One of the most exhausting things about biological essentialism is that it is profoundly boring — a core of true believers regurgitate debunked and disproven arguments to convince a new generation of useful idiots that Science Says™ some humans are better than others. Treating this human-centipede of willful ignorance as if it were a reasonable conclusion and arguing about statistics and academic freedom only serves to further their real goal: a manufactured credibility that legitimizes their work and by extension their theory of eugenics. These posts are intended to highlight the banal and incurious world view that fuels them, and the systems of power that encourage them. Welcome to Box of Rocks #3 — never change.
More than a quarter of a century ago, Steven Pinker was fighting with Stephen Jay Gould in the pages of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) and getting his ass handed to him.
He wasn’t alone. In Pinker’s corner was E.O. Wilson, promoting sociobiology, Richard Dawkins (first of New Atheism, then casually sliding into the company of the far-right as his movement did) and Daniel C. Dennett, stalwart defender of what Gould had called “Darwinian fundamentalism” — the shallow, pseudo-utilitarian concept that every facet of a living thing is an adaptive advantage selected for by evolution. Gould addresses them all with exhausted incredulousness, marveling that these dilantettes thought they had something to say.
Gould had said that the field of evolutionary psychology had some work to do in developing falsifiable hypotheses and considering causal factors other than biology (an issue it continues to struggle with today). Hit dogs will holler and Pinker rushed to the head of the pack to defend his friends, the concept of biological determinism, and the narrow, barren conclusion such dogmatic thinking generates. Enthusiasm doesn’t translate to expertise though, and Pinker reveals an inability to distinguish between origins and outcomes and a weakness for flawed studies, citing phrenology-adjacent work to support his arguments.
Gould responded:
If we define poetic justice as defeat by one’s own favored devices — Robespierre before the guillotine or Midas in golden starvation — then we might be intrigued to find Steven Pinker, a linguist by training, upended by his own use of words”.
Even though Gould passed away in 2003, Pinker still fights his ghost on the regular, probably because burns like that leave you scarred for life. He urges the members of his field to write compellingly so that they can hold their own in the realm of public opinion, citing a need to rebut Gould’s clear, well reasoned arguments against their endless and transparent attempts at reviving race science.
It is working. Sociobiology and eugenics is once again being repackaged for the public as part of the TESCREAL ideologies, pressed into service to rationalize why those with power and resources are morally justified in doing everything they can to retain it. This rebrand is made possible by those like Pinker, Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett, who have carried the gospel of biological determinism out of the NYRB and into the public sphere for the last 30 years.
Pinker has made an entire career of language. He’s spent decades at MIT and Harvard and shaping our understanding of humanity on both the page and the stage. And over and over again, in his own words, he aligns himself with people who believe that genetic material holds the measure of a human being, and tries to convince us to do the same:
- 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.
If it feels like you are seeing the same organizations and people over and over again, it is because you are. May we all have friends as devoted as Steven Pinker. He works tirelessly to ensure that hereditarian hypotheses are seen as reasonable, their investigators rational, and their conclusions credible. He is rock-solid, the constant, unwavering brace for an entire edifice of race scientists and commentators.
Pinker has spent his life defending those who would rank humans from best to worst, obscuring the origins and conclusions of their ideas just enough to weave them into our conversations and assumptions. At no point in his journey has he reconsidered his commitment to the bit. There’s no reason to. Pinker has become wildly popular and influential as a result of his support of the status quo and the limiting beliefs that entrench it.
As the elder statesman of biological essentialism, there is much more to his resume (check out Pinkerite and this open letter to the Lingustic Society of America by his colleagues if you are curious). One more rock in the box, he will spend the next three decades as he spent the previous three, using his prominence to defend scientists doing shoddy work and commentators making poorly reasoned arguments, ensuring scientific racism remains a reasonable position for individuals and society to hold.
Addendum: After this article was published, folks were happy to share new-to-me additions to the timeline. They’ll live here until they find a home in a new installment of Box of Rocks
- 2021 — Pinker uncritically shares an essay by Diana S. Fleischman that attempts to equate to equate individual choices (abortions) with eugenic ideology (incentivizing ‘undesirable’ populations to limit their reproductive freedom). Translation: You’re on our team guys!
For the rock collectors out there:
