genomes don't tell us that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 or how many lynchings were perpetrated. Does it really matter if the lynching party was composed primarily of individuals with a genetic heritage of Scots-Irish with a small expression of German-French?

In spite of Razib Khan's literary inadequacy we can see clearly the tactic favored by proponents of race science: deny the importance of history because only science is pure enough to tell us anything about the world.

Now the nonsense that Khan is spewing is no more incoherent or useless than anything written by Steven Pinker on the topic of history and culture and race - it must really piss Khan off the way Pinker is well-respected and highly-remunerated and beloved by the mainstream media - here they are fawning over Pinker again in this interview at the NYTimes - while saying much of what Khan says and just as badly.

No surprise at all, Steven Pinker defends racist crank Linda Gottfredson

Steven Pinker blocked me months ago on Twitter because, like all members of the "Intellectual Dark Web," he cannot tolerate criticism of any kind. 

But I have another Twitter account for NYCPlaywrights so while logged in there I took a peek today at Pinker's Twitter time line and OF COURSE he is defending racist crank Linda Gottfredson, while supporting Quillette, the Kremlin of race science promoters and attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center a venerable anti-bigotry bulwark.

Pinker is bitter because the Southern Poverty Law Center criticizes supporters of race science - evolutionary psychology, "human biodiversity," "biosocial criminology" which includes his friends like Sam Harris, Claire Lehmann and many other members of the "Intellectual Dark Web."

Steven Pinker is a disgusting, racist-supporting individual. But that's been obvious since he started promoting the careers of race science cranks Steve Sailer and Razib Khan.

The fundamental stupidity of Sam Harris

I was reviewing this exchange between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein recently.

 I have long had a very low opinion of Sam Harris's intelligence and so I shouldn't have been, but I really was amazed at how sharply and clearly Sam Harris's stupidity jumped right off the page (highlighted.)

How is it possible that when Ezra Klein makes a very succinct and clear argument for why Jefferson's generalization of the innate intellectual abilities of blacks as a group was obviously disproved by individuals like James Baldwin and so using the "Jeffersonian politics of difference" that Charles Murray promotes is absurd, Harris completely misses the point and instead leaps to "do you doubt people are different"?

Because Sam Harris is not very bright.

Sam Harris is the recipient of wealth and connections that has allowed him to get to the point where he can play a smart person to gullible groups of young white men. Harris rode to fame on the anti-Islamic bigotry caused by the 9-11 attacks. 

But when people who actually know what the hell they are talking about talk to Harris, Harris comes out looking like an especially arrogant poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect as when an actual security expert, Bruce Schneier, ripped Harris's idiotic ethnic-profiling scheme apart.

And so since Harris isn't actually very bright, he's going to generally come out the worst for it whenever he gets out of the safe spaces of Quillette and "Intellectual Dark Web" echo chambers. And so in order to maintain his own belief in his superior intellect he will have to keep going back to people who believe he's really smart, the people who made him in the first place - the pants-pissing bigots.

And I think that's why he has such a whiny demeanor when communicating with people like Ezra Klein - I think Harris perceives he is being bested, but doesn't want to - or is so blinkered he can't believe it's due to his intellectual failings and so Harris suspects that there's unfair machinations being used against him.

Another thing that really struck me in the Harris-Klein exchange is that Harris, just like the Steven Pinker-promoted duo of alt-right racist Steve Sailer and right-wing operative and too-racist-for-the-NYTimes Razib Khan, wants to discard what we know about the African American experience in the US when discussing blackness and race and nature v nurture. As Khan said:

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 statement is so absurd it took me a while to realize that in this passage Khan means we should disregard history because then we will better understand the purity of the genetic information. It's such a bizarre way to understand humans - unless of course you've already completely bought into the assumption that nature is everything and nurture is nothing.

And Harris is in agreement with this. I suspect the hereditarians think this way in part because history isn't science but genetics is. Here's Harris in the discussion with Klein:

     Ezra Klein 

I doubt that we have, given the experiment we have run in this country, given the centuries of slavery and segregation and oppression, given locking people out of jobs, out of good schools, out of building wealth, out of going into top professions, out of being part of the social networks that help you advance; the amount of violence and terror and trauma that we have inflicted on African Americans in this country, I absolutely doubt — I truly, to the core of my being, doubt — that we are at a place where any of us should have confidence saying that the differences we see in individuals now reflect intrinsic group capacity. I think that at every other point in America history where we have said that — 

     Sam Harris 

But even Murray wouldn’t say that. 

     Ezra Klein 

That is exactly what Murray says. That at every other point in American history. 

     Sam Harris 

Again, there is confusion creeping in here. 

     Ezra Klein 

There is not confusion. 

Sam Harris 

Okay, I’ll try to sort it out in my next volley. 

     Ezra Klein 

You’ll sort it out. Of course. At every point in American history where we have made that argument, we now look back — and, I mean, this is not going way back. Segregation, my mom was alive in segregation. Charles Murray was alive during segregation. We’re talking, I think, it’s within the week of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. This is not ancient history, it is recent history. 

I think we look back and say, “Man, they really had it wrong.” You quoted back at me something that I think either I say it, or the Vox authors say it, now I don’t remember, but that, yeah, if you’re having a version of this conversation again, then it is incumbent on you to say why you’re so sure it will be different this time. 

Murray does say he thinks that some combination of genetic and basically immutably environmental characteristics make it so we can’t do much about this and there just are big differences between the groups, and it’s just going to remain that way, and American politics need to rearrange itself around that reality. 

Yeah, I strongly disagree, and I disagree because of American history. That is why my fundamental criticism of that conversation was that you needed to deal more with the history of this conversation and the history of this country. 

     Sam Harris 

Okay, but even in this conversation you are unwilling to differentiate scientific fact and scientific data and reasonable extrapolations based on data, from past injustices in American history, these are totally separate things — 

     Ezra Klein
No, we disagree on what a reasonable extrapolation from the data is.

Harris then goes onto whine about how the Southern Poverty Law Center was a big meanie to him - they were not.

Towards the end the exchange demonstrates Harris's Dunning-Kruger blind spot:

    Sam Harris 

I get that, but not in precisely the ways you think you do. I’m in the, once again, having the bewildering experience of agreeing with virtually everything you said there, and yet it has basically no relevance to what I view as our underlying disagreement. 

    Ezra Klein 

You have that bewildering experience because you don’t realize when you keep saying that everybody else is thinking tribally, but you’re not, that that is our disagreement.

Harris is bewildered because he can't keep up with the intellectual complexity that Klein has been throwing at him, but can't admit - can't understand - that the problem is his own deficiency and so he has a suspicion that something tricksy is going on.

But Harris will continue to be successful because he's telling all those white supremacists and misogynists what they want to hear and telling them that they are the true smart ones, the pure intellects, unlike those identity politics people.

And of course there's always the wingnut welfare from the Kochs or other right-wingers, glad to prop up mediocrities who say what they want them to say. 

One reason I have never called Steven Pinker a white supremacist

The kind of people who support and in some cases write for alt-right garbage pretending to be centrist like Quillette like to claim I have said Steven Pinker is a white supremacist, as we see Cathy Young doing in this tweet.

I've never said Steven Pinker was a white supremacist. I have pointed out that Steven Pinker has promoted hereditarians like Razib Khan and Steve Sailer who write for white supremacist publications like American Renaissance and Taki's Magazine.

I presented this information in the form of a diagram, which the right/alt-right seems to have a phobia about. The concept of presenting information in the form of an image as opposed to expressing the concept in words seems to strike them as not something sane people would do.

But it's not certain whether some of Pinker's colleagues or Pinker himself consider Pinker, as an Ashkenazi Jew, "white."

Some of the hereditarians ("race realists", biosociologists, evolutionary psychologists, "human biodiversity" proponents, "biosocial criminologists" etc) appear to have decided that the category "Ashkenazi Jew" is a separate category from "white."

Razib Khan comes down on the side of Jews being white, but hedges a little in Discover.

...I think the different statistics are not showing us whether Jews are white or not, because that’s not fundamentally a question which relies purely on genetics. Being white is not totally uncoupled from genetics. Someone of Chinese of African appearance could never be white. Genetics is a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition of whiteness. So, for example, Middle Eastern non-Muslim populations regularly assimilate to whiteness, while Muslims do not. To my knowledge no one thought of Jacques Derrida as a non-white intellectual, despite his Algerian Sephardic Jewish background. But if Jacques Derrida had converted to Islam, and passed himself off as an Algerian Arab or Berber, he would have become non-white. 

By this criterion it is obvious to me that Ashkenazi Jews are white. They have been part of the culture of the West since the late 19th century. But note my qualification. Jews as Jews were not part of Western culture between the years 500 and 1850. Those Jews who impacted Western culture left their Jewishness behind, whether as converts to Christianity (e.g., Karl Marx was a Jew who was raised as a Christian), or as cosmopolitan individualists (e.g., Spinoza). 

** Arguably the Jewish Enlightenment, and the rise of Reform Judaism, were both necessary preconditions for the inclusion of self-conscious Jews as Westerners, and racially as white Westerners.*** 

I find it strange the Khan admits that race is a cultural category, since in the past he's described human descendants of parents of different ethnic groups as "hybrids" as in this article Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern & European hybrids.

Elsewhere he has no problem using the term "hybrid" to mean interbreeding between separate species.

Here we see Steve Sailer in a tweet from April of this year, making a distinction between Jews and whites. Sailer conflates "white" with "gentile" here. 

However, in an article published by white supremacist site VDare Sailer writes:

So that implies one-fourth of white Americans with IQs above 145 are Ashkenazi Jews. 

As for Steven Pinker, he is so certain that race is a biological reality that he said on video that to deny race reality is to deny "reality itself." But what about Ashkenazis as a separate "race"?

As anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson noted in his debunking of the 2005 paper "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence:"

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done much to legitimize and publicize NHAI, while remaining carefully agnostic on its truth value. In the Times:"'It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard... Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well argued-paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright" (Wade 2005). His article about NHAI in The New Republic concluded that it "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken" (pinker2006:27).   

A blogger (Your Lying Eyes 2006) reported a public talk by Pinker on NHAI ("Jews, Genes, and Intelligence"). "Overall Pinker emphasized the reasonableness of the author's hypotheses, the generally better quality of the genetic evidence over the environmental, the non-rational basis of much of the opposition, and the paper's strong foundation in the current state of knowledge."   

Pinker is credited with formulating Edge's Annual Question for 2006: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea... dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?" His own answer is "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." Of his four illustrations, one is Cochran and Harpending's argument on Ashkenazi intelligence.

I think that this shows the standard Pinker approach: make an argument in favor of something but then refuse to express a conclusion, which I believe he does to give himself plausible deniability. 

But it's still unclear from Pinker's perspective if Ashkenazi Jews are a separate race from whites, or a form of hyper-intelligent whites.

Well never fear, Stefan Molyneux (linked to Steven Pinker not only by me, but by Bari Weiss in her "Intellectual Dark Web" article) is happy to declare Ashkenazi Jews a separate race from whites.

Molyneux, for his part, was very happy to be mentioned in Weiss's article.

It must be noted that Steven Pinker didn't have any complaints about being grouped in with Stefan Molyneux.

Pinker appeared on Dave Rubin's show here. Stefan Molyneux appeared here, and explains his ranking of "races" by intelligence:

1. Ashkenazi Jews
2. East Asian 
3. Caucasian
4. Mestizo/Hispanic
5. African Americans
6. Sub-Saharan Blacks
7. Pygmies
8. Indigenous Australians

It's unclear if Molyneux is including South Asians in with East Asians or not. 

It's odd that Pinker, who has no problem attacking Stephen Jay Gould in front of an audience, presenting Gould as a laughable moron as in the video I linked to above, has never gone on record, to my knowledge, to dispute the claims of Stefan Molyneux.

So that's one reason I haven't called Pinker a white supremacist - I don't know if he even considers himself "white. "

Cathy Young and the sample size of one

Right-wingers like Cathy Young like to claim I am crazy for pointing out that Steven Pinker has promoted the careers of Razib Khan and Steve Sailer who have written for white supremacist media. My providing indisputable evidence for all of it doesn't seem to matter - just mentioning the facts in a public forum makes me a "psycho" to Cathy Young.

Yet it doesn't seem to bother Cathy Young so much when Bari Weiss groups Steven Pinker in with Alex Jones.

We know Cathy Young doesn't like Alex Jones because she compared his views to those of a transgender person:

Young doesn't come right out and say that Zinnia Jones represents the views of all trans people, but what else could she mean? Even Young must have been aware that Zinnia Jones was unknown to most progressives, let alone "the average person." But Young goes right ahead, anyway, and portrays Zinnia Jones' statement as something that progressives need to understand concerning the average person, and compares that to Alex Jones, who was already world famous by the time Young tweeted the comparison in July 2017.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when Young smeared me although she proclaimed me a loser nobody. To Cathy Young it seems it's important to smear a nobody because the nobody disagreed with Cathy Young's views and "sniped at" her - ignoring the fact that 80% of Twitter is somebody sniping at someone else. 

Jesse Singal wrote that conservatives aren't really as sensitive to threats as has been claimed. But Cathy Young certainly seems to find threats everywhere, even among those of us who are obscure. A tweet by a nobody is just as significant to Cathy Young as the well-publicized ravings of a world-famous demagogue who promoted dangerous and consequential conspiracy theories.

And if Zinnia Jones is good enough to be a sample size of one to represent the views of trans people, why can't Cathy Young alone serve to represent the workings of the conservative mind?

Cathy Young, Koch brothers handmaiden, on the attack

It looks like I've hit a nerve of the B-list of the "Intellectual Dark Web." 

Cathy Young's snobbish attack on my career as a playwright demonstrates how astoundingly un-self-aware she is. She appears to actually believe that she's made a professional career as a writer, focused mainly on her own bitter anti-feminism, due to her superior literary skills rather than the fact that she - like so many other rightwing pundits including, now, Jesse Singal - has had a career underwritten by the Koch brothers.

Khan references the Undark magazine article for which I was interviewed (because I've been following the racist career of Khan since I started this blog) and it's a good article - I highly recommend it: Race, Science and Razib Khan.

What's really interesting is how the Quillette gang has a meltdown because I simply put facts into a graphic with my Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections chart. Apparently they have a weird phobia about graphics, since it doesn't bother them that Bari Weiss grouped Steven Pinker in with members of the "intellectual dark web" like Alex Jones:

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

So I guess when I finish my project of turning the Bari Weiss article about a "web" into a web-like graphic, their heads will explode.

Jesse Singal gets on board the wingnut welfare gravy train

More of my thoughts on Jesse Singal


When I last mentioned Jesse Singal, the transphobic, Steven Pinker fan-boy on this blog, it was about his passive-aggressive tweets against me. Since then he's covered himself in more shame with his transphobic articles.

Being anti-trans is of course a hallmark of the alt-right-pretending-to-be-centrist flagship of the "intellectual dark web", Quillette. Being pro-Pinker - and that means pro-hereditarian, pro-evolutionary psychology, is also a hallmark of Quillette. And then too, Singal is a buddy of Pinker's favorite out proponent of race science, Razib Khan, also an author at Quillette.

So it wasn't especially prophetic of me, when back in April I said:

But maybe that's why he cultivates hacks like Cathy Young - maybe someday Singal will give up journalism, which he really isn't suited for, and get Cathy Young to help him get a career that does suit him - wingnut welfare. 

My mistake was thinking that "someday" Singal would get on board the wingnut welfare gravy train, instead of "very soon" - as of July 9, Jesse Singal is a contributor to Reason Magazine.

You can't go broke supporting a position that the Koch brothers also support.

Apparently Cathy Young (also an author at Quillette) is not afraid of being sued for defamation.

My favorite Jamelle Bouie tweet so far

Bouie was the main reason Quillette author Razib Khan did not get a job at the New York Times. 

When I mentioned on Twitter that my blog posts about Khan had been used by Bouie in his Khan takedown, Claire Lehmann freaked out.

I've been hoping that Bouie would focus more attention on Quillette and the "Intellectual Dark Web" and it looks like he's doing it.

Steven Pinker's rightwing, alt-right and hereditarian connections, version 2

I have added Sam Harris to the chart in honor of his shout-out at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The PDF version is available here.

Click the image to see a larger version.

The series on "evo-psycho bros."
https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

1. https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros
   
   

   What are hereditarians?

   Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.
   
   
   "Hereditarian" - an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics.
   
   
   https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian
   
   
   Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:
   Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin...
   
   
   https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf
   
   
   Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."
   
   

   Steven Pinker

   Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
   
   
   https://stevenpinker.com/biocv
   
   

   The Blank Slate

   Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians.
   Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that.
   
   
   ...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this...
   
   
   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2
   
   

The question must still be asked: Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously?

Sam Harris, like Steven Pinker is a New Atheist with a hoard of worshipful fan-boys. I am on the record disliking Harris since 2009. Including writing blog posts entitled Why Sam Harris is a second-rate thinker, at best and Sam Harris throws a hissyfit and Sam Harris is still a xenophobic bigot.

I've also referenced this article Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously? many times.

But I've mostly ignored him in my evo-psycho bros series since he's been less obviously hereditarian than people like Pinker and Jerry Coyne. Well he's fixed that.

Recently Harris was sympathizing with Charles Murray, the heir to the racism-infused science of the Pioneer Fund, and got into a debate with journalist Ezra Klein. Then more recently Harris, like Pinker and Razib Khan seem to be under the impression that the recent NYTimes op-ed by David Reich supports hereditarian views when it doesn't.

Harris called out Ezra Klein on Twitter about the article.

Big mistake. Klein published this excellent piece Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science which caused Harris to have a meltdown.

It was widely agreed on Twitter that Harris made a big mistake in reprinting sans permission his exchange with Klein. It was left up to me to point out that Harris doubled-down on Murray's racism by offering as a defense a link to the Winegards article in alt-right Quillette "The Tale of Two Bell Curves" - I blogged about only a section of that article which took me five blog posts to cover, which can be read here:

Tale of Two Bell Curve responses:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Hereditarians declare victory in spite of what David Reich actually said

I found it amusing to read Razib Khan suggesting that the work of David Reich is support for  Khan's own beliefs. In The National Review he writes:

Who We Are and How We Got Here then addresses the reality that large numbers of public intellectuals are extremely hostile to the idea that humans can be grouped together into distinct population clusters. In other words, since race is a pernicious social construction, population geneticists need to tread very carefully. Reich is frank that the time may have come to break the alliance geneticists have made with academics who declare that all differences between groups are trivial. He suggests that science is advancing at such a rate that we will soon understand the genetic basis of complex behaviors in exquisite detail — and that researchers should be prepared for the possibility that some findings will be discomfiting to contemporary sensibilities.

As always with hereditarians, Khan lies about "large numbers of public intellectuals" but then that's the purpose of straw men. Few people deny that there are ethnic differences but in order to paint the Enemy as anti-evolution hereditarians constantly conflate ethnicity and race. The only question is, are they too stupid or careless to realize that's what they are doing, or are they just weasels?

In any case, what Reich said in his NYTimes op-ed piece last Sunday is the opposite of what hereditarians like Khan believe:

At a meeting a few years later, Dr. Watson said to me and my fellow geneticist Beth Shapiro something to the effect of “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” He asserted that Jews were high achievers because of genetic advantages conferred by thousands of years of natural selection to be scholars, and that East Asian students tended to be conformist because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society. (Contacted recently, Dr. Watson denied having made these statements, maintaining that they do not represent his views; Dr. Shapiro said that her recollection matched mine.) 

What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes. They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.

Razib Khan is on the record supporting both Watson and Wade:

• https://www.unz.com/gnxp/is-james-watson-a-racist/
• http://www.unz.com/gnxp/off-topic-comments-and-nick-wades-book/

And Steven Pinker is on the record supporting the notion that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everybody else.

But obviously The National Review wants plausible deniability for its long history of racism and hereditarians like Khan are happy to provide it.

And Reich agrees with what I've said about addressing hereditarian views: Reich wants scientists to fight against the Pinkers and Khans of the world:

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

The reason that scientists aren't fighting against hereditarian views is because most of them have dismissed them as nonsense. And scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson would rather not focus on it.

But racists are motivated to promote the views of Khan and Pinker and so they do. And as I have documented, Pinker uses his celebrity to promote the views of scientific racists, while deflecting from this practice by claiming the media and universities are the real culprits, with plenty of help from "journalists" like Jesse Singal who lie on Pinker's behalf.

Biosocial criminology ~ so what about Australia?

The biosocial criminologists don't seem aware, or don't care that their field is built on the shaky foundation of evolutionary psychology: untestable theories about how humans chose mates in prehistoric times; strict adaptationism; the Northern Superiority Hypothesis; and studies that were funded by racists.

It seems to me that the only way they can continue to believe in the hereditarian basis of their field is to ignore evidence that does not fit their theories. 

Two examples can be seen in this Quillette article written by Razib Khan and Brian Boutwell, which Steven Pinker recommended to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: Heritability and why Parents (but not Parenting) Matter.

In the first example, we see the steadfast belief of hereditarians that human culture has so little impact that it is indistinguishable from "evolutionary processes." 

After admitting to the existence of arranged marriages Khan and Boutwell say:

...Consider the landmark and very famous work (highlighted by Dawkins) carried out on the selective breeding of foxes.8 The goal of the work, in large part, was to better understand the processes of animal domestication. Foxes displaying high levels of tameness (when around a human) were bred with each other.  As it turns out, if you continually cross one tame fox with another, what you eventually get is an animal that starts to act (and even look) more like a dog than a fox.7,8  “Humans are not foxes!” objects the incredulous critic. True, but we don’t get to play by different rules (apologies to our creationist friends [and sadly, to many sociologists*3]).  The same evolutionary processes that apply to the fox and the hound (and every other organism on the planet), apply to us.7,8

Animal domestication is not "evolutionary processes" because throughout the evolutionary history of the creatures which eventually became foxes, the animals chose which other animals they wished to have sex with - an aspect of evolution known as "sexual selection" - without humans controlling the pool of potential mates. And the animals did not prefer traits like "tameness around humans."

Arranged marriages - really any kind of marriage - like animal breeding is an example of human culture intervening in "evolutionary processes." Deciding to have children with an individual selected on the basis of non-sexual traits is not an example of sexual selection but rather a cultural socio-economic process - and in the case of arranged marriages a process not even based on the socio-economic decisions of those getting married. 

And arranged and forced marriages are not only an historical issue. In places all over the world, in the present time, women and girls are forced to copulate with and be impregnated by men they do not sexually desire, because it is in their parents' socio-economic interest that they do so. Patriarchal societies are built on a foundation of thwarting female sexual desire. 

And wealth is no indicator of evolutionary fitness - inheritance laws are not based on the physical beauty and healthy bodies and agreeable dispositions of heirs.

But evolutionary psychology theories can't work unless you completely throw out the inconvenient complexity of human culture. And so that's what they do. 

And then there's this section of the article:

Consider an example that dovetails with the previous point.  Criminologists (and psychologists) have been aware for some time that criminal involvement runs in families*4 and is also heritable (a good portion of that heritability seems to be narrow-sense, though not all; see quillette.com/#comments).  The psychologist Robert Krueger and colleagues10 some years back, provided evidence that humans mate assortatively for antisocial and criminogenic behaviors (put differently, highly antisocial individuals tend to pair off with each other in a non-random fashion).  Does this completely explain the concentration of crime in certain families?  No.  Can it be safely ignored and assumed to be irrelevant?  No.  Just as narrow-sense heritability is a puzzle piece that can tell you something about where the distribution of a trait could be headed in a population, it also helps inform the question of why certain traits cluster in families.9

Now I did some poking around in the books of the biosocial criminologists and can't find any significant discussion of Australia. Which is astounding when you consider that the British system of shipping off its criminals to Australia is the greatest natural experiment ever related to biosocial criminology:

New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788. Over the next 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in lieu of being given the death penalty.  

Today, about 20% of Australians are descendants of convicts, including plenty of prominent citizens. 

Twenty percent of Australians are descendants of convicts. Surely that's unique in the history of the world. There should be dozens of studies of Australia by biosocial criminologists. But as far as I can find, there are none.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that biosocial criminologists never mention the history of Australia  as a penal colony  because it would immediately call into question their claim "criminal involvement runs in families."

But haven't they thought about it themselves? How could they not have thought about it, it's a well-known historical phenomenon.

I think biosocial criminologists have careers because few people take them seriously enough to ask basic questions like "what about Australia?" If serious scientists started asking serious questions the entire field would dissolve.

Meanwhile the biosocial criminologists can keep writing for alt-right Quillette and crying on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's shoulder about how they are discriminated against by those liberals in academia. Who, as they will tell you, have a greater tendency toward criminality, because they are liberal. 

Let's explore biosocial criminology

I feel that I've done all that I can with investigating Steven Pinker's alt-right connections, without becoming a professional journalist myself.

My evo-psycho bros series now has 86 entries beginning in mid-January up until early March. A high-level view of Pinker's connections can be seen in this chart I created at the end of the series, Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections.

I had already been well aware of some of Pinker's alt-right connections, in particular his connection to Razib Khan whose career I've been following on this blog for over 10 years. I was also aware of his Steve Sailer connection although if I was aware he had included Sailer in "The Best Science and Nature Writing" in 2004 I had forgotten.

What really surprised me though was his connection to "biosocial criminology" - I'm not surprised that Pinker is promoting the careers of biosocial criminologists via Quillette, and is in agreement with their research strategy, I'm surprised there is a network of biosocial criminologists in American colleges who, as far as I have so far been able to determine, are in complete agreement with John Paul Wright when he said:

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

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

In fact, based on what I have seen of the alt-right connections of several of these biosocial criminologists, as demonstrated in my Pinker alt-right connections diagram, promoting the idea that "black" people are genetically more criminal than other "races" is the entire reason for the existence of "biosocial criminology."

Both John Paul Wright and J. C. Barnes, frequent co-authors together and with other leading promoters of biosocial criminology Kevin M. Beaver and Brian Boutwell work at the University of Cincinnati. The university's web site includes an essay How Biosocial Criminology Can Help Solve Crimes which does not provide a byline but I assume it was written by Wright, Barnes or both, especially since it references the work of both Wright and Beaver. 

Although Wright is the most frank about the race obsession that underlies biosocial criminology (as well as how much he bitterly hates liberals), he managed to tone it down for the school's web site. The closest the essay comes to admitting the racist heart of biosocial criminology is:

The study found impulsivity, which is one of the most important traits in the development of criminality, is not associated with just one factor, but is characterized by complex biosocial makeup. This and other studies have illustrated that impulse control, much like any human phenotype, is influenced by both social and biological factors.  Therefore, biosocial criminologists keep in account both biological and sociological factors to identify behavior that may lead to criminal behavior.

Phenotype is hereditarian/human biodiversity code-word for race.

The New York Times didn't care that I had been tracking Razib Khan's career for years, it wasn't until Jamelle Bouie, a prominent black writer took notice of Khan that his beliefs became known well enough to prevent him from getting a gig at the NYTimes.

I imagine something similar will happen with biosocial criminology. Some day a journalist or maybe someone associated with the University of Cincinnati, Florida State University or any of the other colleges that teach biosocial criminology will wake up to the fact that they are harboring scientific racists whose beliefs are based on the crackpot Northern Superiority Hypothesis theory of Richard Lynn and the Pioneer Fund-supported studies that were used in The Bell Curve. 

Unless Donald Trump can succeed in his dreams of a dictatorship, in which case all those racists are golden.

So what's Steven Pinker's alt-right gang up to now?

I've pointed out on this blog that the apparent aim of alt-right Claire Lehmann's Quillette is to rebrand Ezra Levant's alt-right views: anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-Left as "centrist."

Here we see Razib Khan promoting the idea that Christina Hoff Sommers and Steven Pinker are "centrists."

To be honest these forays by centrists (Sommers is a registered Democrat with libertarian leanings, similar to Steven Pinker) into the academy are starting to remind me of those ridiculous “debates” that Jews had to have with professional anti-Jews (mostly apostates) in the courts of medieval European monarchs. There were the outward forms of debate, but everyone knew what it was about (since Sommers and Pinker are from Jewish backgrounds perhaps that’s apposite).

In Sommer's case very right-leaning since her primary employer appears to be the Koch brothers via her perch at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Or as this Twitterer observed a couple of years ago:

And Steven Pinker constantly attacks the left, as when he claimed that academia and the media are "radicalizing" the alt-right when it's actually he who is doing just that. Not to mention his good buddies, professional racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, who are also pals together as seen recently on Twitter.

I predict that Pinker will continue to lean ever further right, his hereditarian views are much too popular with the right and alt-right to avoid such a fate. 

And Pinker loves anybody who proclaims him brilliant and who promotes his bullshit Blank Slate theories.

Pinker doesn't do a very good job hiding where his real sympathies lie.

As a recent review of Pinker's most recent, "Enlightenment Now" by David A. Bell in The Nation noted:

But he wraps his arguments up in such a thick layer of exaggeration and misinterpretation that the book does more harm than good. It makes use of selective data, dubious history, and, when all else fails, a contempt for “intellectuals” straight out of Breitbart.

No big surprise there. Both of Pinker's good buddies Khan and Sailer were identified as leaders of the alt-right in Breitbart by none of than Milo Yiannopoulos.

And they have allies at the New York Times. In addition to Jesse Singal, Pinker fanboy and Razib Khan's buddy, there's Bari Weiss, who wrote a column decrying rude college students as the work of the Left and "Official Antifa" which turned out to be a hoax site. As reported in Mediaite:

New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss — a self-described Iraq War-supporting “outspoken Zionist” — took a narrative from the alt-right in her newest column, and used Tweets from a phony account in order to do it. 

The op-ed, which suggests the political left is intolerant and does not believe in free speech on campus “at all,” used two tweets from a fake “Antifa” account run by online trolls to prove that young leftists were attacking new-right personality Dave Rubin for being anti-LGBTQ, despite the fact that he is gay. 

Weiss wrote the following regarding Rubin’s experience with college activists:

“[Leftists] seem to believe that the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst. Among them: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an ‘Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist’ and a ‘fascist lieutenant’ for criticizing identity politics.” 

Upon clicking on the links attached to the terms “Anti-L.G.B.T. fascist” and “fascist lieutenant,” readers will find the parody account @OfficialAntifa is behind the claims — not an actual youth leftist organization.

I think it's pretty obvious that the right-wing and alt-right media have decided a good strategy is to promote right-wingers like James Damore and Christian Hoff Sommers at colleges, and when some of the more obnoxious students - or in Damore's case, not even students, just rando outsiders - make a fuss, use this to claim "the left" is intolerant and anti-free speech. My guess is that Weiss didn't realize "OfficialAntifa" was fake because not only is she a lazy, awful journalist, just like Jesse Singal, but in the alt-right online circles she travels in, there's little concern over whether "Official Antifa" is real or not - if they can get away with using fake news to smear their enemies, they'll do it. 

Naturally Weiss identifies Sommers as a "feminist" in spite of the fact that Sommers' entire career has been devoted to attacking feminists. 

And Steven Pinker makes common cause with these freaks. Anybody who knew anything about Sommers' career could have predicted she would be leading the backlash to #metoo. That's what the fucking Koch brothers pay her for.

Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections

UPDATE 4/20/2018:

This chart & associated discussion has been updated with the addition of Sam Harris. You can see the revised version of the chart here:

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2018/04/steven-pinkers-rightwing-alt-right-and.html 

Click the picture to enlarge.

https://mcclernan.blogspot.com/search/label/evo-psycho%20bros

What are hereditarians?

Although right-wing and alt-right are fairly well-known terms, "hereditarian" is not and requires an explanation.

"Hereditarian" an advocate of the theory that individual differences in human beings can be accounted for primarily on the basis of genetics. 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hereditarian

Although in practice the term most often refers to racial differences, as discussed by Linda Gottfredson:

Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) hereditarian hypothesis is that Black–White differences in general intelligence (IQ, or the general mental ability factor, g) are “substantially” genetic in origin... 

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005hereditarian-hypothesis.pdf

Other terms which are similar are "evolutionary psychology," "human biodiversity" and "racial realism." Related to these terms is "biosocial criminology."

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. His tenth book, to be published in February 2018, is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. 

https://stevenpinker.com/biocv

The Blank Slate

Written by Pinker, published in 2002, this is the New Testament to The Bell Curve's Old Testament for hereditarians. 

Although Steven Pinker claims in The Blank Slate that he doesn't agree with the conclusions about black intelligence made in The Bell Curve, he has never to my knowledge explained why, although he agrees with almost every other hereditarian claim, the Bell Curve is wrong about that. 

...Intellectuals deny biology, according to Pinker, because it interferes with their pet theories of mind and behavior. These are the Blank Slate (the belief that the mind is wholly shaped by the environment), the Noble Savage (the notion that people are born good but are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that there is a nonbiological agent in our heads with the power to change our nature at will). The "intellectuals" in Pinker's book are social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists. The good guys are the cognitive scientists and ordinary folks, whose common sense, except when it has been damaged by listening to intellectuals, generally correlates with what cognitive science has discovered. I wish I could say that Pinker's view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2

Quillette

http://quillette.com

Quillette is an online magazine founded by Australian writer and former psychology graduate student Claire Lehmann. The publication has a primary focus on science, news, culture, and politics......The magazine has been praised by the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, who described it as a "superb online magazine", and has garnered support by the psychologist Jordan Peterson. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette

Steven Pinker has recommended Quillette articles on Twitter and said about Quillette:

...one of the most stimulating & original new web magazines. 

https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/909489258918027264?lang=en

Quillette has published many hereditarians, some of whom have been interviewed by Stefan Molyneux and republished articles in the white supremacist American Renaissance including Kevin M. Beaver, Brian Boutwell, Ben and Bo Winegard and John P. Wright.