It didn’t take long for the paper and Editors’ Note to come to the attention of the wokerati on Twitter. Macquarie University philosophy professor Mark Alfano deemed my paper “shit” and announced his plan to “ruin [my] reputation permanently and deservedly.” He started a petition on change.org demanding an “apology, retraction, or resignation (or some combination of these three)” from the journal editors. A number of philosophers—many of whom did not even read the paper—joined the campaign to get it retracted and/or smear me. University of South Carolina professor Justin Weinberg promoted Alfano’s petition on his widely read philosophy blog, Daily Nous. He also published a guest post that falsely and preposterously claimed that I defended “segregation” and “apartheid schemes.”
But the editors of Philosophical Psychology stood firm. Van Leeuwen and Herschbach wrote a statement on Facebook reiterating that the review process had been carried out properly, and declaring, “Efforts to silence unwelcome opinion… are doing a disservice to the community.”
A group of six philosophers and three anthropologists—including Mark Alfano and City University of New York philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci—submitted a comment on my paper to Philosophical Psychology, pedaling some familiar fallacies and strawmen. First, they proclaim that I think racial groupings are “discrete”—wrongly suggesting that my argument requires that there should be no overlap of any kind among races, or that mixed-race people don’t exist.
Then they throw out the old canard that race can’t be real because humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. They don’t mention that there are three billion base pairs in the human genome, and therefore three million base pairs where we are not identical, which could be the basis of race differences. (The average person’s genome actually differs from a reference genome at 4.1 to 5.0 million sites, and has structural variants affecting approximately 20 million bases.) In any case, crude comparisons of genetic similarity provide little information about the magnitude or significance of differences. We are 99.1 percent identical with chimpanzees in terms of functionally important DNA, but if that’s all you told a space alien about the difference between us and chimps it would be pretty misleading. Whether the 0.1–0.2 percent difference among humans generates meaningful race differences is an open question.
Then they say, “Allegedly, Cofnas felt compelled to write this article because he thinks that scientists’ and philosophers’ moral qualms have led them to abandon research into average IQ differences between ‘races’… But this perspective is significantly out of tune with reality… Journals like Intelligence and Psych frequently publish contributions exploring the issue.” In this case it seems they might have mixed up my paper with their own notes! I wrote: “Research supporting both hereditarian and environmentalist explanations of race differences is routinely published in major psychology journals, particularly in psychometrics journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.” But I pointed out that work supporting hereditarianism (the view that genes play a role in race differences) can be much more difficult to publish and disseminate, and is almost never funded. Many prominent scientists have said openly that it is immoral to study this topic. Scholars who are seen as supporting hereditarianism are regularly fired from their jobs. Examples of the last phenomenon from just the past year include Noah Carl (fired from his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge), Bo Winegard (fired from his position as assistant professor at Marietta College), and Stephen Hsu (forced to resign from his position as senior vice president for research and innovation at Michigan State University). Those who aren’t fired still have to deal with an army of Mark Alfanos trying to “destroy [their] reputation.”
