The stunning shadiness of the evo-psycho bros

I'm continuing to review the links that the Winegard brothers provided in their defense of "The Bell Curve" in Quillette. I've reviewed the first five here.

The Winegard bros maintained that the theory that some "races" are dumber than others is especially plausible because "there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations."

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

They then proceed to mention some of the alternative explanations and dismiss them without discussing them.  Like this:

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities.

They don't provide any examples of people discussing socioeconomic disparities even though "many" do. Instead they jump right to:

But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap.

Which includes a link to work by Arthur Jensen as I already discussed. So in this next paragraph they say:

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

Link #6: intelligence tests are culturally biased

They provide a link to an article from 2009 in the Huffington Post by Dan Agin Emeritus Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, who devotes one paragraph to the cultural bias issue. And they don't address his argument at all, they just move on.

Link #7: predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people

This is the first link they provide to support their position that is not written by the Winegard bros or Jensen/Rushton (Saletan references Jensen/Rushton before he apologizes for it) and they completely misrepresent it. The paper, Fact and Fiction in Cognitive Ability Testing for Admissions and Hiring Decisions is written to support the use of admissions/hiring decisions and does admit that cultural bias can have an impact on test results:

Standardized tests of cognitive abilities are grounded in the psychometric approach to intelligence, which has focused on understanding individuals’ ability to reason, plan, solve prob- lems, think abstractly, learn and adapt, and process and com- prehend complex ideas and information (Ones, Visweswaran, & Dilchert, 2005). This does not mean that cognitive tests are pure measures of individuals’ innate ability. Although highly stable over the course of decades (e.g., Deary, Whalley, Lemmon, Crawford, & Starr, 2000), test scores reflect developed abilities and are a function of innate talent, learned knowledge and skills, and environmental factors that influence knowledge and skill acquisition, such as prior educational opportunities.

Did the Winegards actually read the paper? Especially since the paper provides an explicit example of cultural bias in skill acquisition:

Now consider a skill assessment that shows some large racial differences and has effects on occupational and other outcomes. For example, there are very large Black–White group differences in swimming skills, with white swimmers, on average, being more skilled...

One could raise a legitimate societal concern that there are differential opportunities to learn swimming, as well as familial, social, environmental, peer, economic, and cultural factors that contribute to the difference. Indeed research has found support for some of these factors (Mael, 1995). However, this is not bias in the measure. The key points are that the swimming test is not the source of the difference and is a measuring a legitimate skill and a predictor of subsequent performance. We want life guards who can swim well. Addressing the skill disparity is a societal issue. Condemning the swimming test will not correct the societal issue any more than discarding a thermometer will make a fever go away. 

In other words, skill disparity caused by social conditions is not their problem.

Next paragraph in the Winegards' defense of The Bell Curve:

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

Link #8: certainly not for lack of effort

Again they provide a link to a single source, in this case a book by Richard E. Nisbett called Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count and they don't address any of his arguments. They just declare it a failure and move on.

But what they say prior to that is truly jaw-dropping. The idea that "a legacy of slavery/discrimination" has no impact on black intelligence is an example of the primary problem with evolutionary psychology: its extreme resistance to acknowledging socio-economic factors.

David Buller demonstrated that David Buss, a giant in the world of evo-psycho bros, mistook female slavery for female choice because, I would argue, of the reflexive habit of evo-psycho to turn everything into evolved innateness

Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind"). 

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

You can build a case for "the legacy of slavery/discrimination" having an impact on intelligence in five minutes if you possess deductive reasoning ability and have access to the Internet.

Does poverty have an impact on intelligence? Yes.

Science Magazine: Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

Have black people in general been poor since the days of slavery? Yes.

ScienceDirect: Slavery, education, and inequality

Abstract: We investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across US counties. We find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality, and in particular inequality across races. We also show that a crucial channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation, i.e., current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education.

So there you have it - black people have been poorer than whites since the days of slavery and not only does the legacy of slavery impact the acquisition of wealth by blacks, an important cause is unequal education attainment.  Poor education leading to poverty and the stresses of poverty itself combine to provide a compelling case that blacks having lower intelligence scores than whites is not genetic.

I wasn't aware of either of the two studies I mentioned until I sat down to write this post. I made a tiny effort to look.

The Winegard brothers didn't find any compelling cases because they didn't bother to look.

Here is Steven Pinker on Twitter, in reference to the Winegard article, claiming he doesn't agree with The Bell Curve on race.

But if Pinker doesn't agree with the Bell Curve on race, and given that the "public discussion" of the book has focused on criticisms of what it says about race, and given that he maintains the discussion has been  "ignorant and dishonest" then what exactly is it about race in The Bell Curve that Pinker doesn't agree with?

More on the links in this Bell Curve article in the next post.

Thanks for the shout-out, PZ Myers

Thank you PZ Myers for giving me a shout-out on your blog: Dig into the racist circle jerk which is such a great title. Thank you for recommending my "ugly knitting" LOL.

For your reading convenience, the threads of this ugly racist sweater are connected by the tag "evo-psycho bros."

And also thanks PZ for elaborating on the racist angle concerning quarterbacks. I confess I didn't actually investigate the content of Sailer's discussion of quarterbacking, as I don't feel I am well-informed enough about football to fully understand the issues involved.

I should say to visitors that I am not a journalist nor a scientist, but a playwright with a day job as a web developer/technical writer. But I have an interest in anthropology and have been following the career of Razib Khan for over twelve years on this blog.

Thanks to my interest in anthropology - specifically the work of Marvin Harris and his book Cultural Materialism The Struggle for a Science of Culture - I became acquainted not only with Harris's "research strategy" of cultural materialism but also alternative research strategies including sociobiology - the former name for "evolutionary psychology." I first heard of Steven Pinker thanks to paying attention to the promotion of evolutionary psychology from the late 1990s to now. 

And by the way, if you haven't read this excellent review in The New Yorker of Pinker's Blank Slate, What Comes Naturally, I recommend you do. In my experience only the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer) out of all mainstream media outlets is not too baffled by Pinker's bullshit to clearly analyze Pinker's claims. 

I highly recommend all of Marvin Harris's work, and you can get an excellent comparison of three research strategies including cultural materialism and sociobiology online for free: R. Brian Ferguson was a student of Marvin Harris and wrote this excellent Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war. His discussion of the work of Napoleon Chagnon is especially interesting. 

I still find it shocking that Steven Pinker has gotten away with promoting the career of straight-up racists including a prominent member of the alt-right, Steve Sailer all these years. Although you can see how he has gotten away with it when you read the white-washing Pinker's own statements were given by New York Magazine's Jesse Singal, particularly the part were Pinker blames universities and the media for radicalizing the alt-right, and which PZ rightly harshly criticized.

Journalists have dropped the ball on this issue. And so have scientists. 

PZ Myers is one of the few scientists who regularly criticizes evolutionary psychology and its proponents. 

The real issue of radicalizing the alt-right is not that the "truth" of female and black intellectual inferiority is being suppressed as Pinker claims, it's that there is a whole sociobiology cottage industry providing specious theories on the genetic intellectual inferiority of women and especially of African-Americans. Many scientists, it seems, consider the whole "human biodiversity" thing to be so ridiculous that they don't even take the time to criticize it. And so "scientific" racism is promoted, not only by obvious racist media like American Renaissance and VDARE, but by outlets like Quillette, respectable enough to publish Justin Trudeau's ghostwriter Jonathan Kay. Quillette may not come out and say, like Steve Sailer did, that blacks are intellectually inferior to all other "races" (although he'll give them basketball and jazz and rap) but they use the exact same fundamental sources: J. Phillippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. And Steven Pinker has consistently promoted not only Quillette but the work of Rushton and Jensen. 

Pinker's buddy Razib Khan was denied a post at the New York Times when Jamelle Bouie publicized the work of myself and others tracking his racialist career. But as Khan pointed out in this Undark piece:

Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”

There needs to be much more attention paid to the premises underlying evolutionary psychology, by journalists and scientists. Ignoring the evolutionary psychology industry is not going to make it go away. As we've seen with the election of Donald Trump, there's nothing so ridiculous and obviously false that some people won't believe it. Especially when their racist inclinations make them want to believe it.

The Winegard brothers and human bio-diversity

Unlike Pinker & Coyne, the HBD web site -
which links to work by them,
the Winegards & Razib Khan,
claims to know exactly what race is
and which races exist

For my discussion of the Winegard brothers' Quillette article about the Bell Curve I excerpted the section concerning the racial component of intelligence. What I want to do in this blog post is address the sources the Winegards linked in that excerpt.

Please note that in my opinion the Winegards failed to demonstrate that "race" has any real meaning outside of the colloquial one generally used by North Americans. I will get to that issue when I review their  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism piece.

On to the references for their Bell Curve piece.

Here is the first paragraph that contains links from the excerpt.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Link #1: The Saletan piece

The Saletan piece is used by the Winegards to show that at least one mainstream media contrarian is on board the belief in race-based intelligence differences. Its title is "Liberal Creationism" and was posted November 18, 2007.

What the Winegards fail to mention is that ten days later, November 28, 2007, Saletan posted an article titled "Regrets" and said this (excerpt):

...But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia. 

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. 

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

In his 1994 review of The Bell Curve, Charles Lane discusses the connection between The Bell Curve and the Pioneer Fund:

Which brings us back to Murray and Herrnstein. They cite in their book no fewer than thirteen scholars who have benefited from Pioneer Fund grants in the last two decades—the grants total more than $4 million. Many of The Bell Curve’s sources who worked for Mankind Quarterly were also granted Pioneer money.16

But the Winegards, who don't mention the shady racist sourcing of The Bell Curve also don't mention that Saletan apologized for failing to mention the shady racist sourcing of his beliefs in racial intelligence issues.

Link #2: a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations

In case anybody is foolish enough to buy into the Winegards presenting themselves as objective analysts of the claims in The Bell Curve, this link, used to argue "the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable"  links to their own work Human Biological and Psychological Diversity which shows them to be firmly in the "human bio-diversity" camp.

The next paragraph contains this:

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Link #3: an impressive array of evidence to defend it

In addition to their own HBD paper, which I'm sure the Winegards feel is just as impressive, they describe another "impressive array of evidence" which turns out to be a paper THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY written by the previously mentioned (by Saletan) Phillippe Rushton president of the racist Pioneer Fund along with equally racist Arthur Jensen who argued that programs like Head Start were doomed to fail because the genetic stupidity of those the program served. Studies have proven Jensen was wrong but you'll never hear about that from the likes of the Winegard bros.

To take the paragraph as a whole, the Wingards are claiming that racists, funded by racists making racist claims, are providing "an impressive array of evidence" to defend racist conclusions. And the strongest evidence in favor of racist explanations, they claim, is that there are "no good alternative explanations." Later on the Winegards dismiss without argument poorly-presented alternatives, but since the Winegards are already True Believers in "human bio-diversity" they have no desire to seriously consider alternative explanations. I'll get to that in the next post.

Next paragraph

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Link #4: socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap

One again, they link to the work of Arthur Jensen, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence)

Link #5: almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap

This links to a piece on the Florida State University web site which you can't access without login credentials so I can't examine it, but presumably it's by Bo Winegard, the Winegard associated with FSU.

So what's the score so far? Of the five links, two are to their own work, two are to work by Jensen/Jensen & Rushton) and one is to a piece that Saletan apologized for because of a Rushton connection.

More looks at links in the next post. Don't worry, we haven't heard the last of Jensen and Rushton.

Quillette, the Bell Curve, race and the Winegard bros

It was my intention in this post to analyze the serious flaws of a piece published in Quillette on the issue of the existence of race as a biological reality but then I fell down the racist rabbit hole at  Quillette. So I have to step back and discuss a few other things first.

Quillette is not some kind of peer-reviewed science periodical, but rather a right-wing/libertarian project by Claire Lehmann.

According to her bio, Lehmann is a psychology grad student drop-out who in addition to contributing to mostly right-leaning media outlets (National Review, Commentary, The Spectator) mentions writing for her own Quillette as one of her accomplishments.

Quillette opposes feminism - every article posted about feminism in Quillette is an attack on feminists. And of course it taps anti-feminist Susan Venker to write glowingly of Camille Paglia, buddy of Rush Limbaugh, whose entire claim to fame is based on attacking feminists.

I'll save you the time in reading Venker's take, which is, as always: feminists hate men.

Now typically I'd just ignore Quillette like I ignore the National Review or any other piece of right-wing trash (read about the National Review's history concerning the Civil Rights movement here), but it is used as a source frequently by Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne. Meanwhile the third evo-psycho bro, Razib Khan, is contributor at Quillette.

And to my surprise and disgust I just realized that Jonathan Kay, who ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's Common Ground and who I was inclined to respect and with whom I agree about the perniciousness of anti-cultural appropriation was also a contributor. Maybe I'll have to apologize to Jeet Heer, who called Kay a "rightwing provocateur." Although Kay claims on Twitter he's taking a break from Quillette.

In addition to Razib Khan, Quillette's go-to guys for opinions on race appear to be Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell (the authors of  On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism.)

The Khan piece I linked to early on in this post was co-authored by Boutwell.

Their bios at the end of the piece:

• Bo Winegard is a graduate student at Florida State University. Follow him on Twitter @EPoe187
• Ben Winegard is an Assistant Professor at Carroll College. Follow him on Twitter @BenWinegard
• Brian Boutwell is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Follow him on Twitter @fsnole1 (NOTE: his actual account appears to be FSNole57 )

The Winegards and Brian Boutwell are proponents of "human biological diversity" as demonstrated in this piece: Human Biological and Psychological Diversity.

Not surprisingly, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker's old buddy, is a big fan of their work.

While looking for work in Quillette by the Winegard brothers and Boutwell I discovered the Winegards':  A Tale of Two Bell Curves which was published after the Reality of Race article.

Here is an excerpt:

Claim 4b: It is likely that some of the intelligence differences among races are caused by genetics.

This was the most controversial argument of The Bell Curve, but before addressing it, it is worth noting how cautious Hernstein and Murray were when forwarding this hypothesis: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might that mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” (p. 311). This is far from the strident tone one would expect from reading secondhand accounts of The Bell Curve!

There are two issues to address here. The first is how plausible is the hereditarian hypothesis (the hypothesis that genes play a causal role in racial differences in intelligence); and the second is should responsible researchers be allowed to forward reasonable, but potentially inflammatory hypotheses if they might later turn out false.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

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

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).

Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. Science progresses by rigorously testing hypotheses, and it is antithetical to the spirit of science to disregard and in fact rule out of bounds an entirely reasonable category of explanations (those that posit some genetic causation in intelligence differences among racial groups). The Bell Curve is not unique for forwarding such hypotheses; it is unique because it did so publicly. Academics and media pundits quickly made Murray an effigy and relentlessly flogged him as a warning to others: If you go public with what you know, you too will suffer this fate.

I find it odd that this article, published in March 2017 talks about how "if you go public with what you know, you too will suffer (a bad) fate" and yet don't even mention Razib Khan, who co-wrote a piece in Quillette with the bros' other co-author Brian Boutwell. Even though it's in the public record that Khan lost a job working at the New York Times thanks to the controversy about his racism.

Apologists for The Bell Curve never tell you that one of the major sources of claims used by "The Bell Curve" is itself racist. In Charles Lane's 1994 review of the Bell Curve he writes:

Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828).2 But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.3 

Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.”4

Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia.5 In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.”6 The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education;7 and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”8

I doubt that the readers of Quillette actually take the time to look at the hyperlinked references the Winegards provide in the piece.  However I did take the time, and the Winegards sources are primarily notorious scientific racists and their own work. I will review their sources in the next post.

Razib Khan, Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker can't say exactly what "race" is - but whatever it is they are sure it is not a social construct

Razib Khan of course believes that race is not a social construct, and that race is not only real but predictive of intelligence. And yet I have found that in spite of the title of his article "Why race as a biological construct matters" he in fact failed to demonstrate the existence of race as a biological phenomenon. 

Jerry Coyne, Ph.D is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, and is certain race is not a social construct:

So when people say “race is a social construct,” they’re simply wrong. The only sense in which they’re right is that the designation of a finite number of easily-distinguished human groups (“races”) is a futile exercise, because we have differentiation within differentiation, making the whole exercise purely subjective. (You can, for example, distinguish subgroups of “Caucasians” within Europe, distinguishing those of Scandinavian from Italian ancestry simply by their genetic differences.) 

But that’s not what people mean, I think, by “social construct.” What I think they mean (since they are rarely explicit) is this: “There is no biological difference between human ethnic groups.” 

As always with the evo-psycho bros, Coyne engages in the most blatant straw-manning. Yes, you can distinguish Scandinavians from Italians. And these days both are considered members of the "white race." 

How do we know with great certainty that both are considered  members of the "white race" and have been for some time? Because during Southern segregation, both Italians and Scandinavians would have been allowed to use the accommodations designated "whites only."

And thus we see that when people say "race is a social construct" almost everybody except Jerry Coyne understands they do not mean "ethnic groups are a social construct." It's hard to tell if Coyne is honestly confused on this point or if he is deliberately ignoring the difference in classification between ethnicity vs. race.

In any case, as so often happens with the evo-psycho bros, Coyne wins his argument by misrepresenting what his opponents believe. 

Steven Pinker is also certain that race is not a social construct as he explains in this video. I have transcribed his words starting at 1:36:

"There is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as ah race, whatsoever, that it is purely a social construction."

Here he is on Twitter, referring to an article in the right-wing/libertarian Marx-phobic Quillette.

I have so far been unable to discover what Steven Pinker thinks "race" actually is. One plausible explanation is that he outsources his thoughts on race to Razib Khan and Steve Sailer, as I discuss in two recent blog posts, and lets them take the career debits while Pinker keeps his base of fanboys who like to think of themselves as pro-science and skeptical and not-racist.

So once again, Pinker outsources an explanation for race to someone else. I will review this Quillette article tomorrow. There's no reason to believe that Steven Pinker has any disagreements with what it has to say about race.

Steven Pinker and Steve Sailer: remuneration not repudiation

In yesterday's post I discussed the connection between Steven Pinker, one of the evo-psycho bros and  alt-righter Steve Sailer. Today I want to underline one particular fact - go to the bottom of this post for the thumbnail summation.

In 2000 Steve Sailer wrote an article for VDARE,  described in Wikipedia:

VDARE is an American website focused on opposition to immigration to the United States and is associated with white supremacy,[2][3] white nationalism,[4][5][6] and the alt-right.[7][8][9] Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia describes VDARE as "one of the most prolific anti-immigration media outlets in the United States" and states that it is "broadly concerned with race issues in the United States".[10] Established in 1999, the website's editor is Peter Brimelow, who believes that "whites built American culture" and that "it is at risk from non-whites who would seek to change it".[10] 

The group has been described as white supremacist.[2] The Southern Poverty Law Center describes VDARE as "an anti-immigration hate website" which "regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites", including Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, J. Philippe Rushton and Samuel T. Francis.[7] Brimelow acknowledges that VDARE published writings by white nationalists but said that VDARE is not a "white nationalist Web site".[11][12][13]

Although anti-immigration VDARE is named after Virginia Dare whom the people associated with the website like to fetishize as a beautiful white woman, Dare was of course the daughter of immigrants to North American, if not "the United States" and a member of the "lost colony" of Virginia. As I wrote about 5 years ago, she may have got eaten by people. 

The article in 2000 by Steve Sailer uses The Bell Curve to justify claims of black intellectual inferiority and is entitled America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve and includes the following:

IQ is off-limits today because people who are verbally facile, such as journalists and academics, tend to assume that reality is largely constructed from words. Thus, if we would all just stop writing about unpleasant facts, they would disappear.

Please note that journalists and academics refusing to write about unpleasant facts is exactly what Steven Pinker was talking about in his infamous PC video. So not only was Pinker riding a favorite alt-right hobbyhorse, it's one they've been riding since before they were called the alt-right. Sailer continues:

Unpleasant Fact # 1: Five out of six African-Americans have IQs below the white average. But not talking about this IQ difference has singularly failed to make it go away. The black-white gap has remained roughly one standard deviation for the last 80 years. 

What the censorship has accomplished, however, is preventing the emergence of a more a nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences. Although IQ is, by far, the single most effective measurement known to the social sciences for predicting human outcomes, it`s hardly omniscient. Indeed, African-Americans tend to be better than whites at certain mental abilities that IQ tests are bad at gauging, such as the improvisatory creativity that makes them world-beaters in jazz, basketball, rap, running with the football, and preaching. (See “Great Black Hopes”,  my 1996 article that introduced this novel perspective. Also check out “The Half Full glass”  for my more advanced 1998 review of Jensen`s The g Factor.)

Again we see how Pinker echoed Sailer in Pinker's PC video:

"What the censorship has accomplished, however, is preventing the emergence of a more a nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences. "

There's no evidence anybody has been censoring IQ scores - neither Sailer nor Pinker can be bothered to provide any. And it's funny that Sailer thinks that the problem is journalism and academia aren't promoting a "more nuanced and optimistic view of black-white differences" since in Sailer's mind that nuanced view is that while blacks may be possessed by nature of lower intelligence, they are good at jazz, rap and sports. 

Sailer goes into fuller detail in a 1998 review of The g Factor: the Science of Mental Abilities, by Arthur R. Jensen. The review was once available on his iSteve website, which isn't available anymore except via The Wayback Machine.

I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity. 

For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests -- by necessity objective and standardized -- can never measure this adequately. 

Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?

So according to Jensen and Sailer, blacks, like females enjoy "better short-term memories" which make them (blacks not women) good at music, sport, oratory, dance and slang.

The presidential candidacy of Barack Obama must have been a shock to Sailer who wrote a response, published by VDARE, to Obama's "Dreams From My Father" in October 2008 called AMERICA’S HALF‐BLOOD PRINCE BARACK OBAMA’S “STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE".

Curiously Sailer compares himself to Obama in the introduction of the book, writing: 

To my father and mother, who, together, gave me more than just dreams.

Sailer was an even more obscure fringe figure at that time than he is now, and he compares himself to the leading candidate in a US presidential race. Which gives you some idea of the bafflement and resentment of racist white men in response to Obama's career. Naturally Sailer makes sure to remind you Obama is half-white, right in the title. To get a sense of what Half-Blood Prince is about, here's a helpful paragraph from page 39:

This book serves as a reader’s guide to Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The would‐be President has written a long, luxuriant, and almost incomprehensible book, so I have penned a (relatively) short and brusque book that explains who Obama thinks he is. I mostly follow his life as it unfolds in Dreams, up through his marriage to Michelle in 1992. I especially emphasize the little‐understood but critical four years he spent in Indonesia from age six to ten, during which his white mother, for surprising reasons of her own, set about systematically inculcating in him the racial grievances, insecurities, and ambitions that make up the pages of Dreams.

I've read "Dreams" and it is not in any sense "almost incomprehensible" and of course the most important thing for Sailer is Obama's mother "inculcating in him the racial grievances..."

Most interesting of all to me is Sailer's thanks to his patrons in the introduction:

I am especially indebted to my many patrons, most of whom wish to remain anonymous, who have donated sums of money, small and large, so I can continue to get by as a full‐time professional writer. Due to political correctness, we’re heading into an era when individualistic writers once again depend not upon the mass media for their pay, but upon enlightened patrons. Fortunately, the Internet allows heretical thinkers to help scratch out a living from the small donations of people around the world.

He includes a link to a page on another version of his web site, still online, asking for money.

Like Razib Khan, Sailer owes his career to wealthy racist patrons. But both of these racist hacks would be lifted above the far-right fringe thanks to their association with Steven Pinker.

In Sailer's case, Pinker edited a book called The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2004 and included work by Sailer.

So in summation: just four years after Steve Sailer, whose academic credentials are limited to an MBA from UCLA in finance and marketing, was opining for VDARE that while blacks were intellectually inferior to all other "races" at least they were good at jazz and basketball, Steven Pinker included Sailer's work in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing."

I have yet to find any evidence that Steven Pinker has ever repudiated any claims Steve Sailer has made about race. He prefers rather to pay him to write, and as recently as 2011, quote him for a blurb for one of his books ("Better Angels.")

I emailed Pinker's co-editer Tim Folger about the inclusion of Sailer in the publication. If he responds I will post on this blog.

But there is still the question of what, exactly Steven Pinker thinks is "race." More soon.


UPDATE: Tim Folger wrote back:

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for letting me know about this. In hindsight Sailer's story shouldn't have been included in the anthology, and we should have looked into his background more carefully. Until reading your email today, I knew nothing about Sailer's alt-right connections. Steven Pinker selected the story, and unfortunately I never discussed the article with him, an oversight that I regret.

Tim

I am waiting for my second-hand copy of "The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004" to arrive so I can find out exactly what Pinker hired Sailer to say. 

Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker, the Obamas

I've been researching Steve Sailer's oeuvre in even greater detail along with his connection to Pinker, and I noticed that Sailer really really hates Michelle Obama.

Sailer:

Newsweek has a long article on the wonderfulness of Mrs. Obama, but she sounds like she’s got a log-sized chip on her shoulder from lucking into Princeton due to affirmative action. For predictable reasons, being admitted into one of the Big Four super colleges and being given lots of financial aid didn’t instill in her a feeling of gratitude toward the benevolence of white people. Instead, it just fed her adolescent self-consciousness and racial paranoia. The bad news is that she doesn’t seem to have gotten over it yet. (She’s 44).

Sailer demonstrates what I realized some time in the middle of Obama's presidency - the right/racists believe that Obama isn't really all that smart, he was just helped by the do-gooders. Sailer reprints something one of his readers wrote, with approval:

Virtually everything he’s been given has been donated willingly on the basis of what he is–pan racial, seemingly articulate and forthright exotic who wears clothes brilliantly and is highly charismatic–than what he’s done. No grades, no scores, no actual accomplishments. So how smart is he? Is he really smart? He’s articulate but he uses his charm in any circumstance where he’s out-IQed, and if his charm fails, so does his confidence, and he lurches in gibberish, well documented. 

What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is?

UPDATE: thanks for the shout-out PZ Myers.  For the folks he sent my way, for your reading convenience you can get all the posts in this series on the connections between the alt-right and promoters of evolutionary psychology under this tag: "evo-psycho bros."

The evo-psycho bros (evolutionary psychology proponents) I have in mind are Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Razib Khan, because of their mutual aid society. Pinker was accused of echoing alt-right talking points, Razib Khan expresses his admiration for Pinker as one of his favorite public intellectuals, then links to Jerry Coyne defending Pinker.

Steven Pinker was justifiably accused because he said this:

...I wouldn’t want to say persuadable but certainly um, whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly-literate, highly-intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who um often are uh radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill as the saying goes, the allusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media, ah that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity and they are immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable uh and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions...

The issues Pinker claims are being suppressed by "college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media" are, as described by PZ Myers:

• Capitalist societies are better than communist ones. How odd. I don’t see anyone insisting on that: instead, I see a lot of academics who point out the flaws in capitalism, which, apparently, are lies and don’t exist. Then he makes it worse by using as more specific examples the difference between North and South Korea (I’ve never met anyone who thinks North Korea is a better place to live than South Korea.) or between East and West Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. You will rarely encounter a more pure and absolutely dishonest straw man. How about if the comparison is between, say, a ragingly capitalist country like the USA, and a socialist democracy like Sweden? It gets a bit less obvious.

• Men & women are not identical in their life priorities or sexuality. Again, who is arguing that men and women are identical? He says there is someone on the Harvard campus who argues this, but doesn’t bother to name names. Generally what I’ve seen on the left is approval and encouragement of differences — that men and women are different, but that the bigger differences are between individuals, and that those differences should be respected. We do object to being compelled to fit into the straitjacket of just two stereotypical gender roles. We also don’t think you can go from a karyotype to a flawless description of life priorities or sexuality.

• Different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates. Oh, yeah, he went there. Look at crime statistics and all those violent black criminals! We’re done, that’s all the analysis you need to do (and, by the way, those leftist college professors do not deny the statistics at all). But why do black communities have higher crime rates? It wouldn’t have anything to do with poverty, or discriminatory policing, or the existence of laws that basically criminalize being poor, would it? And of course he brings up that always-useful distinction, that Islamic people are more likely to be suicide bombers, as if that were the sole kind of violence that one ethnic group can perpetrate on another. How many Muslims have been killed by Christians? This is not to excuse either kind of violence, but to point out that playing selective games with the statistics to ignore institutionalized violence is profoundly dishonest.

I want to focus on the race issue because the capitalism argument is just bizarre, and the evo-psychos make no secret that they think women have too much estrogen to care about critical thinking (per Sam Harris) and have evolved to have lesser aptitude for STEM careers than men (per Larry Summers although in the video Pinker misrepresented and downplayed what Summers actually said) and Coyne at least makes no secret of what he really thinks about Islam.

But when it come to race the evo-psychos are not at all clear what they mean, and I've been looking for quite a while.

Well, Razib Khan has been pretty clear about race and that's why he lost an opportunity for a steady gig at the NYTimes, something I played a part in. You can read all my posts about Khan - I've been tracking his racialist career on this blog for 12 years. It's Khan's fate that may give us some indication on why Pinker and Coyne are so unclear about race. Khan is kind of bitter about how he was targeted when, as he said in last year's Undark article:

Still, Khan insisted that his writing about the biology of race was sound. “It’s not socially acceptable to say that there might be group differences in an endophenotype — in their behavior, intelligence, anything that might have any genetic component,” Khan said. “You cannot say that, okay? If someone’s going to ask me, I’m going say, ‘It could be true.’” 

Other scientists, he insisted, believe the same things. They just won’t admit it. “I’m sick of being the only fucking person that says anything,” said Khan. “I know I make people uncomfortable, but a lot of times I say what they’re thinking.”

Pinker is more than just Khan's favorite public intellectual, they have a mutual admiration society as I discuss here. 

But even more blatantly racist has been Pinker's connection to Steve Sailer. 

I recently discovered an exchange in the New York Times between Malcolm Gladwell and Pinker, although it's about something I have blogged about before.

But the NYTimes exchange adds a dimension:

(excerpt from Gladwell)

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.” 

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. 

In his response, Pinker does not deny Gladwell's claim that Sailer is "best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people." Instead he justifies using Steve Sailer as a reference like this:

Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. 

It strikes me as odd that of all the sports blogger statisticians he could pick, he uses someone best known for saying blacks are intellectually inferior.

But it's what Pinker says about IQ that's most interesting. Before Gladwell points to Sailer he says:

(Pinker) is unhappy... with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of I.Q. fundamentalism.

And Pinker replies:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

What Pinker is saying about IQ is that it is a driver of social outcomes, the implication is that IQ is not nurture but nature.

So who are Dean Simonton and David Lubinski? Simonton's biggest accomplishment seems to be ranking all US presidents by intelligence from Washington to G. W. Bush in what appears to me a pointless exercise one step up from astrology.

Lubinski's focus appears to be on gifted children.

I found this when I did a search on Lubinsky and Pinker, it's an interview in Boing Boing in 2009. At one point Pinker says:

My own books are not about IQ or IQ testing, so I don't go over the history myself. The Bell Curve, though treated as toxic by many intellectuals, has some clear historical discussion, and the journalist Daniel Seligman (who died a couple of weeks ago) wrote a history of intelligence testing a while back. An interesting article on the original embrace of intelligence testing by progressives was written by Adrian Wooldridge: "Bell Curve liberals," New Republic, February 27, 1995. Linda Gottfredsen has documented the predictive power of IQ tests in her work, and Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have many papers on the predictive power of high SAT scores in their sample of people who were given the test in early adolescence. J. B. Carroll has written a number of books and edited handbooks on intelligence, and I suspect that one or more contain histories of the field. Ian Deary is probably the most active researcher today on neural correlates of intelligence as measured by IQ tests, and Robert Plomin the most active researcher on its heritability. I also have citations to a number of reviews of Gould's book that challenge his prosecutorial history of testing:

• Blinkhorn, S. 1982. Review of S. J. Gould's "The mismeasure of man." Nature, 296, 506.
• Jensen, A. R. 1982. The debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons: Review of The Mismeasure of Man. Contemporary Education Review, 1, 121-135.
• Rushton, J. P. 1996. Race, intelligence, and the brain: The errors and omissions of the "revised" edition of S. J. Gould's The mismeasure of man. Personality and Individual Differences, 23, 169-180.
• Samelson, F. 1982. Intelligence and some of its testers (Review of S. J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"). Science, 215, 656-657.

Pinker doesn't appear to have any criticisms of The Bell Curve, and his main focus is on liberals and political correctness - clearly a long-standing theme with Pinker. He also uses the topic as a chance to bash Gould. There's nothing the evo-pscho bros hate so much as Stephen Jay Gould. Probably because he used to slice them to ribbons. Please note that the critics Pinker cites include notorious racists Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Ruston.

So back to Steve Sailer, Pinker's go-to guy for sports statistics.

Wikipedia says this about Sailer:

Sailer cites studies that say, on average, blacks and Mexicans in America have lower IQs than whites,[31][32] and that Ashkenazi Jews and Northeast Asians have higher IQs than non-Jewish whites.[33][34] He says that prosperity helped blacks close the IQ gap.[citation needed] He suggests that a problem with mass immigration of non-white Mestizo Mexicans into America is that native-born whites in the US will become a master caste to a non-white servant caste.[35] He also considers that "for at least some purposes—race actually is a highly useful and reasonable classification",[36] such as providing a very rough rule-of-thumb for the fact that various population groups may inherit differences in body chemistry that affect how the body uses certain pharmaceutical products,[37] for "finessing" Affirmative Action when that's economically convenient,[38] and for political gerrymandering. Sailer has also argued that Hispanic immigration is "recreating the racial hierarchy of Mexico" in California:[39]

While RationalWiki says this:

Steve Sailer (born 1958) is a racist, misogynist, white supremacist, anti-Semite, Islamophobe, homophobe, classist, ableist, transphobe, transmisogynist, xenophobe, pseudo-scientist and all-round champion dickhead who can arguably be credited—if such a resumé can be to someone's credit—as the godfather of pseudo-scientific online hate. If it's foul, fetid and attempts to give itself a biological and/or intellectual veneer, then Sailer will have had a hand in it somewhere, trust us. Another way of putting this is that Sailer was alt-right before it was "cool". 

For example, Sailer crafted, christened and cruise-controlled the "Human Bio-Diversity"/HBD meme in an attempt to leverage the inadequacies and insecurities of white nerds for the white supremacist cause. His online acolytes include the likes of "geek-girl" Hbdchick and dweeb-duo Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending at West Hunter,[2] all three of whom parlay their ignorance, stupidity and non-existent grasp of elementary logic to promote a hi-hate, lo-intellect pseudo-scientific agenda of which even creationists would be ashamed to admit ownership.

(End RationalWiki quote)

• Pinker has been associating with Sailer since at least 2002. Here he is giving him an interview.

• In 2004 Pinker apparently co-edited a collection of work called The Best American Science and Nature Writing and included Steve Sailer in it. What are Sailer's qualifications to write about science? Funny you should ask. He apparently has "earned an MBA from UCLA in 1982 with two concentrations: finance and marketing." 

Interesting. With all the science writers out there who are actual scientists, whatever could it be about Sailer's writing that would make Pinker want to include him in such a collection?

• Here's Pinker quoting Sailer as a blurb for his book "Better Angels." 

“Pinker’s range is extraordinary….The Better Angels of Our Nature is a major accomplishment.”
   —Steve Sailer, The American Conservative, Nov. 11, 2011.

Now how alt-right is Steve Sailer? 

• Here is his column for Unz Review (Razib Khan used to write for it too.)
• Here is his work at Taki's Magazine (Razib Khan used to write for it when Richard "heil Trump" Spencer was its editor.)
• Here's Sailer in VDARE arguing for black intellectual inferiority in connection with Hurricane Katrina - and his racism is more blatantly expressed in this piece from 2000 citing The Bell Curve to claim that blacks are by nature intellectually inferior.
• Sailer doesn't appear to have a regular byline at Breitbart, but they give him credit for "human biodiversity" and use him for statistics (like Pinker does) in this case to "prove" that black violence is Obama's fault.

So when the evo-psycho bros deny that Steven Pinker has sympathies with the alt-right, you have evidence, right here, that they are one-hundred percent full of shit. If Steven Pinker has ever repudiated anything that Steven Sailer has ever said, I have yet to find evidence. He rather prefers to hire him and use him for blurbs.

We see that Pinker shamelessly aligns himself with alt-right racists, but what does Pinker himself say about race? And what about Coyne? I'll get to that next.

Back from Montreal

I came home early because it was so bitterly cold in Montreal and I couldn't do any sight-seeing. It's 33 degrees in Manhattan and it feels balmy by comparison.

I made some theater contacts so that's good.

Making connections at the Centaur Theatre

On y va a Montréal

Ugh, too much Twitter drama this week. It's time to go to Montréal!

Passer en français...

Il y a 13 ans depuis j'avais aller la, and ce temps je parle un peu de français. J'ai été pratiquer mon français tous le dernier semaine, quand je n'étais pas tousse. Le tousse ce n'est pas douce!

(Un peu du rime français quoi quoi!)

Le voyage sera de 4 jours mais c'est une journée à faire et un autre retourner en train, donc je n'ai que deux jours pour rester sans voyager.

Il fera froid pendant les 4 jours! Bien sûr, c'est Montréal, mais il fait plus froid que d'habitude. Siri me l'a dit (à droite):

Ca fait un froid de canard!

J'aimerais tellement voir mon amour le Premier ministre pendant le voyage mais je n'ai aucune idée d'où mon petit ami sera les 4 jours. Probablement pas Montréal.

Voici JT lors d'une rencontre avec des Canadiens, et il doit endurer les méchants et les fous.

Il a la patience d'un saint. Je l'adore!

Jesse Singal, member of the evo-psycho club

I just assumed Jesse Singal who wrote a NYTimes piece defending Steven Pinker while white-washing Pinker's actual views was a disinterested writer on the subject of Steven Pinker and accidentally misstated what Pinker actually said in the infamous PC video.

Turns out Jesse Singal is a member of the evo-psycho club and so soft-pedaling Pinker's actual statements was most likely deliberate, not a matter of carelessness as I initially thought.

Here is Singal interviewing Pinker in 2014.

Here he is defending the Damore Google memo - which of course simply regurgitates all Pinker's evolutionary psychology beliefs.

Here he is attacking liberals as anti-science.

Here he is defending evolutionary psychology, quoting ultra-evo-psycho proponent Jerry Coyne.

Here are some friendly exchanges he's had with Razib Khan on Twitter. No wonder it doesn't bother Jesse Singal that Steven Pinker works with Razib Khan.

October 2017

A year ago:

February 2016

Jesse Singal, Pinkerite, defends Pinker in the NYTimes

UPDATE: it turns out that Jesse Singal is a member of the evo-psycho club

The irony is that many of the people who admire Pinker consider themselves New Atheists and skeptics, yet it doesn't seem to bother them at all that not only does Pinker make extremist claims sans evidence, but also proclaims his opinions to be "the truth."

And if you point out that Pinker has a long history of making common cause with the right, and then the alt-right, they will push back on his behalf immediately. Yesterday's NYTimes published an op-ed by Jesse Singal, Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A.

I wrote an op-ed response and sent it into the NYTimes but I don't know if they will publish it or not. 

PZ Myers was mentioned by name in Singal's piece:

Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

Myers responded on his blog, Steven Pinker and the New York Times are making us dumber and makes one of the same points I did in my as-yet unpublished op-ed:

Even when they vaguely puzzle out this point, Pinker supporters don’t understand it. What does Jesse Singal say in the New York Times?

The clip was deeply misleading. If you watch the whole eight-minute video from which it was culled, it’s clear that Mr. Pinker’s entire point is that the alt-right’s beliefs are false and illogical — but that the left needs to do a better job fighting against them.

No. He clearly says that the alt-right’s beliefs are the fault of the “PC” Left, which says nothing about making better arguments to oppose them, and is a falsehood. His talk was about doling out the blame to the Left, not about fighting the alt-right. If you listen to the whole 8-minute video, what you hear is Pinker first saying that you can’t voice certain facts on campus, then stating those facts (self-refutation, anyone?), then explaining that his facts are more complex than he let on, which is what the college professors he’s blaming already do. But then this kind of disingenuous denial of reality, of focusing superficially on he said/she said note-taking, is exactly what the New York Times specializes in.

Jesse Singal is a lazy sloppy journalist and that trait is just as apparent in his tweets. Here he is uncritically repeating Pinker's claim that all he is saying is "the biological contribution to gender differences is greater than zero" along with the claim that there are "people" who react to that as if it was alt-right.

Naturally neither Singal nor Pinker provide any evidence there are people doing that. But even more importantly, "greater than zero" is hardly the extent of what Pinker believes. He believes that biological differences are the cause of a variety of social phenomenon. Which is why he defended Larry Summers.

Pinker lies on the anti-PC video about the source of the Larry Summers controversy, in the same way.

He portrays the Larry Summers controversy as though Summers was punished by simply stating that men and women are different. The actual controversy was that Summers, while the president of Harvard and thus having some power over hiring decisions, suggested at a conference on diversity in STEM that the foremost reason women had less successful careers in STEM than men was because their brains were by nature less capable of STEM subjects than the brains of men.

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

So what exactly were the dire repercussions of Larry Summers proclaiming "the truth"? A few years later Summers went to work for the Obama administration. Apparently the university/media cabal dedicated to withholding the truth is not nearly as powerful as Steven Pinker would have you believe.

It's because of lazy, careless journalists like Singal that Pinker has been getting away with making common cause with professional rightwing racists all these years.

Steven Pinker has gone full right-wing paranoid conspiracy old man

For more of my ongoing series on the interconnections between Pinker, proponents of evolutionary psychology and the alt-right see evo-psycho bros.

Everything I've had to say about Pinker in the last 12 years.

Well it's like I've been saying for years, Steven Pinker is a right-winger. And you'll never guess what he blames for the alt-right - the mainstream media and "fake news."

Although he doesn't use those terms. The beginning of the video below begins like this:

...I wouldn’t want to say persuadable but certainly um, whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly-literate, highly-intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who um often are uh radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill as the saying goes, the allusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or the New York Times, in respectable media, ah that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity and they are immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable uh and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions. Let me give you some examples. So here is a fact that is going to sound ragingly controversial but is not and that is that “Capitalist societies are better than Communist ones.” OK? So if you doubt it, then just uh ask yourself the question: “would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea.” Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany, or in the 1960s...

Pinker believes that the New York Times and "respectable media" are also suppressing the truth about gender and racial essentialism.

Now the thing is that Pinker is clearly either lying or insane. It's easy to prove that the New York Times et. al have plenty of voices speaking up for "the truth" according to Pinker. In fact it wasn't too long ago when there were no voices speaking out against evolutionary psychology as I complained about here.

Clearly another New Atheist, like Dawkins and Hitchens going the route of delusional paranoid old coot.