Who’s that peeping out of the Aporia web page?

Have you ever heard of Aporia? It’s an online magazine. If you want to follow that link, feel free, but it will taint your search history, so let me just describe a little bit of what you’d see on the Aporia main page and spare you the contamination. There are articles about kinship realism, about men and romantic relationships, about incels and evolutionary psychology, about the feminism backlash, about the Roman Empire, about In Defense of German Colonialism, and a lot of nonsense about AI. The authors listed include:

All those links in that list are just to this site, where their names have popped up a lot in discussions of racism, but actually there are other sites that have much more in-depth analyses of those individuals — for instance, Hope Not Hate has a substantial investigation of Aporia and its contributors. These are not good people. These are some of the very worst eugenicists, racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, and all-around heinous bigots you can find on the internet. For example…

HDF is led by three men. The CEO and founder of Human Diversity Foundation LLC is Emil Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard is a well-known Danish scientific racist and far-right activist, having spoken at the Traditional Britain Group conference in 2022.

Kierkegaard’s disturbing views extend beyond race. In 2012, he published a blog on his website about paedophilia, suggesting that abusers should be allowed to rape children drugged with sleeping medicine. “If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape [sic],” he wrote. Kirkegaard later claimed he was merely discussing a hypothetical scenario. He now leads HDF’s research team.

In case you don’t know what HDF is, it is

  • The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation —thought to be essentially defunct — has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF)
  • Aporia is part of the HDF’s organisation, as is a scientific racism research team
  • Andrew Conru, the multimillionaire entrepreneur who created Adult Friend Finder, has given $1.3 million to HDF. After being contacted prior to this report’s publication, he said he would cut ties with the company
  • HDF has connections to Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right German party, and hopes to create a white-only ethnostate
  • HDF is working to create a cult of weapons-trained activists inspired by Scientology and the Nazi SS

Really, this is the worst of the worst. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.There was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench!

All you have to do is glance at their web page, and you will see exactly what they’re all about. They aren’t even trying to hide it, so there has to be something deeply wrong with you to be interested in reading it, and contributing to it? Unthinkable.

But now they have a new contributor.

Oh, hi, Steve.

Steven Pinker is genuinely one of our dumbest “public intellectuals.”

Chris Rufo figured out how to erase part of his history

If nothing else, this is an accomplishment. I know Chris Rufo as a shill for the Discovery Institute — that anti-science, anti-evolution think-tank running on the fumes of rich conservatives’ money, pumping out nonsense about Intelligent Design creationism and fronted by pompous, but ignorant, pseudo-philosophers. If I had that in my background, I’d be deeply ashamed and would want to bury it as deeply as possible. I’d change my name, move to a new city, deny knowing all my old friends, etc. I’d dread someone uncovering my embarrassing past, forcing me to change my name and move again. I’d desperately desire a magic eraser to blot out that past shame.

Chris Rufo has done it! Here’s a prominent article about Chris Rufo that doesn’t even mention the Discovery Institute or creationism! How did he do it?

It is incredibly easy. All you have to do is associate with something even more repulsively stupid than creationism, and Rufo has managed to slather himself with filth so grossly disgusting that there’s no point in even mentioning his relatively minor dabblings in ignorance. He’s buddying up with a site called Aporia.

The rightwing activist Christopher Rufo has links to a self-styled “sociobiology magazine” that is focused on the supposed relationships between race, intelligence and criminality, and which experts have characterized as an outlet for scientific racism.

Now he’s all tangled up with Bo Winegard.

Winegard, a psychologist, was by his own account fired by Ohio’s Marietta College in March 2020 after a seminar he gave to a research group at the University of Alabama attracted protests and coverage in student media.

In that speech an audience member reportedly said that Winegard told his listeners that “people in colder climates, because of differences in brain size, have more propensity for cooperation”.

Winegard has continued to write in this vein on Aporia up to the present. In a 3 January article on the site titled “Yes, we should talk about race differences”, he wrote: “Thus, we must be honest about race. And that means we begin by noting that in the United States (and elsewhere in the world), different races have different average levels of intelligence as measured by IQ tests (and other measures of cognitive ability).”

As proof of this claim, Winegard cites researchers including the late Richard Lynn – a white nationalist, according to the SPLC – and the late Arthur Jensen, whom the SPLC calls “arguably the father of modern academic racism”.

Also, Noah Carl!

Another Aporia editor, Noah Carl, has also been the subject of previous academic controversy.

Carl is a sociologist who in 2018 was stripped of a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University after the college that appointed him discovered that alongside his more legitimate work in sociology, he had simultaneously been publishing scientific-racist articles in outlets notorious for peddling scientific racism.

One of the outlets Carl published in, Mankind Quarterly, was founded “to make scientific racism respectable again”, according to the writer Angela Saini. It was for decades funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, and the journal has been described as a “cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment”.

Now mix in Emil Kirkegaard.

Another venue, OpenPsych, is a platform established by Emil OW Kirkegaard, a self-described eugenicist who explicitly advocates “race science”, and who serves as a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization once headed by Richard Lynn – the same researcher whose data led to Winegard’s retraction.

These are the writers and pseudo-scientists Rufo recommends to others.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “All of these ideas have been debunked over and over again. The danger here is that eugenics and scientific racism have been historically used to justify terrible acts including genocide.”

Other recent articles on Aporia include Winegard’s “The case for race realism”, which reasserts that “underlying race differences in measured cognitive ability and violent crime … make large outcome disparities inevitable”; an article by Gregory Conner, a retired professor of finance, which argues for innate racial differences in intelligence; and two articles arguing high IQ among Jews has a basis in their genetics.

Aporia also publishes a podcast, which featured Rufo as a guest on 4 August, during which he took the opportunity to discuss his newly published book.

Aporia is contemptible racist garbage, and Rufo is promoting it. Rufo is a nobody, a hack with no serious background in science (or anything intellectual at all, for that matter) so sure, creationism, racism, they’re both popular ideas among uneducated ideologues, so he’ll push them — he hasn’t get the education to understand how terrible they are.

On Rufo’s recommending the site to his readers, Bird said: “There’s nothing legitimate on biology or evolution or genetics that’s really been published by anyone at Aporia,” adding: “Pointing people towards that is pointing them toward unambiguous white supremacist propaganda and nonsense.

“There’s nothing of value there. There’s nothing that resembles real mainstream science. There’s nothing that resembles real discussions happening in the field. It can’t be anything other than racist propaganda.”

Beirich said of Rufo’s links that “it’s not surprising to find that a person who is playing footsie with eugenicists is also happy to attack diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education or a Black president of Harvard”.

By linking to Aporia and appearing on its podcast, she said: “Rufo is helping to bring back this despicable material and mainstreaming it.”

Keep in mind that Rufo has been elevated to high advisory positions in the Florida government, and is making decisions about the universities in that state. Nothing in his background has prepared him to make competent decisions on much of any of the institutions he now has his thumb on.

Oh, he does have one qualification that doesn’t bother me at all but might alienate him from his fans. He has a Masters Degree…in Liberal Arts. Work on erasing that from your CV, guy.

Scientists crying about cancellation, again

This “cancel culture” nonsense has gone on far too long — it’s nothing but an imaginary assault on the power and privilege of conservatives. It’s a label, nothing more, that idiots hang on any attempt to criticize them. You’re canceling me! How dare you! <swoon>. It’s all really tiresome.

Unsurprisingly, Jerry Coyne falls for the BS. He races to defend the notion of racist Noah Carl in the racist online rag the Genetic Literacy Project that Darwin might be next to be canceled.

Given the scientific and political luminaries who have fallen under the axe, it’s not beyond possibility that Charles Darwin himself may undergo a “reevaluation,” with people discovering what we already knew: Darwin, like many people of the mid-19th century, had some bigoted views of whites (i.e., Brits) as a superior race. Yet Darwin never did anything but write a bit about it in The Voyage of the Beagle and The Descent of Man, and was, to boot, an ardent abolitionist along with his wife’s family, the Wedgewoods. Josiah Wedgewood, Darwin’s grandfather (and also his wife Emma’s), designed this ceramic medallion that was popular among abolitionists as early as 1787. That may be enough to save Charles but, as we know, one misstep can cancel you for keeps. And Darwin made more than one—according to today’s lights.

I already posted about this nonsense from Carl, and like all his reactionary predecessors before him, Coyne fails to explain what it would mean to “cancel” Darwin. He’d lose his Twitter account? People would block him on Facebook? PragerU would make a video approving of him? Somebody would tear down a monument to Darwin? Big whoop. Don’t care. Charles Darwin, in particular, doesn’t give a damn — he’s dead.

Coyne continues:

It’s thus possible that Darwin could meet the fate of other scientists who unfortunately didn’t foresee the change in morality in the last century and a half, and his statues and other honorifics could come down.

That’s it? That’s all? A dead man might lose a few statues and honorifics? If you think Darwin’s legacy is in marble busts and buildings named after him, rather than his work and ideas, you are a very confused biologist. Evolution is secure. Darwin could be revealed to have been Jack the Ripper (couldn’t happen, since Darwin died before the ripper murders), and it wouldn’t affect the science.

As for this common, stupid argument that these poor canceled heroes “didn’t foresee the change in morality” — nonsense. Darwin wrote enough on the right side of morality that we should know that he had an intellectual understanding of the common humanity of all races and sexes, yet somehow at the same time he also wrote passages that are distinctly racist and misogynist. Recognizing that Darwin had flawed attitudes and cultural biases is, I guess, canceling him. Likewise, these unnamed scientists who met an unspecified doleful fate lived in an era when we could be conscious of the equality of races and and sexes, yet they chose to accept an immoral status quo. Darwin and Frederick Douglass were contemporaries, there is no excuse for thinking black people were inferiors in the 19th century. Darwin loved and respected his wife Emma, yet somehow he could hold with a Victorian view of women as lesser.

Acknowledging the flaws in famous people, though, is now “canceling” them. I call that “historical accuracy”, instead.

Coyne just has to chew on his foot some more:

In a piece before the one I’m mentioning today, sociologist Noah Carl (who’s had a bit of tumultuous history, having been canceled himself)…

“tumultuous history”? Are you fucking kidding me? He was sacked by Cambridge for unethical work and affiliation with outrageously flaming racists! “Tumultuous”. Yeah. And the KKK is sometimes a bit “rowdy”, and the Proud Boys are a bit “mischievous”. Here’s what the Cambridge review panel said about Carl.

The panel found that Dr Carl had put a body of work into the public domain that did not comply with established criteria for research ethics and integrity. In any event, it considered that the poor scholarship of this problematic body of Dr Carl’s work, among other things, meant that it fell outside any protection that might otherwise be claimed for academic freedom of speech.

Furthermore, the panel found that, in the course of pursuing this problematic work, Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute. In addition, the panel also noted that the way in which Dr Carl has conducted himself with regard to his publications and the ideas he has expressed have had a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the College with feelings of hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief that the College could be associated with such views.

If you knew how cautious and mannered academic review comittees were, you’d know that was a university’s version of backing away in horror and vomiting in outrage.

Coyne, unfortunately, is capable of both downplaying the racism of Noah Carl while simultaneously exaggerating the significance of “cancellation”, whatever that is.

Carl concludes that if there’s a valid case for dethroning people like Hume, Galton, Fisher, and Linnaeus for their “retrograde” views on race and white superiority, then you can make an equally compelling case against Darwin.

Just yesterday, I lectured my cell biology class on the structure of DNA, and I also told them that Jim Watson was an asshole with a history of embarrassing racist and sexist statements. Yet I still talked about his work. That’s not going to change. We’ll be discussing Crick & Watson’s discovery for the next century or more. I’ve known that Galton and Fisher were racist jerks and supporters of eugenics for as long as I’ve been teaching, but their names are still in my genetics textbooks and I still bring up their work in my genetics classes…but I also don’t shy away from discussing their bad ideas.

Is that what canceling is? Then we should fully support more canceling. Even if regressive senior scientists are aghast that we dare to deplore racism and sexism in old dead white guys.

*You can anticipate the usual whines that SJWs call anyone racist at the drop of a hat. Alas for them, Noah Carl was fired for his racist views and the shoddy pseudoscience he used to defend them. The Genetic Literacy Project is a website set up by journalist Jon Entine with money from Monsanto to defend GMOs, a cause I’m sympathetic to, but you might want to read the Wikipedia article on Entine.

Entine has written three books on genetics and two on chemicals. Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution examines the controversy over genetic modification in agriculture.[23]

Entine’s first book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It was inspired by the documentary on black athletes written with Brokaw in 1989. It received reviews ranging from mostly positive to highly negative in The New York Times. Physical anthropologist Jonathan Marks characterized the book as “make-believe genetics applied to naively conceptualized groups of people.”

In 2007, Entine published Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People which examined the shared ancestry of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and addressed the question “Who is a Jew?” as seen through the prism of DNA. In a review of this book, geneticist Harry Ostrer wrote that Entine’s “understanding of the genetics is limited and uncritical, but his broad, well-documented sweep of Jewish history will inform even the most knowledgeable of readers.”

Toss in the GLP’s tagline of “Science not Ideology” and I’m going to have to fire up a big signal flare on that outfit. The claim that they are ideology-free is one of the most common lies of the Right.

Darwin cancelled?

Noah Carl is a notorious racist who was fired from a position at Cambridge for racism. Now he’s complaining that Darwin might get “cancelled” because he wrote racist stuff in the 19th century. Yeah, so? Would that mean we couldn’t worship Darwin as a god anymore? Because we don’t anyway.

So I had to grumble a bit.

I don’t even know what “cancelled” means yet.