Ari Feldman writes for the Forward:
There’s a piece of the “alt-right” puzzle of bigotry you need to know more about: “human biodiversity.”
An ideological successor to eugenics, human biodiversity (HBD) is, like eugenics (from the Greek words for “good” and “breeding”) primarily a euphemism. Ostensibly, HBD refers to the scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans. The term fuses biological and liberal language into a benign-sounding neologism, like “neurodiversity,” a key term within the autism rights movement.
But it is just pseudoscientific racism, updated for the Internet age.
“Human biodiversity” appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans. It uses the language of genetics to underscore, for example, the prevalence of Mongolians in sumo wrestling, the IQ scores of black people or the inbreeding patterns of Ashkenazi Jews. The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are “non-negligible” or “non-trivial” and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, that’s just Internet forum-ese for “you’re genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.”
Recently, the conservative “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos boosted awareness of the HBD proponents when he name-checked a couple of HBD gurus in his article “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” He brought the term human biodiversity — coined by Steve Sailer in the mid-90s — to a wider audience. Sailer, a blogger for several conservative websites with racial preoccupations, including Taki’s Magazine, the Unz Review and VDARE.com, has said of human biodiversity (in an interview with the H.L. Mencken Club, one of 40 hate groups in Pennsylvania) that it’s both a field of study and a political movement, because it has to “fight for its right to exist.”
The other writers in the HBD community are former journalists, science grad students and a lot of comment-section laymen. Sailer, who founded the Human Biodiversity Institute, maintains a blog at the Unz Review, writing about the dating prospects of Asian men and the inadequacies of gay men and lesbians, among other things.
Reddit hosts a human biodiversity forum, though membership is by invitation only, and the site has flagged the forum as racist. A racist Reddit forum called Coontown runs an online resource dump and lexicon called HBD Bibliography, which is linked with a Twitter account of the same name. (A Redditor with the username TheZizekiest posted an exhaustive, three-part rebuke to the sources compiled by HBD Bibliography on Reddit.) Elsewhere on the Internet, a woman calling herself “hbd chick” runs a wide-ranging personal blog on HBD; she seems particularly consumed by the inbreeding habits of Ashkenazi Jews and the genetic makeup of Europeans.
Though many in the HBD community are Internet autodidacts — people with little to no scientific training who spend their free time learning the scientific argot — some are trained scientists with an expertise in animal biology or statistics. One such writer, Razib Khan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Davis’s Department of Animal Science, has been writing about human biodiversity for many years. He briefly had a job at The New York Times as a writer for its Opinion section, before Gawker reported that he’d contributed to the virulently racist Taki’s Magazine and written to VDARE.com, an anti-immigrant website.
Steve Sailer and other HBD bloggers believe they present an accurate depiction of human genetics — especially population genetics, the study of how gene pools change over time, and behavioral genetics, the study of how genes are expressed. These two fields have been generating controversy for the better part of a century. One of the hallmarks of genetics research is that it produces data that are easy to sensationalize, such as IQ scores of black people (see: “The Bell Curve” controversy) or the supposed Khazarian origin of the Jewish people. In addition to obscuring the actual scientific consensus, these false conclusions have, in the former case, served as a license to discriminate against black people and, in the latter, provided “evidence” for those who say that Jews have no ancestral connection to the land of Israel.
The modern field of genetics has disavowed theories of human behavior that are all nature — i.e., based only on genes — just as sociologists and anthropologists have disavowed theories that are all nurture. The reality is somewhere in-between, where, for example, a genetic predisposition to asthma (more common among Jews) may be worsened by living in smoggy Mexico City or mitigated by moving to Phoenix. The science of that in-between is called epigenetics, the study of the environmental effect on gene expression.
Yet HBD blogs tend to skip the last 25 years of genetics, during which epigenetics supplanted the nature versus nurture debate. Human biodiversity is stuck at the moment when geneticists were able to show that distinct ethnic and geographical populations have distinct genomes and are therefore distinguishable from other groups (albeit under a microscope). The evidence of these genetic isolates is, for the HBD community, evidence of different races…
COMMENTS (heavily censored in favor of political correctness at the Forward.com):
* Isn’t saying race doesn’t exist sort of like saying family doesn’t exist? There’s no obvious hard dividing line for how distantly someone has to be related to you before they stop being considered family. But family is still a useful concept. A race is just a big family, essentially.
* As I’ve been saying since the 1990s, a racial group is simply an extended family, but one that possesses a heightened degree of coherence and endurance by being somewhat inbred.
* Right, the closer two people’s ancestors were geographically, the closer the two people are likelier to be genetically. We would expect this from what we know about the inheritance of genetics and also empirical studies. Doesn’t everyone know this, actually? Didn’t people in Roman times know this?
* “The problem is the adherence to the totem of “race”: It is a word so slippery as to be meaningless…”
You should take up your complaints about the meaninglessness of the word “race” with institutions far more influential than HBD bloggers. The word “race” is used by the U.S. government in the Census to collect vast amounts of data sorted by race; it’s used by the New York Times dozens of times per day; and it’s used in the title of the President’s autobiography: “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.”
* This article is almost unreadable. Rather than deal with a pretty big (and old) body of research on race and IQ, you spend most of it blathering about how secret racists in suits and lab coats are trying to trick us into neo-Nazism. The author seems a lot more comfortable attacking people than challenging (or even properly identifying) arguments.
It’s funny how race doesn’t exist until we want to blame whites for something (or everything).
* You’re saying race doesn’t exist because that would be racist. That’s absolutely retarded. Racism is a word invented by the communist Leon Trotsky to shut down dissent among the party. Are you trying to shut down the dissent of the alt-right with “racism” because you don’t like their racial theories.
* I just hope the goyim don’t look into actual pseudo-science, like the founder of modern anti-racism Franz Boas and his “studies” that showed immigrant brains “become American” within a few years, which happened to coincide with his ethnic background and that group’s tendency to support mass immigration to America, which coincided with his personal agenda. I hope they don’t look too hard into his successor Ashley Montagu, real name Israel Ehrenburg, and especially not look too hard into the Marxist political activist posing as a biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, or his deliberate lies about Samuel George Morton’s “scientific racism,” as they now call it since they’ve hounded honest human biologists out of the academy.
* This is just an incredibly terrible article.
You also seem to miss that some of the foremost people working on HBD are black (JayMan) or are real working scientists.
I mean seriously, I know you have to preach colorblind pluralism and “more diversity” for political purposes (except when discussing Israel of course) but this is just ridiculous.
Oh, and I’m Jewish so don’t come at me with that fake anti-Semitism crap. There IS evidence of Ashkenazi inbreeding and higher IQs are nothing to be ashamed of, even if the author of this piece falls a little below our mean.
* Kenyans are long distance runners, West Africans and Jamaicans in particular are sprinters. Of course, I’m probably making this all up, I’m sure Inuits will be winning 100 meter dashes, Zambians will be leading research at the Large Hadron Collider, and Jews will be honest any day now. All established tendencies to this point are surely complete coincidences, which means that you just can’t have nations for European peoples, but remember to keep Israel Jewish. That ethnic group obviously exists and must be preserved on our dime while they spy on us and maintain a secret nuclear program, but the goyim can all just melt into a mocha-colored race of docile consumers.
* As for the Jewish angle:
1. It is not correct that HBD bloggers have a particular preference for the Khazarian hypothesis (which was propagated by Arthur Koestler a long time before). In fact, the Khazarian hypothesis has found the interest of some (mostly Jewish) professional geneticists and has been tested extensively – and this has just been reported by the HBD layman community without much ado and partisanship.
2. Is it really possible, even today, to write an article about gentile racism and completely to ignore the existence of Jewish racism, in particular Jewish racist views about Arabs?
* “Race” is an arbitrary measure of genetic distance. To say race is social construct is like saying “color” is a social construct.
In a sense, it is: we call this wave length “yellow” and this wavelength “blue”; where “yellow” begins and “red” ends, also is somewhat arbitrary. We have different color schemes (RGB or CMYK), etc.
And yet, “color” very much depends on the physical wavelength of light. This is not a social construct.
To say “race”, i.e. genetic distance, like “color”, has no physical basis, that it is a social construct, is imbecilic. Hence the vigorous adoption among the Left.
* I attended university from 1941 to 1946 when the anthropology class I took did not have to be “politically correct”. So the instructor really talked about race! And the “differences” were described! For example, according to this professor, Caucasians have at the end of their nose, a separation between the cartilage shaping the nostrils. Blacks don’t. Blacks have longer arms and legs in relation to their trunk, making them better athletes and dancers. Asians have a distinctive skin structure around their eyes resulting in the almond-shape. And so on. His answer as to “what are the Jews” was that they are an ethnic group!
* Intelligence is about 80% heritable. Genes have been identified that positively correlate with IQ and those genes are not uniformly distributed between races. Enriched environments via exorbitantly expensive government programs fail to raise intelligence. Biological parent’s IQ is a better predictor of a child’s IQ than adoptive parent’s IQ.
Divergent evolution and unequal distribution of intelligence-linked genes explains why Africans never invented written languages, the wheel, a calendar or a system of numbers. It explains why they under-perform as a group compared to whites and Asians, no matter where they are in the world. It explains why Hong Kong and Singapore maintained and improved what colonial powers left for them while Africans destroyed what was left for them.
Where is the evidence that everyone is equal?
* They should put their belief in human equality to the test. Hire wise Latinas and sassy Black women in equal proportion to Whites and Asians in their new Democrat Party cyberwarfare defense commission. Lets see if Black and Brown are a match against the Russian hackers, amirite?
* Running performance correlated mainly to one thing between races, trunk length vs leg length. There are other factors like iliac vs subischial length, speed at which lactic acid is processed and so on, but those are fairly constant among groups of people.
People of sub-Saharan African heritage have the longest leg lengths compared to their trunk lengths, which is why they dominate running sports. Ethiopian highlanders are an especial outlier because of their tendency
to also be barrel chested and have a larger percentage of RBC in their blood, but this is too regional to be called a race.
Caucasians have the longest trunks and shortest legs on average, so they can’t really compete in running sports. But because of the Caucasian trunk size, they can (and do) dominate swimming sports. Most other races have a smaller trunk to leg length ratio. There’s an informal and humorous hypothesis that this came to be because Caucasians were some of the first people to sail seas, invested the most time in doing it at pre-marital ages, and shipwrecked most often…. to the point where the ladies back home only got romanced by teens who could swim back to shore from a shipwreck.
* Tribalists like Feldman have no problem with Race when attacking Whites. The problem for (((them))) is when Whites use race as a positive group identity to advocate for themselves. That’s when the kvetching starts.
* You want policy? How about something akin to Israel for white, non-Jewish Americans — i.e. our own state (country).
* Anatoly Karlin writes: I wrote the following comment to the Forward article:
“she [hbdchick] seems particularly consumed by the inbreeding habits of Ashkenazi Jews”
I just checked hbdchick’s site and she has 25 posts tagged “Ashkenazi Jews” out of the hundreds she has written.
So I wouldn’t really describe that being “consumed” – at least not any more so than this very publication: http://forward.com/culture/140894/may-you-live-until-120-dna-uncovers-secrets-to-je/
It was removed. Sad!
* “Yet HBD blogs tend to skip the last 25 years of genetics, during which epigenetics supplanted the nature versus nurture debate.”
Whenever you read epigenetics being talked up like this, you know you are dealing with a blowhard and a clown.
They seem to attribute magical qualities to Buzzwords.
* If Ari is mentioning you by name, it won’t be long before Heidi Beirich has you in her sights. She must be lonely now that Lawrence Auster is dead. I expect you’ll be getting one of her disconcertingly frisky emails inviting you to chat with her.
I hope you’ll resist the gentlemanly impulse to keep her correspondence to yourself. It’s an election year and I can use all the laughs I can get.
* Steve, he’s not saying you’re wrong. He’s saying the implications are terrifying to him.
There is no shortage of misguided policy proposals that harp on the pet obsessions of the HBD community. However, at least in the blogs and forums I examined, there was little discussion of what to do with the data of “human biodiversity.”
If you remember, quite a while back, there was a writer [William Saletan] for, I believe SLATE (or Salon?), who had read about biodiversity, and concluded that, scientifically, it had to be true.
His first question about his newfound discovery was “what do we DO with it?”
Shortly afterwards, he was converged upon by not only the Slate readership, but also his editors, and the people who sign his checks. He recanted and apologized.
In debates I’ve had with others personally on the issue, those who give me some consideration have inevitably stared at me with nervous eyes and said “okay, if you’re right, what DO we do with this information?”
If I recall, your response was using it for better social policy for the improvement of the lives of everyone, which… just isn’t enough for them. They need more assurance that it doesn’t end in concentration camps, enslavement of the lessers, or it’s a non-starter, science be damned.
Until a better view of the social outcome of HBD being widely accepted is clear and believable to them, they ain’t gonna play. They’ll play AROUND it, like Ari just did. He’ll give you a little bird whistle, but until you convince him of roses on the other side, he ain’t playin’.
* I dunno, methinks Mr. Feldman understands exactly that HBD is true, and wants to let the Jewish Daily Forward’s readers know so, too. Hence, it is “a piece of the ‘alt-right’ puzzle of bigotry you need to know more about.” Obviously, he can’t say it’s true in the Forward, or that would be another useful footnote for future reference, a la Saletan’s admission of many years ago. In fairness, he does link to you, Razib, and HBD Chick toward the top of the article, which has probably just created a thousand or more new, Jewish HBD realists.
* Writers like Feldman who laud the benefits of diversity, always fail to show convincingly why it’s such a good thing, other than nebulous reasons of little virtue. Many of us ask the question of diversity, Why? What purpose does it serve? Who benefits? Who loses? Does the good outweigh the bad? What is the greater good from having different peoples and cultures clash? Isn’t it possible that we’ve been through this before – in some past time, some past age – maybe, diversity clashes are why people are spread out to the four corners of the globe, inhabiting a set region for a particular people – Whites in Europe, Yellows in Asia, Blacks in Africa, etc.
I certainly hope that the world doesn’t blend into a turd brown of mediocrity – why, heaven forbid – but this seems to be the ‘diversifiers’ end goal – the opposite of what preach – a world without diversity.
* That same man considers non-binary gender neutral Hebrew “super cool”. Adjust language to ideology.
Super cool: Jewish summer camp creates linguistic workaround for campers wanting to speak Hebrew w/o binary genders https://t.co/8OBggDY959
— Ari Ephraim Feldman (@aefeldman) August 12, 2016
* I’d like to see that guy explain that races don’t exist to the forensic experts working for the FBI:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/oct2004/case/2004_10_case01.htm
“Ancestry was assessed by gross cranial morphology. Craniofacial features (broad face, nasal overgrowth, projecting zygomatics, blurred nasal sill, large teeth, and edge-to-edge bite) are characteristic of an individual of indigenous ancestry, and notably not of African origin (Bass 1995; Krogman and Iscan 1986; Rhine 1990).”
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/jan2001/phillips.htm
“The skull was analyzed metrically to determine the age, race, and sex of the victim. The anatomical features of the skull were determined to be of mixed racial origin, containing Khoisanoid, Negroid, and Caucasoid features (Figure 16).”
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/july2000/deedric1.htm
“Forensic examiners differentiate between hairs of Caucasoid (European ancestry), Mongoloid (Asian ancestry), and Negroid (African ancestry) origin, all of which exhibit microscopic characteristics that distinguish one racial group from another.”
* I had to giggle a the pop-up that encouraged me to get “the Jewish take on the news!”. I guess we’re all so much the same that we’re different.
I found it heartening that nobody in the comment section was defending Feldman.
