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stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Kevin Bird
@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
8.2K followers 1.3K following 4.1K posts
Postdoc in evolutionary genomics of polyploids at RBG Kew | science & society | opinions mine

Mizzou, Fulbright Belgium, and Michigan State alum. Here because of medicaid, public universities, and pell grants

https://kevinabird.github.io/
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stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
The problem was well stated by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social here and elsewhere. It's a part of the broader right wing ecosystem of scams and grifts, turning people in to marks willing to accept increasingly blatant cons.
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
The most basic of data exploration and quality checks would have identified this as a clear spurious correlation from confounded data. Same as with the National IQ case. It's deceptive and plays to people's confirmation bias. The goal is to get people to think every correlation you like is causal.
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
I'm increasingly interested in race science as a form of cultivated, weaponized statistical illiteracy. Take this figure, one of the most common propaganda plots, plotting national IQ data against education polygenic scores. "The correlation is so high! Clearly IQ differences are genetic!"

Oops!
November 28, 2025 at 11:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
This was the exact same problem that Jelte Wicherts and colleagues pointed out (among many others). Lynn cherry-picked studies to depress the IQ of African countries and there's noticeable divergence between datasets for Africa. jeltewicherts.net/wp-content/u...
November 28, 2025 at 1:41 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Kudos to Rebecca for leading this charge! Lynn's data is an embarrassment to the scientific enterprise. The skull measurers on Twitter are having a predictable response with the repeated claim that "other data replicate" Lynn's results.

Easy to see that's not true for the 2002, 2012, or "new" set
November 28, 2025 at 1:37 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
thank god people were trying to rehabilitate this guy
Richard Hanania: To redefine “pedophile” to mean attracted to anyone under 18 is the same as wokes defining racist to mean not a far leftist. It’s a definition that is specifically designed to make people irrational and engage in a moral panic. It has no other purpose.
November 16, 2025 at 2:09 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Someone seems a little upset the journal isn’t a race science factory anymore
November 15, 2025 at 11:33 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Look I’m willing to say it: maybe James Watson got two things right
Sent: To: Subject: Attachments: Robert Trivers 6/25/2018 2:19:44 AM jeffrey E. [jeevacation@gmail.com] Re: EPSTEIN.docx Importance: High perhaps i misunderstood "let's concentrate on you" Jamaica is bad enough but i have mastered that-at least the danger-4th highest murder rate in the world as for the us i have alienated large stretches of it-i will spare you the details i was amused that you are now friends with JD Watson he single-handedly prevented me from getting a Junior Fellowship at Harvard In 1972 I got my PhD in Biology and it was conventional to nominate the very best post-docs for a Junior Fellowship, Harvard's most prestigious award-it provided three years of research support without any duties. I was the best student out of Evolutionary and Organismic Biology in more than 20 years. The entire department was behind me. but Watson was on the 3-man committee, in charge of all the science candidates and he deemed my two papers, reciprocal altruism and parental investment and sexual selection as "not being science" and dismissed me in one sentence. Well bless his soul, he now does not even understand his own subject-yes, i speak of genetics-because having remained resolutely ignorant of evolutionary logic and biology he can neither understand the shape and form of the genotype nor how it differs systematically within life i have been preparing something for you for a long time on human intelligence, Africa, parasites etc because i prefer to get things right but i am ready to send you what i have main focus is-Africans stupid or smart? “The Worst person you Just Made a Great Point” photo from The Onion meme
November 13, 2025 at 8:25 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Amanda and one of her undergrads did some experiments to test for feeding preference and pathogen resistance between enantiomers and, while the specific roles aren't know, they seem functionally distinct. This helps explain the repeated evolution of different enantiomeric specificities
November 13, 2025 at 4:17 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
It took some macrosynteny detective work and tracking down the closest homologs to even get a partial idea of how distal gene duplications expanded and diversified gene content across these species. And after all that, we still have no idea where one of the clades came from!
November 13, 2025 at 4:10 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
This gene's evolution is wild. It roughly breaks in to 4 clades, 1 with Arabidopsis & relatives, 3 from the Brassica lineage with a subsequent whole-genome triplication. BUT none of these clades derived from the triplication event; they were much older. (It took broad species sampling to know)
November 13, 2025 at 4:07 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Given that Woodley et al. never even try to scientifically or ethically justify RHR, there seems little left to debate. 11/
Consider the absurdity of this controversy. Human geneticists, biological anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists are not regular features of white nationalist conferences, only psychologists are. We cannot imagine other scientists having to minimize their discipline's leading figures' extensive collaboration with racist organizations, publishing with them, citing those publications, advocating racist policies and then claiming criticism is “anti-scientific.” The scholarly community has “five decades of careful, archival investigations” (Jackson Jr & Winston, 2021, p. 15) documenting how RHR has been an important part of regressive racist ideologies. Intelligence researchers should be outraged that RHR psychologists claim to speak for the entire field rather than their unscientific agenda. It is time to end this manufactured controversy and embrace responsible and ethical scientific inquiry.
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
We show this argument against any kind of research ethics or researcher responsibility is grounded in Woodley et al.'s misunderstand of Mertonian norms, and the counter-norms that they claim we and other critics embrace 10/
Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) accuse Bird et al. (2024) of violating Merton's (1942) norms of “universalism, communism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism” (p. 118). They claim their critics embrace “anti-Mertonian norms” but cite Mitroff (1974) and Rodriguez (2009), who discuss counter-Mertonian norms, not anti-norms. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017) noted “counternorms appear to conflict with dominant Mertonian norms but...are an inherent part of actual science practice” (p. 28, our emphasis). Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) argue Bird et al.'s (2024) proposals “promote the anti-norm of Secrecy, restricting access to scientific data to prevent ‘unethical’ or ‘harmful’ uses” (p. 1) ignoring existing restrictions that reflect good practice. Bird et al. (2024) stated unauthorized uses of genomic databases can be serious ethical violations, citing Brian Pesta, an RHR researcher that Carl and Woodley of Menie (2019) claim was unjustly dismissed from Cleveland State University for conducting RHR (p. 2). Pesta was dismissed for misusing a genomic database and misleading the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He claimed to research schizophrenia and gender but instead published an RHR article in a journal he edited, stored data on an unauthorized computer, and shared it with an unauthorized individual. This was the finding of the NIH, two Cleveland State University investigations, and a federal court which dismissed Pesta's claims of “free speech” with prejudice, ruling “the facts do not support Pesta's allegation that he was retaliated against because of the content of his speech. Rather, he was fired due to his misconduct in accessing NIH data” (Pesta v. Bloomberg, 2024, pp. 10–11). Pesta remains listed as a “taboo” victim in Carl and Woodley of Menie's (2024) database despite the court finding no basis for their claim before their article's submission. The Pesta case shows existing restrictions on data use reflect responsibl… Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) accuse Bird et al. (2024) of rejecting Mertonian universalism by embracing “particularism, which encourages scientists to judge research not by empirical merits but by the reputations of those producing it” (p. 1–2). Merton (1942) limited universalism to “the acceptance or rejection of claims” (p. 118). The scientific process extends beyond evaluating conclusions, as Bird et al. (2024) noted: “The racism lies in the RHR program's claims, research questions, and history of legitimizing racist social orders, often by RHR psychologists themselves” (p. 506). Bird et al. (2024) affirmed the National Research Council's stance that “answering an empirical question must be ethically justified before research” (p. 504), which RHR psychologists fail to do (Elliott, 2017). RHR's defenders offer no ethical defense of the ugly history of RHR's political ties and how it influences every aspect of their research agenda; they simply beg the scientific community to ignore it. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) accuse Bird et al. (2024) of promoting “motivated interestedness by ethically challenging research deemed ‘socially pernicious’ and selectively demanding scientific rigor (such demands are rarely made of findings that support egalitarian views)” (p. 2). Bird et al.'s (2024) rigor demands are not selective; they argue findings in evolutionary biology and human genetics must meet those fields' rigorous standards. This aligns with the view that “human genetics, especially psychological and behavioral subfields, should tighten epistemological culture to prevent low-quality racial hereditarian ‘research’ from appearing scientific” (Panofsky, Dasgupta, Iturriaga, & Koch, 2024, p. S20). Woodley of Menie et al., 2025a, Woodley of Menie et al., 2025b) have not met this challenge. Scientific investigation is founded on the idea that science should be of use to society. Disinterest does not mean institutional isolation from social concerns. Psychology has a codified obligation to provide useful knowledge and ethical research standards (Bird et al., 2024, pp.504–5). RHR psychologists could explain how RHR can be ethically conducted or argue for changing ethical codes. They have done neither. Our critics maintain that “activism is not science” (Woodley of Menie et al., 2025a, p. 2) yet claim RHR psychologists' collaborations with David Duke or Jared Taylor, publishing with Richard Spencer, or praising the Unz Review are scientific, apolitical “intelligence research” while criticism is “political.” The evidence for RHR's political agenda is much more robust than their claims that their critics are “Lysenkoists.” Merton (1942) defined “organized skepticism” as “The suspension of judgment until ‘the facts are at hand’ and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria” (p. 126). Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) charge Bird et al. (2024) with endorsing “Organized dogmatism which seeks to exempt certain views and assumptions (e.g. the environmentalist view of group differences) from scientific scrutiny” (p. 2). We have not exempted any research from scrutiny. Merton (1942) stated scientists must be skeptical only “until the facts are at hand” (p. 126), and the facts regarding RHR are available. RHR psychologists have had a century to establish their case (Richards, 2012) but failed to meet scientific requirements. Their claims of “censorship” mirror the “tobacco strategy” (Oreskes & Conway, 2009), where skepticism is misused to keep open a settled question. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) thus misunderstand both the original Mertonian norms and the counter-norms they claim their critics embrace. Accepting their claims that ethical considerations should be irrelevant to scientific inquiry undermines all scientific inquiry, not just the “egalitarian” racial research they criticize. Their claims that all criticism of RHR should be rejected for being “political,” ignores that RHR psychologists have always urged political action that follows from their research, a topic we address in the next section.
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
We then further review the entanglements of RHR and the researchers who produce it with far-right political movements. Instead of disputing these relationships or explaining how RHR could align with ethical principles; Woodley et al. argue the very enforcement of ethical principles is censorship 9/
Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) suggest Bird et al. (2024) could strengthen their “case if they could provide examples of ‘RHR psychological theories’ influencing major policy changes in Western countries in seven decades” (p. 8). A key question is what policies have RHR psychologists advocated? Henry Garrett, Robert T. Osborne, Frank C.J. McGurk, and Audrey Shuey failed to overturn Brown v. Board of Education and retain segregated education in the American south (Jackson Jr, 2005). Carl and Woodley of Menie, 2019, Carl and Woodley of Menie, 2024 list criticisms of McGurk's segregation efforts as unfair. Arthur Jensen, in his work and in an interview in a neo-Nazi publication, advocated de facto in-school racial segregation based on intelligence tests, a practice deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court (Jackson Jr., 2022a, p. 4–8). Cofnas (2020) cites RHR psychologists arguing such programs “ought to exist” today (p. 134). Herrnstein and Murray (1994) urged ending policies supporting low-income women with babies, concerned that welfare programs “inadvertently social-engineer who has babies” (p. 548), a view seen as a “punitive form of passive eugenics disproportionately impacting families of color (Prichard, 2018, 72). Jensen, Raymond Cattell, and Richard Lynn urged eugenic policies to prevent overbreeding of lesser races (Jackson Jr., 2022a, pp. 5-8; Mehler, 1997, Tucker, 2002, Tucker, 2009). Kevin MacDonald, Woodley's co-author, advocates for an “ethnostate,” a racially homogenous area to prevent white civilization's racial death (Blutinger, 2021) a view echoed by Lynn when he claimed “the only solution lies in the breakup of the United States” along racial lines and “predominantly white states should declare independence and secede from the Union” (Lynn, 1995, p. 11). Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) do not indicate whether they celebrate or mourn the failure of these policies. The American political right's obsession with intelligence differences is well documented (Breland, 2024; Lanigan, 2024; Restuccia, 2019; Slobodian, 2019, Slobodian, 2023a, Slobodian, 2023b; Turiel, 2020; Winston, 2018). Stephen Miller, a powerful figure in the Trump administration, is the architect of its immigration policies (Cai, Burns, Sentner, & Johansen, 2025). Miller is a white nationalist (Bellware, 2019). His ideological education came from “overtly racist websites” (Guerrero, 2020, p. 121) like VDARE and American Renaissance featuring RHR psychologists. Jason Richwine, whom Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) incorrectly label a “political moderate” (p. 5), published anti-immigration pieces with Richard Spencer (Moody, 2013) and works for a designated hate-group, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) (Jackson Jr & Winston, 2021, p. 15). Richwine contributed to Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump's immigration policies (Dans & Groves, 2023, pp. 30, 84). CIS claims they “provided extensive background and analysis on many of the immigration topics” to Trump (Center for Immigration Studies, 2025). Michael Anton, whose essays at the Unz Review and elsewhere decry equality of intellect (Anton, 2016, Anton, 2019), holds white supremacist views and now has a key State Department position (Corbett, 2024). The Trump administration's embrace of white nationalism and eugenics means “Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals” (Wojcik, 2025). RHR psychologists, by contrast, urge us to ignore the impact their work has on these policies. We urge psychologists to follow geneticists in acknowledging the social responsibility that comes with scientific inquiry. In the United Kingdom, Lynn deeply influenced British politics in the 1960s and 1970s, with ongoing effects: “The appeal and acceptance of arguments like Lynn's provide a foundation for later policy debates about depen… RHR psychologists pretend they do not urge political action, when they often do. In Europe, Woodley and co-authors argue that “a more ethnocentric society will always predominate over a less ethnocentric one” and decry “extreme humanitarian ideology” including multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, postmodernism, and political correctness, which show “how far g has fallen” and claim “the displacement of the original population with outsiders...the native population goes into decline” (Dutton & Woodley, 2018, p. 212, 248). They urge policymakers to act because “the welfare of humankind as a whole cannot ignore our results in good faith” (Woodley of Menie et al., 2017, p. 100). When German banker Thilo Sarrazin claimed that “All Jews share a particular gene,” Carl and Woodley of Menie, 2019, Carl and Woodley of Menie, 2024 reported criticism of him as an attack on “intelligence research” ignoring the political impact of Sarrazin's absurd claims. The “widespread support for the ethno-racist ideas of...Thilo Sarrazin, in 2010 illustrates that authoritarian and xenophobic sentiments exist within the German society” (Berbuir et al., 2015, p. 158) and how his ideas contributed to far-right movements in Germany (Mitra, 2022). RHR psychologist Rindermann (2023b), who cites Sarrazin, concludes that immigration into Germany is so dangerous that “Only a god can save us. A miracle pill. Genetic interventions. Positive birth policies.” (p. 261). Rindermann's essay appeared in a Festschrift to RHR psychologist Helmuth Nyborg alongside RHR figures Richard Lynn, Emil Kirkegaard, Edward Dutton, Gregory Connor, and far-right politician Grégoire Canlorbe, published by extremist publisher Arktos Media, a leading publisher of ethnonationalist books (Teitelbaum, 2019). Such collaborations with racist extremists are not “value-free” or “apolitical” science. Nor are they rare. RHR psychologists who offer political advice and then deny that they do so are not acting as responsible scientists be… 2.5. Values and responsibilities RHR psychologists write extensively about freedom of inquiry, less so about responsibility. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025a) claim RHR psychologists decry the “misappropriation” of their research by bad actors, yet “still are cast as shouldering responsibility whenever some disturbed individual misappropriates some of their ideas (even in the most impotent and obscure contexts, such as anonymous posts on heavily stigmatized extremist websites)” (p. 4). The evidence that RHR psychologists participated in these “heavily stigmatized extremist” organizations for decades or that a widely cited dataset in RHR literature was published by a white supremacist press (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2006) is not “misappropriation” but collaboration with white nationalists and their agenda. Woodley of Menie et al. (2017) claim “As scientists...we are merely describing” deteriorating genetic behaviors in the Western world. They claim they are “Libertarians and therefore have extremely strong disinclinations to endorse any [coercive] policies” (p. 19). The belief in racial inequality is foundational to certain libertarian strands (Slobodian, 2019), Charles Murray, a prominent RHR publicist, is a libertarian (Slobodian, 2023b). In 2016, Heiner Rindermann justified restricting racial inferiors' immigration into Europe due to “pathological violence” and “rape, group sex, [and] sexual assault” (Kinsella, 2022) by immigrants at the anti-democratic and libertarian Liberty and Property Society (Hermansson, 2019; Slobodian, 2019). At that meeting, Rindermann shared the podium with Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, a Nazi regime apologist (“New AFD Senator,”, 2016). Ron Unz praised Schultze-Rhonhof's Holocaust denial work (Unz, 2025), continuing a tradition of libertarian Holocaust denial (Jackson Jr, 2021). Many RHR scholars, by their own actions and words, are political activists and it is time they took responsibility for the views they have publicly endorsed. Rather than doing s…
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
I'm particularly proud of the section on psychological life-history research tradition, where we trace its history not to evolutionary biology and ecology and their decades of theory and modeling, but to the baseless abberation initiated by JP Rushton. This distinction is not widely known enough. 8/
1.1.2. Psychological life history research Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) contest our inclusion of papers utilizing life-history theory applied to human psychological and behavioral variation, claiming they are based on a “well-established” and “commonly used” framework and are distinct from Rushton's “Differential K" theory of race differences (p. 7). Both points are false. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) equivocates two scientific programs under the name “life-history theory”. In ecology and evolution, life-history theory refers to a set of assumptions and models to understand how energy is invested between growth, survival, and reproduction (life-history traits) across the life course and their timing across the lifespan. Early biologists hypothesized species fell on a continuum of life-history strategies. One extreme (r-selected) experienced selection for a high population growth at low population densities, while the other (K-selected) experienced selection to maximize survival at high population densities (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967). Later work postulated that r-selected species would be physically smaller in size, mature earlier, and produce more offspring, while K-selected species would be larger, mature later, and produce fewer offspring (Pianka, 1970). Importantly, r/K theory was not a central feature of life-history theory nor was it a result from formal mathematical modeling that is central to evolutionary research in life history. Shortly after its formulation, biologists largely abandoned r/K theory because of the lack of evidence for its core claims (Nettle & Frankenhuis, 2020; Stearns & Rodrigues, 2020). Contra to the decline of r/K in evolutionary biology and ecology, Rushton (1985) introduced the model to human psychological and behavior evolution with his “Differential K theory”. No empirical or theoretical work justified this extension of r/K to psychological and behavioral traits (Anderson, 1991). While this initial paper focused on both individual and group (racial) differences, Rushton's own historiography makes clear that racial differences were the primary motivation and focus of his theory (Rushton, 2012). Most of the subsequent life-history research in psychology on individual differences in human behavioral and cognitive traits is derived from Rushton's work (Black, Figueredo, & Jacobs, 2017; Nettle & Frankenhuis, 2020; Sear, 2020, Sear, 2021).4 This work is noticeably distinct from life-history theory in ecology and evolution by the centrality of the r/K continuum (sometimes called the fast/slow continuum), isolated citational communities, and the lack of formal mathematical evolutionary models to support or test theoretical predictions (Nettle and Frankenhuis, 2019, Nettle and Frankenhuis, 2020; Sear, 2020; Stearns & Rodrigues, 2020).5 The psychometric constructs used (e.g. Figueredo et al., 2005, Figueredo et al., 2006) are not grounded in evolutionary or ecological theory (Sear, 2020, Sear, 2021; Volk, 2025) and show little relation to traditional life-history traits related to growth and reproduction (Kwiek & Piotrowski, 2020; Međedović, 2020; Sear, 2020, Sear, 2021).6 While psychological life-history researchers attempt to distance themselves from the field's RHR origins, the connection to Rushton's program is still apparent in the modern literature, contrary to Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) (see Sear, 2021). Cabeza de Baca and Woodley of Menie (2018), state that “individual models subsume group-difference models of life-history” and use the psychological life-history model to support Lynn's (2002) explanation of racial differences in criminality…
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
We document other elisions and inconsistencies used to minimize the scale of RHR. They arbitrarily throw out dozens of entries, and they misrepresent our inclusion criteria and required works to provide "unambiguous" support rather than our stated standard of supporting RHR in "whole or in part" 7/
To support the claim that RHR literature is unimportant, Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) eliminate portions of the bibliography. They discarded thirty books as “excessively costly” (p. 2) and too time consuming to analyze. These books include works from academic publishers Cambridge University Press, Springer, Sage, Peter Lang, and Palgrave MacMillan, and trade publishers Crown, Hatchett, and Penguin, undermining their claim that this work is “fringe.” The list contained four books published by Washington Summit Publishers, a White nationalist publishing house directed by Richard Spencer (see Jackson Jr & Winston, 2021). Eliminating these works from consideration allowed Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) to sidestep the entanglement of RHR with white nationalism we detail below. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) also discarded 50 articles they claimed, without evidence, were of kinds that “tend rarely to ever be cited, to lack academic significance” (p. 2) or might be changed, such as editorials or preprints. We see no valid reason why these materials supporting claims of evolved racial differences in intelligence should be excluded. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) content analyzed the remaining material by coding on five dimensions. The first three were defined by them, not by Bird et al. (2024), as “central elements” of RHR: Folk race,3 biological race realism and evolved/genetic differences, coded 0 or 1. They included a 362 word footnote questioning Bird et al.'s (2024) use of the term “folk races,” which is common in philosophy of biology, in order to claim that Bird and co-authors are actually “race realists” a claim that is belied by the co-author's own publications (Bird, 2021; Jackson Jr, 2016; Jackson Jr., 2017, Jackson Jr., 2022c; Winston, 2020). They also coded an “Other” category that included national IQ differences, skin reflectance, continent or latitude. Their fifth dimension, interest in the RHR articles by the white nationalist organization American Renaissance, is discussed below. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) factor analyzed their coding, despite having only moderate or fair interrater agreement. Then Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) shrunk the literature of RHR again by counting as “unambiguously” (p. 4) RHR only the 60 articles that the raters coded positively on all three “central” dimensions, despite Bird et al.'s (2023a) explicit position that these works supported RHR in “whole or in part” (p. 2). Requiring all three of their dimensions only serves to make the literature disappear in order to revive claims of “taboo.” Their use of the term “unambiguously” obfuscates how RHR literature is replete with ambiguity regarding racial categories. Indeed, as we argue in the next section, using “strategic ambiguity” (Ceccarelli, 2001) is central to RHR: use of implied racial categories without the use of the term “race” is common.
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Our response highlights a slew of deficiencies: First and foremost is that the bibliography was never the basis of our arguments and recommendations; the content of the paper and references cited therein were. Amazingly, Woodley et al. never respond to our arguments that RHR is bad science! 5/
1. The meta analysis is flawed and irrelevant Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) is based on a fundamental error. Given space limitations in American Psychologist, Bird, Jackson, Jr., and Winston created a supplementary bibliography of material supporting RHR “in whole or in part” (Bird et al., 2023a, p. 2). Reference lists are not bibliographies: “A reference list contains works that specifically support the ideas, claims, and concepts in a paper; in contrast, a bibliography provides works for background or further reading” (American Psychological Association, 2022). Because Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) misunderstand this distinction, they err in claiming the bibliography is “the empirical basis for their policy recommendations to the APA” (p. 2) given the evidence for Bird et al. (2024) is in the article's “References” section. Woodley of Menie et al. (2025b) do not address arguments in Bird et al. (2024), instead treating the bibliography as a data set to claim it does not support the paper's conclusions. They used content analysis to argue RHR literature is small and uninfluential because it is taboo, unrelated to white nationalism, and requires no action. The content analysis is irrelevant to Bird et al. (2024)’s arguments. The case for RHR's existence rests on in-depth historical analysis and contextual readings of RHR's texts (e.g., Mehler, 1997; Tucker, 2009). For example, the Pioneer Fund's decades of “funding of scientific racism” (Tucker, 2002), including a research grant to Woodley of Menie et al., 2025a, Woodley of Menie et al., 2025b coauthor A. Figueredo, (Flaherty, 2018) cannot be captured by their content analysis. Offshoots of the Pioneer Fund, such as the Ulster Institute for Social Research or the Human Diversity Foundation, have continued RHR and scientific racism (Saini, 2019; Shukman & Hermansson, 2024). This network of interlocking funding sources and interests cannot be revealed in any content analysis of publications.
November 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Evolutionary biologists have been warning us for decades about the danger to humanity posed by fish men. Will we listen?
November 11, 2025 at 2:05 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
"The world's richest man continually manipulates his company's AI to lie about science and promote white supremacism" sounds like some hack sci-fi writing, but it's just our current reality
November 11, 2025 at 11:48 AM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Evolutionary psychology makes a big to-do about their finding that sexual selection favors a "feminine body type" that "signals fertility/reproductive potential", including some rather... silly research. Turns out, those traits don't seem to signal reproductive success. Oops! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....
November 9, 2025 at 2:00 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
A political message all branches of the tree of life can get behind
November 8, 2025 at 9:33 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
Go on now, get
November 5, 2025 at 9:26 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 8:50 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
November 5, 2025 at 8:43 PM
stairwaytokevin.bsky.social
I think democrats should stand for environmental consciousness and equitable education
November 4, 2025 at 1:06 PM