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:

• Bo Winegard
• Emil Kirkegaard
• Noah Carl
• Steve Sailer
• Edward Dutton
• Bruce Gilley

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.”

This little meme was posted by Will Stancil. I’m wondering if I’m just too online, because I got the joke immediately.

In case you haven’t heard of him (you live a blessed life), Steve Sailer is a notorious and ubiquitous racist and far right pundit who haunts many comment sections. Well, he would be ubiquitous, if reasonable people didn’t insta-block him as soon as he tries to intrude on a conversation. All you really need to know about him is this bit from his wikipedia page.

Sailer, along with Charles Murray and John McGinnis, was described as an “evolutionary conservative” in a 1999 National Review cover story by John O’Sullivan. Sailer’s work has frequently appeared at Taki’s Magazine, VDARE, and The Unz Review. He used the phrase “Invade the World, Invite the World” in the 2000s as a criticism of American foreign and immigration policies.

Sailer’s January 2003 article “Cousin Marriage Conundrum”, published in The American Conservative, argued that nation building in Iraq would likely fail because of the high degree of consanguinity among Iraqis due to the common practice of cousin marriage. This article was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited by Steven Pinker.

He’s not an “evolutionary conservative”: although he likes to claim the authority of biology and evolution in his pronouncements about race, he’s really just a guy with an MBA in marketing. He knows nothing about science.

Anyway, what made me laugh about the little cartoon is that I’ve been using the fact of finding Sailer babbling in a thread as analogous to the site flying the black death quarantine flag — back away quickly and never return. There’s something wrong with a site that tolerates his disease. It’s why I shun Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen and Razib Khan, and that Steven Pinker would actually publish his poison is another nail in his coffin.

The table to the right is a list of the bottom 10 nations for IQ, as reported by Richard Lynn in 2002. Should we really believe that the people of Ghana have an average IQ of 58? It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s not possible to assess an entire nation in that way, it implies that most people there lack the brains to tie their shoes, and further, he argues that the entire population of the continent of Africa were cretins. Does that sound credible to anyone? Well, maybe to hardcore racists who somehow let that shoddy work pass peer review and get published in the journal Intelligence.

I do notice that Lynn revisited that work in 2010, and suddenly Ghana’s average IQ score shot up to 71. Remarkable progress for 8 years. Shouldn’t that alone have called the hereditarian premise into question?

Well, finally, a major publisher is proposing to re-evaluate all of Richard Lynn’s work, which is something. The publisher is Elsevier, so I don’t expect much from them, though.

A leading academic publisher is reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late British professor Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of “race science” who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups.

Elsevier provides access to more than 100 papers by Lynn, including several iterations of his “national IQ” dataset, which purports to show wide variations in IQ between different countries but which has been criticised by mainstream scientists for serious flaws in its methodology.

The database, a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that was first published in 2002, is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded “race science” activists, whose activities were uncovered in a recent investigation by the Guardian and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

Yeah, it’s about time…although his flaws and fallacies have been well known for decades.

Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear, Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.

The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.

That semi-secretive “race science” organization is the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) (racists have been busy ruining the reputation of a perfectly good word, diversity, by tying it to fundamentally anti-diversity goals), which is led by the odious Emil Kirkegaard and was, at least formerly, funded by a Seattle tech bro named Andrew Cornu. It’s nothing but good times for these hateful wackaloons, thanks to a recent election, and who have been capitalizing on the unwarranted academic reputation of their hero, Lynn.

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

They are now labeling mass deportations as “re-migration.”

It’s about time his work was publicly repudiated. In fact, it’s about time his corpse was dug up and kicked into the nearest sewage ditch, although that’s pointless now — it should have been done while he was still alive (he died in 2023).

I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.

A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.

Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.

You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.

Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.

The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…

In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”

It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.

Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.

Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.

Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.

And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.

The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.

“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.

His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.

Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”

The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)

Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”

The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”

It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.

“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.

“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”

New grift, same as the old grift.

The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.

---

P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.

One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. All you have to do is look at Steven Pinker’s history of academic friendships to see that maybe there’s a problem here.

• 1999 — Pinker joins the human biodiversity (h-bd) group begun by Steve Sailer, now the editor of VDARE, along with race science researchers like Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, race science funders like Ron Unz (of the Unz report), J.P. Rushton of the infamous, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and J. Michael Bailey, who used pseudoscience to stoke transphobia and hate.
• 2004 — As editor of Best American Science Writing, Pinker publishes Steve Sailer’s essay citing inbreeding in Iraq as a rationale for an inevitable failed state, as well as fellow h-bd members Virginia Postrel and Daniel C. Dennett. Also included is writing by Max Tegmark, the MIT professor who recently attempted to fund a neo-nazi media group as part of the Future of Life institute, and two columns by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, who later wrote a ‘deeply flawed, deceptive’ book on race science and was condemned by 140 population geneticists for misappropriating their work.
• 2005 — Pinker writes a letter “to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of professor Helmuth Nyborg”, a fellow h-bd member who speaks at the same conferences as David Duke and researches sex and race differences in IQ. In June of 2006 Nyborg was found to be “grossly negligent”, misrepresenting his own scientific efforts and results. Nyborg is subsequently relieved of duty from Aarhus University as part of a 3 year investigation. In 2009, Pinker sends a second letter in defense of Nyborg without changing a word, addressing it this time to the new president of the university. Many fellow h-bd members join him, including Rosalind Arden, Harpending, and Rushton, as does Linda Gottfredson.
• 2006 — Pinker writes a lengthy article on the the IQ of Ashekenazi Jews by fellow hb-d members Harpending and Cochran (debunked and later proven utterly unfounded by better science and scientists) in which he blithely asserts that “Like intelligence, personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group, and slightly different, on average, between groups.” In 2019, Pinker defends Bret Stephens’ use of the discredited paper, while Stephens goes on say that he regrets not obscuring the source of the data, noting that “I could have cited from any number of other sources not tainted by Harpending’s odious racial views.”
• 2007 — Pinker provides counsel to Alan Dershowitz, with whom he taught a class on Morality and Taboo as described by the Edge.org (full syllabus here), on the interpretation of the interstate commerce law used to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. The late Epstein was, of course, a prominent funder of the Edge.org, the elite group of scientists and thinkers which included Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, Cochran, and Pinker (as well as Gould and many others). Pinker is a bit sensitive about this connection.
• 2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).
• 2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
• 2018 — Pinker shares a Quillette article by fellow hb-d member Rosalind Arden on the disinvitation of fellow Nyborg supporter, Linda Gottfredson, from a conference. In his note, he tuts at the SPLC for labeling her an ‘extremist’ simply because she has spent nearly half a century insisting that racial disparities in IQ are innate, immutable, and ensure unequal outcomes between racial groups. Perhaps he feels this too is a reasonable hypothesis — or perhaps he feels the conference would benefit from the work of Arden and Gottfredson correlating intelligence and semen quality. (Arden discloses their professional relationship if not the subject of their work in her article, saying of intelligence research “How often do we take the time to walk empathetically in the cognitive shoes of others? Millions of people struggle to maintain their health, their jobs, and their finances for the blameless reason that they are a little less adept.”)
• 2022 — Upon the posthumous discovery of E.O. Wilson’s approving correspondence with eugenicist (and h-bd member) Rushton, Pinker does not reflect or contemplate the implications of this discovery for either his field or his close collaboration with Wilson. Instead, he promotes an article by Michael Shermer (another one of the New Atheists that took a hard right) and remembers the battles Wilson, like Pinker, fought in the NYRB on behalf of biological determinism.

I’m also grateful that the article reminded me of the argument between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology. Gould was brilliant. Man, I miss that guy.

Well, this is awkward. Once again personal biases have throttled me for years.

Razib Khan was a colleague on ScienceBlogs. He’s a former student of the geneticist John Postlethwaite, a man I respect a great deal, and who was also on my graduate committee. Razib is a very smart man, and the times we have met he was pleasant and interesting. And for those reasons I’ve been reluctant to repudiate his racist views. Mea culpa, I confess, I am guilty of overlooking a great evil because it was incompatible with a casual friendship, and sometimes I’m a bit tired of burning all my ‘friends’ to the ground in the course of the past decade. At the rate I’m going, no one is going to come to my funeral.

As most of you already know, EO Wilson died recently, and one person has asked me why I didn’t mention it here on the blog. That’s also awkward. There’s a lot I liked about Wilson — funny, isn’t it, that people are complicated and have multiple parts to their self — but there were also things about him that deeply bothered me. I couldn’t just say, “good guy, he’ll be missed” because there was more to it than that. I read his book Sociobiology when it first came out (good grief, I have that very same volume with that paper cover, now I feel old) and loved the entomology, but was bothered by the bits where he tried to interpret human behavior in the light of ants. There were other little things over the years, but by the time of his death, Wilson had become revered and a saint of science, so again, it was hard to write an honest opinion of him, so I chickened out and just didn’t.

The wisdom of my caution was confirmed when Scientific American published an opinion piece titled “The Complicated Legacy of EO Wilson” by Monica McLemore. Uh-oh. As you can guess from the title, she wasn’t just going to buy into the idea that Wilson was a saint, and felt as I did that he was messy mix of good and bad, like most people. And then the usual suspects roared at her and yelled at SciAm and howled in protest. Jerry Coyne hated the article, of course. Michael Shermer made a big stink and complained on Quillette. It was too woke! Even if I had thought the SciAm article was out of line (I don’t), I would have been reluctant to side with those assholes. So I again stayed silent.

Sometimes you get tired of the battles, you know?

Now the conflict has flared up again. Razib Khan (remember him?) wrote an open letter to SciAm to argue that the article was “indecent. It was muddled and uninformed at best, disrespectful and misleading at worst”, and protested that, oh no, how dare you accuse EO Wilson of scientific racism, which was really weird coming from a guy who writes for VDARE and praises Steve Sailer. Maybe it was because relative to his usual associates, Wilson wasn’t racist. He was trying to whitewash Wilson as hard as he could, which is what I really find disrespectful. It’s really betraying his scientific legacy to pretend that his ideas never fueled scientific racism, or that he had no racist views of his own. Khan got a lot of high powered signatories to his letter, but then recently a couple of them, including Hopi Hoekstra (a former student of Coyne’s) had second thoughts and withdrew her name…and now that has got the whitewashers angry at her. How dare you think Wilson’s legacy was complicated? How dare you think Wilson ever contributed to a racist ideology?

Here’s a comment on Khan’s substack from David Sepkoski, a historian of science.

How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?

Specifically, Rushton (if you don’t know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human “races,” ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be “attacked” if he did.

And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton’s university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to “racial” populations).

I knew Wilson and I don’t think he was intentionally racist. But science–and biology, particularly–has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn’t help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it “set the record straight.”

I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a “psychopath,” dismissing all criticism of his ideas as “Marxist,” and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.

Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be “what’s your evidence,” I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don’t pretend that nobody’s offered any substance.

He also posted a follow-up to some criticisms:

Well, in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic–his ideas are a matter of public record and you can make up your own mind. I’m not going to be posting archival documents on discussion boards, but I’m in the process of drafting an essay about Wilson and the larger issue of systemic racism in science that I hope to place in a magazine or journal soon (apparently not Sci Am, though! one thing I agree with in this substack essay is that Sci Am owes it to readers to allow for a back-and-forth, and I don’t like their stated policy). If there’s sufficient interest I’ll come back here with a link to anything that eventually gets published. I’m not trying to be coy–I’ve been working on a book on this topic but it’s still far from complete, and I now see the need to get something shorter out sooner without basically just dumping my research materials on the internet!

One thing you raise that I’ll comment on, though, is the issue of a political agenda among Wilson’s critics. That’s indisputable. What troubles me, though, is the insistence by Wilson and his defenders that he (and they) have no politics or ideology. That’s patently ridiculous, since everyone has a politics and it’s impossible to separate that from everything else we do.

In Wilson’s case (and Dawkins’, and Pinker’s, and Sam Harris’, so on) that politics seems to be the same kind of fairly straightforward neoliberalism that has driven centrist politics from the 1980s onward, and which–while sometimes socially progressive–emphasizes “individual responsibility” at the expense of certain kinds of progressive social welfare programs. I’m not interested in debating the merits of that neoliberalism (which you can find influences of in everyone from Thatcher and Reagan to the Clintons and even Obama), but rather in pointing out that this IS an ideology (or a politics), and it influences views of science just as much as Lewontin’s Marxism, etc.

And here, Wilson’s discussions of ants are totally germane, as the author of the Sci Am essay proposes (though perhaps again without enough specificity), since Wilson frequently interpreted ant behavior though analogy to human social organization, and then turned around and used that interpreted analogy as a basis for understanding human social evolution and organization. It is in the circularity of that argument that Wilson’s politics enter his science (among other places).

Yes. Exactly, although I disagree that SciAm needs to allow for back-and-forth with goddamned racists. I shouldn’t have been shy about saying so earlier.

No one will be coming to my funeral anyway.