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Scientific racism, a thread: In March, a journal published a paper defending the “theory” that Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychology, multiculturalism, Marxism and left-wing political movements in general are best understood in terms of “Jewish group evolutionary strategy.”
These “Jewish ideologies,” we are told, promote Jewish group interests by weakening the white populations sense of nationalism, religiosity and ethnocentrism. 2/100 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-018-0158-4
It is also claimed that this group evolutionary strategy also manifests itself in the over-representation of Jews in the leadership of cultural, academic and political fields that have been tainted by cultural Marxism. 3/100
This “theory” is, obviously, the nothing more than the delusions of a neo-Nazi crank.
Originating with open White Nationalist Kevin MacDonald, it’s basically every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard dressed up in pseudo-Darwinian clothes. 4/100
Originating with open White Nationalist Kevin MacDonald, it’s basically every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard dressed up in pseudo-Darwinian clothes. 4/100
But this wasn’t published in some fringe journal. It was published in Evolutionary Psychological Science a Springer Nature journal with leaders in the field like David Buss and Steven Pinker sitting on it’s editorial board. 5/100
If this surprises you, it probably shouldn’t. Semi-mainstream scientific journals a littered with bogus race science just like this. 6/100
Hell, this paper itself was part of an exchange with a rival scholar who claimed that Jewish over-representation in the leadership of these movements can be best explained in terms of racial differences in innate intelligence. 7/100 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-018-9310-x
So how did we get to this point where mainstream scientific journals are hosting a debate on the finer details of the Jewish Question?
In this thread, we’ll see how this is the result of a concerted effort at entryism into academia by a network of far-right activists. 8/100
In this thread, we’ll see how this is the result of a concerted effort at entryism into academia by a network of far-right activists. 8/100
This is the story of how Nazi money continued to corrupt the sciences long after the Second World War by funding fringe scholars and selectively funding semi-mainstream research. 9/100
It is the story of how former members and active supporters of the NSDAP, along with their ideological successors, infiltrated academia and set up fake scientific institutions to advance their racist ideology; institutions which still exist to this day. 10/100
The story starts with an eccentric American millionaire named Wickliffe Draper who, having inherited his father’s textile empire and more money than he knew how to spend, became a kind of anti-philanthropist, throwing vast sums of money at various bad causes. 11/100
He became a major donor to the American Eugenics Society and funded the publication of white supremacist literature out of his own pocket. 12/100
His involvement in the cause became more direct after travelling to Nazi Germany to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems, presided over b Wilhelm Frick
Any guesses as to which populations were the problem? 13/100
Any guesses as to which populations were the problem? 13/100
Following the conference Draper teamed up with Harry Laughlin, a man whose views were considered extreme even among other American eugenicists – having written the draft of what would become the Third Reich’s forced sterilization law. 14/100 https://bit.ly/2kKpN3F
Together in 1937, the two men founded the Pioneer Fund, whose purpose was described as that of “race betterment,” a goal they intended to promote by arranging screenings of Nazi propaganda films in the United States. 15/100
http://ferris-pages.org/ISAR/bios/Laughlin/nazifilm.htm
http://ferris-pages.org/ISAR/bios/Laughlin/nazifilm.htm
After the war the appetite for Nazi-style eugenics rapidly faded, and Draper contented retreated to funding the Back to Africa movement, which offered financial incentives for African Americans to leave the United States, alongside a range of pro-segregationist causes. 16/100
In his effort to oppose desegregation, Draper funded Henry Garrett and Carleton Putnam. Garrett, a former President of the American Psychological Association, testified as an expert witness in Brown v. Board of Education and other court cases in support of segregation. 17/100
Putnam was a leading segregationist and populariser of scientific racism as espoused by Garrett and by his cousin, Carleton Coon who was then President of the AAPA, and who was one of the last big names in the old guard of scientific racism. 18/100
The battles over segregation in the fifties had demonstrated the powerful role that science could play in the propaganda war (on both sides) however the scientific consensus was fast turning against the racialist agenda. 19/100
But what if Draper and his allies could make their own, alternative science?
And so the Pioneer Fund was reinvented as a private research council, issuing grants to sympathetic researchers and to projects whose results could likely be abused for propaganda purposes. 20/100
And so the Pioneer Fund was reinvented as a private research council, issuing grants to sympathetic researchers and to projects whose results could likely be abused for propaganda purposes. 20/100
Over the decades the Pioneer Fund would issue millions of dollars in grants in the fields of genetics, anthropology and psychology. Some of these recipients were creatures of the Pioneer Fund, often independent “scholars” who were outright neo-Nazis.21/100
http://ferris-pages.org/ISAR/Institut/pioneer/pfspread/homepage.htm
http://ferris-pages.org/ISAR/Institut/pioneer/pfspread/homepage.htm
Others worked within mainstream academia. The factor which united them was that the research being funded was useful in opposing racial equality.
And their influence was considerable. 22/100
And their influence was considerable. 22/100
Among the recipients of their grants was Arthur Jensen, whose research brought the race/IQ controversy back into the mainstream. 23/100
It funded the side projects of the prestigious psychologist Hans Eysenck, who develop an obsession with comparing the IQs of various ethnic groups. At the height of his career, Eysenck was the most widely cited living psychologist. 24/100
It also funded, alongside the Koch foundation, the Minnesota study of twins reared apart, at the time one of the largest adoption studies, which found IQ to be highly heritable. 25/100
Whenever 20th century psychology as a discipline indulged, as it often would, in misguided efforts to weigh the influence nature against nurture, the well-financed Pioneer Fund would be there with its thumb on the scales. 26/100
But even with these successes, getting some of their more outrageous claims published was an uphill battle. Luckily for Draper, and unluckily for the integrity of science, a solution to this problem would be found by one of his young grant recipients from across the pond. 27/100
As a young man Roger Pearson lost much of his family to the war. Such a tragedy would weigh heavily on any young man, but the way in which this affected Pearson was not to leave him with a lasting hatred of the Nazis or of war in general. 28/100
Instead he came to see the war as a pointless conflict in which kindred nations fought among themselves at the instigation of their true enemy, the Jews, who had sought to carry out “the genocide of the German nation.” 29/100 https://bit.ly/2kdHWXg
Instead of seeking out a good therapist, he set up the Northern League, a pan-Germanic neo-Nazi group. And began writing articles on the merits of killing the disabled for magazines with subtle names like White Power: The Revolutionary Voice of National Socialism. 30/100
Alongside his British following, which included future British National Party founded John Tyndall, Pearson was joined in the league by many former Nazi party members, including former officers on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff, and prominent Nazi racial theorists. 31/100
Several American white supremacists linked to Draper also joined the group, including professor Garrett.
Pearson also received Pioneer Fund money to write crank articles. 32/100
Pearson also received Pioneer Fund money to write crank articles. 32/100
Through the League he also met Robert Gayre, a retired British Army officer and dilettante, and together, with the funding provided by Draper, they established a journal of their own, Mankind Quarterly. 33/100
Gayre and Pearson were joined on the editorial team of the new journal by Henry Garrett and Otmar von Verschuer, a German “racial hygienist” best known for his collaboration with Joseph Mengele on his infamous twin experiment. 34/100
Verschuer worked off-site, receiving shipments of blood samples for analysis, as well as both partial and intact human remains from those murdered at the Auschwitz camp by Mengele and his assistants. 35/100 https://bit.ly/2lOQnce
Over the years Draper, Pearson and their heirs would set up various other journals and bogus scientific institutions with professional sounding names like the Institute for the Study of Man but it’s Mankind Quarterly which endures as the central pillar of scientific racism.36/100
One of Draper’s last investments before his death was to fund the publication of a book, The Dispossessed Majority, which asserted that West Germany’s post-war economic miracle was attributable to the fact that it was now “free of Jewish financial domination.” 37/100
So these guys were awful. But does any of that matter today? After all, many companies and their founders said and did terrible things back then. This really breaks down into 2 questions: 38/100
1) Does their research output continue to reflect their ideological origins?
2) Is their research still lacking in merit? (i.e. the genetic fallacy: just because they’re Nazi’s doesn’t prove that they’re wrong.) 39/100
2) Is their research still lacking in merit? (i.e. the genetic fallacy: just because they’re Nazi’s doesn’t prove that they’re wrong.) 39/100
In 2013 he current head of PF, Richard Lynn, published a paper on racial differences in penis size. He concluded that the “Negroid race” (2013!!!) is indeed endowed with both superior length and girth.
Why? 40/100
Why? 40/100
I know what you're probably thinking: that Lynn read somewhere that scientific racists used to measure heads and misunderstood.
But the truth is actually a lot dumber than that. 41/100
But the truth is actually a lot dumber than that. 41/100
To understand why racists obsessed with IQ differences are so often also obsessed with differences in penis size, we need to first familiarise ourselves with the legacy of Canadian psychologist Philippe Rushton. 42/100
Rushton was one of those professors who churn out a decade or two of unremarkable but mainstream research, get tenure, then immediately pivot to promoting their own crackpot ideas, abusing their status for credibility with the public and as a shield against censure. 43/100
Rushton, who preceded Lynn as head of PF, spent the last few decades of his career developing and publicising his pet pseudohistorical theory of the evolution of human races. Yes, that’s races. Plural. 44/100
You see Rushton appropriated an archaic biological taxonomy in which modern humans are subdivided into three main sub-species, or races: “Caucasoids”, “Mongoloids” and “Negroids”. 45/100 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0092656687900389
These races are imagined to be distinct lineages subject to highly divergent natural selection, becoming adapted to suit the environmental conditions of their respective continents, and with little flow of genetic information between them. 46/100
Such theories had been common in anthropology until the mid-20th century, but had been swept aside by the neo-Darwinians.
Rushton’s innovation was to pair this racial model with a newer, less tainted theory. 47/100
Rushton’s innovation was to pair this racial model with a newer, less tainted theory. 47/100
r/K selection is a real, albeit now dated, theory in ecology which posited that natural selection produces a correlation between the population-density of an environment and the level of parental investment exhibited by the species that inhabit it. 48/100
In more crowded, and hence stable environments species would evolve so as to favour greater parental investment in each individual offspring so that they might better compete for scarce resources. Such species are said to be K-strategists. 49/100
In contrast, sparsely populated environments have little competition for resources, and reproductive fitness is maximised by adopting a quantity-over-quality approach to breeding. These species are said to be r-strategists. 50/100
Archetypal K-strategists will produce fewer offspring, both per cycle and overall, exhibit longer gestation periods, will live longer and take many years to fully mature and will have both parents invested in providing for and raising their offspring. 51/100
Conversely, archetypal r-strategists will give birth to many offspring or lay many eggs at a time, will have more offspring overall, rapidly reach maturity, live fast-die young, and are abandoned by both parents shortly after birth or hatching, if not sooner. 52/100
Humans and elephants are highly K-selected species while mice and insects are highly r-selected.
Rushton argued that his three races of humans have undergone different levels of K-selection, with Asians being the most K selected and Africans the least. 53/100
Rushton argued that his three races of humans have undergone different levels of K-selection, with Asians being the most K selected and Africans the least. 53/100
In support of this idea Rushton drew up a list of human traits that he believed would depend of degree of K-selectedness. 54/100
The more K-selected races, he claimed, would be more intelligence, more altruistic and cooperative, have more complex social structures, have children who take longer to reach sexual maturity, be strictly monogamous, highly value education and have bigger brains. 55/100
While the more r-selected races would be more passionate, violent, promiscuous, prone to criminality, prone to selfishness and individualism, have larger genitalia, be more likely to have twins, have more children overall, and be prone to paternal absenteeism. 56/100
Rushton then produces evidence, and “evidence,” appearing to show that for each of these traits the three races are consistently ordered into the same hierarchy Asians>Whites>Blacks for K-selected traits and Blacks>Whites>Asians for r-selected traits. 57/100
He doesn’t imagine whites at the top of a hierarchy of races, objectively superior to the races below them in all characteristics that are deemed important – in this way Rushton’s is a more subtle form of white supremacist ideology than most that came before him. 58/100
Instead Rushton imagines Whites as occupying a golden mean between two undesirable extremes: the Asians, who he imagines as a race of effete, conformist, sexless nerds; and the Africans, who are imaged as a race of aggressive, dumb, promiscuous jocks. 59/100
By making claims about both physiological and behavioural differences it was easier for him to play down the idea that cultural and socio-economic factors caused these differences than it was for those who focused on IQ exclusively. 60/100
One of his favoured talking points was that Asians give birth to fraternal twins at a lower rate than Europeans, who in turn give birth to twins at a lower rate that Africans. 61/100
Since fraternal twins are the result of multiple ovulation, such a difference couldn’t possibly be explained away by culture or economics – could it?
Well, yes. Yes it could. 62/100
Well, yes. Yes it could. 62/100
It turns out that the rate of multiple ovulation is positively correlated with the number of previous pregnancies and also with age. It’s widely understood that in the least developed economies with limited welfare provision, people tend to have larger families. 63/100
This means that the average expectant mother in sub-Saharan Africa will, in general, have had more previous pregnancies and be older than her average European counterpart, and hence have twins at a greater rate. 64/100
So ovulation rates are out. Now you can probably see why Rushton’s disciples, of whom Lynn is the de-facto leader, are so obsessed with measuring penises. Differences in penis size can’t be explained away by cultural or socio-economic factors, right? 65/100
In 1987 Rushton published a paper compiling evidence in support of his theory, central to which was the observation that the penises of African men are significantly larger than those of European or Asian men.
But he didn’t cite any lab studies that measured penis length. 66/100
But he didn’t cite any lab studies that measured penis length. 66/100
Instead his main source for this claim was a book titled “Untrodden fields of anthropology: observations on the esoteric manners and customs of semi-civilised peoples; being a record of thirty years experience in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania.” 67/100
It was published in 1898 by an anonymous French army surgeon.
What kind of scientific research is published anonymously, you ask? Well, this kind: 68/100
What kind of scientific research is published anonymously, you ask? Well, this kind: 68/100
The book goes on like this for a couple of hundred pages of pornography thinly veiled as ethnography. Somehow professor Rushton manages to calculate from this, the average penis lengths of the Europeans, Asians and Africans as follows: 69/100
He doesn’t explain how he arrived at these figures and they don’t even seem to appear in the book as reported. 70/100
https://archive.org/stream/b21993981/b21993981_djvu.txt
https://archive.org/stream/b21993981/b21993981_djvu.txt
What’s surprising about Rushton’s use of this book as his main source, besides the fact that it’s basically a series of erotic anecdotes from a Victorian sex tourist, is the fact that it doesn’t even seem to support his theory all that well. 71/100
To be sure there’s plenty of passages in which our intrepid hero describes the superior dimensions of the black member. . . 72/100
But there are also observations that outright contradict Rushton’s claims, for example, when describing the anatomy and behaviour of Vietnamese men, the surgeon has this to say 73/100
While this agrees with what Rushton has to say about Asian penis size, it complete contradicts his predictions as concern libido. 74/100
The surgeon also reports that while black men often have very large penises, they have much smaller testes than Europeans, an observation which, if true, would be difficult to reconcile with greater r selection. 75/100
Somehow the scientific community weren’t immediately convinced by Rushton’s evidence, and so the task fell to his disciple Richard Lynn to bravely pursue this line of enquiry, wherever it may lead.
So, how does Lynn measure up? 76/100
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.02.016
So, how does Lynn measure up? 76/100
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.02.016
Lynn claims that new data from 113 countries supports Rushton’s thesis. Lynn didn’t collect any data himself, nor did he create his own meta-analysis. Instead he cites a now defunct website that looks like it belongs on Geocities. 77/100
https://bit.ly/2kATJiR
https://bit.ly/2kATJiR
This website collated results of studies that mention penis size from across the world. On the basis of this listing of sources, the website created a ranking of penis size by country.
This is the basis for Lynn pronouncing the success of Rushton’s theory. 78/100
This is the basis for Lynn pronouncing the success of Rushton’s theory. 78/100
The data – as you may expect from a novelty website ranking penis sizes by country – has some problems with it.
While some of the sources are genuine scientific papers, others are of more questionable provenance. 79/100
While some of the sources are genuine scientific papers, others are of more questionable provenance. 79/100
One source cited is titled “Argionic desire: Innovative penis enlargement product for men.” which appears to be a 2005 article, or possibly advertisement, in For Him Magazine. Not a journal I’m familiar with. 80/100
And, as pointed out by a blogger back at the time, many of the results reported on the website don’t match that reported by the original source.
Take a guess as to whether Lynn checked? 81/100 https://ethnicmuse.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/worldpenissize-analysis/
Take a guess as to whether Lynn checked? 81/100 https://ethnicmuse.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/worldpenissize-analysis/
Note that the data isn’t broken down by race, but by country. Lynn solves this by grouping countries as “Negroid,” “Mestizo,” “Mixed” etc. but no methodology is given to justify these categorizations, nor is there any reason to suppose the samples are representative. 82/100
And the problems don’t stop there. For many countries used in Lynn’s analysis the only data available was self-report data.
At this point I came up with the wild hypothesis that the “racial difference” was due to self-report studies tending to exaggerate size. 83/100
At this point I came up with the wild hypothesis that the “racial difference” was due to self-report studies tending to exaggerate size. 83/100
And sure enough the greatest percentage of self-reports were for “Negroid” countries, with no self-report data at all used for “Mongoloid” countries. The average length of each group is well predicted by rate of self-reports. 84/100
He even notes the anomalous results for the “mixed race” nations, focusing on Venezuela (very large) and Cape Verde (very small), and puts this down to sampling error. Guess which one of these two results is based on self-report data and which was not? 85/100
Note also that self-reported penis length is given to the nearest 0.1 millimetre. What does he think people were self-measuring with, a laser? 86/100
Okay, so the evidence is a non-starter. But what about the theory behind it?
Here too, we run into problems from the outset.
At no point do Rushton or Lynn stop to establish any clear link between penis length and fertility. 87/100
Here too, we run into problems from the outset.
At no point do Rushton or Lynn stop to establish any clear link between penis length and fertility. 87/100
An even more fundamental problem with Rushton’s version of r/K theory is, as pointed out by Weizmann et al, that many of the traits attributed by Rushton to r- or K-selection have no clear relationship to either. 88/100
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0078934
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0078934
Indeed altruism is identified by Rushton as a K-strategy (hence Asians>Europeans>Africans) but K-selection occurs in environments with greater inter-individual competition for resources, which does not obviously favour altruism over selfishness. 89/100
Also, there’s also no clear reason why colder (Eurasian) environments would result in greater K-selection, as claimed by Rushton.
This is a pretty fundamental problem with his theory. 90/100
This is a pretty fundamental problem with his theory. 90/100
In summary the research output of Rushton and Lynn, the two most recent heads of Pioneer Fund, is methodologically trash and shows clear ideological continuity with the Fund’s origins. 91/100
In case anyone’s actually curious about group differences in penis size, I produced this helpful chart. 92/100
But why churn out all this pseudo scientific twaddle in the first place? Surely no one takes it seriously?
One audience is far-right activists and alt-media. But these guys manage to get themselves cited in semi-mainstream science disturbingly often. 93/100
One audience is far-right activists and alt-media. But these guys manage to get themselves cited in semi-mainstream science disturbingly often. 93/100
Sadly people often don’t check sources as closely as they ought to. And if you want a source to support a particular claim and don’t especially care how sound it is, then the PF/MQ network offer up a treasure trove of resources for the unprincipled contrarian. 94/100
This seems to be part of the strategy: building up a base of bad facts which can then be cited to get a slightly milder version published in a more legitimate journal. 95/100
To get an idea of how this works, take a look at the reference list from the anti-Semitic paper mention at the top of this thread. 96/100
More than half of these sources have at least one co-author directly associated with PF or MQ. Some of the names should now be familiar. 97/100
Those that I’m not including in that figure includes sources like ‘The Bell Curve’ and the ‘Daily Stormer.’
Of those that aren’t directly connected to PF/MQ, many rely heavily on citations of papers written by those who are (including The Bell Curve). 98/100
Of those that aren’t directly connected to PF/MQ, many rely heavily on citations of papers written by those who are (including The Bell Curve). 98/100
Finally, lest there be any lingering doubt about the nature of this group today, it’s worth noting that the author of the anti-Semitic paper, Ed Dutton, is the current editor of Mankind Quarterly, alongside Lynn. 99/100
Now, should you see someone defending their decision to legitimise these ghouls by attending their conferences or citing their papers, you know exactly what sort of person you’re dealing with.
Remember: the science is fake but the racism is very real. 100/100
Remember: the science is fake but the racism is very real. 100/100
Addendum: People definitely shouldn’t google sci-hub and use that to access any of the pay-walled papers cited in this thread. That would be naughty.
Additional reading on the early Pioneer fund:
http://www.iupui.edu/~histwhs/h699.dir/KennyPioneer.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2962466?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.iupui.edu/~histwhs/h699.dir/KennyPioneer.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2962466?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Puns not used in this thread:
“the (mis)measure of man”
“junk science”
“brane size”
“the (mis)measure of man”
“junk science”
“brane size”
Since this is blowing up, if you like being outraged by bad science you should check out this Youtube video I made about the shoddy science used by the IAAF to justify their regulations excluding Caster Semenya.
A Youtube video based on this thread: https://twitter.com/Simon_Whitten/status/1177574380437741569
