Lawrence Krauss' Race Science Problem
So I’m going to talk about this book again.
I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody did read it. Namely, a popular YouTuber who has been posting video essays for a decade under the mononym “Shaun.”
His video about The War on Science is just over four hours long if you have that kind of time, and yes it did reaffirm most of my suspicions about it, but also, right toward the end, in the last half hour, Shaun discovers something that just hadn’t occurred to me at the time: In order to sell his soul out to the “anti-woke” science community, Lawrence Krauss has had to get into bed with some serious fucking ghouls. I’m talking, of course, about the skull-measurers.
So I got a copy of the damn book. I make money from this newsletter so I can legally deduct it from my tax as research material. But this was a mistake already—I got scammed on this. The book I bought is missing around a full third of the chapters that appear in the book that Shaun reviewed. I have never seen this kind of bullshit before. I had to re-check that I actually purchased the official book from the official Amazon page. I got the Kindle version, which I rarely do because I hate ebooks, but I don’t need this garbage taking up physical space in my house.
Is that a thing, with ebooks? That sometimes you get a heavily redacted version of the paper edition? Has this ever happened to anyone?
So yeah, see Shaun’s video if you want the long review—I am unable to review it myself because I don’t have the whole fucking book I paid for.
I’ll mention at this point that Lawrence Krauss used to be an idol of mine back when I used to buy New Scientist magazine every week and he would often appear as a columnist. Then he was credibly accused of a lot of sexual misconduct and suddenly became this huge antifeminist, “anti-woke” guy, completely by coincidence, fighting against the supposed leftist takeover of science.
Here’s the thing: When you try to pivot to the right on science, as a scientist, you run into some problems—namely that the science agrees with the left on most of the topics that have been decided, for some reason, to be “political.”
I don’t mean there aren’t any right-wing scientists who are experts and correct in their field. Obviously you can be a field-leading expert on Planck’s quantum radiation law while also hating immigrants or whatever. It’s only within specific areas of sociopolitical overlap where right-wing scientists have to decide whether they’re going to side with the science or dismiss it as conspiracy and align instead with a fringe that better describes what they prefer to be true about the world.
Whenever you encounter “anti-woke” science, it inevitably falls into one or more of these four categories:
- Rejection of climate science;
- Rejection of vaccine science or germ theory in its entirety;
- Rejection of gender theory;
- Or, perhaps most insidious and also our topic today: Pseudoscientific race bullshit.
First off, what genuinely surprises me about this book—what little of it I’m able to read—is that it’s not just the one giant rant about transgenderism that I fully assumed it would be, There’s some of that in there, don’t get me wrong, but this is actually just an incredibly weak book that doesn’t even talk that much about science at all. What it talks about is universities, and how they’re overrun with social justice thought. Whole chapters are dedicated to how too many students and academics favor Palestine in the Israel conflict, and that has nothing to do with science whatsoever. This book is about cancel culture, whiny feminists, anti-Zionists, and sensitive SJWs. It’s a fucking anachronism from the Gamergate years.
But Krauss really had no choice but to assemble a weak book, because his position within the right-wing science world is weak. He doesn’t reject climate science or vaccines. Being a (alleged! alleged!) massive sex pest, his big thing is antifeminism, but he can’t do a whole book about that, so he has to cast a broader umbrella. Most of the book, therefore, is about spooky scary “DEI” in academia. I’ve written about the right-wing use of the term DUI before and how it’s just a dog whistle about race. It just objectively is.
It's clear in this book that Krauss prefers to talk about women rather than race. In the introduction to the book he writes:
Dubious postmodern notions regarding objective, evidence-based inquiry and epistemology, and, more recently, CSJ, while once restricted to fringe departments, have now become endemic, making their way into the mainstream, even in hard science curricula. Those hired under the banner that racism and sexism are rampant in academia tend to echo that in their research and teaching. As a result, the debate about scientific issues often becomes stifled. For example, the question of whether gender-based differences between fields reflect underlying sexism or simply deeper psychological or sociologically based differences in interests between the sexes cannot safely even be raised in numerous universities, as various academics who have lost their jobs or affiliations can attest.
Here Krauss mentions directly the topic of gender disparity within academia, and the various innate differences between the sexes that might account for this. He skims over the racial disparity and quite deliberately dodges the implication of innate differences between races. I propose that this is because Lawrence Krauss, my once hero, is a coward. And not even the relatable type of coward.
With DEI being such a transparently racist moral panic, it is likely not possible to assemble a book like this without tapping into the dark universe of Eugenics Substack. And the only reason I mention Substack here is because that’s where these guys live—not trying to re-litigate the whole Substack Nazi Problem thing, it’s just an objective reality.
Throughout The War on Science, across several essays on various topics, there are several citations to the work of one Bo Winegard. His research is cited, at least, in essays by Alan Sokal, Anna Krylov and Jay Tanzman, and Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja. So a pretty prominent figure in the anti-woke science bucket. Who the hell is he?
Bo Winegard is the executive editor of Aporia.
Aporia is a Substack that functions as more or less the hub of modern scientific racism. It’s operated by something called the Human Diversity Foundation, which, after getting bad press and mainstream exposure as a consequence of a Hope Not Hate investigation, appears to have quietly changed its name recently to “Polygenic Scores LLC.”
Whatever it’s called, this thing was started by self-described eugenicist and ethnonationalist Emil Kirkegaard, whose pseudoscience is such legendary bullshit that the only way he can get a paper published is to publish it in his own journals, which carry the aesthetic of proper journals enough to be commonly mistaken as legitimate by laypeople. These fake journals are published by OpenPsych, which is owned by Kirkegaard.
Kirkegaard also has a Substack, naturally.
The HDF, Aporia, and OpenPsych are essentially the shared landscape in which the modern eugenics movement operates. It is an insidious, incestuous, pseudoscientific bundle of quackery that mimics science. I like to call it scarecrow science. But it mimics science well enough that it can trick people who actually want to do their due diligence and back things up with what appears to be legitimate research, because it’s a very delectable cherry for cherry-pickers.
Some of the contributors to Krauss’ The War on Science are more nefarious than others. In any case, the Aporia universe has deeply, deeply infected the whole crop of intellectuals who want to be trendy and appear heterodox and anti-woke. Even if you’re careful to avoid getting any explicit white nationalists, if you scoop up any number of anti-woke scientists to write papers for you, you are inevitably going to get a whole bunch of Aporia bullshit.
Jerry Coyne (who I called Temu Richard Dawkins in my first piece about this book) shares a chapter with Luana Maroja, someone who I identified in that piece as kind of a proto-race scientist, and in fact, their chapter is actually a reprint of the exact article I linked that had led me to that conclusion. Their argument is that the fear of appearing racist is making it taboo to study genetics at all. Which is a fair point, if true! Unfortunately, they back this point up with a lot of Aporia bullshit.
First, this is one of the multiple chapters that drops a Winegard reference. They say:
Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.
The word “apparently” is doing some heavy lifting here. Winegard was fired after a pattern of thinly veiled racism, including a tweet that suggested if white countries continually fail to recognize innate racial differences “I suspect our countries will be torn apart from the inside like a tree destroyed by parasites.”
The real final straw was that Winegard published a paper that had to be retracted because he relied on debunked data from the notorious white nationalist race scientist Richard Lynn. Lynn was also the editor-in-chief of a race science journal called Mankind Quarterly, founded in 1961 by a group called the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, and which is now published by the HDF as a sister publication to Aporia.
Coyne and Maroja surely know all this. There is no reason but explicit deception to coyly suggest Winegard was fired for “merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups.”
Later, Coyne and Maroja discuss some supposedly legitimate studies by fearless academics that have been done to address the question of how much IQ and life outcomes are affected by genetics, but they cite “Lasker et al. 2019.”
This paper, Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability, is authored by Jordan Lasker, Bryan J. Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst, and—oh, look—Emil Kirkegaard.
We know Kirkegaard, but let’s take a look at these other characters.
Jordan Lasker is a white nationalist race scientist who writes online as “Crémieux.” He has a Substack, of course, and is also associated with Aporia, of course. According to unearthed comments from a former handle, he considered himself, at least at some point, a neo-Nazi.
Bryan J. Pesta is employed by the Human Diversity Foundation and, according to conversations within the group overheard by Hope Not Hate, one of his roles is explicitly to massage the language of their more racist material to make it more palatable to mainstream academics—to people like Coyne and Maroja. Like Winegard, Pesta was also fired from an academic institution for writing a terribly researched bullshit article that failed basic academic standards.
John G. R. Fuerst is a Mankind Quarterly contributor who writes about the biological reality of race.
The article these four chucklefucks collaborated on was published in MDPI, which is a predatory open access publisher that successfully pressured prominent academic librarian Jeffrey Beall to take down a widely consulted list of predatory publishers by harassing his employer.
This is the real war on science.
Even when you dismiss the elephant in the room here—that Donald Trump’s turbofascist regime is waging a very literal war on science from the right, a fact that has left Krauss sputtering and blubbering since the election—but predatory publishers and insidious pseudosciences that try to bash their way to credibility by dressing up in the clothing of science. The HDF investigations reveal a parasitic organization that takes advantage of your childish distaste of feminism, of pronouns, of overhearing people at Starbucks speaking in Spanish, and dangles tasty little morsels of Bell Curve bullshit in front of you.
Several of the authors featured in The War on Science have featured either as guest contributors or podcast guests to Aporia, including one of its most popular and mainstream figures, Steven Pinker. According to HDF, this is a deliberate effort to create legitimacy by association. And yet anti-woke academics just keep snapping at that bait, snapping, snapping, snapping, because they’re sick of having to hear indigenous land acknowledgments or whatever.
The HDF and its associated ventures are not a grass roots operation. They are well-funded, by their own giddy admission, by far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Their agenda is malicious, and if the severe Aporia bullshit infection in The War on Science is any indication, it’s effective.
I’m sorry that she wasn’t into it, Dr. Krauss, but maybe you should grow up and see the real war.
Hey, you know what else is well-funded by far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs? The current war against democracy, which I’m writing a book about. It's an analysis of how the internet, in merely its first 25 years of existence, has changed western culture and dragged it toward the far right. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
