Yves here. Sadly, the more you study the history of bad ideas, like “free markets,” or here, race science, more often than not, it turns out that its rise to prominence was due to ample and concerted funded.
By Angela Saini, a science journalist and author of four books. This article extends from research she first carried out for her 2019 book, “Superior: The Return of Race Science,” which was shortlisted for the LA Times book prize. Originally published as Undark
In 1961, a new journal of ethnology and anthropology appeared on academic bookshelves. Nearly every page betrayed an obsession with racial differences.
“The few worthwhile contributions cannot justify the publication of the rest of the journal,” wrotethe English anthropologist G. Ainsworth Harrison, spotting error after error. “None of the authors rigorously and objectively appraises the limitations of the tests he uses.” One article made the bizarre claim that Egypt — a country described as being made up of racial “hybrids” — was more “disease-ridden” as a result. “What is particularly insidious in a supposedly scientific journal is the use of words with overtones of moral judgment,” Harrison concluded.
What he didn’t know was that this was entirely by design. The journal had been founded by a tight web of far-right thinkers intent on blocking racial integration in the United States, ending immigration from everywhere but Western Europe, and promoting eugenic policies that would encourage only those they believed were the fittest to survive and reproduce. They were relying on the naivete of fellow researchers, using academia as cover so they could present their agenda to politicians and policymakers as supposed scientific fact.
The Mankind Quarterly, as this journal was known, was a work of political propaganda. Its cover featured a globe divided into three, each with a head sticking out of it. The top two heads were labelled “Homo Caucasicus” and “Homo Mongolicus,” and the one at the bottom in black was labelled “Homo Africanus.” The editors never pretended they weren’t publishing race science.
Harrison’s declared hope was that The Mankind Quarterly would be shut down before it did any more damage. Had the scientific process operated perfectly, perhaps it would have been. After all, this is how good science is supposed to work. Researchers read each other’s papers to make sure that dodgy theories and biased studies don’t slip through. The worst mistakes are meant to be corrected or retracted. Peer review of this kind is the ultimate check and balance. It forms the cornerstone of public trust in science.
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.
The Mankind Quarterly was first published in 1961 to widespread condemnation. Today, more than 60 years later, the journal continues to publish race science under the guise of academic credibility.
In the 1960s, there was still a wide gray area between those on the disreputable fringes and those in the center of academia when it came to race, giving room to those who harbored political biases. A few contributors to The Mankind Quarterly were scientists with positions at top universities. Among them was Henry Garrett, the chair of psychology at Columbia University between 1941 and 1955, president of the American Psychological Association — and the one who made the unsubstantiated racist claims about Egypt’s diverse population. On the back cover of the October to December 1961 issue of The Mankind Quarterly was a full-page request for donations from the University of Edinburgh, with payments to be made directly to the university’s administrative office. These stamps of approval from reputable academia would have been enough to mislead some readers.
But most crucially, The Mankind Quarterly was funded and distributed independently. Its editors didn’t have to care about the judgment of other scholars because they were being bankrolled by a single benefactor from outside the scientific establishment. This philanthropist gave thousands in grants and gifts to Garrett alone, as well as bequeathing him $50,000 in his will. The influence of his largesse was so profound that today, more than 60 years after the first issue was released to widespread condemnation, The Mankind Quarterly is still in publication.
This is a story of how outside political interests have skewed the science of human difference for decades. And the damage continues. Only recently a grant was given by one of these shadowy funds to an American academic whose work was so ethically unsound that this year he was fired by his university.
Ifirst began investigating The Mankind Quarterly in 2017 for a book about racism in science. The journal was already notorious. The late psychologist William Tucker described it as being written by racists for racists. This was a publication in which nothing was “too bizarre or repugnant” to get a seal of approval, Tucker wrote in “The Funding of Scientific Racism,” a book published in 2002.
The current editor-in-chief, Gerhard Meisenberg — a relatively unknown biologist — did not respond to requests from Undark for comment. But when I interviewed him by email in 2017, Meisenberg wrote that “some of the early editors were nutcases.” He and others considered changing The Mankind Quarterly’s title after he took over, he added, “but then didn’t do it because perhaps improving an existing shoddy brand is more promising than having something without name recognition at all.”
Meisenberg’s candid admission nodded at the journal’s ignominious history. It originally owed its existence to a wealthy American philanthropist named Wickliffe Draper. Born in 1891, Draper was descended from plantation owners and textile machinery tycoons. The sole heir to his family’s fortune after the death of his sister, he invested his inheritance in defending what he saw as one of the most important causes of his time: segregation. In the early 20th century this wasn’t a difficult proposition. He had plenty of political support, particularly among leaders in the Southern states.
Draper enjoyed some sympathy in academia, too. Modern science had been macerating for so long in the belief that there really was a biological hierarchy between races that the myth had become embedded in mainstream biology. “Racism,” explains Michael Yudell, a historian and public health ethicist at Arizona State University, was “part and parcel of scientific thought at the time.”
This was a time in which eugenics was popular even among progressives. The Second International Eugenics Congress, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1921, had as its honorary president the inventor Alexander Graham Bell — famous for patenting the telephone. One of the four sections of the congress was on human racial differences. “Policymakers, eugenicists, and mainstream scientists — some of which were also eugenicists — were in dialogue,” says Yudell. “Even if somebody is not declaring themselves a eugenicist, ideas of eugenics, of racial hierarchy, of some groups being more fit, or in more extreme cases superior to others, you can find it throughout.”
Shy and preferring to operate behind the scenes, according to William Tucker, Wickliffe Draper’s millions would for decades be used to quietly fund individuals and groups who could help make the case that there were such profound psychological and intellectual differences between races that integration was impossible — and that as a result, all efforts toward racial equality were doomed. Directly through grants and cash gifts and indirectly through secondary organizations, money was pumped into academics who shared his political leanings. These funds would eventually extend toward the publication and distribution of The Mankind Quarterly.
As Tucker has documented, Draper funded the pamphlets of white supremacist Earnest Sevier Cox, author of the incendiary 1923 book “White America,” which argued that racial mixing would destroy Western civilization and that Black Americans should therefore be forced to leave the United States. He helped promote a 1939 bill by Sen. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo, of Mississippi, aimed at the repatriation of Black Americans. And he donated research funds to Charles Davenport, who founded the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1910 and served as its director until 1934.
But it was after the Second World War, in the era of civil rights and Brown v. Board of Education, that Draper’s funding of scientists ramped up. Thousands of dollars were given to Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley who argued in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969 that there might be innate intelligence differences between races, and the Stanford professor William Shockley, who advocated for eugenic sterilization policies.
Funds would also reach the University of North Carolina anatomy professor Wesley Critz George, who manipulated science to push against school integration in North Carolina. Another beneficiary of Draper’s money was the psychologist Audrey Shuey at Randolph-Macon Women’s College, author of the 1958 book “The Testing of Negro Intelligence,” which became a much-used resource by those wanting to defend segregation and make the case for natural intellectual disparities between races.
Draper passed away in 1972. The grants continued.
They would go on to support the work of Jean-Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario who also contributed to The Mankind Quarterly and later became central to the small international community of academics seeking to keep scientific racism alive into the 21st century. Rushton would eventually head the Pioneer Fund, an organization incorporated in 1937 to administer Draper’s money to researchers. In 2001, the fund had assets totalling more than $3 million. But sometime after 2011, according to tax reports, these assets seem to have been almost entirely drained. By 2012, the year that Rushton died, they were down to roughly a million. That same year, large amounts of money had been divested to an organization calling itself the Charles Darwin Research Institute in Canada — headed by Rushton himself before his death.
Following Rushton’s death, the Charles Darwin Research Institute was taken over by his son, Stephen Rushton, an associate professor at the University of South Florida. Stephen Rushton did not respond to a request for comment about the status of the institute or what has happened to the money invested in it by the Pioneer Fund.
It has been said, to quote the physicist Max Planck, that science advances one funeral at a time. But money doesn’t die the way people do. Perhaps if everyone who wrote for The Mankind Quarterly or received grants from Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer Fund was no longer around, the scientific community might be able to tell itself that rigorous, reliable science won out in the end against the forces of politically motivated race science bankrolled by the wealthy.
But some of these researchers are still alive. And more are taking their place.
One of the largest single beneficiaries of Wickliffe Draper’s generosity in the 20th century was the psychologist Thomas Bouchard, currently the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota, whose twin studies remain influential in intelligence research circles. Most recently, Bouchard’s work was cited in a 2022 paper in the Nature journal npj Science of Learning looking at genetic effects on cognitive performance as people learn over time.
In her 2012 book “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study,” the evolutionary psychologist Nancy Segal claims that Bouchard had never heard of the Pioneer Fund until its staff contacted him in 1980 or 1981. Despite concerns among his colleagues about accepting money from what was known to be a disreputable source, according to Segal, Bouchard admitted in 2009 that, “If not for Pioneer we would have folded long ago.”
Another psychologist, Linda Gottfredson at the University of Delaware, was given a research grant of $174,000 by Draper’s Pioneer Fund in 1989. The Washington Post reported at the time that taking this money was considered controversial by her university, but she went ahead and accepted it nonetheless. Gottfredson told Undark by email that the grants she received from the Pioneer Fund ultimately totaled “perhaps several hundred thousand dollars” and that she remains “grateful for its support.” She added that the fund’s president at the time “developed a talent for recognizing world-class scientists committed to answering critical questions that others feared asking,” and “supported them when other organizations would not.”
Those critical questions, for Gottfredson at least, have focused on racial group differences in intelligence and her belief that they have some natural underpinnings. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of genetic evidence for group differences in cognitive ability, her work has attracted suspicion. In one paper she shared with Undark, she condemned her critics for attempting to stifle her academic freedom, using the opportunity to defend fellow researchers Arthur Jensen and Thomas Bouchard. In another paper, titled “Resolute Ignorance on Race and Rushton,” she wrote that Jean-Philippe Rushton was a “scholar and a gentleman,” and that in her view, it is plausible to assume that IQ differences between Black and White Americans could be largely attributed to genetics.
But Gottfredson is perhaps most well-known for her public statement in The Wall Street Journal in 1994 defending widely-refuted claims about race and intelligence made in “The Bell Curve,” a book published that year by political scientist Charles Murray and the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein. Gottfredson argued that while the statistical bell curve for intelligence among Whites centered at an IQ of around 100, “for American Blacks” it was “roughly around 85,” and that there was no persuasive evidence that these curves were converging. The statement was signed by 52 others, many of whom were also linked to Wickliffe Draper and his funds, including Bouchard, Jensen, and Rushton.
Another signatory was a less well-known figure: Richard Haier, a psychologist and now emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine. Haier is the editor of Intelligence, a journal belonging to the major international scientific publishing group Elsevier, which also publishes the highly prestigious journals Cell and The Lancet. Unlike The Mankind Quarterly, Intelligence is considered a reputable mainstream publication, with bona fide academics on its editorial board. Yet many Pioneer Fund grantees — Gottfredson, Bouchard, and Rushton among them — have had dozens of papers published in the journal. After Rushton died in 2012, the journal printed a gushing obituary comparing him to the 18th-century English social economist Thomas Malthus, whose memorial in Bath praised him for his “spotless integrity.”
It is with people like Haier at the respectable end of academia that this story reaches out of the fringes of science and into its core.
The web woven by Wickliffe Draper in the 20th century, when he could count on august leaders of scientific institutions to support his segregationist and eugenicist causes, is far less distinguished today. But it hasn’t been wiped out completely. Stealthy back-scratching continues among The Mankind Quarterly contributors with scant academic credentials and those in mainstream academia and publishing.
In early 2018, I reported for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. that there were at least two individuals sitting on the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Intelligence who failed to meet the publisher’s own professional benchmarks. One of them was editor for The Mankind Quarterly, Gerhard Meisenberg. The other was Richard Lynn, then assistant editor of The Mankind Quarterly, and the president of Draper’s Pioneer Fund. Lynn was an emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, but a few months into 2018 that title would be withdrawn, following a motion by its student union that his views were “racist and sexist in nature.” (Since 2015, The Mankind Quarterly has been published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a think tank headed by Lynn.)
At the time, Haier, the editor of Intelligence, defended Lynn and Meisenberg. “I have read some quotes, indirect quotes, that disturb me,” he told me, “but throwing people off an editorial board for expressing an opinion really kind of puts us in a dicey area.” Yet, by the end of 2018 — after the piece in The Guardian was published — the journal’s editorial board went through a dramatic reshuffle and Lynn and Meisenberg were both gone.
A spokesperson for Elsevier told Undark that it is policy “to rotate Editorial Board members from time to time” and that “Elsevier’s journals operate under the guidance of an Editor-in-Chief and an Editorial Board. Editors-in-Chief are established researchers with a broad interest in their field and are well connected and respected in their subject community.”
In 2021, after losing all respectable academic affiliations, Lynn went on to co-author a paper in another Elsevier journal, Personality and Individual Differences, comparing the processing speeds of people in the United States and Taiwan. He made the unverified claim that part of any gap could be attributed to genetic differences between population groups. Lynn sat on the editorial advisory board of Personality and Individual Differences as recently as 2018. The journal’s editor published a review of his memoirs in 2021.
A TANGLED WEB
Wickliffe Draper’s early investments in race science have spawned a vast and still thriving network of people and publications devoted to race essentialism. Click unexpanded boxes to learn more about the personalities involved, the funds that support them, and the many avenues they have used — and continue to use — to spread their ideas.
“Peer review should weed out papers like that that are being submitted today,” says Yudell of Arizona State University. “But certainly, there are journals that are out there that have missed the boat and publish stuff that is promoting racism explicitly.” Both Elsevier journals, Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences, have become clearing houses for those closely connected to The Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund, routinely publishing articles about psychological and behavioral differences between races.
“The hard truth that some people don’t like to admit is that you can get anything you want published in something that looks like a respectable, prestigious journal,” says the science journalist and editor Ivan Oransky, who co-founded Retraction Watch, a website that logs papers that have been retracted from academic journals and reports on cases of scholarly misconduct, including plagiarism and harassment.
“There’s this imprimatur of peer review that happens, and I would argue in many cases, a false imprimatur of quality or legitimacy or even being correct,” Oransky explains. “Then it’s in the literature, and once it’s in the literature, inertia is an incredibly difficult force to reckon with. And so, it becomes even harder to remove something from literature or retract it.”
When these avenues fail, some simply set up online journals of their own. “Anybody could put a journal up on the internet right now and call it ‘the journal of whatever’ and create a peer review system with their own set of lackeys and publish and promote nonsense,” says Yudell.
The line between serious, rigorous scientific publications and shoddy ones, or “junk journals” as Oransky refers to them, has become further blurred in recent years with the dramatic rise in online academic publishing.
“This stuff keeps coming up,” says Oransky. It can be difficult for those on the outside to distinguish reliable content from the unreliable. Fringe race researchers looking for credibility have employed the effective strategy of publishing in both junk journals and — if they’re able to — in more respectable ones that are willing to give them room, such as Intelligence or Personality and Individual Differences. As their publications and citations mount up, they appear to meet the metrics for academic success.
“No one can tell the difference,” says Oransky. “And I would argue that undermines the legitimacy of the entire corpus of literature, even the good literature.”
Publishing is one side of the research coin. The other is funding. And following a temporary hiatus, Wickliffe Draper’s Pioneer Fund is still in business. In 2013, following the death of its president Jean-Philippe Rushton, only a small fraction of the fund’s assets remained. By 2020, though, they had risen again to almost $300,000 — suggesting that money was coming in from somewhere.
The Pioneer Fund’s U.S. tax records show that its most recent grant was given in 2019, totalling $15,000 to support an organization known as the Human Phenome Diversity Foundation, based in Ohio. This foundation’s president was listed as Bryan Pesta, then a tenured business professor at Cleveland State University in Ohio. In 2016, Pesta published a paper in which he predicted that as the IQ level required to do a job increases, “the percent of White and Asian workers will increase, while the percent of Black workers will decrease.” This was published in Open Differential Psychology, an open-access online journal edited by a right-wing blogger with no known reputable academic affiliations, who is — like Pesta — a contributor to The Mankind Quarterly.
In 2020, Pesta also published research in Intelligence on racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence. Roughly a year later, the University of Virginia psychologists Evan Giangrande and Eric Turkheimer responded, stating that the work of Pesta and his colleagues in this paper served “as an example of how racially motivated and poorly executed work can find its way into a mainstream scientific journal, underscoring the importance of robust peer review and rigorous editorial judgment.”
In 2021, Pesta worked on another paper, this time trying to look for correlations between race and behavioral traits using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development database, a long-term study of brain development in American children supported by the National Institutes of Health. The paper analyzed the DNA of almost 10,000 of the children in the study to calculate the percentage of five broad population groups each one might statistically belong to, in a similar way to modern-day genetic ancestry tests. Children were labelled as 10 percent or less African, for example, or 90 percent or less European. The goal was to see if differences in rates of depression, educational attainment, and other factors could be linked proportionately to a child’s race.
In September, Cleveland State University told Undark that Pesta was dismissed from his job in March, following an internal investigation. This was not because of his associations with The Mankind Quarterly, nor because he had accepted money from the Pioneer Fund. It was because the university had been informed by the National Institutes of Health that Pesta had been misusing their data, “resulting in multiple violations of the Data Use Certification agreement he signed to gain access to the information.” A spokesperson for Cleveland State University added that the National Institutes of Health had banned Pesta from using its data for three years, describing this as “the most serious and longest such ban” in its history.
In its statement to Undark, Cleveland State University defended the right of researchers to follow whatever line of investigation they chose without interference. “We strongly believe our faculty are entitled to full freedom in their research, but they must adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and professional ethics.” Ultimately, then, Pesta’s failure was not seen to be his chosen field of research — race. It was his breach of data protocols.
In an email message to Undark, Pesta admitted to receiving money from the Pioneer Fund, but described the investigation against him as a “kangaroo court.”
“I absolutely did not misuse NIH data,” Pesta said, noting that the most recent payment from the fund came to him after he had been fired, amounting to $20,000. “As per my agreement with them, I am using the money to fund a series of papers that further explore strong links between race, IQ, and human well-being.”
On May 14, a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, became the scene of an American mass shooting. Ten people were killed — all of them Black — and three others were injured. Like the Christchurch killer three years earlier, who shot 51 worshippers in a mosque in New Zealand, the murderer in this case wrote an exhaustive racist manifesto seeking to justify his actions. But in the pages of this document were also citation after citation of scientific journal papers.
In the aftermath, scientists were quick to introspect, wondering how published research could have been distorted to serve such horrific ends and asking how they might communicate better to make sure good scientific work wasn’t misinterpreted. For many, the manifesto represented nothing more than the misguided appropriation of honest scientific research by a rambling conspiracy theorist who had failed to understand it. What fewer were willing to confront was that among the academics cited were those who had knowingly accepted funds from supporters of white supremacy like Wickliffe Draper or had chosen to contribute to overtly racist publications such as The Mankind Quarterly for years.
The manifesto cited a 2004 paper by the twin researcher Thomas Bouchard, and a 2002 paper by Richard Lynn, president of Draper’s Pioneer Fund, titled “Racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality.” It cited two papers by Rushton, including one that was retracted in 2021. According to the retraction note, Rushton’s work was not only offensive, but it also failed to “provide a fair representation of the literature of that time which was available” to the authors, and then failed to “draw valid inferences from it.” All appeared in journals owned by academic publishing giants such as Elsevier, SAGE, and Wiley.
Two other papers mentioned in the manifesto, making the case for links between genetics and intelligence differences, were co-authored in 2011 and 2015 by the Scottish psychiatrist Ian Deary, who retired from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 and has frequently contributed to the Elsevier journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. Deary wrote for The Mankind Quarterly in 1991, although as he told Undark by email, that paper was a “pointed critique of a paper in that journal that was purporting to provide evidence for a biological basis for claimed race differences in intelligence test scores.” Deary has co-authored at least two papers with Linda Gottfredson, the Pioneer Fund grantee and author of the Wall Street Journal Letter. He did not respond to a request for comment regarding his work with Gottfredson.
Another researcher credited in the shooter’s manifesto was Michael Woodley, a British academic who often collaborates with other Mankind Quarterly contributors, and has been promoted on far-right media channels. The New York Times reported in June 2022 that Woodley claimed “there has been an IQ decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa” and that “humans can be divided into subspecies.” Yet, as easy as it is to find Woodley’s extremist writings online, at the time the manifesto was published he was affiliated with one of Belgium’s most highly-regarded universities, Vrije Universiteit Brussels.
When there were protests after the Buffalo massacre, the university suspended its links with Woodley, declaring itself in a statement to be “shocked” by what had happened.
How is it possible for institutions to be shocked at having racists on their staff or for journals to plead innocence when racists write for them when these individuals make no effort to hide their views? “Ideology plays a role in all science,” says historian Mark Borrello at the University of Minnesota. He dismisses as naïve the defense of academics and institutions that claim to be politically neutral, or oblivious to the real world when it comes to race and racism.
“Everyone comes from a perspective,” he argues. Science “is rife with politics, and particularly when we’re talking about something like this.”
The story of Wickliffe Draper and his millions makes this clear. It could be argued that science bared its political cracks in 1961 when The Mankind Quarterly should have been closed down at the urging of serious researchers. It revealed its ideological failures again with Jean-Philippe Rushton, whose papers are only now being flagged or retracted, years after his death. More recently, concerned academics made clear that Woodley’s and Bryan Pesta’s research could not be trusted, yet their universities allowed them to continue in their posts and keep publishing race research until external events forced their hands.
The question this raises is where the boundaries of acceptable research lie in a system compromised by outside political interests for more than a century. One of the factors keeping fringe racist theories in academia alive well past their sell-by dates is the perennial defense of academic freedom. This principle holds that nothing, no matter how uncomfortable it may make people, is beyond scientific inquiry — and it is so deeply embedded in how scientists think and how institutions operate, it can leave a low bar for what is morally or socially acceptable. In some cases, it also leaves a low bar for what is factually or scientifically accurate.
Can academic freedom be treated as absolute if organizations like Draper’s Pioneer Fund and publications like The Mankind Quarterly are able to circumvent the processes designed to maintain academic rigor? Not according to Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch. “If you’re going to talk about academic freedom above all else then you have to take responsibility and acknowledge when there is wrong information, wrong claims, dangerous information, harmful claims and take responsibility for that,” he warns. “I don’t see that happening.”
This isn’t to say that there haven’t been challenges to the individuals and organizations funded over the last century by Wickliffe Draper. There have been, and many times over. Countless articles and books have been written exposing the dangerous, pseudoscientific networks that Draper and his staff cultivated through the 20th century, and have helped keep alive into the 21st. What is less clear is why this kind of firefighting is still needed if science is so good at correcting itself. “Where’s the academic vetting? Where’s the academic responsibility toward facts and the truth?” asks Oransky.
In the meantime, politically motivated work continues to be published by journal groups that are supposed to maintain the highest ethical standards for the sake of public trust in science. “It would take a century’s worth of work to go back and look at all the terrible research that was done to promote racism,” says Yudell. At the moment, progress is happening painfully slowly — one retraction, one ethical breach, one massacre at a time.
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Since he is mentioned, it seems appropriate to mention that BIlbo’s statue was finally removed from storage at the MIssissippi Capitol Building a few days ago. The statue had been removed from public display a couple years ago. https://mississippitoday.org/2022/12/16/statue-of-former-gov-bilbo-removed-from-capitol/
As another of the historians that infest this site, I would like to express my disapproval of the removal of Mr. Bilbo´s statue and all the other statues and monuments to Civil War heroes (racists by association, and often by word and deed). This practice of erasing our history is bad bad bad! As the eminent philosopher Pogo said many years ago, ¨We have met the enemy and he is us¨. Those men are assumed to be racists, sexual abusers, white supremecists, torturerrs and all that, and they probably were. I never knew any of them personally. The fact is, that is who we are as a nation. It is our history. It is who we are, what we did and in many cases are still doing. We cannot deny it and should not try. It won´t go away. If we look the other way and pretend it didn´t happen, it will happen again. The way to deal with these things is to erect another monument or plaque next to them explaining who these men were, what they did, note the fact that the standards of civillized behavior in our country have changed for the better since then, and express the hope that the bad things they did never happen again. We on the left/¨liberal¨/ progressive side condemn the right wingers for throwing all the Nazis in our recent history down the memory hole, but lets not do it ourselves to those we do not approve of.
That said, the practice of outright racism masquerading as science needs to stop. As noted yesterday, peer review has its problems but some sort of ¨crowd sourced¨ review and criticism process might be the best way to deal with it. A political correctness czar would be counter productive.
This viewpoint with regard to leaving the statues up is tendentious. We erect statues to people we admire. Have you seen a statue of Benedict Arnold or Adolf Hitler – both of whom have had a more consequential outcome on history than bigots and segregationist officials. If the descendants of those that suffered at their hands demand their removal – there ought to be little hesitation.
I see plenty of statues in Lenin all over Russia, though there is no family that has not suffered because of him and though plenty of people have complained… I think the removal or the retention of controversial statues has less to do with the suffering and more to do with the priorities of whoever is currently in power (not so much descendants of victims as people wishing to pander to progressive opinion, in the US; people wishing to pander to residual pro-communist opinion and to “own the libs”, in Russia).
Comparing Lenin to Confederates is practically slander.
Those who have power to act, in our time, erect monuments to that which they admire.
Those who had power to act in the past did the same, in their time.
Given the ephemeral nature of glory, power, and life itself, it is wisest to treat past works with the utmost indulgence. As Cristobal suggests, interpretative or contextual signage is easily provided. The pigeons can then be left to do their work.
The public accumulation of different monuments, representing different beliefs, ideas, and styles, is visible proof of social, cultural, and political dynamism, and therefore of great value to any who desire social or political change, irrespective of what any particular monument may be thought to represent. A veritable forum of dialectics, in plain view downtown.
On the other hand, the notion that the works of others must be made ever subject to the beliefs and ideas of those in power today shows a thirst for imperium and stagnation, a notion as anxious as it is arrogant. It is the notion of those who think they rule the world, rather than live for awhile in it. It is the notion of those who hate the people of the past and distrust the people of the future. It is the notion of those whose present victories are won only against enemies that cannot fight back.
That pretty much sums up today’s bourgeois elite, doesn’t it? An elite of frail nerves, towering vanity, and with little sense of stewardship.
I say we ought to leave monuments as they are, unless they pose an acute menace, in which case they should be relocated to some sort of park or museum.
The removal of monuments has less to do with justice than it has to do with power, and more still to do with the insecurity of those in power. The desire to use present power to edit the public texts of history is a common trait of unstable regimes. Beware of those in power who waste time renaming things.
This is complete nonsense. History is interpretation, by definition. Newer generations should absolutely be open to condemning and disowning the past as they see fit.
And I say this fully aware that anything I support today might be subjected to the same dismissal in the future. If, for example, tomorrow Medicare for All happened and statues to the main pushers of the legislation were erected, and then in 150 years the worm had turned and now M4A was vilified and those statues were torn down, that would be entirely the business of the people 150 years in the future.
The Confederacy were traitors and scum. I’m perfectly happy with tearing down their monuments (monuments that were themselves part of a coordinated propaganda campaign aimed at erecting a revisionist myth, they are not some genuine organic expression of regional pride). These statues shouldn’t exist in the exact same way statues of Hitler shouldn’t exist.
This hand-wringing about the supposed sanctity of the past is beyond absurd, because it’s a strawman. No one is advocating for altering the historical record. No records or sources of historical information are being destroyed. This is not some damnatio memoriae where knowledge of a Pharaoh and his reign is being purged. The history is not being lost; crappy parts of it are simply not being celebrated anymore.
Cristobal – Erecting a monument or plaque to correct the record is a poor solution. By default people are going to consider statues in the “public square” to be there as a celebration of the life and accomplishments of the person depicted. It’s an honor to have a statue with one’s face on it.
Statues can be seen from a distance and only a few of the more interested folks are going to walk up close to read a plaque explaining the context.
The racists and white supremacists should not be celebrated in the public square. If you want to preserve the history, and I am one who does want to, the appropriate place is in a museum or other facility devoted to telling the entire history of the person and events in which they were involved.
No one is under any obligation to honor trash from history. It’s just taken a while for public opinion to realize ‘oh, we shouldn’t have honored these garbage people in the first place’.
That’s on top of the fact that with the American South in particular, a whole lot of those figures were in fact not honored for decades until a concerted propaganda effort was launched to erect a noble myth of a Lost Cause. The lie and the twisting was history happened when those statues were first erected, not now when they’re being removed.
Extremely interesting to me, both professionally and personally (I knew Phil when he first came to Western, and even have two publications with him). I only found out he was a flaming racist after I finished my doctorate (but I knew he was an idiot from the moment he first showed up). Western was “accommodating,” if exclusive back then (I was the first Haudenausaunee the graduate psychology department enrolled). But after I finished Western began stocking up on frothing racists, if not just fostering the latent racists it already had. Two years before he died Phil reached out, asking if we could publish together again using our old data; but I never bothered to transfer my punched cards to data files and neither had he.
I think that a Project needs to be set up to trace where all that money went and who signed up for it. You see all this and it is surprising to learn that so many different threads like eugenics laws, antisemitism, sterilization, the more recent “The Bell Curve” book, all of them are threads from just the one cloth and are not random appearances. Of course in an ideal world this should be a job for the FBI but it is my understanding that these days they have other priorities – like Twitter parody accounts that hardly have any followers.
This is an unpopular opinion but it seems to me that the problem is not in investigating differences between human groups per se, but 1) Defining what the groups are 2) using these differences by some groups in discriminating and persecuting others.
Look at the NBA and NFL for example. It’s obvious there are differences in physical ability between black and white players, which is why most players are black. If that is the case with physical attributes why not elsewhere?
The two issues I mentioned above are difficult to tease out. For example, for mixed race (say Nordic & sub-Saharan Africa to take an extreme) how do you classify them. What about groups that have been mixing for hundreds or even thousands of years? When studying you need as “pure” as possible, which again is difficult and for some in modern day North Africa, Near East, and certain Asian countries is difficult, but not impossible.
The second is unfortunately this research is done for the purpose or leads people to discriminate and persecute others. Some of it is fraudulent from the start with the expressed goal of keeping certain groups down. This goes both for research that assigns all to nature (genetic) AND research that assigns all to nurture (society). Other research is genuine and valid.
For this I think the way forward is:
1) Separate the weed from the chaff: bad politicized science needs to be discarded and genuine valid science kept (regardless of what it uncovers)
2) Continue the research. The only antidote to bad science is good science
3) Separate the value of a human from their abilities. An even better way to look at it is different groups of people inherently have different abilities. In a just civilized society, we should structure the system in such a way for different groups with different abilities to use those abilities to live a decent fulfilling life.
Do that and you make something good out of what started out as bad ..
I posted a devil’s advocate comment that was not accepted.
The TLDR was that good science should be done and politicized science needs to be purged. Science only informs us of reality and it is up to us to react to it. Group differences exist but they do not mean that we should persecute or discriminate against others. It also doesn’t exclude individual intra-group differences. Knowing what is nature vs environment will allow us to be MORE effective in alleviating inequity (in the traditional sense) and human suffering and unleashing the true potential of all human beings.
This might not have been the goal of the original funders and researchers but we can wrest this away from them and do better. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is not to shy away from uncomfortable truths but face them courageously and justly. I hope we can.
“Group differences exist but they do not mean that we should persecute or discriminate against others.” “Knowing what is nature vs environment will allow us to be MORE effective in alleviating inequity (in the traditional sense) and human suffering and unleashing the true potential of all human beings.”
These sentiments fueled the eugenist movement and the entire “White Man’s Burden” rationale for Imperialism and Colonialism (and slavery).
Scientists like Stephen Jay Gould & Richard Lewontin spent their entire careers debunking the entire concept of “group differences.”
There ARE group differences. All you have to do is look at which group the NBA players are primarily composed of vs 60 years ago and how much better it is now. Differences go both ways. And if there are differences in the physical domain why not anywhere else? Group differences are consistent with evolutionary theory and it is self-delusion to buttress a misguided notion of equity to deny that – especially by ideologically driven researchers.
“White Man’s Burden” was used as a justification for colonialism and exploitation. Emphasis on justification, because they were planning on doing it anyways. It does not erase Group differences but shows the danger if used by the wrong people.
Are things better off now with our drive for “Equity”? Let’s take Africa. Our charity is really a thinly veiled contempt for African nations, used to keep them in debt while we exploit them and their natural resources. If we actually wanted to make a difference then we would treat them fairly as human beings and “teach them how to fish” so to speak, then leave them alone to develop at their own pace. In my opinion, denying Group Differences only perpetuates the same cycle of exploitation but under a different guise.
Is there something genetic that makes black NBA players better?. I always assumed it was environmental factors: less opportunities to “make it” elswhere so black players tended to focus more on basketball vs their white counterparts.
I agree with the crux of your arguement, though. The vary thing that determines your skin color also determines how much vitamin D you get from the sun. Its important to know that so you can act accordingly
I don’t know: in the early half to thethe middle of the 20th century, there were a lot of talented Jewish basketball players, disproportionate to their numbers. Rather than dismissing the notion that there’s something inherent to Jewishness that makes them better basketball players, people tried to come up with (and many believed) increasingly bizarre reasons why Jewishness and basketball went together, and why not? It was “obviously” true that Jews and basketball go together, right? 50-70 years later, these claims seem comically absurd (and often downright racist), as does what seemed to be “self evident truth” that Jews were somehow naturally and “racially” good at basketball. I don’t think it’s good idea to come up with overly generalized explanation (like race) for something with very small N (eg talented athletes).
By “ideologically driven researchers.” I assume you’re talking about Gould & Lewontin, & books like “Not In Our Genes,” & “The Mismeasure of Man,” Neither talked about morphological group differences. The both talked about abusing science to justify claiming group group “intelligence” differences & argued strenuously and persuasively about the very concept of IQ testing. IMO Gould, Lewontin & others were the ones opposing ideological driven science & not the other way around.
Why couldn’t it be both?
It looks to me like this modern race science (largely) emerged for extra-scientific reasons and was promoted by extra-scientific means; then when the political currents changed, it was attacked (at least in part) for extra-scientific reasons and by extra-scientific means (that is to say, they were attacked not only because it was bad science, but also because it was specifically racist science). The latter may be closer to the truth, but I do not think their motives should be beyond scrutiny. It is not like anti-racists have never erred in their crusades: see the pushback against racist-promoted invasion theories of ancient migrations, which nonetheless seem to be more accepted nowadays since they also align with evidence.
Phoenix – They way you use “group differences” seems an awful lot like “racial differences”. If that’s not right, please explain what you mean because to me it sounds quite racist.
Yes, let’s take Africa, and Central and South America, and Southeast Asia, and any less-developed country. The US could not care less about equity. All the US wants is to dominate the politics of the countries with resources that we can extract so the leaders won’t get in our way or, better yet, will help us confiscate whatever resources we desire.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with “group differences”, it’s purely economic and political.
Can I assume that you know that “race” is a social construct and there are no genetic markers that distinguish one “race” from another?
Gould cooked his data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
Morton’s data was correct.
Lewontin’s stuff is just outdated. For example, Noah Rosenberg’s paper in 2002 finding that humans can be classified into 6 basic genetic clusters, 5 of which were associated with geographical regions of the world, uses techniques that were really not available in 1984 when Not In Our Genes came out:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Science%202002%20Rosenberg.pdf
There are a couple of obvious concerns with this sort of article. One is that a hundred years ago, belief in the idea that humanity was divided into races, as dogs and horses were, and that these races had different characteristics, was pretty much the rule among educated people. It was considered to be up-to-the-minute scientific truth. The culture and politics of the time are full of it, and it was not limited to the West either. There is a cottage industry of right-wing pundits who spend their time crawling through the writings and personal papers of early Socialists, looking for things which now seem questionable so they can say ha-ha you’re another. Take a random set of educated people at that point in history and such views will be common. It’s an example of the tendency that I’ve called chronicism, of sitting smugly in judgement on the errors of earlier times: it’s a form of temporal imperialism, in which we take over the mentalities and practices of the past, so that we can feel superior to all those great minds now proven guilty of Thoughtcrime.
The other is the the judgements here are moral and aesthetic, not scientific. As the article says, scientific conclusions should be “morally and socially acceptable.” For example, when I read that an academic has been suggesting that “there has been an IQ decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa” I thought at first that I had missed a phrase along the lines of “in a since-discredited study”, or “in a study that has since been withdrawn” or “in a study that has since been contradicted by more recent research.” But no, the problem with the study is that its author has been “promoted on far-right media channels.” That’s all you need to know. In fact, the story is probably a garbled reference to the documented precipitous fall in educational standards in France since the 1990s, especially as measured in things like mathematics and reading comprehension age. This is not in dispute, but what is in dispute is the extent to which it’s related to mass immigration of poorly educated and sometimes illiterate families from the Maghreb, suddenly pitched into an education system which was not given the resources to cope with them, and how far it’s related to other social factors and changes in policies for the teaching of literacy and mathematics. The official position is that the problem does not exist (although the PISA rankings say otherwise) and anybody who says it does is a racist. So nothing is done. Maybe somebody would be brave enough to do some research on the subject? I doubt it.
you can see the woodrew wilson democrats are back. robert riech, bill clinton, gene sperling and others cited the western(white)innovators would design the consumables of tomorrow from their cushy well adorned home offices of the future, and send that information off to the sweating yellow grunts in china.
you could see the rage in hillarys voice and face in 2016 when she said i will ring china in with missiles till they know their place in the world.
the dim wits actually drank their own kool aid, and sent off the west’s wealth and technology to china, because they thought that the chinese could not figure out how things worked, without western(white) management.
PBS used to have all sorts of this type on citing how the west(white)will manage china because it would be to difficult for them to do it on their own, just as modern machines could not be operated by blacks in america.
i used to hear that when i was just a small kid in the 1950’s. truman desegregated the military, and that put that lie to rest.
the type the author has stated, has gotten a hold of most western ex-left parties, such as the canadian liberals, the u.k. labor party, and of course the american democrat party.
they are tied in knots as what they consider to be sub humans, russians, show them up to be the small little minded dim wits that they are.
Last Xmas, Santa gave me HG Wells’ Outline of History, which I hadn’t read. Disappointingly it kicks off with illustrations of human ‘racial’ differences: the Mongol, the Negroid, the dashing Caucasian…
Wells was a great science fiction writer – as a historian, not so good.
This sort of racial heirarchy stuff runs deep. Early work in ethnology in the US was interested demonstrating that native Americans were inferior and there was quite a power struggle among the early ethnologists. Finally concluding that different ethnic groups may have their own peculiaraties, but that did not make one superior to another was quite a struggle. As late as the 1960s the FHA appraisal process had a built-in redlining bias. The neighborhood in which the house was located was ranked depending the ethnicity. Northern Europeans were of course at the top, with Italians, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Asians and Negros at the bottom. It was quite detailed.
Are Northern European, Eastern European, Italians etc different races? Seems to me that segregating by group is what runs deep. If we didnt do it with race we’d just find other ways to do so — socioeconomic status, caste, religion, etc
Depends on your definition of race. When people do genetic PCA that clusters samples nicely by country and yet generates greatest separation, you basically have Baltic Finns as one long cluster and All The Rest as another, diagonal cluster.
Late to this but a couple of points:
–is the name of Draper a familiar one here in Textile Town? Absolutely. But those logos are gone now along with our textile economy. One might also ask whether the concerns of the above article are also a hop in the time machine even if the foundation and its beneficiaries linger. The would be censors love to cite the New York massacre to make their case but mass shootings in America these days are so common we don’t even hear about most of them. Unless the articles in question were advocating the shooting of Black people they would not pass muster as accessories.
–and secondly one might point out that the Eugenicists are not the only wielders of the genetic superiority club. Indeed the entire meritocracy movement that followed the Sputnik panic was premised on IQ tests and “grouping” of the supposedly genetically superior (via those tests in first grade) into ranked elementary school classes. It goes on even today in cities like NY which have special public schools for the gifted. If one were to rake all of the no longer racial but still genetic assumptions out of our society–often based on testing–you would cast a very wide net indeed.
To me it sounds like the above lengthy article is a call for more censorship and cancelling and antithetical to principles of free speech. If the articles are bad then the cure is more speech not less. But if one wants to start regulating speech then you are going to have to start regulating all of the politics in science and that goes way beyond Draper.
While I am generally inclined to agree with the caution around the utilisation of this topic, the article does make the valid point that “more speech” or “more science” objectively hasn’t been the cure in this case. If one is bent on promoting questionable science (and it does appear highly questionable at best), one can do it with enough effort and money. There has been pushback, but it clearly has not been effective. (On the other hand, censorship wouldn’t be effective either.) Also, the author calls for more academic vetting, which at least ideally ought to be something different from censorship.
In the first instance, David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here is an excellent book that addresses these issues with both candor and tact.
It needs to be underscored that there is an empirical reality out there which doesn’t care about your ideology.
IQ is over 100 years old, substantially replicated, and while there are problems with it (it is a relative measure), reality is that there is a difference cognitively between someone who scales at 80 and someone who scales at 120 and it matters in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. You have the Flynn effect, you have problems generalizing across cultures and SES, but at the end of the day, you have clear demonstrable group differences in the United States (the subject of the Bell Curve), and anyone who says otherwise is a liar or hiding in relativism. 52 people in psychometrics signed an article in the WSJ stating the Bell Curve was consistent with the scientific mainstream at the time. Group differences in observable behaviors is simply an irrefutable fact. Look at the FBI crime stats, look at PISA scores across countries, look at SAT scores by demographics. If you look at someone like Flynn, who definitely stacked up on the environmental side of things, he had the utmost respect for his colleagues, unlike Gould:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
who cooked his research to discredit Morton’s findings, which have subsequently been replicated (and brain volume does correlate with IQ, if the effect is modest).
The genomics data banks are new, and there are clear correlations between genes and educational attainment (EA), and, of course, now the NIH aren’t letting scientists study correlations between genes and EA because “stigma”:
https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database
In humans, it is usually better to look at what people do over what they say. If a group of people are actively trying to suppress research into correlations between genetics and educational attainment, it is pretty clear that they believe strongly that such research will demonstrates such correlations, and in a non-politically correct manner, or they wouldn’t waste effort on suppressing scientific research.
Last, now you have people studying those genes that correlate with educational attainment and it turns out many of them are related to the development of brain architecture (who could guess), so I guess we have to shut down neurology, embrylogy, and attempts at understanding cognition. . . for which the interested can check out Haier’s book on the neuroscience of intelligence, published by the dubious “Cambridge University Press.”
However, working backwards, you have clearly demonstrable behavioral differences, next you are able to assign correlations in genetics to those behavioral differences, and now you are able to understand how those genetic factors affect brain development, which means you are one step away from something that could become a replicable scientific hypothesis from the structure of brain anatomy to behavior. It ought to be exciting, but instead the Saini’s of the world are trying to shut it down. I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, but what kind of theocrat would want to prevent scientific inquiry in this area?
The blank slate is garbage, its not true, so if that means we all have to become Nazis or eugenicists, let’s have that discussion. Better than pretending Ptolemy is correct and Galileo is an evil man who hates God and has proposed a discredited theory on behalf of the devil. Life’s not fair, and not everyone gets dealt the same hand at the start. If you poll population geneticists, they are overwhelmingly hereditarians, even if they don’t weigh in on the issues of the day for fear of decapitation. Behavioral genetics is well-established and not all that controversial if you don’t talk about group differences. There is no known behavior that doesn’t have genetic correlates. I do not see how having a scientific description of the world necessitates an ideological or normative perspective. I do not see how some aggregate group average necessitates some rule regarding how you treat individuals.
The solution to reality, rather than call people names, and brow-beat people into submission, and most importantly, shut down scientific inquiry, is to try and wrestle with reality in the most humane way possible. Because willful ignorance will not stop scientific progress. Even if the West embraces some form of Lysenkoism, and renders itself scientifically backwards, I doubt the Chinese care, and all we do is hobble ourselves. How are we going to produce real scientists, when we ask people to pretend that the emperor (here the Blank Slate) is wearing exquisite clothing? What you get is ideologues, hacks, and cowards.
The other thing is medicine. In the US, Black women have a much higher incidence of premature babies. This may be entirely cultural or the result of systematic racism. On the other hand, it might have something to do with genetic group differences, and if it did, then by studying those differences, you might actually be able to develop medical interventions that save and improve lives, more effectively than anti-racist exorcism rituals. The groups that people are afraid of being stigmatized may have the most benefit in the long-term from these forbidden forms of research.
> The groups that people are afraid of being stigmatized may have the most benefit in the long-term from these forbidden forms of research.
Those groups may not feel that way. Moreover, they have reason.
> If a group of people are actively trying to suppress research into correlations between genetics and educational attainment, it is pretty clear that they believe strongly that such research will demonstrates such correlation
Nonsense. You’re arguing that every insurgent paradigm is correct simply because it’s insurgent.
I don’t have time to dig into the detail here. Speaking generally, I”m seeing a lot of material that gives off “code smell“, as it were. Lots and lots of faith in standardized testing. A denial that science (I assume as practiced) has no “normative perspective” and is non-ideological. Above all, no examination of what constitutes a “group.”
Haven’t seen The Bell Curve mentioned in donkey’s years. I’m not sure I find the reminder refreshing.
Lambert, humbly my 2 cents. But as far as standardized testing, IQ is used in every public school in the US in special education, as well as by the Armed Services. It is also embraced by Leftist types in the context of the death penalty. Historically, the lack of male/female IQ differences was used for such reactionary goals as advocating for women’s right to vote.
And people can eugenics this and that, but John Maynard Keynes was the head of the London Eugenics Society, and for good or bad, his embrace of eugenics was not unrelated to the rest of his political and economic vision. To ignore that component of his thought, while embracing his economic perspective really distorts his world view. It was directly related to avoiding the Malthusian trap from the standpoint of progressives, another thing that exists whether we want to believe in it.
Look, without being reductionist, whatever is not reducible to biology exists on a biological platform, and is driven by biology and biological evolution in the first instance, which is to say, biology is the motor of culture, language and economics. You can invert that if you want, but I have to reject it based on a commitment to physicalism.
At the end of the day, Stalin was right. You can have blank slate, or you can have genetics and evolutionary biology. At least the fundamentalist Christians are honest about their rejection of evolutionary theory on the basis of theology, and it makes more sense to say God created the world than to claim nature created everything except the human brain or human behavior.
Just to add an additional two cents, those of us here who have been boosters of the genetic connection to behavior would agree that any avenue of legitimate scientific inquiry should be left open and particularly in light of how extremely political science has become in our current era. The debate over Covid and vaccines would be a recent example.
Banning such research is not going to stop the haters or affect the real issue which is that individual characteristics vary within groups even if the groups themselves are different and generalizing about such things amounts to prejudice. And that btw applies to those who think certain groups are inherently superior as well as those who sneer at the supposedly inferior. Both are a kind of racism and should be condemned.
Having dug into the Effective Altruism/ Less Wrong crowd, I have come across claims that Peter Thiel is founding the neoreactionary “Intellectual dark Webb”. It’s more focused on building an appearance of respectability then academic scholarship, but there is probably an overlap. This seems to be where the HBD, “Human BioDiversity” comes from, that among others the Alameda CEO is into (according to her Tumblr). Also a large overlap with the incel worldview, so I would guess that comes from the same tree of thought.
Just if anyone thought millionaires funding racism was all in the past. Though it’s billionaires these days.
Allegedly goes back at least to 1999, and original HBD group included Krugman, Pinker, Becker, Fukuyama:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/BaileyAssociates/HumanBiodiversityGroup.htm
I should mention that some of the *same* foundations that are mentioned as sponsors in PBS/NPR also funded eugenics “research” pre World War Two. I was an interesting, um… feeling seeing some of the names on the screen match those on paper in my books.
People might die, but their foundations (and corporations) can live for generations.
I’m happy to live in a world where ideas and not personalities matter. It must be hard to be Ms. Saini. She doesn’t know is she should believe in calculus until she finds the paper trail for who was funding Newton and Leibniz.