How can you research the science of race when bad actors are eager to distort your conclusions?

There are interesting questions in the population genetics and evolution of different human groups, and it would be nice if there weren’t wretched ideologues who will happily misinterpret every difference between two groups of people, or even two people, to turn a description of differences into a ranking of superiority. It’s the Jordan Peterson problem of turning everything into evidence of a hierarchy.

Jedidiah Carlson provides some specific examples of how the right wing mangles research. It’s easy to see when the current fad is for murderous mass shooters to provide manifestos with their interpretation of the science; they are happy to name the credentialed scientists who provide fodder for their delusions.

The Buffalo shooter’s scientific bibliography has clear echoes to a similar citation scandal that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this era, the National Front (NF), a neofascist political party in the UK that had been steadily growing throughout the 1970s, distributed a series of pamphlets with articles referencing mainstream academic research. Their goal was to justify the organization’s platform of ethnic nationalism, white supremacism, and eugenics using contemporary science. The first wave of NF propaganda proclaimed, “scientists say that races are born different in all sorts of ways, especially in intelligence. This is because we inherit our abilities genetically.” Here, the NF cited the work of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen, two of the most vocal proponents of the hereditarian theory that genetics could explain IQ differences between racial groups. Steven Rose, a champion of radical science and coauthor of Not in Our Genes with Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, lambasted Eysenck and Jensen in a 1978 letter to the editor of Nature, calling upon them to “publicly and unequivocally dissociate themselves from the National Front and its use of their names in its propaganda.” Eysenck and Jensen both complied with Rose’s request, albeit without a hint of apology for the societal harm their research precipitated. Eysenck asserted that he was “absolutely opposed to any form of racism” and claimed that “No-one familiar with Professor Jensen’s or my own writings could possibly misinterpret our arguments about the mean differences between various racial and other groups with respect to intelligence as implying the kind of policies advocated by the National Front.” Jensen echoed this self-absolving and patently false sentiment but also took the opportunity to lash out against his leftist critics for being, as he believed, as guilty as the far right in their desire “to promote and to gain public acceptance of a particular dogmatic belief about the nature of racial differences.”

That’s fascinating. Jensen actually tried to argue that oh no, he’s not a racist!, while producing some of the most outrageously bad pseudoscience defending racist discrimination. This is an ongoing problem in recognition, because it is common for racists to deny they are racist, while promoting awful garbage that they will never deny. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, “Jensen worked hard to develop a reputation as an objective scientist who “just never thought along [racial] lines,” and to portray critics of his racist conclusions as politically motivated and unscientific.” Right. That’s why he has a long entry at the SPLC.

Jensen is way, way out there, and it’s patently obvious that he was a screaming bigot manipulating the data to support an evil conclusion. But there have also been other scientists, less aggressive about their racism, who have been quietly smuggling bad science into the literature. How about kindly old Grandpa EO Wilson, who, after his death, was found to have been supporting all kinds of openly racist ideas? On the one hand, we’re supposed to objectively evaluate scientific ideas, but on the other, we’re supposed to somehow ignore the biased presuppositions that have led to those ideas, which makes no sense. People regarded sociobiology with suspicion when it first came out, because we were supposed to consider only the limited set of facts presented within it, but somehow we should overlook the fact that it quickly acquired a following among the worst kinds of people, the ones who wanted a racist conclusion and could read between the lines and see that sociobiology was a tool to reach that conclusion? Only racists are allowed to see the obvious interpretations, critics are “politically motivated and unscientific”, which provides a useful ratchet to make sure only the racist perspective gets widely disseminated.

So what do we do about subjects like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, which promote, with the authors’ open consent and approval, bad ideas like genetic reductionism or determinism? I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of censorship, so perhaps a better idea would be if the various channels of scientific communication, the journals and blogs and so forth, were more proactive in rejecting work that is so clearly constructed around fallacious premises? Good luck enforcing that. The gatekeepers seem to have mostly bought into the bad ideas, since they’re typically privileged beneficiaries of the biases.

And then even work in which the authors were not advocating racism (near as I can tell) will be chewed up and twisted by malicious actors to arrive at a malicious conclusion. There’s no avoiding that.

Much of the scientific community’s outrage in the aftermath of Buffalo centered around the shooter’s citation of a paper colloquially known as the “EA3” study (Lee et al., published in 2018 in Nature Genetics). This study, carried out in over 1.1 million individuals of European descent, identified hundreds of genetic variants associated with “educational attainment” (often abbreviated to EA)—i.e., the number of years of school completed, often taken to be an “easy-to-measure” proxy for intelligence. The shooter’s reference to the EA3 study came in the form of a screenshot of a plain-looking document (figure 1) proclaiming, “The latest findings on genetics and intelligence show that biological factors contribute to the gap in intelligence between European and African populations.” Beneath this image, the shooter weighed in with his own interpretation, punctuating his earlier claims that “whites and Blacks are separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution, and our genetic material is obviously very different.”

Many variations of this table can be found throughout the internet, but the earliest version can be traced back to a thread on 4chan (an anonymous and largely unmoderated online forum) timestamped to September 15, 2018, barely six weeks after Lee et al. was published online (on July 31, 2018). The original post that initiated this thread (figure 2) is a perfect example of what sociologist Aaron Panofsky calls “citizen scientific racism”: an individual, having come across the EA3 study, collected the top EA-associated variants from a supplementary table of the paper, annotated these variants with the allele frequencies in European and African populations using publicly available data from the 1000 Genomes Project, and curated a set of EA-associated variants with the greatest differences in population frequency to argue that Europeans are genetically predisposed to higher intelligence.

The responses to this thread rapidly crystallized into a simple propaganda strategy: turn these “findings” into a standalone unit of easily-digestible visual information—or a meme, for lack of a better term—and let it organically spread across other online spaces. Shortly thereafter, another user took these suggestions to task and independently reproduced the original post’s analysis, presenting the results in a table similar to that shown above. Within hours, this image began to circulate in other 4chan threads and mutate into alternate versions, often accompanied by zealous calls for diffusing these memes throughout the internet. “SPREAD THESE IMAGES LIKE WILDFIRE,” encouraged one user. “This is the new IOTBW” said another, referring to the racist slogan, “It’s OK to be white.” The meme was even passed on to a cabal of popular alt-right bloggers and Youtubers who “have several PhDs and can give you a hand…plus they’re fantastic propagandists.” This collective enthusiasm for propagandizing the EA3 study appears to have been wildly successful. Altogether, variations of this meme have been posted over 5,100 times on 4chan and regularly appear on more mainstream social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Quora. Contrary to the scientific community’s prevailing narrative that the shooter was an isolated extremist who happened to stumble upon the study,20 these data demonstrate that the EA3 study has been a significant force in empowering far-right extremists for years, virtually since the day it was first published.

(Note that Carlson article includes many figures that illustrate the point he’s making, but he’s flagged all of them with a “do not replicate” watermark. They often come from places like 4chan, so I agree, let’s not promote these vile sources.)

One step forward that Carlson promotes is the revitalization of activist-scientists. We need to speak up on all fronts, rather than passively sitting by while nonsense gets published in multiple outlets.

Weaponized science continues to threaten far more than the public image of scientific authority. Today, it has morphed and evolved to find new victims and modes of victimization, and exploits whatever platforms and resources are at its disposal to promote its message. Synthesizing the lessons learned from past radical science movements provides us with a path forward: our collective response to weaponized science must be fiercely multimodal and operationally diverse, taking place in the pages of scientific journals, the digital streets of social media, and the physical spaces of our institutions and cities.

He also gives us three challenges.

First, we must further educate ourselves on the ecosystem of weaponized science. Second, we must actively resituate our appetite for scientific progress towards the service and liberation of our communities. Finally, we must channel this knowledge and desire for change towards the development and implementation of creative strategies to disarm weaponized science, inoculate against its normalization, build resilience and solidarity, and spread those ideas like wildfire.

All right, I think I’ve been doing the first. I’m depressingly familiar with the bad science that gets published in all kinds of outlets. I’ve been involved in the second already, too, as one of those people who strongly believes that science should be serving a larger social purpose. The third…I’m not sure about what creative strategies I could implement, beyond just telling all of you what sucks about some of our modern science.

The conspiracy theories are getting wilder

Steve Bannon. Speaking at a Turning Point USA conference. With Alex Jones. Summarizing the evil schemes of the elites.

It’s too much. I couldn’t even imagine what batcrap nonsense was going to come out of his mouth, and Bannon was definitely balls-to-the-wall. This is an impressive conspiracy theory.

“This is the biggest inflection point in human history,” Bannon said. “In the lived experience of half of this room, or maybe more, we’re going to get to a point where you’re going to have Human 2.0. Right? They’re telling you that. They’re funding that. This is not science fiction, this is fact.”

Note: it is not a fact.

Bannon claimed “they” want to be “immortal” and could be working on this covert “Human 2.0” mission under the guise of doing good.

“They talk about they’re going to save kids, and they’re going to do this — that’s all crap. They want to be immortal. Right? And they also say there’s too many people, the carrying capacity of this planet– there’s too many people,” Bannon argued.

The true “great replacement theory,” he added, is the replacement of Homo sapiens.

“You know, they’re all over Tucker [Carlson] and the great replacement theory and about the thing. Hey, the great replacement theory is Homo sapiens. That’s what they’re trying to replace,” Bannon said.

“Of course you haven’t heard about it. They don’t want to talk about it,” Bannon told the crowd. “They’re just going to do it. And they’re going to call it the Cancer Moonshot. This is what we have to stop.”

He gives the game away near the end. Bannon’s ilk have been pushing the Great Replacement nonsense, the idea that “they” (which usually means “the Jews”) are replacing white people with brown people, and this new idea is simply a distraction from the patently racist stuff Tucker Carlson is mainstreaming. Now the idea is that “they” aim to replace all of humanity with immortal genetically engineered non-humans, all done under the guise of treating cancer.

It’s not enough that they have been undermining treatment of infectious disease, hey, let’s spread the conspiracy theory that cancer therapies make you non-human. The logic is going to be persuasive to all those deluded folk in QAnon.

He has got to work on his delivery, though. He has none of the charisma of Charlton Heston.

“You maniacs, you blew it up! God damn you, God damn you all to hell!” “Soylent Green is people!”

2:52

Émile P. Torres just pointed out the existence of this 5 year old video.

Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Ray Kurzweil, Demis Hassabis, Sam Harris, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Bart Selman, and Jaan Tallinn discuss with Max Tegmark (moderator) what likely outcomes might be if we succeed in building human-level AGI, and also what we would like to happen.

It’s 10 right-leaning white men dressed in black suits who have a history of stirring up fear to their own profit (or, in the case of Tallinn for instance, dismissing credible concerns about climate change for his own profit) clumsily sharing too few microphones to make up some science fiction shit. The panel is titled Superintelligence: Science or Fiction? | Elon Musk & Other Great Minds. I’m done already after seeing the title and lineup, but I’ve always wanted to witness hell, so I watched a little of it. Very little of it.

I made it to the 2:52 mark before I said, “aww, hell no, fuck this” and bailed out. Years of dealing with creationists has given me a high tolerance for bad bullshit, but this was too much for me. How far can you get?

Frantically rewriting lectures

Aaargh, neglecting the blog again. My big distraction today: as always happens, I looked over last year’s notes and grumped at myself and said this will not do, this is totally inadequate, I need to rewrite the whole thing. The plan for tomorrow was to talk about the pentose phosphate pathway AKA the hexose monophosphate shunt AKA the phosphogluconate pathway because this stuff is important and, weirdly, our textbook doesn’t even mention it, so I can’t even punt and tell the students to go away, don’t bother me, just read Chapter X. As is common in cell bio, all we talk about is how we burn sugar to make ATP, and very little about essential anabolic reactions. And that bothers me.

The PPP is cool beans, too, so I rewrote the lecture from the ground up to cover more of the details, expanding what used to be a short aside into the whole dang talk, and I’m probably going to terrify them all with a peek into more advanced biochemistry (this is a class for 2nd year students, so it’s introductory level) and the way all of biochemistry is tangled and intertwined, but hey, they’re smart students. They can take it.

Unfortunately, it’s stuff that isn’t going to entertain a more general audience, unless you think filling in the details on this introductory slide would get you excited.

Man, I was so into biochemistry as an undergrad, and then I got distracted by neuroscience and development. I need to begin a second lifetime so I can catch up.

Now I have to finish grading, which is far less enthralling.

The unnoticed killer

Well, this is an unexpected ploy. The flu epidemic of 1918 didn’t kill people, it was all those cases of bacterial pneumonia generated by wearing masks.

(Don’t go after Gregory, he’s being sarcastic.)

It makes one wonder. So all those medical professionals who have been wearing masks routinely for the past century must have been suffering tragic levels of mortality thanks to pneumonia, I guess? Have doctors and nurses been dropping dead at alarming rates and no one noticed until INITIALS+STRING OF NUMBERS came along?

You know what else? Now I suspect that Jason, Michael, and Ghostface didn’t actually kill anyone. It was all the masks! It makes sense now!

Would you debate a creationist for a bottle of Thunderbird and a pack of cigs?

Jesus fuck, but I despise the debate cultists. The most ignorant, unpleasant, dishonest people seem to have adopted this grift: set up a YouTube channel, find some over-confident idiot spoiling for a fight, invite rather more qualified people to get into hours and hours of argument, and then sit back and rake in the pennies from YouTube. You don’t need to know anything to set up a debate channel, and in fact, most of the ones I see are run by creationists and flat-earthers and other such loons.

It’s basically a digital bum fight. It’s despicable.

I guess a lot of people are catching on, though, and are refusing to play that game. The organizers are getting desperate, because there’s a challenge going around demanding that people debate Kent Hovind or…a creationist will call them chicken. They’re reverting to childish schoolyard behavior.

Any evolutionist (PhD and non-PhD) who turns down the challenge will be added to a list of those unwilling to defend evolution in a live debate.

All we require is a “yes or no”. If our challenge goes unanswered or ignored (after an extended period of time), your name will be added to the list.

Oh no. If you refuse to dignify ol’ Kent with a debate, your name will go on a list. That ought to send a chill down your spine…not. I am amused that you can get put on this list by simply ignoring Hovind, because that means 99% of the scientific community ought to be on the list of shame.

Since this challenge has been prolific and has also comprised some of the biggest debates on the topic, we understand that most evolutionist YouTubers are more than aware of this challenge. Therefore, those who ignore the challenge, and ignore our emails, or comments, will be added to the list. If an evolutionist name is on the list who steps up to take the challenge, their name will immediately be removed.

Hmm. How can a challenge be “prolific”? I don’t think he understands the word.

He also overstates the importance of these debates. They’re on YouTube, which lets anyone yammer on at ridiculous length. Arguing with idiots might, in some limited cases, be useful for educating bystanders, but no, it’s not going to have any important consequences for evolutionary theory. I’m sure a lot of YouTubers are aware of the chucklefucks ranting in odd corners of the web, but they’re more a target of derision and amusement.

Who is the author of this challenge? It’s Donny B, a used car salesman with no education in science and a remarkably inflated opinion of himself. He portrays himself as a superhero and as fair, sophisticated, and professional, when he is none of those things. He is a clueless moron. But you knew that already, since he worships Kent Hovind.

For those who have adamantly turned down the challenge with unconvincing excuses will be added to the list. Those that refuse the challenge due to the platform it is held on (Standing For Truth Ministries) will also be added to the list. Standing For Truth Ministries has hosted and moderated over 200+ debates. Donny B (who is the main host and moderator for debates) ensures a fair, sophisticated, and professional debate atmosphere. Evolutionists who refuse to debate on a fair platform (such as Aron Ra) with a demand to debate on one of their atheist dominated channels will also be added to the list. We don’t want evolutionist excuses–we want results! This is why all we require is an either “yes or no”. We do not necessarily need your reasons for why you refused the challenge.
NOTE to extra-sensitive evolutionists: the point of a challenge is that you take the challenge and debate according to the challenge requirements (moderated by Standing For Truth Ministries, equally timed, one topic at a time, civil, and professional). Therefore, those that refuse to take the challenge due to an unreasonable excuse (such as a disliking of the debate requirements) will be looked at as refusing the challenge.

The rest of the document is a hideously formatted list of people who refused or ignored challenges to waste time with Kent Hovind. It’s not even a useful list of interesting evolutionists, because browsing it reveals that it contains a peculiar mix of big names in popular science that he’ll never get, some good science communicators, horrible obnoxious people, and obscure lay people who really don’t have the chops to debate science. Donny B is really trawling the scum in the sewage pond, near as I can tell, eager to feed his channel and Hovind’s ego with anyone who will talk to him.

The list is such a mixed bag that I can’t feel anything about the fact that I didn’t make the cut. That’s right, I’m not on it, despite loudly and repeatedly telling Hovind to go piss up a rope when he’s asked to debate me; he even tried to arrange debate with me from prison, for when he got out, and I turned him down (worse, I told him he’d have to split the revenues from any such debate with me, and he balked immediately).

Maybe I didn’t get on the list because Hovind repeatedly claimed that he had debated me, and won, of course, so maybe thinks I stepped up to take the challenge. I didn’t. You shouldn’t either. No one escapes from a bumfight with their dignity intact.

He’s not wrong

The current president of South Korea is a conservative jerk, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is wrong. Sometimes he’s on the money, especially when the truth is obvious.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was caught on a hot mic Wednesday insulting U.S. Congress members as “idiots” who could be a potential embarrassment for President Biden if they did not approve funding for global public health.

A bit impolitic, maybe, but yeah, many members of congress are idiots. They don’t get elected for being smart.

Maybe more impolitic than I thought. He spoke in Korean, and called them “saekki deul”, which apparently means something more like “sons of bitches”. Still accurate.

By the way, I discovered a video where I learned about the richly profane Korean vocabulary. Useful for learning what not to say around my Korean daughter-in-law.

I’m lacking this level of delusional arrogance

I just encountered Bret Weinstein’s self-promotional blurb, and I’m kind of in awe.

Dr. Bret Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology, earning his PhD at the University of Michigan, before teaching at The Evergreen State College for 14 years, from which he resigned his tenured position in 2017. He has developed a new Darwinian framework based on design trade-offs, and made important discoveries regarding the evolution of cancer, senescence and the adaptive significance of moral self-sacrifice.
He is currently working to uncover the evolutionary meaning of large scale patterns in human history, and seeking a game theoretically stable path forward for humanity. With his wife, Heather Heying, he co-wrote A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, and is the host of the DarkHorse Podcast.

I couldn’t puff myself up that much. If I were to write a similar blurb, it would be:

PZ Myers earned a PhD in developmental neuroscience at the University of Oregon, and has spent the last two decades teaching at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. He has tried to popularize science and evolutionary biology with a blog, Pharyngula.

That is all. Personally, I would attach more importance to my family life, but no one outside my clan would care about that. Claiming to have advanced a scientific discipline while working at a primarily teaching university is gilding the lily. Developing a new Darwinian framework is unbelievable; I do try to keep up with the literature and haven’t seen any dramatic Weinstein model of evolution sweeping the field. The concept of evolutionary trade-offs is so old I have no idea who first proposed it — it might have been Darwin. Oh, yeah, he at least implied it, in the Origin:

“The whole organism is so tied together that when slight variations in one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is a very important subject, most imperfectly understood.”

I don’t know what his important discoveries were.

He loses me at seeking a game theoretically stable path forward for humanity. That’s an epic level of pretentiousness. That’s the kind of meaningless drivel a guy desperately straining to pad his résumé to claim that while he may have been working at an undergraduate teaching university, he was actually making a grand plan for human destiny in his head, and that that should count towards his credit.

He also has a big bold label for himself.

EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST + PROFESSOR IN EXILE

It is true, he is an evolutionary theorist. It’s just that, as can be seen in that book he and his wife wrote, they are crap theories, warmed-over evolutionary psychology and panadaptationism.

As for “professor in exile”…no. He is not a professor. “Professor” is a category of employment. He was not exiled at all — he was asked to resign after alienating most of the student body with his intransigent and obvious refusal to support an exercise in civil rights, and walked away with a substantial settlement. He’s now milking the gullible with his martyrdom schtick. None of that counts as “exile”. He needs to revise that label a bit.

BAD EVOLUTIONARY THEORIST + PROFESSIONAL VICTIM

That’s better.

The comparisons can’t be avoided

There was a time, way back around the time Trump was elected, that there were people howling about how you can’t call Republicans “fascists” or “Nazis” because they weren’t literally German, or invading Czechoslovakia, or wearing toothbrush mustaches. It was annoyingly literal-minded, and the people most vociferously arguing for an extraordinarily narrow interpretation of the term all seemed to be sympathetic to fascism. People like Rich Lowry scribbled a lot of denials against Nazi comparisons.

Fortunately, we’re starting to see past the smokescreens and recognize that the historical correspondences are inescapable. Ken Burns has made a new documentary about the Holocaust, and while he tries to avoid contemporary comparisons, he finds them unavoidable. When asked if he intended to make a historical documentary that resonates so strongly with current events, Burns says he didn’t mean to.

I don’t think it was the intent. Every film we’ve worked on has sort of rhymed in the present. As we were working on this, we began to realize how much things were resonating with what’s going on now. The assault on the Capitol, the insurrection and other events in which we felt the institutions of our democracy were challenged enough that it was important for us to take this story and remind people what the consequences are of yielding to the various kind of nefarious aspects of the [authoritarian] playbook.

When Hitler came to power, he downplayed for a moment antisemitism and the platform of the Nazis and stepped up street warfare to give the German people a sense that civil war was imminent and that the causes of this were the communists and the socialists. He’s already in power because other conservatives think they can handle him. Those conservatives are worried that there is now what we would call a new progressive majority. And so they are doing everything to subvert the democratic process because they realize, in fact, in a democratic society, these things won’t hold. And so out of this comes the monstrous regime of Adolf Hitler, and one of the many horrific things — the most horrific — is the attempt to exterminate all of the 9 million Jews of Europe.

And he repeatedly denies it! He just couldn’t help it.

No, we don’t subscribe to any of that stuff. We’re just storytellers. Telling a complicated story. I don’t know what critical race theory is. It’s essentially a graduate school legal concept of how to frame certain arguments that has been appropriated by people to use as a cudgel to to beat them up over these various things.

I made a comment about the [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis play in Martha’s Vineyard as being a kind of an authoritarian response, just as it was when Disney says we don’t agree with you, he punishes them. When a state employee doesn’t do what he says, he fires them. That’s the authoritarian thing. It’s not the democratic way that you handle it. But the right-wing media has said that I’ve equated what DeSantis did with the Holocaust, which is obscene. I mean, literally obscene to do that. But it is also classic authoritarian playbook to sort of lie about what somebody just said in order to make it so outrageous that then you can deny the complexity of what’s being presented.

I agree that the magnitude of the horrors of Nazi Germany perpetrated is not at all comparable to what is going on right now. The appropriate comparison, though, is to the pre-war politics that laid the groundwork for the atrocities. There should be no doubt that while DeSantis hasn’t set up camps to murder immigrants, that’s what he wants to do, and would do if he could get away with it. Which he could, if we keep electing Republicans.