Race-obsessed Razib Khan - still obsessed with race PART 1

I actually didn't wonder very much about Razib Khan's reaction to the Undark piece about him, Race, Science, and Razib Khan by Michael Schulson. I thought the article bent over backwards to be fair to Khan, and it certainly supported its claims about Khan - and gave Khan a chance to try to deny his race obsession. So I assumed Khan wouldn't have a notably negative response. 

I should have known better. He wrote a couple of weeks ago:

After the recent hit piece that was written about me in a well respected science journalism publication* (which has really updated my priors as to what I think about journalism and how much, or honestly little, I respect the profession) there is really no point in engaging with any prominent liberal that is outside of science because their minds are made up. I am honestly OK with that since I’m not liberal, and I still retain influence and following on the Right, where people are more open-minded about the world in my opinion (basically I think anyone who has sympathies that they have the courage to make vocal with classical liberalism will end up on the Right eventually; I’m looking at you, Bret Weinstein).

It's interesting that Khan considers himself a conservative: he is not white, he's an atheist, pro-choice and pro-science. I assume that the reason he thinks that the Right is more "open-minded" than liberals is because the Right accepts without question the nineteenth-century "science"  that claims humans can be arranged in "race"-based hierarchies. Because obsessing over race is what Khan does.

I was interviewed a year ago for the Undark article because I have been criticizing Khan since the earliest days of this blog, so my blog posts about him tend to appear on Google searches of Khan. Thanks to this visibility, I was a contributing factor in his being denied a post at the New York Times. 

As I said, I thought Schulson was much too sympathetic to Khan:

For all of this, dismissing Khan as a crank would be a mistake. While his associations are extremist, his science is not, and very little of what he writes about human genetics falls outside the pale of ordinary scientific discourse. Khan is also not alone in bridging the worlds of scientific racism and mainstream science and science writing. The Times dropped Khan in 2015, less than a year after one of its own science journalists, Nicholas Wade, published a book that made more sustained, incendiary arguments about race, with far more blowback from scientists.

In fact he is a crank - and a lousy writer too. The fact that the NYTimes publishes another crank, Nicholas Wade, does not make Khan any less of a crank. It's interesting that Schulson quotes Khan as saying: "Obviously, I don’t condone (racism)” while writing this about Wade:

“I can’t control how people use the book,” said Wade, who retired from The Times last year but still regularly contributes freelance articles to its science section — and who was himself interviewed by Khan back in 2010. Wade insisted that the book was not racist, but in an phone call, he also did not take an opportunity to disavow the white nationalists who have embraced it. He was dismissive of the controversy that surrounded “A Troublesome Inheritance,” and of the biologists’ letter to The Times. “It was an attempt to suppress a discussion of race,” Wade said. “Almost everything in the book you can find in The New York Times in my articles, and none of these guys objected at the time.”

I don't think this means that Khan is any less racist than Wade though. I will discuss that tomorrow.

Razib Khan's Struggle

All my thoughts on Razib Khan here.

Well it looks like the brass ring has been snatched away from Razib Khan.

Politico: New York Times drops Razib Khan

The New York Times has terminated its contract with one of its new online opinion writers after a Gawker article highlighted the writer's previous association with racist publications, according to that writer's Twitter account. 

Razib Khan, a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis, was one of 20 writers who signed contracts with the Times to write for the paper's online opinion section. 

The Times announced its new stable of contributors on Wednesday. Hours later, Gawker's J.K. Trotter reported that Khan had a "history with racist, far-right online publications." Khan wrote 68 posts for Taki's Magazine, a publication founded by a "flamboyantly racist Greek journalist," Trotter wrote. Khan also wrote a letter to VDARE, "a white nationalist website named after the first white child born in America, in which he discussed [an essay] concerning the threat of the United States becoming “more genetically and culturally Mexican.”

The Washington Post also reported this news, rather more chattily, and included a link to my blog.

Here’s the upside of signing 20 new opinion writers in a single strategic move: You make a big splash. 

Here’s the downside of signing 20 new opinion writers in a single strategic move: That’s a lot of people to vet. 

In a statement released by spokeswoman Eileen Murphy this morning, the New York Times has signaled that it is severing its recently inked relationship with Razib Khan:

After reviewing the full body of Razib Khan’s work, we are no longer comfortable using him as a regular, periodic contributor. We remain open to consideration of submissions from him to our op-Ed pages, both in print and online.

You have to wonder why the writers weren't vetted before the announcement of their selection went out. You'd think the New York Times would have its shit together better than that.

I should say that I suspected something was up on Thursday when I started to get hits on this blog from National Geographic, NPR and yes, several visits from the NYTimes.

Khan himself, writing from his perch at the far-right Unz Review, wants you to know he isn't bothered by it:

After the events of today I’m going to curl up with Xunzi: The Complete Text. That’s just how I roll. Most of my friends are more outraged than I am. I don’t know why. It just is that way. It is heartening that people care about me, and I appreciate it. But there’s not much more to say than has been said, and perhaps even less. Things happen. If today I was a dying man and I would tell you that I was the child with a book in hand, not the proud one demanding that my views be heard because of the stridency of my voice. My views aren’t important, the truth as best as I can understand it is important. My friends know who I am, and that is all that matters to me. I regret the day that I am the story. That’s besides the point, and uninteresting to boot. Being at the center of a mini-media mini-controversy is rather tiring.

The passage above includes this sentence, which demonstrates that not only is Khan a sociobiology racist, he's a bad writer too: If today I was a dying man and I would tell you that I was the child with a book in hand, not the proud one demanding that my views be heard because of the stridency of my voice.

It's incorrect as a sentence, lacking a predicate:  If today you were a dying man and you would tell me that you were the child with a book in hand not the proud one demanding that your views be heard because of the stridency of your voice what?

Now don't forget - he gets paid by Ron Unz to post this stuff.

At first I thought he must have been quoting a song or something but an online search turned up nothing. I think that's the pure literary stylings of Razib Khan.

Khan mentioned his friends are outraged - but who are his friends? Let's see...

There's John Derbyshire, who as the New Yorker reports here, was fired from the National Review in 2012...

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review,announced over the weekend that he was ending the magazine’s association with John Derbyshire because of a post he published in Taki’s Magazine (an online publication that promises “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar”). Lowry said that the column, “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” was “nasty and indefensible.” Given its conceit—Derbyshire explaining to his children that black people are generally dumber than they are and dangerous and should, on the whole, be avoided—it might also be described as racist. (Josh Barro, at Forbes.com, called it “kind of unbelievably racist.”) In firing “Derb,” Lowry directed readers to his “delightful first novel” but said, in effect, that “Derb” had become bad for theNR brand:

We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

Wasn’t Lowry at the party where Derbyshire “danced around the line”—hosting it, in fact? Lowry called the column “outlandish,” as if the ideas, as opposed to their expression, were foreign to the National Review. Derbyshire years ago called himself a “mild and tolerant” racist; “tolerated” seems like the right modifier.

Derbyshire, in the racist publication VDare writes:

So, having known Razib all these years and admired his erudition; and having met him a few times and found him articulate, witty, and charming; I was glad to see him elevated to the status of New York Times contributor. 

Glad, but also surprised. Razib is of course a race realist, as anyone who knows as much genetics as he does is bound to be. True, theTimes also publishes Nicholas Wade, another race realist, to write in their Science section: but Wade is a skillful diplomat, who softens his articles on population genetics with many qualifications and cautions about the provisional nature of results and the fallacy of inferring “ought” from “is.” Razib can’t be bothered with diplomacy, he just talks science … and sometimes also history, and religion, and philosophy, always from a deep background of reading, quoting half a dozen scholarly books and papers to you as he goes. 

Well, so I was looking forward to Razib’s contributions to the New York Times blog, and to seeing him pitilessly demolish some of the innumerate idiots he’d be sharing that blog with. 

Alas, it was too good to be true. I was browsing the blogs that same evening, Thursday evening, and I saw a post on geneticist Greg Cochran’s blog with the title The Once and Future Khan. From which:

Razib Khan managed to get himself hired and fired by theNew York Times over the course of a single day, an enviable record. Having the Times look upon you with favor is a dubious honor in the first place, something like having a leper ask you out on a date — so a quick hire-and-fire is optimal. Something for the CV, but you never had to actually hang out with the slimebags. Not as cool as “refused the Fields Medal.” but pretty cool.
What seems to have happened is that Gawker.com, a Cultural Marxist website, did a hit piece on Razib exposing his associations with such racist white-supremacist racist far-right racist bigots as racist Taki Theodoracopulos, racist Steve Sailer, and oh my God! racist John Derbyshire.

Although Derbyshire refers to Khan as a "racial realist", Khan himself is careful enough to avoid using the term to describe himself. Another term Khan and the other sociobiology-based racists like to use is "human biodiversity." Another writer at VDare gripes about Khan's disassociation from the Times:

The latest example: the treatment of Razib Khan, a noted commentator on human biodiversity and genetics who blogs at the Unz Review and has been featured at Slate, among other publications. He was recently announced as a new monthly columnist at The New York Times, yet within a day, he was dismissed [New York Times drops Razib Khan, by Dylan Byers,Politico, March 19, 2015].

Another euphemism favored by the SB racists is "human population differences." The commenters at Stormfront are mostly supporters of Khan, although being unrepentant White Supremacists some have a problem with Khan being insufficiently Aryan. But they have to agree with his views on race:

If you couldn't tell be his name, Razib Khan is of Bangladeshi descent. So of course Razib isn't a "white nationalist", though he is a bright scientifically literate geneticist, so like anyone else well-read in the subject, he has acknowledges the reality of aggregate human population differences. His blog GNXP published the best defense of Nobel Prize winning geneticist James D. Watson after he was denounced as a racist. Considering the current quality of NYT writers, I would consider him a vast improvement.

Stormfront links to a 2003 blog post and comments from Khan's old blog Gene Expression in which Khan and others discuss whether being racial realists who comment on human biodiversity and human population differences really make him a racist. Khan wrote:

Razib adds: Racist? God-that-I-don't-believe-in I'm tired of this crap. I've addressed these issues before. I believe in equality before the law. But, I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy.

What he mostly means when he talks about aptitudes and "tendencies" is intelligence. He is of course a huge fan of The Bell Curve, in which Charles Murray argues - out of what I believe is a Libertarian aversion to government spending - that it is useless to aid poor minorities because they are innately, intellectually inferior. That's what Khan means by "serious problems when applied to public policy." He doesn't want tax money to be wasted trying to improve the lot of poor black people's lives when they cannot be improved that way.

But he isn't a "racist" he merely believes in "human biodiversity."

Race-obsessed Razib Khan - still obsessed with race PART 2

I mentioned yesterday that in his Undark article Race, Science and Razib Khan, author Schulson compared the racism of Razib Khan to that of NYTimes columnist Nicholas Wade, and seemed to indicate that Wade was the most hard-core believer in "race" and racial essentialism.

I don't think Khan is any less racist though. I think the reason for this is because Wade, as Schulson indicates, is retired. Wade is 75 years old. As a commenter in Schulson's article notes:

Put more bluntly, I don’t believe that Razib truly disavows anything he’s said or done since 2008 or so. I think he’s a man who’s suffered a ton of professional damage by running in certain circles, and is now trying stop the bleeding.
Understandable? Yes, of course. He has a family to support, and he’s no longer on Unz’s teat. I’d do the same in his position. But I still think he’s lying.

It's not hard to find evidence that in spite of his ending his gig at Unz as a regular columnist, Razib Khan is still obsessed with race.

One of his concerns is making it clear that people from Southeast Asia are different from Africans as he discusses in Race is not just Skin Color (Khan's father is just as dark as some African Americans.)

And Khan's wrong-headedness on the subject of race can be clearly demonstrated in this September 2017 blog post from his Gene Expression site. He writes in Black Ancestry In White Americans Of Colonial Background:

I stumbled upon striking photographs of “white slaves” while reading The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. The backstory here is that in the 19th century abolitionists realized that Northerners might be more horrified as to the nature of slavery if they could find children of mostly white ancestry, who nevertheless were born to slave mothers (and therefore were slaves themselves). So they found some children who had either been freed, or been emancipated, and dressed them up in more formal attire (a few more visibly black children were presented for contrast). 

This illustrates that the media and elites have been using this ploy for a long time. I am talking about the Afghan girl photograph, or the foregrounding of blonde and blue-eyed Yezidi children. Recently I expressed some irritation on Twitter when there was a prominent photograph of a hazel-eyed Rohingya child refugee being passed around. Something like 1 in 500 people in that region of the world has hazel eyes! That couldn’t be a coincidence. Race matters when it comes to compassion.

Several points to consider: Khan considers abolitionists to have been "elites" - the term elite is used at the present time by conservatives to refer to liberals. Who are always the Enemy. The media is also the enemy of the Right as Donald Trump's recent tweets have made clear. Razib Khan considers the elites - abolitionists, modern-day liberals and the media, to be three groups who use the same "ploy."

Khan describes a strategy by abolitionists to promote compassion - by showing pictures of slave children who looked white. And he confesses to find this irritating - and he compares it to the distribution of photos of hazel-eyed refuges on Twitter.

Khan seems to find it offensive that "elites" are aware that "race matters when it comes to compassion." But it is not a controversial view to hold that in general, people prefer those who look like themselves. My impression is that Khan is trying to smear "elites" for recognizing this reality.

But I think the more important source of Khan's agitation over the "ploy" is that abolitionists made an important point: that the concept of race itself was a social invention and not a biological one. A major justification for slavery was that blacks were innately inferior to whites - a belief that Razib Khan and his patrons hold and promote. And yet how could slave children who look exactly like superior white children be members of the inferior black group?

I don't think that Khan will continue to downplay his racial obsession for much longer. First because he can hardly help himself, that is who Razib Khan is, obsessed with demonstrating the inferiority of Africans - especially West Africans who were most heavily targeted in the slave trade for the Americas.

But also because blatant racism - especially racism that can pass itself off as science by employing STEM terms - is where the money is. 

And we know that's where the money is because we know that the very wealthy are bankrolling racism - the Koch brothers support Khan's intellectual hero Charles Murray, while Robert Mercer has been supporting Khan's admirers including, until recently Milo Yiannopoulous - although not to worry, Mercer sold his stake in Breitbart to his daughter Rebecca, she-wolf of MAGA.

And Khan seems to be building a case on Twitter to justify his association with right-wing racist moneybags - because it's hard to make money as a pure scientist:

But what about Razib Khan's idea that having ancestors directly out of Africa - instead of out of Africa and then through Europe or Asia -  contributes to reduced "aptitude"? I will talk about that next.

Razib Khan and his continuing successful quest for respectability

UPDATE: my response to the Jamelle Bouie twitter link: The Triumph of Racist Razib Khan 

All my thoughts on Razib Khan here.

Every now and then I get a visitor to this blog via a search for Razib Khan. For those out of the loop, Khan used to run a web site called "Gene Expression" that is now sponsored by - and given a level of respectability by - Discover Magazine. I've been writing about Khan since the earliest days of this blog.

Of course Razib Khan is also granted respectability by Steven Pinker.

But there is no evidence that Khan has dropped the obsession that drove him ten years ago - the search to prove that blacks and women - but especially blacks - are intellectually inferior.

He's not so blatant about it now as he was in 2003 though. To understand the true Razib Khan, check out this comment he made on Gene Expression ten years ago:

And a book published recently claims to show that American blacks who come from families that have a certain amount of wealth do have the same IQs as whites who come from families with that same amount of wealth

this is chicken or egg now....
what you mean is *asset* levels. income on the other hand is less important, "middle class" blacks do far less well academically than "middle class" (or even working class) whites. this can be chalked up to culture of course. and that is where adoption studies come in, and i tend to think they tilt toward a genetic explanation-though we haven't eliminated all possible variables that could give a cultural explanation.
but as i've noted, the ~ 1 STD deviation difference between blacks & whites persists for a century-despite the fact that blacks are wealthier & healthier (though not AS healthy or wealthy) in relation to whites than they were one century ago.
certainly environmental effects are important, but me thinks we attempt to eliminate the VERY POSSIBILITY of inherent differences of IQ between individuals, and average mean differences between populations, for political, not scientific, reasons.
one reason that black adoptees might do more poorly on IQ tests than white adoptees is that society is racist-and yet, scarr et al. found that genetic markers for "blackness" did not correlate well to intelligence, and Dienekes has posted data which indicates a weak correlation between light-skin & IQ in blacks. what would this imply? scarr tries to argue that this implies race != have a relationship to average IQ, though jensen counters that generations of recombination surely have lead to a decoupling within the black population of more eurpoid phenotype from the alleles that contribute to higher IQ. if, as some, including flynn, have argued, that racism even among adoptees from the parents is what causes the lower average IQ of black children, then the "whiter" looking ones should be subject to less racism and therefore have higher IQs. scarr i believe found that biracial children had IQs intermediate between white and black children, which dovetails well with both the thesis that IQ is genetic, or that social discrimination determintes a child's self-perception and therefore eventual IQ. from jensen's perspective, he would argue that progressive recombination over many generations have not resulted in the linkage equilibrium between multiple genes (assuming random mating, etc.), and so that is why biracial children still exhibit higher IQs than black children....
economic deprivation does not lead to cocomittant low academic performance (to the same degree) among some non-black groups (asians of course i mean here), so the cultural explanation is the catch-all. so you look at kids that are adopted and therefore of "white culture," but if that data doesn't fit, you assert their phenotype sets them off from the population. from the various interpretations you then weight toward the one that argues for environment more than genetics.
from what i see, most people have a conclusion they want to reach, and they will keep positing "plausible" hypothesis after plausible hypothesis until they find something they can hold onto.
Posted by: razib at July 25, 2003 09:14 PM

I bolded the last bit. In a display of his standard lack of self-awareness, Khan suggests that it's others who have a conclusion they want to reach (in this case that there is no evidence for black intellectual inferiority), while he, Razib Khan is pure and unaffected by politics.

Maybe the most telling evidence for where, exactly, Razib Khan is coming from is further down the page:

the numbers cited in AMREN i have seen elsewhere in print (from lynn and a few others). the "asian" population in england has a lot of components. the gujaratis from east africa tend to be well-off and well educated. the sikhs less so, but still OK. the bottom of the heap are bangladeshis and to a lesser extent pakistanis. these last two groups tend to come to work in blue-collar sectors. there is probably some lag in that the lower SES groups are less assimilated/newer to british culture (east africa gujaratis might have showed up in the 1970s, but they tend to come from world-wide cosmopolitan families with a strong command of english and western folk-ways)-but the type of person who comes to work in a mill is going to be a bit different that the Ph.D. sort, at the least, the dumber brothers will go work in the mill, the bright one come to the US.
btw...according to CITY JOURNAL 25% of students in med school in england are south asian-about the same population:med student ratio as the US....
Posted by: razib at July 27, 2003 12:46 AM

The AMREN source Khan is using to bolster his argument is American Renaissance, a proudly racist site. And although Razib Khan doesn't show his love for American Renaissance any more, going so far in 2006 as to refer to them as "the most highbrow of racialist publications" American Renaissance still loves Razib Khan and links to his Discover-branded Gene Expression all the time. He's their hero, of course, because Khan has achieved the kind of respectability in this century that other racists can only dream of.

Khan and Steven Pinker both believe there is a liberal conspiracy to suppress the truth of evolutionary psychology and its message of black/female intellectual inferiority. In a correspondence with me some years ago Pinker claimed that Stephen Jay Gould's opinions on socio-biology (different name but exactly the same as evolutionary psychology) should be discounted because Gould had left-wing political views.

We see Khan doing the same thing recently in reference to Richard Lewontin:

Richard Lewontin’s fame rests in part on his pioneering role in the development of the field of molecular evolution, and secondarily due to his trenchant Left-wing politics.

Actually, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Lewontin, his fame does not rest, even secondarily, on his left-wing politics. But for Razib Khan as much as Steven Pinker, the very fact that you have objections to the conclusions of biological determinism proves that you are driven by left-wing politics. Because it is literally unthinkable for them that there might be solid scientific objections to biological determinism. 


Or perhaps they really do see themselves are political players, and understand that the best defense is a good offense - to claim the other side is tainted by political considerations is a good tactic to obscure your own blatant political views.

Razib Khan sees no hypocrisy in complaining about the alleged political leanings of socio-biology critics while contributing to a web site called "Secular Right" - one of its other contributors is John "too racist for National Review" Derbyshire.

And I find it extremely offensive that Khan writes for the site under the name "David Hume." I strongly suspect David Hume would have found Razib Khan contemptible.

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

Welcome right-wing racists of UNZ.

Lot 

says:

     

September 20, 2015 at 5:24 pm GMT

@Reg Cæsar

There was a failed attempt at Pinker:

http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2011/11/miffed-at-new-yorker-steven-pinker.html

Yes apparently it's SUCH a failure that you feel the need mention it but you can't address the points made. 

But UNZ readers aren't big fans of evidence, just like their hero Steven Pinker.

And be sure to check out everything else I've said about Pinker over the last 10 years.

Not to mention everything I've said about Razib Khan over the last 10 years.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Razib Khan, National Geographic & Race

The "races of Europe" created by Gilbert Grovsenor for National Geographic

In January 2016 in his Unz site column, Razib Khan responded to someone who wanted to promote the notion of "human biodiversity" and proof of intelligence based on race by writing:

honestly i would just sit on my hands for now. in the next < 5 years the genomic components of traits like intelligence will finally be characterized. this is not speculation, but anticipation based on research going on now.

Which would appear to indicate that Razib Khan holds out great hopes for genomic evidence for race-based intelligence.

Elsewhere in the same Unz column, Khan wrote:

A different section of statement relays Fisher’s view of the empirical realities, which would make him extremely unpopular today:


Sir Ronald Fisher has one fundamental objection to the Statement, which, as he himself says, destroys the very spirit of the whole document. He believes that human groups differ profoundly “in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” and concludes from this that the “practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, and that this problem is being obscured by entirely well intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist”.

But it's odd that Khan considers Fisher's beliefs to be "empirical realities" (although regrettably unpopular ones) when Fisher's understanding of race must have been formed by the race map above, which classifies the French as "Greco-Latins" while the Germans are classified as "Teutons" (along with the British) and meanwhile Khan says in 2017:

“French-German” is a cluster almost certainly because there are no clear and distinct genetic differences between French and Germans. 

So other than agreeing that "race" exists, Khan's understanding of who is which race based on genetic evidence is completely different from Fisher's "empirical realities." And this doesn't seem to concern Khan in the least. It seems as though, so long as one is a true believer in the vague concept of "race" it doesn't matter if the racial classifications themselves are all over the place.

Unlike Razib Khan, National Geographic appears to have rethought its position, not on who belongs to which racial group, but rather the existence of race itself. The map above is from National Geographic in 1918, but ninety-nine years later they published an article: Why Race Is Not a Thing, According to Genetics which is primarily an interview with geneticist Adam Rutherford who says:

In many ways, genetics makes a mockery of race. The characteristics of normal human variation we use to determine broad social categories of race—such as black, Asian, or white—are mostly things like skin color, morphological features, or hair texture, and those are all biologically encoded.

But when we look at the full genomes from people all over the world, those differences represent a tiny fraction of the differences between people. There is, for instance, more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world put together. If you take someone from Ethiopia and someone from the Sudan, they are more likely to be more genetically different from each other than either one of those people is to anyone else on the planet!

If I was Razib Khan, I wouldn't hold my breath about finding any stupidity markers on African genes any time soon.


Based on their Twitter interactions, Khan appears to be on much friendlier terms than I would have predicted with Rutherford, who was called a  “race denialist” this past August by “American Renaissance’s John “too racist for National Review” Derbyshire.

Khan and Derbyshire have a mutual admiration society going back to at least 2005.

And when Khan was dumped by the NYTimes Derbyshire spoke up for him.

Razib Khan believes that he is unfairly treated because of his racialist positions but I think a big factor in his career trajectory is that he is just not very bright, and people outside of the right-wing bubble are not so willing to forgive that.

Khan has spent much of his career impressing people who believe in white supremacy and he's apparently found that a convincing argument for his own brilliance. And so in his mind the only possible reason for his career failures are the dastardly machinations of the barbaric Left and the media. 

23 and Razib Khan

I blogged about my own 23 and Me analysis some months ago.

But I didn't realize how closely Razib Khan was connected to 23 and Me. He's been writing about the company often on his Gene Expression blog since 2009. He's also discussed in the Forum section of 23 and Me.

Now it's clear that Razib Khan does believe that we are all, ultimately, Africans as the site he is (or was) associated with, FTDNA Learning Center says:

Don’t we all go back to Africa?

Yes. All of our Y-chromosome lineages trace back to a common ancestor who lived in Africa at least 115,000 years ago. Some lineages migrated out of Africa; others remained.
This map shows each of the major (backbone) paternal haplogroups’ paths out of Africa.

So the real issue for Razib Khan must be: at what point did groups of people moving out of Africa become intellectually superior to those who stayed behind in Africa? What was it that prompted the increase in intelligence?

I assume it can't be as simple as moving geographically northward, since Razib Khan's ethnic ancestry is from Bengal, which is fairly far south.

If you think all this DNA info would change Khan's unshakeable belief in the reality of rigidly-defined "races" you would be wrong. The Undark piece quotes Khan:

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.”

Clearly Khan feels constrained by political correctness, not by the weakness of his Got Smarter Once Out of Africa theory.

Just this past May, Khan replied to an article Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ in Vox, a piece which, as much as anything, demonstrates once again what a simple-minded bigot Sam Harris is.

Murray's point, as always, is that race is everything (it's pretty much his whole career) and that anybody who denies race, and who questions the use of IQ testing, is just being politically correct.

Of course Khan defends his hero, by quoting geneticist Neil Risch admitting that they don't have any scientific definition for "race" so they just go by the US census:

Risch: Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I’m not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways. In our own studies, to avoid coming up with our own definition of race, we tend to use the definition others have employed, for example, the US census definition of race. There is also the concept of the major geographical structuring that exists in human populations—continental divisions—which has led to genetic differentiation. But if you expect absolute precision in any of these definitions, you can undermine any definitional system. Any category you come up with is going to be imperfect, but that doesn’t preclude you from using it or the fact that it has utility.

First off - how convenient that he hand-waves away the broad brush used for race identification by saying "any category is going to be imperfect." But he believes it has "utility" - but what utility could it possibly have to broadly generalize people by "race"? Unless you're already convinced that race is a real thing and so you must have something in your data results that indicates race?

Risch is later quoted as saying that there is a connection between "micro satellite markers" and which race - presumably on the US census - the subject identifies with:

He's quoted in 2005. The US census for 2000 gave these choices:

One Race - Total                              450,000
White                                         400,000
Black or African American                      10,000
American Indian and Alaska Native               5,000
Asian                                             500
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander        100
Some Other Race                                34,400

Two or more races - Total                      50,000

Thanks to genetic testing we know that a large number of African Americans are two or more "races" - something that freaks Razib Khan out as I talked about here.

The reason it freaks him out is because his own beloved 23 and Me provided data to the NYTimes demonstrating the percentage of African DNA possessed by people who self-identified as African American. The percentage is as low as 65% in some states and less than 80% in most states. In other words most "African Americans" are two or more races.

We also see a considerable portion of "whites" with one percent or more of African ancestry, with the highest  likelihood of African ancestry being in the former slave states.

Now instead of acknowledging that the micro satellite markers were unable to demonstrate the high percentage of "mix race" individuals, Khan just says this:

2005 is a long way from 2017. Risch may have changed his mind. In fact, it is probably best for him and his reputation if he has changed his mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if Risch comes out and engages in a struggle session where he disavows his copious output from 2005 and earlier defending the utilization of race as a concept in statistical genetics.

What Khan is refusing to say is that advances in genetic testing demonstrate how useless the utility of  Risch's 2005 methodology is, and instead he implies the real problem is political correctness and risk to reputation.

Tomorrow: Vox responds to Khan.

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 3

Evo-psycho bros and the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 2 here.

Razib Khan has been talking about 23andMe since at least 2009. In 2013 he wrote a positive piece about the company in Slate, saying:

This brings us to the fact that 23andMe is just part of a broader movement toward the democratization of health information.

He even promoted a sale they had last July. And on his blog in 2016 he seems to hold out hope that genetic testing was going to provide evidence of race-based intelligence:

Razib Khan says:

January 26, 2016 at 2:32 am GMT

@Curle

honestly i would just sit on my hands for now. in the next < 5 years the genomic components of traits like intelligence will finally be characterized. this is not speculation, but anticipation based on research going on now.

---------

And while we are here, I mentioned in this series the evo-psycho bros like to use the term "Platonic." Khan uses the word Platonic in this article and gives a definition, in response to a commenter's question:

marcel proust says:January 25, 2016 at 1:08 pm GMT • 100 WordsThe problem, if there is one, is that these population genetic differences are not necessarily good fits if one assumes a Platonic model of racial categorization.  

I don’t understand this. It may be that the phrase “Platonic model of racial categorization” is what I don’t understand; but please elaborate the whole sentence.

-------

Khan responds:

Razib Khan says:January 25, 2016 at 3:45 pm GMT@marcel proust 

typologies.

According to Webster's typologies is:

"study of or analysis or classification based on types or categories

In fact that term typology and the term Platonic are not actual synonyms and have a complex non-obvious connection. The same dictionary's definition of Platonic is:

1. capitalized : of, relating to, or characteristic of Plato or Platonism 

2 a : relating to or based on platonic love; also : experiencing or professing platonic love  

b : of, relating to, or being a relationship marked by the absence of romance or sex

3 : nominal, theoretical

Most people of course know only of definition 2. Presumably he's getting at "Platonism" since nominal and theoretical are so vague as to be useless. My assumption has always been that he means races can't be conceptualized like Platonic solids, but really the context never gives any clear indication.

So why does Razib Khan use the term Platonic instead of typologies? I think most likely because he's a terrible writer and won't use a clear term when he can use a more obscure one.

Khan is a big booster of the use of genetics testing. But back in 2014 he didn't seem to like an article by Carl Zimmer that used 23andMe data. Considering the evo-psycho inability to provide racial typologies it has an unexpected title: American Racial Boundaries are Quite Distinct for Now. In it he writes:

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. 

Now Khan bolded the bit in the paragraph above. I highlighted the sentence that follows. I blogged about this curious passage back in March 2015:

History explains everything - so yeah, of course if you removed it you would be "amazed" by the state of whiteness. But why would you do that? 

After all the research I've done in the past few weeks into the work and thought-patterns of the evo-psycho bros I understand now why he said it. The evo-psycho system is so rigidly hereditarian that to Razib Khan it's absolutely no big deal to just remove "all the history that we take for granted."

Khan demonstrates the impulse of the evo-psycho bros to erase history and all other factors and just use "genetics" to explain everything.

Khan then proceeds to say:

It is entirely reasonable to argue that racial categories in the United States are blurred if one holds to a Platonic and essentialist view which resembles that which underpinned white racial supremacy and the law of hypdoescent. But as it is these views have no necessary scientific basis, and a percent or two of African ancestry in someone who is ~98 percent of European ancestry does not make them non-white in any rational sense.

"One" doesn't have to hold Platonic and essentialist views - "one" has to acknowledge that the essentialist view was and is the white supremacist view. The entire point of Zimmer's article is exactly that "these views have no necessary scientific basis." I'm not sure why Khan stuck the word "necessary" in there, but then lack of clarity is his calling card.

So who does Khan think he's arguing against there? He seems confused - even more than you would normally attribute to his lousy literary stylings. This was especially interesting:

a percent or two of African ancestry in someone who is ~98 percent of European ancestry does not make them non-white in any rational sense.

Khan has told us that we can't expect a typology for race. And yet we see here Khan identifying two "races" in this section: white and non-white. And then he tells us that 98% of European ancestry is not sufficient to make an individual non-white.

We can deduce from this that if Khan knows what percent of African ancestry does not make one non-white, he therefore knows what percentage of African ancestry does make one non-white.

But as always his lack of clarity makes it impossible to know what Khan really means. Does he think a genetic-testing-derived ancestry indicator of 98% European make someone exclusively "white" in a genetic sense or in a social construct sense? What about 75% European ancestry? And 50%?

We know ancestry composition and socially perceived "race" are not the same thing. That's what the NYTimes article is saying. Fortunately Zimmer is a much better writer than Khan and it's not a struggle to understand what he's getting at:

“We use these terms — white, black, Indian, Latino — and they don’t really mean what we think they mean,” said Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study. 

The data for the new study were collected by 23andMe, the consumer DNA-testing company. When customers have their genes analyzed, the company asks them if they’d like to make their results available for study by staff scientists. 

Over time the company has built a database that not only includes DNA, but also such details as a participant’s birthplace and the ethnic group with which he or she identifies. (23andMe strips the data of any information that might breach the privacy of participants.) 

And then this map is displayed:

What this map displays is "white" Americans who have one or more percent African ancestry and we see that in South Carolina and Louisiana the percentage is as high as 12.5%. In other words, "Octoroons."

And as we discussed in the inconvenient truth about slave rape part 2, the average black person in the United States is almost 1/4 white.

But just in case you're still not sure where Khan is coming from, he finishes off the piece with a link to Steve Sailer, who says:

Actually, as the genome data has gotten more precise in the 21st Century, the big surprise has been how white are American whites. 

Except Sailer doesn't say "if we removed all the history." Perhaps because Sailer has even less self-awareness of how much his view of "race" erases history than Khan does. But the only way you could be surprised at "how white are American whites" is because you erased history.

As I wrote in response to this article back in 2015:

Yes, if we removed all the history, the very thing that explains exactly why we shouldn't be "amazed" at the whiteness of the European population. The indigenous people were wiped out first by European diseases for which they had no resistance, and then European land expansion. And of course people of "partial African ancestry" were not considered partially black, they were considered fully black according to the one-drop rule and there were laws against miscegenation right up until 1967 and the case of Loving vs. Virginia. But not only that - since there were social taboos and outright laws against black/white marriage, a goodly portion of those who were "partially black" were the result of slave rape - and of course the children of raped slaves were invariably slaves themselves, and thus not likely to be having much sex with the general white populace. 

Thanks to what I've learned in this ongoing series, the children of raped slaves were not "invariably" slaves themselves but still, pretty often - but it's likely almost all descendants of slaves were considered "black" and thus even as freemen not likely to be marrying whites. We've seen thanks to the two separate endings provided for the popular mid-19th century play The Octoroon, being one-eighth black still made you "black" and the prospect of such an individual marrying a "white" person was considered a "mixed marriage" and unacceptable to white Americans of the time

So the same clear historical point stands: the white population is so "white" thanks to an obvious, well-documented legal and social system.

Both Khan and Sailer in the articles linked here demonstrate they are well aware of the one-drop rule and miscegenation laws. So it's odd they are "surprised" by white ancestral composition in the US.

But considering they were both working for Ron Unz at the time (Sailer still does), this Upton Sinclair phrase springs to mind:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

We've already seen the Winegard bros attempting to erase history in their defense of The Bell Curve in Claire Lehmann's Quillette:

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,

As I noted, they don't actually provide any refutation for non-genetic explanations, they just dismiss them. They clearly believe that the legacy of slavery/discrimination has had no impact on people identified as "black" in our social system. And although they only talk about intelligence in this article, I'm pretty certain they believe the same is true for criminality since they run in the same Criminal Justice gang as John Paul Wright.

In the Summer 2017 issue of the City Journal, a publication of the Koch brothers-funded Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, John Paul Wright also dismissed slavery:

While promoting the report, Travis and Nicholas Turner, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, an advocacy organization, published a New York Times op-ed assailing American prisons and holding up the German penal system as a positive exemplar. “To be sure, there are significant differences between the two countries,” the authors observed. “Most notably, America’s criminal justice system was constructed in slavery’s long shadow and is sustained today by the persistent forces of racism.” Not only does this statement shed light on the authors’ ideological views; it also manages to insult anyone who works in the criminal-justice system and who values public safety and order. 

As is the custom with evo-psycho bros Wright doesn't address the argument about slavery/discrimination, he just apparently dismisses it, and then proceeds to rant and rave about liberals.

Liberal criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex...

I'm sure the liberal criminologists might take the time to explain how their comment about slavery's long shadow relates to the "lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead." But Wright will never give them that chance because he already knows the answer and he already stated it publicly in 2009 in Biosocial Criminality New Directions in Theory and Research:

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.

Based on the theories of evo-psycho bros like Wright, you would never guess that members of other "races" besides blacks commit crimes. Evo-psycho bros have this obsession with black crime and black intelligence and they will not be persuaded that non-genetic factors play a significant role in any of it. I will address this next in a post about the belief at the center of the evo-psycho view of African Americans.

And then, because it finally arrived, I will review Steve Sailer's contribution to the Steven Pinker edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 in which Sailer explains what's wrong with Iraqi society. I promise you, you will never guess what it is. 

In my discussion about Sailer's piece I will reference a fascinating recent New Yorker article on organized crime in southern Italy, which also relates to Wright's rantings about black criminality.

Which will lead us to the question we always seem to get back to in discussions of the history of racial classification: Are Italians White?

Razib Khan, America's favorite race-obsessed science writer

I had been ignoring Razib Khan recently, but I've been getting hits on this web site lately from the discussion board associated with 3Quarks - specifically a piece posted there that demonstrates Khan's usual obsession with "race."

Coincidentally, I was just recently wondering what the racialists thought of the recent NYTimes maps displaying ethnic/genetic breakdowns of Americans. My mistake was going to the blatantly racist American Renaissance web site, when I should have just gone directly to their hero Khan.

You get a sense of Khan's anxiety over the possibility of "race mixing" in the title of his Unz editorial American Racial Boundaries Are Quite Distinct (For Now).

This editorial is valuable in its crystal clear demonstration of Khan's extremist, unscientific approach to ethnicity - his use of the word "hybrid" -

I have known very few non-European hybrids with Chinese – one of my daughter’s friends had a Persian grandmother. She is considered an attractive girl because erm she’s attractive.

The scientific definition of hybrid is:

Hybrid

Definition

noun, plural form: hybrids

(general) Any of mixed origin or composition, or the combination of two or more different things.

(biology) An offspring resulting from the cross between parents of different species or sub-species.

(molecular biology) A complex formed by joining two complementary strands of nucleic acids.

adjective

Of or pertaining to the offspring produced from crossbreeding.

Humans are not separate sub-species. A proper use of the term "hybrid" would be human-Neandertal. Khan uses a colloquial definition of "hybrid" when he claims to be talking about science. That's how Khan does it - he plays fast and loose with science-based terminologies and there are enough people baffled by his bullshit that he gets away with it.

In fact, Khan is such a bad writer I can hardly believe he is paid any attention to outside the right-wing bubble - and of course the article reposted at 3Quarks comes from a media outlet of the right-wing Unz Review, which also publishes the thoughts of John Derbyshire on race. Derbyshire was fired from the National Review for being too racist.

Here is how bad Khan is - he wrote an article entitled Why race as a biological construct matters but in fact does not even address race as a "biological construct" in any scientific sense, and in fact what he really means is race as a sociological construct. But you could argue I suppose that since "race" is used to refer to humans and we are biological entities it's not a technical falsehood. But that's how Razib Khan writes - slippery and full of shit.

He says:

So there you have it. An underlying biological reality which is a reflection of deep history. It may not be real or factual, but it is consistent and coherent.

and later:

There is no Platonic sense where there are perfect categories with ideal uses. Rather, we muddle on, making usage of heuristics and frameworks which are serviceable for the moment. We lose our way when we ignore the multi-textured nature of the issues.

Laughably, this writer for a science magazine Discover feels that consistency and coherence is more important than reality or fact when it comes to what he chooses to call "an underlying biological reality."

And he's fine with heuristics and frameworks which are "serviceable for the moment."

How convenient for someone who wants to argue that "race" is a valid scientific category and who is too lazy to use the term "hybrid" in a non-colloquial sense.

We should not be too surprised that Khan is given this kind of leeway - many science writers rely on reader (and apparently editor) ignorance and their own bullshit artistry. Steven Pinker, a mainstream public intellectual is habitually sloppy, and likes to have things both ways, and just about the only publication that consistently calls him on it is The New Yorker. And when the New Yorker criticizes Pinker, he turns to Razib Khan to back him up.

And I thought the world of theater was full of assholes.