Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #scientificracism, aggregated by home.social.
Eugenics and Scientific Racism
Eugenics is an inaccurate theory linked to historical and present-day forms of discrimination, racism, ableism and colonialism. It has persisted in policies and beliefs around the world, including the United States.
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
DATE: July 2, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Are preprint servers inadvertently legitimizing scientific racism?
Unreviewed research platforms are inadvertently hosting debunked theories about race and genetics. A recent analysis reveals that individuals promoting scientific racism use mainstream open science archives to distribute flawed comparisons of human behavior. The study was published in Behavior Genetics.
Over the last decade, the open science movement has drastically changed how academics share information. Researchers frequently upload early drafts of their manuscripts, known as preprints, to internet archives. This allows scientists to bypass the traditional peer review process and share their data immediately.
Peer review usually involves independent experts evaluating a study for methodological errors before it is accepted by an academic journal. By skipping this step, open science platforms accelerate scientific discovery. They also remove the editorial gatekeeping that typically prevents poorly conducted or pseudoscientific research from reaching the public.
Eugenics is a historically debunked movement claiming that human populations can be improved through selective breeding. Related concepts of scientific racism falsely suggest that there are fundamental biological differences in cognitive ability or behavior among socially defined racial groups. These ideas were largely pushed out of the academic mainstream following the mid-twentieth century.
Proponents of these discredited concepts instead relied on obscure fringe publications to share their ideas. Foremost among these is a publication called Mankind Quarterly, which was founded by segregationists and routinely publishes racist pseudoscience. Because mainstream scientists quickly learned to ignore these specialized outlets, the authors struggled to reach broader audiences.
To appear more credible, some of these individuals have recently changed their tactics. They have begun uploading their papers to popular preprint servers right alongside legitimate scientific studies.
Evan J. Giangrande, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, wanted to quantify the scope of this issue. He sought to understand how often flawed genetic studies regarding group differences appear on modern preprint platforms. He also aimed to categorize the common tactics used in these papers.
Giangrande started his investigation by identifying all authors who published an article in Mankind Quarterly between 2014 and the spring of 2024. He then searched for those specific authors across four major open science archives. These online archives included PsyArXiv, bioRxiv, SocArXiv, and OSF Preprints.
The search returned 79 distinct preprints tied to these authors. Giangrande narrowed the list to 42 papers focused specifically on behavioral differences among human groups. He categorized each paper by the traits it examined, the groups it compared, and the methods it employed.
These preprints attracted thousands of online views and document downloads. A majority of the papers categorized humans into socially defined racial, ethnic, or national groups. The author noted that most of the group comparisons focused on intelligence, cognitive ability, or educational attainment.
Out of the 42 papers focused on group disparities, 31 discussed genetics and 13 performed new genetic analyses. Giangrande wrote that these analyses routinely relied on elementary misunderstandings of biology. The papers used these misunderstandings to falsely argue that social disparities are caused by innate genetic gaps rather than environmental factors.
Many of the preprints incorrectly assumed that estimates of heritability within one specific population can explain differences between completely separate populations. Heritability is a measure of how much genetic variation accounts for a trait within a specific group of people at a specific time. Mainstream geneticists agree that this metric cannot be used to explain the average differences seen between distinct, separate groups.
Other papers included in the sample misused polygenic scores in an effort to establish fundamental genetic differences. Polygenic scores are mathematical estimates of a person’s genetic likelihood for a certain trait based on thousands of tiny DNA variations. Comparing these scores across different ancestral groups is notoriously unreliable because the variations do not map equally across populations.
A few preprints relied on a technique called admixture regression, assessing individuals with mixed ancestry to separate genetic impacts from environmental ones. Biologists heavily criticize this method for its inability to accurately account for social confounds. Despite these basic mathematical errors, the preprints presented their findings as definitive proof of hereditary differences in intellect.
The authors of these preprints often utilized publicly available data or federally funded databases to perform their analyses. They interpreted this data through the lens of thoroughly debunked evolutionary frameworks. One prominent example was the cold winters theory, which baselessly argues that humans who migrated to colder climates evolved higher intelligence to survive harsh environments.
Another common theme identified in the preprints was differential-K theory. This racist biological concept suggests that certain minority populations evolved to have high fertility rates and low investment in offspring while majority groups evolved the opposite traits. The papers also pushed dysgenics, a false eugenic concept suggesting that a population’s genetic quality is deteriorating due to the reproductive rates of marginalized groups.
By using complicated methods, statistical software, and academic formatting, these papers create a false sense of authority. Giangrande reasoned that unfamiliar readers might struggle to distinguish this content from legitimate scientific inquiry. Unsuspecting public audiences could then cite these preprints as proven facts in online discussions.
The study features a few limitations. The inclusion criteria required a prior publication in Mankind Quarterly for an author to be tracked in the search. This strict rule means the calculated number of problematic preprints is likely an underestimation of the actual volume of pseudoscience online.
The research also focused explicitly on four platforms with relevance to behavioral genetics. It did not catalog other general research clearinghouses or newer artificial intelligence platforms. The issue of weaponized science extends beyond preprints to social media, blogs, and occasionally mainstream academic journals.
Giangrande outlined several potential responses for the scientific community to handle this recurring issue. He proposed that scientists must be extremely precise in their own language to prevent their legitimate data from being misconstrued. Vague terms regarding race and genetics invite bad actors to exploit the remaining confusion.
Improving public education regarding human genetics will also help everyday readers spot logical errors in pseudoscientific work. Individual academics can actively format rebuttals and label flawed research when they encounter it online to provide context for casual readers. Finally, the study recommends that open science platforms could provide explicit warnings that unreviewed content may not meet basic scientific standards.
The study, “The Preprint Problem: Fringe, Genetically Informed Studies of Group Differences in Behavior Housed on Open Science Platforms,” was authored by Evan J. Giangrande.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #PreprintEthics #ScientificRacism #OpenScience #BehaviorGenetics #PolygenicScores #HeritabilityMisuse #EugenicsDebunked #MankindQuarterlyCritique #AdmixtureRegression #PseudoscienceAlert
When will proponents of scientific racism and eugenics understand that the number of children produced by an individual is an objective measure of fitness unlike "intelligence", "creativity", "culture", and "technology"?
#humans #eugenics #scientificracism #racialism #evolution #humanevolution #fitness #birthrates #reproduction #geneticfitness #iq #racism #pseudoscience
🇬🇧 💀 **How the racist study of skulls gripped Victorian Britain’s scientists **
"_In research for my forthcoming book on skull collections, I’ve found that Cambridge’s cranial register includes a skull sent from a former student stationed in India. He had plucked it from a cremation site in Bombay despite the outrage of gathered mourners. Brazen grave-robbing and colonial violence were central to the international network that furnished British universities’ skull rooms._"
#History #Histodons #Science #HistSci #Phrenology #Universities #ScientificRacism #Racism #Medicine #UK #UnitedKingdom @histodons @science
Visiting #MountainLake and thinking about Dean #IveyLewis . I think he would be pleased that his ideas have been embraced and spread across the world. #ScientificRacism #eugenics #segregation https://mlbs.virginia.edu/lewishall
Conspiracy Theories We Aren't Falling For
#ParkrosePermaculture
#Culture #Politics #Misogynoir #GenderEssentialism #whiteSupremacy #ScientificRacism #ReSegregation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9gnQfpm_fY
If anyone has the energy to critically appraise this article, please feel free to have at it. ⚔️
Note: I think the partial redaction of the chart was probably accidental; the unredacted image is here (original link is 404).
Scientific Racism, Eugenics, literally believing non-Europeans were a different species, has a long history and thrived with government funding for centuries. By 1921, California's eugenics program accounted for 80% of sterilizations nationwide, didn't end until 1979. The pseudo-science of eugenics permeates medical education and practice, influence law, policing, and adjudication to this day.
The Racist History of the Body Mass Index (BMI)
Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman
#BlackMastodon #ScientificRacism #Eugenics
https://www.taylorraealmonte.com/newsletter/the-racist-history-of-bmi
Mass deportations don’t keep out ‘bad genes’ − they use scientific racism to justify biased immigration policies
https://theconversation.com/mass-deportations-dont-keep-out-bad-genes-they-use-scientific-racism-to-justify-biased-immigration-policies-243785
#GeneticEssentialism
#Eugenics
#ScientificRacism
Racism is the root cause of America's predatory healthcare system. https://hartmannreport.com/p/were-it-not-for-white-supremacy-america-d21?r=1rtvr5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
"Rugged Individualism" is a myth designed to cover up the ugly truth.
"....But why should the violent behavior of some desperate and discouraged people point to a specific disorder of their brain while the corruption and violence of some congressmen and presidents provokes no similar theory? ...."
- The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (Section four - Measuring Bodies / P. 175)
Undercover inside a ‘scientific racism’ network
> Harry Shukman of the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate went undercover to expose how some of the wealthiest and most powerful people see race.
Fascists continue to silence dissent in supposedly 'free' countries whose coward leaders only defend the free speech of the Rich
#FuckTheFash #HopeNotHate #HavanaMarking #NickScanlon #ScientificRacism #UK #LondonFilmFestival
"In 2017, England's blood service defended its procedures amid concerns over the racialization of blood donation. However, the question remains: doesn't this amount to an endorsement of race science?"
https://towardsracialequity.substack.com/p/its-time-to-stop-racializing-blood
"Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a 'dangerous ideology with political aims and real-world consequences.
'Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,' she said. It was also deployed to 'argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations'.
In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing 'remigration' – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: 'You’ve just got to pay people to go home.' The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times.
‘Race science’ group say they accessed sensitive UK health data | Race | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/17/race-science-group-say-they-accessed-sensitive-uk-health-data
#Race
#Racism
#RaceScience
#Eugenics
#ScientificRacism
#NHS
#UKBioBank
#HopeNotHate
#HumanDiversityFoundation
#Data
What is new ? the phone in the hand or smart watch on the wrist ? and what is old ? the imagination or the summons of narcissistic personality underneath the skin ?
#Racism #FarRights #ScientificRacism #Technology #Nazism #Eugenics #Narcissism
Really good research from 'HOPE not hate' on the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), a kind of successor to the Pioneer Fund, continuing its work of supporting and funding "scientific" racist research.
As is so often the case, a mega-rich asshole from Silicon Valley has coughed up a lot of the funding. In this case, that asshole is Andrew Conru, founder of Adult FriendFinder (sorry, swingers), who has given HDF no less than $1.3 million.
Among the other major players are Emil Kirkegaard (legal name: William Engman), who is easily one of, if not the, best known race "scientist" in the world.
Another is Erik Ahrens, a close associate of "identitarian" figurehead Martin Sellner's and a member of Alternative for Germany (AfD). He specifically wants to turn "Germany, or probably eastern Germany, a state power," into a white ethnostate and is seeking to build an "international network generating revenue in different countries" in order to do that.
Anyways, good work all around, and well worth reading.
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From the article:
In an online presentation to our undercover reporter in October 2023, Matthew Frost claimed that HDF has two arms. Emil Kirkegaard runs the “underground research arm”, a continuation of Pioneer’s main activity. It is a group of academics and independent researchers that convene weekly for a video call to coordinate ideas and share access to genetic data sets.
The team aims to slip papers into academic journals with higher impact and circulation than their own publications. If unable to do so, HDF will publish the group’s papers in their print journal Mankind Quarterly or the OpenPsych website, which has been described as “a pseudoscience factory-farm”. Kirkegaard is associated with the management of both titles. During a research team meeting in November 2023, Kirkegaard told his researchers that an article on “international dysgenics” was unlikely to get accepted by a proper academic imprint unless their colleague Bryan Pesta, a former scholar at Cleveland State University, could “make the words soft and sweet”. HDF leaders discussed a “pipeline” whereby the underground research team would publish scientific racism articles that would then be promoted by HDF’s public operations like Aporia or Edward Dutton’s YouTube channel, “The Jolly Heretic”.
A diagram shown to our undercover reporter shows that the research team has approximately 10 members. The meeting our infiltrator attended had 11 writers from the UK, the US, and Europe, including Kirkegaard. At least one contributor (Meng Hu at the University of Hong Kong) was not present. Several of the team are known in the world of scientific racism, and had contributed to Aporia or had in the past been funded by Pioneer. Chief among them is Bryan Pesta, who between 2019 and 2022 received Pioneer money and was dismissed from his academic position at Cleveland State University in February 2022 for misusing genetic data in his research.
Davide Piffer is also part of the team. His 2013 paper on intelligence and race was cited by Payton Gendron, the terrorist who shot dead 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in 2022. The gunman wrote in his manifesto that Black people have a “lesser IQ”, concluding: “We must remove blacks from our western civilizations.” In past research papers, Piffer was credited as a member of the psychology department at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, however a representative said he never completed his PhD and left after a year in undisclosed circumstances.
Members of the research team are sometimes successful in smuggling their articles into peer reviewed journals. Piffer co-wrote an article with Kirkegaard focused on IQ for the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics, published by Cambridge University Press, in March 2024.
https://investigations.hopenothate.org.uk/race-science-inc/
#HumanDiversityFoundation #HDF #PioneerFund #EmilKirkegaard #ErikAhrens #PeterThiel #AmRen #noAfD #fcknzs #fascism #ScientificRacism #racism #eugenics #HopeNotHate #TheJollyHeretic #EdwardDutton #MartinSellner #TechBro #TechBroFascism
How Cambridge bred eugenics
"The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for ‘well born’) was birthed here in Cambridge by Trinity’s own Francis Galton in 1883. Galton was inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin and adapted the idea of natural selection to presuppose that the survival of the fittest had been distorted by social welfare policies."
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/27401
#History #Histodon #Histodons #Science #HistSci #Eugenics #Race #Racism #ScientificRacism #Cambridge #University #Academia @histodon @histodons
I have to thank #ElonMusk for this knowledge, because without his descent into #ScientificRacism, I wouldn't have investigated the topic and learned of key historical proponents. I'm now on a mission to wipe his name clean, or at least educate young geologists so they will wipe his name clean.
The Smithsonian seeks to return Human Remains, most collected and studied under dubious circumstances
L'antropologo Aleš Hrdlička (Archivi dello Smithsonian Institution)
The Smithsonian seeks to redress the historical injustice and practice of scientific racism
https://newsviews.online/2024/02/27/the-smithsonian-seeks-to-return-human-remains-most-collected-and-studied-under-dubious-circumstances/
#HumanRights #AlesHrdlicka #HumanRemains #Repatriation #ScientificRacism #TheSmithsonian
How One Of The World's Greatest Athletes Almost Died Because No One Listened To Her with Dr. Uché Blackstock
#BlackMastodon #ScientificRacism #RacialisedClass #RacialEssentialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_7MNM9Oe5A
"This article aims to complicate the origin story of biological anthropology by examining how colonial subjects were involved in the development, testing, and refinement of racial theory, and thus of biological anthropology itself. Taking India as an example, I trace how Indians and the caste system were first the subjects and eventually the interlocutors of racial scientific theory and testing."
Weaver, L.J. (2022) 'The Laboratory of Scientific Racism: India and the origins of Anthropology,' Annual Review of Anthropology, 51(1), pp. 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041320-024344. #DOI #Article #History #Anthropology #Race #Racism #ScientificRacism #India #Colonialism #Science #Biology #Academia #Academic #Academics @biology @science @anthropology
“Rufo, a close ally of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and one of America’s most prominent activists fighting so-called ‘wokeism’…has been credited in conservative media and beyond with playing a central role in the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, who is Black.”
#woke #ScientificRacism #ClaudineGay #racism
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/rightwing-activist-christopher-rufo-ties-scientific-racism-journal
#HumanRemains and #Museums: A Reading List. Questions over their value for #research conflict with the #ethics of possessing the dead, especially when presenting human remains in the setting of a museum. https://daily.jstor.org/human-remains-and-museums-a-reading-list/ #IndigenousPeople #eugenics #scientificracism #slavery #mummies #archaeology
@timnitGebru AI is truly today’s phrenology. #scientificracism
Notorious race “scientist” Richard Lynn is, once and for all, good and dead. I generally try to avoid celebrating people dying, but this guy might be an exception. For a long time, he was a close colleague of J. Philippe Rushton, who may be more responsible than any other single person for reviving a lot of debunked theories about race and IQ, “breeding strategies”, etc.
Lynn was the editor of arguably the most influential “race science” journal in the world when he died. He was also one of the major sources for the content of ‘The Bell Curve’. A horrible person who claimed the title of “scientific racist” for himself. Fuck that guy, fuck everyone who cites him approvingly, and fuck all of his “research”.
#racescience #scientificracism #richardlynn #lynn #iq #rushton #mankindquarterly
Personally, I thought Stephen J Gould dismantled the very basis of IQ and scientific racism thoroughly in "The Mismeasure of Man". Spearman's g is a statistical artefact.
It seems it is such a useful tool of white supremacy that it cannot be allowed to die.
#AI #ChatGPT #ScientificRacism #Ableism #Eugenics #WhiteSupremacy
#Racialism (often "scientific racism" or "race realism" by its adherants) is the idea that humanity can be easily divided into well-defined biological categories ("races") that are both broad and clearly-defined. Racialism implies that these races are substantially physiologically different from each other and that these racial differences strongly determine the abilities and behavior of individuals and peoples.
This #pseudoscience is technically not the same as #racism, which is the belief that one or more of these various groups is "superior" or "inferior" to one or more others, usually in some vague, undefined way. But while racism and racialism are distinct concepts, their respective adherents do overlap a lot more than either would have you believe.
Racialism first developed in the 1700s. It remained virtually unchallenged until the 1930s-1960s, when genetics showed it to be erroneous.
#RationalWiki #scientificracism
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism
"The rise of biosocial criminology has ... sparked alarm among some scholars, who argue that the science is shoddy — and that racist ideas and assumptions animate the field."
New today at Undark: https://undark.org/2023/01/25/criminologists-looking-to-biology-for-insight-stir-a-racist-past/
#science #ScienceMastodon #scientificracism #crime #criminology
"Yerkes declared that ... the tests measured innate intelligence rather than education. “It behooves us to consider their reliability and their meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration”."
The racist past - and present - of standardised tests in the US, by Deborah Blum in Undark.
⚠️ Long read ⚠️
https://race.undark.org/articles/born-of-eugenics-can-standardized-testing-escape-its-past
#LongReads #DeborahBlum #Undark #ScientificRacism #StandardizedTesting #SATs #Education #USA
I haven't read this yet, but Intend to. #scientificracism #paleoanthropology #southAfrica
"What the public is not told is that some mistakes are never corrected. A few are so profound that their effects reverberate through the decades."
Today in Undark's Long Division series, Angela Saini takes a hard look at the long-lasting impact of Wickliffe Draper's money.
https://race.undark.org/articles/drapers-millions-the-philanthropic-wellspring-of-modern-race-science #science #racism #scientificracism