Written by Bo Winegard.

The French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, is often ridiculed by conservatives and analytical philosophers. By conservatives, because he was a political radical who railed against the West, despised bourgeois normalcy, lauded Che Guevera and refused to criticize Stalin long after his brutality was widely known. And by analytical philosophers, because his philosophy seems not only wrong but almost meaningless, full of gnomic prose and puzzling, paradoxical assertions. He was at times a dazzling writer, but also a charlatan. Even today, criticism of Sartre regularly makes the rounds on Twitter, with recent tweets mocking him for his physical appearance.

I am both a conservative and a fan of analytical philosophy, so I might be expected to share this disdain of Sartre. But I do not. In fact, I have long been attracted to his philosophy, and still find his greatest work, Being and Nothingness, invigorating (even if, at some 700 pages of difficult prose, it is a little taxing.)1 In what follows, I will defend Sartre’s philosophy from accusations that it is meaningless, obvious, purposefully obscurantist or simply irrelevant in a Darwinian world.2

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Fertility and Family Labor Supply. Katrine Jakobsen and colleagues examine whether the effect of earnings on fertility differs between men and women. Analysing Danish register data, they find that higher earnings reduce fertility among women but raise fertility among men. This suggests that the substitution effect dominates for women, while the income effect dominates for men.

Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed. Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman report results from a survey of students at two major US universities. They asked, “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?” and found that 88% said yes. Four out of five had misrepresented their views to align with professors, and more than three quarters had self-censored.

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Written by Noah Carl.

The typical partisan (on any side of politics) talks and acts as if nothing would make him happier than for all his opponents to give up and for his vision to become permanently instantiated in policy. Ever indignant about his enemies’ desire to tear down everything that is good and pure, he wishes to convey that only total political victory would give him lasting fulfilment.

In most cases, I would argue, this is simply a delusion. I am not saying that he would experience no joy or satisfaction from achieving total political victory. I am saying, rather, that the happiness he experienced would be fleeting and short-lived.

Humans derive meaning from competing in groups. And it’s this competition — the struggle towards a shared goal as part of a group — that is the primary source of meaning for partisans. It is not the fact that the government’s policy program may eventually bear some resemblance to their own preferred set of policies.1

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Timestamps:

00:00 Welcome and Paper Overview

00:43 Key Findings Across Traits

02:43 Controlling for Ancestry

08:14 Confounds and Genetic Hitchhiking

11:27 Data Embargo Controversy

12:48 Challenging the Sapient Paradox

17:09 Polygenic vs Single Gene Selection

21:30 How This Compares to Piffer’s Research

24:50 Citation Dispute and Complaints

38:14 Future Directions and Africa Data

41:23 New Project on Civilization Stages

44:51 Closing Remarks

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Written by Jonathan Salem-Wiseman.

The reception to claims about an Indigenous “way of knowing” tends to be determined by our political tribe. On the left, the very idea of a distinct, non-Western way of knowing is accepted as an obvious truth, if not an unimpeachable piety. Indigenous peoples, it is argued, live in harmony with nature and are thus uniquely attuned to the “interconnections between all things.” On the right, such a claim is often met with derision, and is dismissed as the latest iteration of faddish, “noble savage” mysticism.

I think both these positions are wrong and misleading, and they overlook a much more interesting story. An Indigenous “way of knowing” is a real phenomenon, but it falls short of exaggerated claims about an epistemic access to the world that is just as rigorous as the natural sciences. I want to argue that an Indigenous way of knowing, properly understood, is explained by global psychological variation, manifesting as a set of differences in visual processing skills and cognitive dispositions.

A case study

An interesting recent development within anthropology is the idea of combining Indigenous ways of knowing with contemporary scientific methods.

In parts of Eastern Canada, this is typically referred to as “two-eyed seeing”, a framework developed by the Mi’kmaq Elder, Albert Marshall, which seeks to combine the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing with mainstream, scientific methodologies. In New Zealand, a similar idea was formalized in 2018, according to which knowledge is conceptualized as two canoes lashed together. In north-eastern Australia, the analogy involves the confluence of sea water and fresh water, which allows for interaction while maintaining separateness at the same time. Robin Kimmerer embraces something similar: “a polyculture of complimentary knowledges”.

In a recent article, Marshall and several other Indigenous scholars applied the two-eyed seeing model to study the aquatic health of a North Saskatchewan ecosystem. Participants included both local Indigenous Elders and academic scientists flown in from six universities. The big question was whether the Indigenous observers would arrive at the same conclusions as the scientists.

Where water quality and fish health could be described in terms of ‘turbidity’ (in Nephelometric Turbidity units) or ‘fish external anomalies’ (number of cysts, tumours, lesions and malformations) through a Western scientific lens, they could likewise be understood in terms of the physical appearance of the water (changes in water visibility or movement over time) or ‘fish aesthetics’ (changes in frequency of lesions or deformities over time) through an Indigenous lens.

After several years of study, the scientists arrived at a more optimistic assessment of the water and fish quality than their Indigenous counterparts did. Were they simply more objective? Perhaps.

Another possibility is that the scientists were outsiders and therefore didn’t have decades-old memories of water and fish qualities before the introduction of upstream industries that altered the health of the ecosystem.

It is also possible that the scientists overlooked or failed to include some rather obvious empirical criteria, like water visibility, before making their assessment. If one sample of water is less clear than another, this difference could be accounted for by the measurable, physical differences between the two samples. So the contrast is not so much between an Indigenous way of knowing and a scientific one, but rather between which observable criteria are most relevant. If the Indigenous participants were able to point to criteria that were systematically overlooked by the scientists, this might tell us something interesting about possible, subtle cognitive variations between the two groups.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, under the aegis of Indigenous ways of knowing, there are some exaggerated, quasi-mystical claims that run afoul of any responsible account of how knowledge is acquired. These “extra-intellectual” methods reduce to trial-and-error at best, and pseudo-scientific hunches at worst. Given the backlash such claims tend to generate, the case for Indigenous ways of knowing would be strengthened if they were simply dropped and discarded.

Second, there are differences between Indigenous ways of knowing and standard scientific methodologies that deserve our attention and merit further consideration. In the study mentioned above, the Indigenous participants were not claiming to intuit unobservable qualities beyond the epistemic reach of the scientists; rather, they were drawing attention to real, observable cues that were overlooked by the scientists, but which may well have been relevant.

Whether these subtle cognitive differences can themselves be empirically vindicated and explained in some way is the question to which I shall now turn.

Something WEIRD is happening

Most educated people have been taught that, despite cultural differences, there is a universal human psychology and, by extension, a common suite of evolved cognitive traits or dispositions.

It turns out that our assumptions about a common human nature rest upon data generated by psychological studies of a highly peculiar group: university students from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries. These “WEIRD” people are not representative of humanity, and thus the conclusions we have drawn about cognition, perception, personality traits, moral intuitions and behavioural dispositions simply do not translate to the global population.

This insight is the subject matter of Joe Henrich’s remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World. Despite our decades-long assumptions, Henrich and his colleagues have shown that university students at elite Western universities are not the human norm, psychologically speaking, and are in fact statistical outliers. It is Western psychologies, Western cognitive dispositions, that need to be explained. My tentative hypothesis is that Indigenous “ways of knowing” should not be viewed as anomalous or even peculiar — a unique phenomenon that requires special explanation — but as the global norm that existed before the Europeans began exporting their WEIRD institutions and practices around the world.

So what event was responsible for the onset and development of WEIRDness? According to Henrich, it was the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family programme” (hereafter MFP) that began in fits and starts in the early Middle Ages, and had the effect of transforming the structure of family and inheritance practices.

Now, historians have written about this before. Francis Fukuyama drew popular attention to the topic in his book, The Origins of Political Order. Henrich, however, was the first to explain its massive significance, arguing that the MFP not only abolished the intense kinship relationships that preceded today’s “normal” nuclear families, but also changed our psychologies — including our cognitive dispositions and thinking styles — in a profound and far-reaching way.

Before the Catholic Church launched the MFP in the early Middle Ages, European social life was structured by thick kinship ties. This meant many things, but a highlight reel would include: arranged marriages, cousin marriage, polygyny, patrilineally organized families, and the submergence of individuality within the larger community. In fact, individual identities were shaped by the various roles they played in the kinship network, which in turn exerted control over land and property. These kinship units were also tasked with resolving conflicts and providing a rudimentary “safety net” for the weak and infirm.

Despite the cultural and material differences between 7^th century Western Europe and the rest of the world, a time-travelling anthropologist looking down from a considerable height would observe one key, structural similarity: a dense system of kinship relations. All this changed in Europe when the MFP reforms were introduced. But why the change of Church policy?

It was certainly not out of morality or high-mindedness. Instead, the MFP reforms were designed to extract land and property from extended tribal families and clans. By implementing strict rules against cousin marriage, levirate marriage, polygamy, and arranged marriages, the MFP broke down the extended kinship networks of medieval Europe, and property that had previously been “kept in the family” was gobbled up by the Catholic Church.

By dismantling the intensive kinship systems, the MFP unwittingly led to smaller, mobile nuclear families, neo-local marriage and individual autonomy. This, in turn, led to impersonal prosociality (getting along with strangers, basically) and the development of important voluntary associations like guilds, universities, charter towns and market economies.

Max Weber was right to highlight the Protestant Reformation’s role in the promotion of individualism and other psychological traits conducive to modern economic life, but Henrich moves the origin-story back several centuries. The early Protestants certainly promoted the development of WEIRDness — but this historical trajectory was already set in motion almost a thousand years earlier by their theological adversaries.

Did the MFP actually cause this wide array of psychological and institutional changes. (Some have argued that European WEIRDness actually predates Christianity.) Henrich argues that it did, and brings forth a wealth of supporting data. Across ninety-three Italian provinces, there are measurable differences — often between neighboring villages — in the local population’s thought and behaviour, and these depend on the degree of exposure to the Church’s MFP. To this day, we can measure the differences in rates of cousin marriage between Northern and Southern Italians.

WEIRD perception

I will now zero in on the perceptual and cognitive dispositions that reveal the differences between Western and Indigenous minds.

First, there is some evidence that WEIRD individuals are more likely to be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Two parallel lines of equal length appear to be unequal due to the arrow-like tips on the ends of each pointing either outwards (which makes the line look longer) or inwards (which makes the line look shorter). While WEIRD people are routinely duped by this, when non-WEIRD African cultures, like the San, are presented with the same visual stimulus, individuals typically report that the lines are the same length.

Henrich speculates that the reason for this difference lies in the fact that WEIRD people live in highly “carpentered” environments and spend their days navigating through a world of dry, medium-sized objects featuring lots of straight lines and right-angles, and thus the presence of the angled lines throws off our ability to judge the lengths accurately. (Though it should be noted that the difference in perception has recently been called into question.)

WEIRD people are also distinct with respect to “focal object bias” in scene description. Fancy jargon aside, this simply means that when WEIRD people are presented with visual images of, say, a lion crouching in the middle of a detailed forest scene (as in Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings), we are more likely to focus on the lion while ignoring the framing, contextual details.

Non-WEIRD observers, on the other hand, devote their attention across the entire picture and have an easier time picking out the interactions of the flora and fauna in the background.

This finding sheds light on the different assessments made by Indigenous observers and scientists in the fishery case-study mentioned above. While the scientists zeroed in on the measurable, physical anomalies on the fish, the Indigenous observers appealed to a broader range of seemingly peripheral, contextual cues to inform their assessment of the ecosystem’s health.

This supports the Indigenous scholars who maintain that Indigenous people are more apt to survey interconnections and inter-relationships than Westerners, even trained scientists (who are psychologically predisposed to focus on the shiny object in the middle). Several other WEIRD–non-WEIRD differences in visual perception have been documented in the literature.

WEIRD cognition

The distinction between WEIRD and non-WEIRD minds is also evidenced in cognition. As an aside, it is worth noting that these two populations, mixing and mingling for centuries, do not exist in separate boxes. Instead, the cognitive differences between them vary along a spectrum.

The most important cognitive difference is that between holistic and analytical thinking styles. But what, exactly, do we mean by “analytical” and “holistic” thinking? As Henrich notes:

The idea here is that intensive kinship cultivates more holistic thinkers who focus on broader contexts and on the relationships among things, including the interconnections among individuals, animals, or objects. By contrast, societies with less intensive kinship foster more analytically-oriented thinkers who tend to parse the world by assigning properties, attributes, or personalities to people and objects, often by classifying them into discrete categories according to presumed underlying essences or dispositions.

The purely analytic thinker looks out at a world and understands it as a collection of distinct, isolated objects possessing various identifiable attributes. These attributes, in turn, explain the objects’ actions and demarcate them from other objects. Each separate entity can be pried from its context and understood by virtue of whatever properties it has.

Analytic thinkers also tend to assume that time is linear, and that a trend will continue to unfold in its current direction unless something intervenes to disrupt it. And they tend to complete “I am X” sentences with words that refer to personal attributes, achievements or membership in idealized social groups” (like “a professor” or “a wine-tasting contest winner” or “a Toronto Maple Leafs fan”).

In contrast, the purely holistic thinker looks out at a world and sees a field of relationships, where nothing makes sense in isolation from these interconnections. Time itself is experienced not just as a linear flow of points in one direction, but as cyclical, as if attuned to the cycles of nature. According to Shawn Wilson, “the relationship with something (a person, object or idea) is more important than the thing itself.” Holistic thinkers complete “I am X” sentences by specifying social roles and relationships (“Michael’s father” or “a member of the Anishinaabe First Nation”).

To be somewhat reductive, we might say that holistic thinkers see the forest, whereas analytic thinkers see the individual trees. Given how Indigenous ways of knowing focus on interconnections and interrelationships, it should be clear that Indigenous scholars are making the same point as Henrich, often using the same descriptive language.

How do these different cognitive dispositions show up in the psychology lab? It turns out that when subjects are given triad tasks, holistic and analytical thinkers tend to pick different answers. (In such tasks, subjects must say which two objects out of three have most in common.)

To use Henrich’s example, subjects are given a picture of a rabbit, and are asked whether the rabbit goes with a cat or a carrot. The analytic thinker will probably choose “cat” while the holistic thinker will typically choose “carrot.” The analytic thinker is relying upon a rules-based mode of categorization (“both the rabbit and the cat are mammals, so they should go together”), whereas the holistic thinker is relying upon a relational mode of categorization (“the rabbit eats the carrot, so they should go together”). Again, there is no “right answer” here. In some contexts, it might be more useful to see cats and rabbits as fellow mammals; in other contexts, it might be more useful to know what rabbits like to eat.

The philosophers Michael Polanyi and Martin Heidegger have drawn a distinction between “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi) or “background understanding” (Heidegger) on the one hand, and focal or explicit knowledge on the other. The former refers to knowledge that is difficult to convey or write down but still invaluable. It seems likely that various non-WEIRD peoples possess extensive tacit knowledge about the environments they inhabit, and that this knowledge reflects their somewhat distinct faculties of perception and cognition.

A different worldview

It is not particularly surprising that as analytical thinking took hold in Europe, it led to a profound updating of pre-modern worldviews. Europeans began to view nature itself as separated from the supernatural and moral orders.

Material entities were no longer invested with intrinsic meaning or value, but were viewed instead as just matter in motion, open to quantitative description and analysis. There was no longer any larger suite of mysteries, no longer any purpose or “final cause” governing the cosmos. We were left with a universe that is desolate, empty and huge, despite being made up of tiny particles too small to be observed by the naked eye.

Human nature itself was likewise transformed: the soul and the body were pried apart and consigned to different metaphysical realities. Galileo even took colours, smells and tastes — what became known as “secondary” qualities — out of the physical universe and deposited them inside human consciousness. While this made possible the development of physics, it left us with a world that is alien to our common, everyday experience.

In his recent book Rationality, Steven Pinker discusses the work of Louis Liebenberg, a tracking scientist who has studied the hunting practices of the Indigenous San people in southern Africa. Despite their harsh environment, the San have survived for thousands of years by employing “logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, causal inference, and game theory.”

While they may not have heard of Bayes’ theorem, their hunters use Bayesian reasoning to determine the likelihood that an ambiguous track belongs to one species of game or another, based on prior probabilities. In other words, they employ the same basic tools of rationality as Westerners. Quoting Pinker, “The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species.”

I do not dispute Pinker’s claim. However, beneath this smooth surface of universalism churns important variation. When we look under the hood of our shared human nature, we find cognitive differences that are real and relevant.

These differences correlate with specific cultural practices and natural environments. Certain Indigenous groups may therefore have an edge in understanding their environments and how to navigate them — relative to other peoples, including Westerners. To speak of Indigenous ways of knowing is, therefore, not so unreasonable.

Jonathan Salem-Wiseman is a philosophy professor in Canada, specializing in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy and political theory. He has published articles in Areo, Arc Digital, Merion West and Quillette.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Like many revolutions, the revolution in human biodiversity will likely disown its own forebears.

Consider Harvard scientist David Reich, a pioneer in human genetics, who has pushed back against racial equalitarianism more effectively than almost anyone in mainstream discourse. His 2018 New York Times article, ‘How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race,’ accomplished the apparently impossible, making the case for human biological and psychological diversity in a prestigious liberal outlet. In that piece, Reich explicitly rejected the dogma of human sameness and warned that genetics would discover undeniable evidence of racial differences.1

So how should we prepare for the likelihood that in the coming years, genetic studies will show that many traits are influenced by genetic variations, and that these traits will differ on average across human populations? It will be impossible — indeed, anti-scientific, foolish and absurd — to deny those differences.

His book Who We Are and How We Got Here is, among other things, a sustained attack on the implausible notion that human races are the same, telling the unique evolutionary stories of different human populations, each facing different selective regimes.

For this, Reich should be commended. Yet his strategy for engaging liberals and others potentially resistant to human diversity is not wholly commendable. It relies heavily on cautious hedging, selective engagement with previous scholarship, and the castigation of more candid or speculative writers.

Strategic caution is understandable. Winning hearts and minds matters. HBD bloggers who attack pieties about human equality with a rhetorical sledgehammer are unlikely to persuade; they even may do more harm than good by alienating the educated lay reader. But caution has limits. It does not require mendacities. Nor does it require maligning others.

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Converging evidence of positive selection at height-associated loci in Europe. Valentin Hivert and colleagues re-examine evidence of positive selection for height in Europe. Combining within-family GWAS designs with allele frequency estimates from 13 European populations, they detect signals of positive selection both within and between populations. The between-population signal is driven by the difference between the Dutch and other populations.

How Test Optional Policies in College Admissions Disproportionately Harm High Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds. Bruce Sacerdote and colleagues examine to what extent “test optional” policies in admissions harm high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They find that test scores are the best predictors of success in college, and under “test optional” policies, applications from disadvantaged backgrounds are much less likely to submit scores.

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Written by Noah Carl.

Why do some national and ethnic groups commit more crime than others? A popular theory among British politicians is that it’s due to lack of integration.

Addressing the unrest in Southport in 2024, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch argued that “we need a clearer strategy on integration”. Commenting on public disorder in Handsworth, former Tory MP Robert Jenrick said “it was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to”. He had a similar explanation for the Manchester synagogue attack, noting that the perpetrator “was clearly not integrated into our society”. Speaking in the House of Commons, Tory MP Chris Philp said “we have a problem with social cohesion and a lack of integration”, citing as evidence the fact that “there are some immigrant groups where levels of criminality are very high”.

The idea seems to be that groups that are culturally distant from mainstream British society tend to have higher crime rates, whereas groups that are culturally close tend to have lower crime rates. How might this work? There are several possible mechanisms. Perhaps culturally distant groups face discrimination in the labour market, which forces some of their members into a life of crime. Or perhaps culturally distant groups feel unwelcome in Britain, and some of their members start resenting the country.

While superficially plausible, the theory falls apart on closer scrutiny.

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Simon Johnson have practically become household names with their work on the “colonial origins of comparative development”.1 The central claim is simple. In regions where European settlers found environments suitable for settlement, they constructed “inclusive institutions” that protected property rights, constrained elites and encouraged entrepreneurship. But in regions where settlement was difficult, colonizers instead imposed “extractive institutions” that simply transferred wealth to the metropole.

This argument reshaped the study of economic development and culminated in Nobel Prizes for the aforementioned trio. However, it requires substantial qualification.

Extractive institutions do distort incentives, concentrate political power and curtail entrepreneurship. Hence they often slow growth relative to plausible alternatives. But slowing growth is not the same as preventing it altogether. In fact, evidence shows that economies frequently grow under extractive institutions, sometimes for long periods and sometimes quite substantially.

It is important to recognize that extractive institutions in Africa and the Americas did not originate with European colonialism. Long before Europeans arrived, many societies in these regions were governed by centralized, coercive regimes that relied on forced labor, payment of tribute and elite control over land. Empires and chiefdoms in the Americas extracted surplus through labor drafts and tribute systems, while large parts of Africa had hierarchical polities that exercised authority over almost all production. Colonial rule intensified, reorganized or redirected these extractive institutions; it did not create extraction from nothing.

Colonial Peru illustrates that extractive institutions do not necessarily imply economic stagnation. Spanish rule relied on coercive labor systems such as the mit’a, as well as monopolized trade and political exclusion. These institutions were deeply extractive by any reasonable definition. Yet reconstructions show that Peru experienced rising real wages and per capita output over extended stretches of the colonial era. Mining centers generated large surpluses, supporting complex networks of artisans, traders and service providers. By the eighteenth century, this dynamism was visible in urbanization rates. By the 1700s, urbanization stood at roughly 12 percent in Mexico and about 20 percent in Peru, compared with only 11 percent in Spain itself.

This economic activity was accompanied by meaningful investments in human capital. Colonial authorities and religious orders established schools, seminaries and universities across Spanish America. Literacy and numeracy spread, albeit unevenly. Evidence from numeracy estimates indicates that by the late eighteenth century, the gap in basic human capital among regions such as Argentina, Mexico and Peru narrowed substantially over time, falling from roughly 50 percent to about 30 percent by around 1780. These trends suggest not stagnation but convergence under extractive rule.

While a substantial share of colonial surplus was transferred abroad, enough remained to raise average living standards. Growth occurred not because institutions were inclusive, but because production, specialization and market integration and human capital formation continued under coercive systems.

The same is true in the case of the Dutch cultivation system in Java. The colonial regime was highly extractive. Village authorities were subordinated, peasants were coerced into producing export crops, and the system existed to maximize revenue for the colonial state. Yet extraction on this scale required a major reorganization of economic life: the Dutch build sugar factories and the transport infrastructure to go with them.

Evidence shows that areas near colonial sugar factories remain richer and more educated today than otherwise similar areas farther away. This is despite the fact that sugar production itself has long since disappeared. The explanation is straightforward. Extractive production required infrastructure, technology transfer and human capital. Meeting these requirements forced the colonial state to solve a series of practical problems: expanding irrigation, constructing processing facilities, and strengthening local administrative structures. Once established, these institutions did not vanish with the end of colonial rule. Growth arose not from inclusive institutions, but from the material and organizational demands of extraction itself.

The effects extended even to villages that were subjected to forced cultivation. These villages accumulated more communal land and enjoyed higher levels of education, including for cohorts educated during the colonial period. Extractive rule empowered local authorities in ways that unintentionally facilitated the provision of public goods. So while extractive institutions constrained freedom and entrepreneurship, they actually helped economic development.

The Cold Storage Commission in Southern Rhodesia reveals the same pattern in another sector, namely beef. Established to stabilize settler incomes and secure export markets, it enhanced production by enforcing quality standards, coordinating supply and investing in refrigeration. These measures were explicitly designed to benefit a narrow group of white producers. Yet they boosted the scale and efficiency of the food industry as a whole, and integration into global markets followed.

This case reveals that even racially exclusive institutions can generate economic growth when the colonial state is committed to building real, productive capacity. Growth was not inclusive, and its benefits were narrowly distributed, but it occurred nevertheless. Extractive institutions in Rhodesia created hurdles for some entrepreneurs and ordinary people, but they certainly did not prevent economic development.

The point is not that extractive institutions are optimal but that they are far less deleterious than is often claimed. When extraction is done in order to expand output, states are compelled to invest in both physical and human capital. The resulting institutions — schools, transport networks and administrative systems — then outlast the states that created them.

Furthermore, the popular idea that colonization invariably hurts long-run growth begins to unravel when examined systematically. Once other factors are taken into account, the simple fact of having been colonized carries little independent weight in explaining economic performance. (Hong Kong and Singapore are two of the richest places on the planet.) What stands out instead are disruptions that occurred after colonization.

Warfare, for example, imposes severe and lasting damage — destroying capital, fragmenting markets and diverting resources away from productive use. Trade policy also plays a key role. The turn toward protectionism in many postcolonial states prevented access to global markets and reduced competitive pressures. By shielding domestic industries, governments encouraged rent-seeking rather than innovation. And the costs of such policies accumulate over time.

Latin America offers an interesting case study. The region did not emerge from the colonial period with uniquely high levels of inequality. The decisive break actually occurred much later, during the twentieth century. While much of the world experienced a marked compression of incomes — a broad levelling driven by industrialization, expanded education and integration into global markets — Latin America moved in the opposite direction. From 1913 to the 1970s, inequality rose rather than fell.

This divergence was not some long-delayed consequence of colonial rule. It reflected a specific set of policy choices: protectionism limited exposure to global competition, while state-led development strategies concentrated gains in politically connected groups.

The broader lesson is clear. While extractive institutions are not something for which countries should actively strive, they can and have coexisted with sustained economic growth. There is therefore no simple contrast between inclusive prosperity and extractive stagnation. (The historical record is more complicated than that.) What is more, the “legacy of colonialism” cannot explain all or even most of the differences in income we see today. And its long-term effects aren’t uniformly negative.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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Written by Bo Winegard.

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
—The Gospel of Matthew 7:3-5

I suspect that hypocrisy is inherent to human consciousness itself. We treat our own tribe, our own sacred values, differently from those of our adversaries. Thus, I am not surprised when I encounter it.

Nevertheless, like other natural proclivities that we correctly try to restrain, we should not embrace or celebrate hypocrisy. And when confronted with evidence of our own hypocrisy, we should contemplate it seriously. We are all hypocrites. But the wise among us are strive to be less hypocritical than we were yesterday. The difficulty is that we often cannot see our own hypocrisy because it doesn’t look like hypocrisy to us.

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Alcohol, Violence, and Injury-Induced Mortality: Evidence from a Modern-Day Prohibition. Kai Barron and colleagues examine the impact of South Africa’s five-week alcohol ban in July 2020. Comparing the year of the ban to previous years, they find that it led to a substantial 14% reduction in the total number of unnatural deaths. They also find that it led to a temporary reduction in violent crime, particularly rape.

A gender gap in gender gaps: social norms and housework reporting. Martin Acht and Mara Rebaudo examine the impact of the interviewer’s gender on reporting of time spent on housework in social surveys. Analysing data from Germany, they find that women report significantly more time spent on housework when interviewed by a woman. By contrast, interviewer’s gender does not affect men’s reporting. These results may be explained by intrasexual competition among women.

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Written by Peter Frost.

“I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders.”

In 2023, Shafi Musaddique left England for Estonia, “lured in by the promise of clean air, quiet and a chance to continue freelance journalism” — plus the benefits of a high-trust society. (Apparently, this promise is no longer available in England.) His disappointment wasn’t long in coming.

He found himself “living in one of Europe’s last remaining countries without proper hate speech laws, encountering racism and White Supremacists in broad daylight.” He also discovered that Estonians reserve their trust for insiders:

Estonia (and neighbouring Nordic countries) often score high in rankings that measure public trust. Yet such metrics hide the ingrained distrust of outsiders, handed down generationally. (Musaddique, 2026)

It’s no fun being excluded from a high-trust society, but how could things be otherwise? Most humans on this planet trust only close kin and long-time friends, so they don’t have the reflex of trying to keep the wider community clean, peaceful and orderly. If Estonia opened its borders to the rest of the world, it would become like … the rest of the world. And our journalist friend would have to seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Such an outcome doesn’t seem to worry Shafi, who prefers to frame the issue in moral terms: we have a duty not to discriminate against fellow humans. But do we? Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within a community of people who, consciously or unconsciously, respect certain norms. It is thus culturally bound.

This point is made in a recent paper on the future of liberalism:

Besides the high-profile foreign policy failures arising from the failure to conceive of liberalism as culturally bound, it has also led to a neglect of the interests of the liberal moral community as such. Reconceptualizing liberalism, not as the universal birthright of humanity or the inevitable conclusion of rational thinking, but as a particular moral community with an interest in its own continuation, may be important to ensure that it does indeed continue. (Harwick & Bawa-Allah, 2026, p. 14)

Preservation of the moral community overrides the duty to be moral. If certain aspects of morality are leading your community to extinction, you should change course and adjust those aspects accordingly. You don’t just plunge ahead.

This is especially so for high-trust societies. Belonging to one isn’t like belonging to a football club. It requires thinking and behaving in ways that run counter to the way most humans think and behave. In concrete terms, it means being unusually prone to empathy, rule following and feelings of guilt (Frost, 2020).

But if high-trust societies like Estonia have such an ingrained distrust of outsiders, wouldn’t they seal their borders long before they risk demographic replacement? Aren’t there both geographical and psychological limits to social trust? As Shafi notes, “the borders of Estonian empathy fall short.” His hosts seem unwilling to feel empathy for the entire planet.

Of course, a single observer cannot fully answer this question. Let’s turn to the academic literature and see what it has to say. Its findings may surprise you. Or maybe not.

South Korea. This country has recently interested researchers because “its high level of in-group trust coupled with a low level of out-group trust offers an intriguing case for exploring the association between social trust and anti-immigration attitudes” (Kim & Kang, 2026).

South Korea has 2.7 million people of “migration background” — foreign residents, naturalized citizens and second-generation immigrants — who make up over 5% of the population (Yonhap, 2025). Admittedly, some are ethnic Koreans from China, Russia and elsewhere. There are also nearly 400,000 undocumented residents (Seo, 2025). In the elementary schools, 3.5% of all students are of non-Korean descent, with this figure rising to over 10% in a quarter of all cities, counties and metropolitan regions. About half of these students have origins in Southeast Asia, chiefly Vietnam and the Philippines. Compared to Koreans, they have lower attendance rates and trouble keeping up with classwork (Frost, 2021; Kim, 2024; Park, 2024).

How then does the host society respond to immigration? With surprisingly little pushback. When 1,245 South Koreans were interviewed for the World Values Survey between 2017 and 2020, a slight majority said they favored a liberal immigration policy:

Even more had no problem with immigrants as neighbors. These respondents formed a super-majority of 78% that included half of those who wanted strict limits on immigration. Evidently, consensus is needed in a high-trust society before people act on their personal beliefs, including xenophobia.

Along with the need for consensus, there is also the need for moral approval from authority figures, particularly those in government. If the government is considered trustworthy, and if it wants more immigration, people will suppress any misgivings they may have:

Those who are confident in the government’s capacity to manage potential security risks, are less likely to support restrictive policy preferences despite their security concerns. This moderating role of political trust has broader theoretical implications for understanding how institutional trust serves as an anxiety-reducing psychological mechanism; especially, when facing influx of immigrants (Kim & Kang, 2026, p. 13).

Sweden. This country has experienced a greater influx than South Korea in recent years, particularly from lower-trust societies within and beyond Europe. In 2019, 20% of the population was foreign-born and more than a third had one or two foreign-born parents.

A study of 1,352 young native Swedes showed that trust in the political system is key to reducing xenophobia. When politicians deliver on their promises and ensure well-being in the main areas of life, people trust the system, including immigration policy. The result is “a generalised expectation of trustworthiness and a widening of their circles of trusted others. This then translates into more positive attitudes toward immigrants” (Korol & Bevelander, 2023, p. 5599).

European Union. Social trust is higher in Europe as a whole than in the main immigrant-sending regions, i.e., the Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It also varies across the European continent, being higher in the northwest and lower toward the south and the east (Beilmann & Lilleoja, 2015).

High-trust European societies have received most of the influx, partly because they offer a higher standard of living and partly because they are more accepting of cultural differences. This was the finding of a cross-country study of about 1,500 people in 29 EU member states: “residents are more tolerant towards cultural minorities in high trusting societies, liberal democracies, prosperous nations and in non-postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).

Cultural minorities are less tolerated in Eastern Europe, as are sexual minorities and other people with unconventional lifestyles: “Tolerance towards people of deviant behavior is higher in economically wealthy countries, and only marginally higher in democratic societies and in culturally diverse countries, while it is lower in postcommunist societies” (Reeskens, 2012, p. 17).

This difference is attributed by Anatoly Karlin to the “Soviet freezer” — during the communist era, traditional values were better preserved in the East than in the West, which remained open to American culture throughout the Cold War (Karlin, 2018b).

Others have argued that this east-west difference goes back farther in time. For at least the past millennium, individualism, weak kinship ties and impersonal prosociality have characterized human relations to a greater degree north and west of the “Hajnal line” — an imaginary line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (Frost, 2025a; Hajnal, 1965; hbd*chick, 2014; JayMan, 2018; Schulz et al., 2019).

Perhaps both explanations are true. Because the Iron Curtain hindered the inflow of American culture, and because all regimes need to shore up their legitimacy by respecting local values, communism came to reflect the pre-existing characteristics of those who lived under it, including greater attachment to family and community.

While Eastern Europeans are less accepting of cultural and sexual minorities, they are more accepting of intellectual dissent (Reeskens, 2012, p. 21). This finding is consistent with both of the above explanations. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans favorably remember the dissenters of communist times. On the other, Western Europeans have a long history of excluding people for heresy, witchcraft and the like — the “Other” is a moral outsider, and not just a stranger (Frost, 2025).

With removal from the Soviet freezer, growing numbers of East Europeans have embraced the current Western model of intolerance for intellectual minorities and tolerance for racial and sexual minorities. This is especially true for younger generations, as shown by support for gay marriage in Estonia:

Younger generations of Estonian-speakers have been more exposed to American cultural messaging via the Estonian-language media. They thus have more liberal attitudes toward gay marriage. Older generations have been shaped much more by the media of Soviet times and are less liberal. No such generational difference exists within the minority of Russian-speakers, who continue to be influenced by media based in Russia (Karlin, 2018a).

Discussion

Some nuance is needed if we wish to describe high-trust societies as xenophobic. Clearly, they no longer are. They now receive immigration on a large scale, with only sporadic and ineffectual pushback. Violent incidents do occur, but, in the vast majority of cases, the victims are natives (Immigration to Denmark - Crime).

This begs the question. If high-trust societies are a minority in the world, and if their existence requires atypical levels of empathy, rule following and guilt proneness, why haven’t they been diluted out of existence? Why are they still around?

First, their authority figures used to act as gatekeepers. The line between “us” and “them” was not only between “kin” and “non-kin” but also — and more importantly — between “the trustworthy” and “the untrustworthy.” This dividing line had a moral dimension that was defined largely by figures of moral authority: church leaders, public officials, respected writers and so forth. Over the past century, however, these gatekeepers have come to see discrimination as immoral: we are now told to trust everyone equally; and if we refuse, we become the moral outcasts.

Second, high-trust societies have been economically more successful, and this economic success used to be translated into demographic success. When you can take people at their word and not have to check and double-check every commercial exchange, transaction costs are reduced throughout the economy, and many activities become cost-effective that would otherwise not be. Markets no longer confine themselves to isolated points in space and time, i.e., physical marketplaces. They can spread into all areas of life to create a true market economy.

In Western Europe, this economic success had demographic consequences. More people lived to adulthood, and more had the means to marry and have children. In particular, successful entrepreneurs married earlier and had larger families, if only to expand their workforce. The result was a long-running population boom, while population growth remained anemic elsewhere.

This boom overflowed the confines of Western Europe and pushed into other regions, particularly North America. As the actor John Wayne put it: “Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves” (Wayne, 1971).

All of this changed with industrial capitalism and the rise of labor markets in the 1800s. Industrialists found that they could more easily expand and contract their workforce by hiring and firing non-family members. Meanwhile, compulsory education made young people less available as a source of labor. Children became a net cost, and their numbers shrank. Thus ended the West’s population boom, first during the 1920s and 1930s and then for good in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to experience substantial population growth due to Western advances in medicine, sanitation and agriculture.

For a long time, Western societies didn’t have to worry about being replaced. They were doing the replacing. They thus fell prey to an excess of confidence that persisted into the amber zone and beyond. Today, the tables have turned. The West may be on the brink of a collapse as dramatic as the one that befell the North American Indian.

Let’s not end on a dark note. Yes, the West is on the brink, but it might still save itself. Recent data from the U.S. are showing a much smaller fertility decline for Euro-Americans than for other groups. As strange as it may seem, they are poised to become the most fertile group in the U.S. — thanks largely to subcultures like the Amish, the Mormons and the Hassidic Jews and, more generally, to conservative Protestants and Catholics. A similar pattern may be emerging elsewhere in the world (Frost, 2025b). Northwest Europeans seem to be adept at following rules, and this is no less true for the rules of natalism.

If immigration can be restricted — an admittedly big “if” — the West will cure itself through internal population replacement. We will be replaced, but by people like us.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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References

Beilmann, M., & Lilleoja, L. (2015). Social trust and value similarity: the relationship between social trust and human values in Europe. Studies of Transition States and Societies, 7(2), 19-30. https://doi.org/10.58036/stss.v7i2.267

Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 10(3), 214-134. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012

Frost, P. (2021). Damunwha in South Korea: A case study of divergences in cognition and behavior. Advances in Anthropology, 11(2), 153-162. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2021.112010

Frost, P. (2025a). Did Christianity make Europeans WEIRD? Aporia Magazine, June 26.

Frost, P. (2025b). Is individualism less toxic for northwest Europeans? Peter Frost’s Newsletter, August 21.

Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage pattern in perspective. In: D.V. Glass & D.E.C. Eversley (eds). Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography. London, Arnold.

Harwick, C. & Bawa-Allah, Q. (2026). The Sabbath Was Made For Man: On Dynamic Stability as a Metaethical Criterion (January 26, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6169889

hbd*chick (2014). Big summary post on the Hajnal Line. October 3. https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

Immigration to Denmark - Crime. (2026). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Denmark#Crime

JayMan. (2018). Forest, Trees, and the Hajnal Line. JayMan’s Blog, November 19. https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2018/11/19/forests-trees-and-the-hajnal-line/

Karlin, A. (2018a). Gay marriage in Estonia. The Unz Review, October 30. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/estonian-freezer/

Karlin, A. (2018b). PEW confirms “Soviet freezer” theory, The Unz Review, November 3. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/soviet-freezer/

Kim, K., & Kang, S. W. (2026). Anti-immigration attitudes in a homogeneous society: the case of Korea. International Review of Public Administration, 31(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/12294659.2025.2485341

Kim, Y-J. (2024). South Korea’s unprepared classrooms tested by rising multiculturalism. KoreaPro, April 2. https://koreapro.org/2024/04/south-koreas-unprepared-classrooms-tested-by-rising-multiculturalism

Korol, L., & Bevelander, P. (2023). Does young adults’ life satisfaction promote tolerance towards immigrants? The role of political satisfaction and social trust. Current Psychology, 42(7), 5599-5610. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1007/s12144-021-01923-0

Musaddique, S. (2026). My Estonia. White Man’s Dark Paradise. From the Frontier, February 16.

From The Frontier

My Estonia. White Man’s Dark Paradise

This week, I bring you a story that has taken years to publish. This one involves myself…

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2 months ago · 40 likes · 177 comments · Shafi Musaddique

Park, J-H. (2024). Korean schools becoming more diverse. The Korea Herald, January 7. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3297760

Reeskens, T. (2012). But… who are those “most people” that can be trusted? An evaluation of the relation between generalized trust and social tolerance across 29 European societies. Paper presented to Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, in January 2012 (Chicago).

Schulz, J.F., Bahrami-Rad, D., Beauchamp, J.P., & Henrich, J. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 366(707), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5141

Seo, J-E. (2025). Illegal foreign residents in Korea fall below 400,000 for first time in 4 years after crackdowns. Korea JoongAng Daily, February 7. https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-02-07/national/socialAffairs/Illegal-foreign-residents-in-Korea-fall-below-400000-for-first-time-in-4-years-after-crackdowns/2237571

Wayne, J. (1971). “Playboy Interview: John Wayne. A candid conversation with the straight-shooting superstar / superpatriot.” Playboy, May, p. 75. https://www.iplayboy.com/issue/19710501

Yonhap. (2025). Immigrants account for over 5% of Korea’s population in 2024. The Korea Times. December 8. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/globalcommunity/20251208/immigrants-account-for-over-5-of-koreas-population-in-2024

Written by Noah Carl.

Mass deportation of illegal immigrants was the key pledge of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

“Following the Eisenhower model,” he told crowds in Iowa, “we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”.1 This would involve removing up to “20 million people”, according to an interview with Time magazine (despite most estimates putting the illegal immigrant population at around 15 million). And when he took the stage at the Republican National Convention, hundreds of baying supporters could be seen waving signs saying “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” (to the horror of liberals and leftists).

After winning the election, Trump announced he would be appointing several figures with staunchly anti-immigration views, including Stephen Miller as White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and Tom Homan as White House Border Czar. All this suggested that he was serious about substantially reducing the illegal immigrant population — that whatever snags had obstructed his first term’s agenda would not get in the way this time.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

From obscure poems to bizarre birds, I take an interest in many odd things. But only one is routinely met with the morally perplexed and often accusatory question: “But why do you care about that?” The “that” is race differences, especially race differences in intelligence. Indeed, interest in the subject is often treated as evidence of some underlying pathology or fetish. Why would anyone care about such an unsavory topic?

Perhaps the proper response is simply that I care about truth. But that answer is too dismissive. Do we not all care about truth? The real question is why devote time to studying race, rather than to, say, whale mating habits, electromagnetic radiation, or any of the other innumerable subjects that do not provoke hostile reactions or cause contentious debates? Time is finite. And every hour spent reading about race or cognitive ability is an hour not spent reading Shakespeare or Newton.

It started with The Bell Curve. In my first psychology classes, I was taught what many undergraduates have since been taught about that book. It is seriously flawed and has been thoroughly debunked by Stephen J. Gould and others. Perhaps the authors are racist, perhaps not, but whatever their motives, the book is full of elementary errors and other logical embarrassments. Being ignorant about psychometrics and caring little about the topic at the time, I assumed my professor was right and gave the matter little further thought.

A few years later, however, I met someone who spoke favorably about The Bell Curve. “Isn’t that book severely flawed?” I naively asked. He replied that it was a careful, judicious work that had been unfairly maligned by its critics. I was surprised. I had never before met anyone willing to defend The Bell Curve. It seemed to me, then, that I ought to read it for myself before forming an opinion one way or the other. The subject was obviously important, and I wanted to know whether my professors had misled me. Was it a reasonable book after all?

I should note that, at that time, I was still a Chomsky-reading, revolution-preaching, cigarette-smoking opponent of the status quo. A free radical, as I pretentiously called myself. Someone who criticized “the system.”

But my leftism was decidedly a pro-science, pro-speech leftism. I thought my political views were correct, after all, and wanted to debate others as much as possible. And if my views were wrong, well, then I also wanted to know. I’m not sure how this affected my understanding of race and IQ, but I do know that I was a racial equalitarian who assumed, without much reflection, that racism was the cause of all racial disparities. I certainly did not approach the topic hoping to defend some racial hierarchy or capitalist status quo. Quite the contrary. I hoped I would find that The Bell Curve was indeed a shoddy book and that racial equalitarianism was true.

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How foreign wars can consolidate authoritarian power: Evidence from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mikael Elinder and colleagues analyse public opinion data from Russia during the War in Ukraine. Analysing data from both Russian and American pollsters, they find that Russians became more supportive of Putin, with an effect seen in almost every demographic group. Russians also became more optimistic about the future and even slightly happier.

The role of pre- and post-birth factors in the transmission of political engagement. Aaron Weinschenk and Christopher Dawes examine the transmission of political engagement using data from a major adoption study. They find that adopted children are more similar in terms of engagement to their biological parents than to their adoptive parents — though due to low power, not all the differences are statistically significant.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Your grandmother is on her deathbed. Being a devout Catholic, she asks, “Surely you believe in Jesus? Will you pray for me?” You, however, are an atheist. And not a reverent, conciliatory atheist, but a Hitchens-reading, fire-breathing atheist. How should you respond? Should you say, “No, I think Jesus is irrelevant and religion is hocus pocus.” Or should you respond, “Yes, of course grandmother. I will pray for you. And I hope you will soon be at peace in the arms of God.”

I have only my intuition here, but I suspect most of us would find the second response more loving, more humane, more moral. Yes, it is technically a lie. But it seems to be a benevolent lie, a lie not for one’s own advantage, but to protect the feelings of another.

Immanuel Kant, the great Prussian philosopher, famously disagreed. For Kant, every lie, regardless of its motivation, was wrong. He took this principle to extreme lengths, arguing that even if a murderer came seeking your friend who was hiding in your house, you could not lie to him. For Kant contended that a lie destroys trust and so any lie — however small, subtle, or selflessly motivated — violates the rational foundations of contract and public discourse. Without trust, society collapses.

Sam Harris would likely also disagree with my intuition. In an entertaining essay titled, “Lying,” he argued that most lying is unethical1 because:

By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make — and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.

Even white lies, those myriad lies we tell to ease social tensions and reassure others, are wrong:

But what could be wrong with truly “white” lies? First, they are still lies. And in telling them, we incur all the problems of being less than straightforward in our dealings with other people. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding — these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

Since I have argued elsewhere that lying or dissembling about supposedly unpleasant truths, such as racial differences in intelligence, is wrong, one might expect me to agree with Harris. Yet I do not.

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Written by Bryan Pesta.

In 2022, intelligence researcher Bryan Pesta was fired from his tenured position at Cleveland State University. What follows is an excerpt from his new book Condemned: The Taboo Science of Race and Intelligence, which is available for purchase. (Reviews are appreciated.)

By 2018, I had published several articles on intelligence and organizational outcomes, along with others on sexual harassment, decision making and employment law. My research portfolio was eclectic but typical for a mid-career academic at a public research university.

That year, I began collaborating with researchers who were widely regarded as controversial. The controversy had little to do with technical skill and more to do with credentials and topic. They were not university employees and did not hold doctoral degrees. They studied a question that had long attracted attention and discomfort in the social sciences: why Black populations, on average, score lower on standardized intelligence tests than White populations, and whether genetics might contribute to the difference.

In 2019, we published a paper titled Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability.1 It appeared in a peer-reviewed academic journal called Psych.2 The study analyzed restricted genetic data obtained through the National Institutes of Health’s controlled-access system.3 I applied for the access because I was the only collaborator with a university affiliation. The final line of the abstract stated, “Results converge on genetics as a potential partial explanation for group mean differences in intelligence.”

Soon after publication, a complaint was sent to university officials alleging improper use of the NIH data:

The authors offered the conclusion that, “Results converge on genetics as a potential partial explanation for group mean differences in intelligence.” Use of NIH data for studies of racial differences in this way is both a violation of the data use agreement and unethical. I am interested in knowing how this data abuse occurred—specifically who signed off on the data access request and where human subjects review occurred by a qualified institutional review board.4

The complaint did not address the study’s design, methodology or statistical analyses. Instead, it questioned whether the data could be used for this type of research at all.

The study

I believe that some questions about intelligence and group differences become difficult to pursue not because they are empirically inaccessible, but because their possible answers are socially sensitive.5 Other chapters of Condemned describe the institutional mechanisms through which inquiry can narrow—publication friction, funding incentives, and professional risk—and argue that these forces shape the literature before conclusions are openly debated.

Here I turn from general description to a concrete example: the study that ultimately led to my termination. My purpose is not to defend a conclusion, but to document how a specific piece of research was conducted, what it reported and how it was received.

Our paper examined the relationship between genetic ancestry and cognitive ability using restricted-access data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC), a large community sample of children and adolescents collected through the National Institutes of Health.6

Research in this area is often criticized for small samples, indirect ancestry measures, or limited phenotyping. The PNC dataset addressed these concerns by combining dense genotyping with a standardized cognitive battery administered to thousands of participants drawn from a single metropolitan region.

The question was narrow: whether variation in genetic ancestry within a U.S. sample was statistically associated with variation in cognitive performance, and how that association compared to alternative explanations frequently proposed in the literature.

Cognitive Ability: Cognitive ability was measured using the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery, a widely used assessment designed to capture general cognitive performance across multiple domains.7 Composite scores were derived from subtests following established procedures.

Prior measurement-invariance research on comparable batteries indicates that these tests measure the same latent construct across groups.8 Consistent with that literature, the results did not indicate differential test functioning between Black and White participants.

The observed mean difference between groups in this sample was 14.72 points, similar to the approximately one standard deviation gap (i.e., 15 IQ points) repeatedly reported in large datasets.9

Genetic Ancestry: Individual ancestry estimates were calculated using standard admixture methods applied to genome-wide genotype data.10 The primary variable of interest was percentage European ancestry for each participant.

Self-Reported Race: Parents identified participants’ race using standard NIH categories. This allowed comparison between social classification and genetic ancestry as predictors.

Skin Pigmentation: Skin pigmentation was estimated from non-identifying genetic markers using published prediction algorithms widely used in biomedical and forensic genetics.11 The purpose was to evaluate hypotheses attributing cognitive differences to discrimination linked to visible phenotype.

Socioeconomic Status: The dataset contained limited socioeconomic measures. Parental education served as the available proxy. Although imperfect, parental education is commonly used in developmental research and correlates strongly with cognitive outcomes.12

Analytic Strategy: Multiple regression models estimated the association between cognitive scores and four predictors simultaneously: genetic ancestry, self-reported race, pigmentation, and socioeconomic status. This approach isolates the statistical relationship of each predictor while holding the others constant.13

No novel statistical techniques were introduced; the models followed standard practice in behavioral and genetic epidemiology.

Results: Genetic ancestry showed a statistically significant association with cognitive ability after controlling for race, pigmentation, and socioeconomic status. Self-reported race and pigmentation did not independently predict scores once ancestry was included. Socioeconomic status remained associated with cognitive ability, but the effect was weaker than that observed with genetic ancestry.

Substantial overlap existed between individuals, but the mean trend increased monotonically with ancestry across the full range of the sample.

Interpretation: The paper interpreted the findings cautiously. The results were described as consistent with the possibility of a partial genetic contribution to group mean differences, while explicitly noting alternative explanations and the need for replication.14

The study did not claim determinism, exclude environmental influences, or make policy recommendations. It reported a statistical association and evaluated competing hypotheses within the limits of the available data.

The reaction

Subsequent objections rarely focused on the statistical model itself. Instead, discussion centered on interpretation and potential social consequences. Critics emphasized that the conclusions could be harmful, misused or ethically problematic.

The controversy therefore did not primarily concern whether the analysis followed conventional methods, but whether the question should have been investigated.

Scientific disagreement is routine. Methods, assumptions and interpretations are constantly contested. Normally, such disputes are addressed through replication, critique and additional data. In this case, the dispute moved outside that process. Professional sanction followed publication rather than refutation of the results.

The significance of the episode lies less in whether the study was correct than in what it reveals about the boundary between empirical disagreement and professional acceptability. If some results are treated as intolerable independent of methodological error, the structure of inquiry changes. Certain hypotheses become costly to test regardless of evidentiary standards.

The cost extends beyond any individual researcher. When some findings carry consequences unrelated to methodological quality, the published record no longer reflects only evidentiary weight. Absence can be interpreted as disconfirmation even when it reflects avoidance.

The next part of Condemned returns to the broader evidentiary landscape. The overriding question is not whether the data are complete; they never are. The question is how institutions respond when incomplete data point in uncomfortable directions…

Bryan Pesta is a Cleveland-based writer and former tenured professor whose work spans both academic research and fiction.

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