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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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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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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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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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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Written by Noah Carl.

Philosopher Nathan Cofnas must be one of the most petitioned men in academia.

In 2019, he published a defence of free inquiry into group differences in intelligence. The paper appeared in a respected, peer-reviewed philosophy journal.1 But that didn’t stop the mob from trying to get it cancelled. More than 100 academics signed a petition calling for an apology, a retraction and even the resignation of the journal’s editors. The instigator of this campaign, philosopher Mark Alfano, told Cofnas, “You’re about to learn why people generally avoid fucking with me.” (He thus earned himself the nickname “Mafia Mark”.)

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Written by Gary Marks.

“Socioeconomic status” or “SES” dominates research, public debate, policy and politics on social inequality. From early childhood to graduate school, inequalities between children and students are largely attributed to parents’ education, occupational class, income and wealth. Since education is important for subsequent social and economic outcomes, SES is understood as the ultimate source of educational and labor market inequalities in society — and for their reproduction across generations. These inequalities are falsely assumed to be profound, pervasive and persistent.

This is the essence of the SES paradigm. It is assumed that SES is the key influence for almost every conceivable educational outcome: test scores, grades, examination results, school differences, school and classroom climate, truancy and student misbehavior. Of course, SES adherents also believe that other factors influence student outcomes, such as schools, teachers, parents, and peers. However, according to the paradigm, SES is the dominant influence, and these factors mainly mediate SES effects.

What’s more, the differences in student outcomes by race, ethnicity, family size and family structure are assumed to be attributable to SES (at least in part). SES is claimed to be the primary influence on cognitive development among very young and preschool children — exerting its influence through material resources, parental stress and parenting behavior. In addition, it is frequently asserted that SES impacts (either directly or through education) the entire range of labor market outcomes: participation in the labor force, unemployment, occupation, earnings and career trajectories.

The SES paradigm extends further into health, crime, socio-emotional development, well-being, mental disorders and delinquency. Occupational class and SES remain part of the rhetoric of political parties and political activists of the left — although the relationship between them and political preference has reversed in many Western countries (Kitschelt & Rehm, 2022).

An alternative to the SES paradigm is the “IQ + genes” paradigm. This paradigm contends that the relationships of SES with educational and labor market outcomes are largely spurious. The relationships are due to the associations of parents’ cognitive abilities with their education, occupation and income, combined with genetic transmission from parents to their biological children. There is considerable evidence for these contentions (Marks & O’Connell, 2023). Thus, the intergenerational correlations of education, occupation and income are primarily epiphenomena and, therefore, cannot be substantially reduced by policy.

Paradigms

Many readers will be familiar with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Normal science is based on a paradigm — a set of practices, beliefs and knowledge shared by its practitioners and adherents. Scientific paradigms define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field. Its accomplishments attract an enduring group of adherents, but unlike religion or ideology, allow unresolved issues to be investigated through research. Within a paradigm, knowledge slowly accumulates through revision, refinement, and the resolution of alternative theories and hypotheses.

Scientific paradigms work well until empirical observations do not conform with them. Anomalies are first accommodated within the paradigm by minor modifications to the relevant theories. For a while, more serious anomalies can be ignored or dismissed because of uncertainties about data, measures or methods. A crisis occurs when inconsistencies between theory and empirical observations accumulate so much that it is no longer possible to explain or dismiss incongruent findings within the paradigm.

A paradigm shift occurs when an alternative paradigm provides far more compelling explanations for relevant empirical observations. The original paradigm remains consistent with many empirical observations, but it is further eroded with each new set of findings that cannot be accommodated. Eventually, the original paradigm collapses, although the timing is influenced by the political context.

George Ritzer noted that a more meritorious paradigm cannot gain ascendency without winning the political battle. Less worthy paradigms can maintain hegemony through political channels despite their inadequacies. This is the case for the SES versus IQ + genes paradigms.

Paradigm shifts have occurred despite strong political opposition. For example, the heliocentric solar system replaced the geocentric one; Darwin’s theory of evolution replaced creationism; and in the USSR, Mendelian inheritance replaced Lysenkoism. Kuhn also discusses paradigm shifts — Maxwell’s equations, relativity theories, and continental drift — that were largely unnoticed because they posed no threat politically to anyone outside the small group of scientists. Today’s SES paradigm is unique in the depth and breadth of its political support. In contrast, the alternative IQ + genes paradigm is unpopular since it contradicts cherished political beliefs and ideologies.

John Ioannidis concluded that most research findings in medical science fields are false. The social sciences are likely to fare much worse. Ioannidis identified several characteristics that reduce the probability of research findings being true: small effect sizes; lack of replicability; many variations in definitions, analytical designs and findings; and a high degree of prejudice (i.e., political ideology).

The SES paradigm has most of these characteristics. SES effect sizes are only moderate and are much smaller when considering stronger predictors, such as cognitive ability. There is very little replicability, but an overabundance of similar analyses purporting to be novel. There is a great variety of theoretical explanations, operational definitions of SES, and statistical approaches. However, there are very few generally agreed-upon conclusions. Almost every point is contested with little or no resolution. Many research fields relating to social inequality in education, sociology, psychology and economics are highly politicized.

It could be argued the SES and IQ + genes paradigms do not constitute distinct paradigms at all. Cognitive ability can be simply accommodated within the SES paradigm. Many studies include measures of SES and cognitive ability in the same analysis. However, the two approaches are fundamentally different.

The SES paradigm assumes that the effects of SES represent purely sociological processes, such as home, school, economic and cultural resources. In contrast, the IQ + genes paradigm assumes that SES effects include non-sociological processes involving genetic transmission. Furthermore, the SES paradigm assumes that cognitive ability is a product of class background and other factors, with genetics playing little or no role (Fischer et al., 1996; Richardson, 2002).

A collapsing paradigm

The SES paradigm is collapsing because the very notion of SES is nebulous. Prominent theoretical concepts, such as economic and human capital, are construed to provide post-hoc justifications. There is no consensus on what SES is, and how to measure it. The variables that measure SES are often unreliable and are too weakly intercorrelated to support the claim that SES is a meaningful concept (Marks & O’Connell, 2021).

The collapse of the SES paradigm is clearly evident in the sprawling explanations for the effects of SES on education and other outcomes. There is no consensus on why SES matters, just innumerable overlapping theories. The sheer number and variety of theoretical explanations are a testament to their inadequacy.

SES-focused theories become prominent, not because they provide satisfactory explanations for a range of empirical phenomena, but because they become fashionable for a while and then fade away. Some have greater longevity than others. For a short time, prominent theorists strut the academic stage as if they have discovered something important, like a latter-day Newton or Darwin.

The ultimate reason that theories of SES inequalities go in and out of fashion is that they cannot account for the empirical phenomena they purport to explain. Plus, they ignore the fundamental empirical realities that SES effects are only moderate at best. The strong possibility that these effects substantially reflect parental abilities and their genetic transmission is almost universally ignored.

The IQ + genes paradigm is superior. It has much greater explanatory power and explains the observed relationships involving SES. It can account for empirical phenomena that the SES paradigm cannot.

It is well-established that intelligence is a valid and measurable concept. The numerous myths surrounding the concept, its measurement, and its importance have been debunked by extensive literature that has accumulated over the last century (Warne, 2020). For student achievement, educational and occupational attainment, and income and wealth, cognitive ability has greater explanatory power than comprehensive measures of SES. It accounts for a large proportion of the effects of SES, whereas SES only minimally accounts for the effects of cognitive ability (Marks, 2022). The effects of SES on cognitive ability and student achievement are primarily accounted for by the mother’s cognitive ability (Marks & O’Connell, 2023).

Furthermore, the most important variables involved in social stratification — cognitive ability, student achievement, educational and occupational attainment and income — all have sizeable heritabilities, that is, the proportion of the variation in a trait attributable to genetic differences (de Zeeuw, de Geus, & Boomsma, 2015; Plomin & Deary, 2015; Pokropek & Sikora, 2015; Hyytinen, Ilmakunnas, Johansson, & Toivanen, 2019; Silventoinen et al., 2020). The causal implications of high heritabilities cannot be dismissed (Egeland, 2023).

The strong explanatory power of cognitive ability and the sizable heritabilities are incompatible with the SES paradigm. The paradigm collapses because it is unable to account for these findings. Therefore, the vast SES-centred theoretical and empirical literature is rendered highly questionable. In addition, cognitive ability and genetics account for the lack of success for policies emanating from the SES paradigm aiming to eliminate, or at least substantially reduce, socioeconomic inequalities. It also explains why parents’ socioeconomic characteristics still matter under socialism and in the Kibbutz (Firkowska et al., 1978; Justman & Gilboa, 2012).

Sources of support

Given that the vast majority of SES-centered theories have poor explanatory power and are misleading because they ignore cognitive ability and genetics, why does the SES paradigm remain dominant? It survives because it is central to so much academic research, policy formulation, and political discourse.

Its fundamental contention that societal inequalities can be attributed to socioeconomic origins is largely unquestioned across academia, research institutes, government bureaucracies, international agencies, the commentariat, social media, teacher unions, the political left and even the political right. The adage that paradigms change “funeral-by-funeral” does not apply to the SES paradigm given its high level of political support.

In the social sciences, each new cohort of students is exposed to the SES paradigm. Many academics have built successful careers around some aspect of SES — perhaps by becoming an expert in a particular theory or theorist, proposing a slightly different theoretical explanation or resurrecting an old one. Most academic journal editors and referees accept the major tenets of the SES paradigm. It provides fertile, although very much over-tilled, ground for journal articles, books and book chapters, research grants, and PhD theses. This has been happening with little progress for over 50 years and is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Critical theory and post-modernism are also concerned with social inequality. However, they are not scientific — often explicitly rejecting scientific assumptions, methods and practices. Importantly, they deny the possibility of objective knowledge. However, they are accepted as academic disciplines with all their paraphernalia of conferences, journals and research grants. They are not rejected from academia for being unscientific and highly politicized because their general political orientation is consistent with that of the SES paradigm. So highly tendentious “research” that does not adhere to the evidentiary rules of normal science has become quite acceptable. This is disastrous for the accumulation of scientific knowledge and effective policies.

Academic research into social inequality has been strongly influenced by Marxism. Much of the inspiration for stratification research comes from the belief that socioeconomic inequality is morally repugnant, and the need to understand the capitalist system in order to change it. Many of the theoretical accounts for socioeconomic inequalities have Marxist legacies. For example, cultural capital theory purports to explain class inequalities with an emphasis on social exclusion and cultural hegemony. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was an enduring, and ultimately fruitless debate on Marxist and Weberian approaches to class. Many of the most strident critics of cognitive ability and behavioral genetics were self-identified Marxists (e.g., Gould, Lewontin and Kamin).

The SES paradigm is central to the political agenda of left-wing political parties and activists.

For the centre-left, socioeconomic inequality is a problem that can be alleviated by policies. Once in power, left-wing political parties promote, debate and implement policies consistent with the SES paradigm. Notably, they ignore similar policies that have failed in the past. Academic research is cherry-picked to support the party’s political position and proposed policies. Opposition is depicted as insensitive — ignoring, if not supporting, socioeconomic inequality. Since research communities and education bureaucracies generally accept the SES paradigm, center-right governments tend to do the same.

The SES paradigm is a major plank of far-left politics too. The supposedly strong and enduring SES inequalities constitutes further evidence of the iniquity of Western capitalist societies. No amount of contrary empirical evidence will change this belief, despite enormous improvements in wealth, health and living standards, substantial reductions in real poverty, the expansion of social welfare and other government services, and the implementation of policies specifically designed to reduce socioeconomic inequalities.

What are the far-left policy prescriptions to combat the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities? Generally, it is state control of all the major societal institutions. Entry to elite educational institutions would not be based on academic performance but by bureaucrats using political criteria. Similarly, the state would be involved in hiring, promotion, and dismissal in workplaces. They advocate intellectuals (like themselves) leading an agenda of radical social reform to obliterate disparities — a model that has historically proven disastrous wherever implemented.

A larger political agenda

No research in cognitive psychology or behavioral genetics argues that social outcomes are biologically determined. No one actually identifies as a “genetic determinist”. Behavioral genetics does not dismiss the role of the environment; the shared and unshared environment are fundamental concepts. Likewise, no one argues that heritability applies to individuals or is immutable across time and societies (see Sesardić, 2005).

There is no logical connection between cognitive IQ research and apartheid, Jim Crow laws, or state-sanctioned racism. Much of the support for eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was from progressives and socialists (Freeden, 1979; Paul, 1984).

Yet, the IQ + genes paradigm has been attacked as being offensive to low SES families and social minorities. This critique is not about sensibilities but, again, a political ploy to silence criticism of the SES paradigm. There is a vast industry and prominent political ideologies to protect.

Although the language surrounding SES-based explanations is usually couched in a sympathetic tone, such explanations could also be considered offensive. For example, they seem to imply that less educated parents are uninterested in their children’s education, have negative attitudes towards academic pursuits, use fewer words and less complex language, and do not read enough to their children.

So why are the attacks on cognitive psychology and behavioral genetics so vehement? It is because the IQ + genes paradigm poses a scientifically rigorous challenge to left-wing sensibilities. The SES paradigm, although failing as an explanatory model, survives because of ideology, not science.

A different version of this article was previously published on Aporia.

Gary Marks is an honorary principal fellow in the Department of Sociology, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

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References

de Zeeuw, E. L., de Geus, E. J. C., & Boomsma, D. I. (2015). Meta-analysis of twin studies highlights the importance of genetic variation in primary school educational achievement. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 4(2015), 69–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2015.06.001

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Firkowska, A., Ostrowska, A., Sokolowska, M., Stein, Z., Susser, M., & Wald, I. (1978). Cognitive development and social policy. Science, 200(4348), 1357-1362. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.663616

Fischer, C. S., Hout, M., Jankowski, M. S., Lucas, S. R., Swidler, A., & Voss, K. (1996). Inequality by design: Cracking the Bell Curve myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Freeden, M. (1979). Eugenics and progressive thought: A study in ideological affinity. The Historical Journal, 22(3), 645-671. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00017027

Hyytinen, A., Ilmakunnas, P., Johansson, E., & Toivanen, O. (2019). Heritability of lifetime earnings. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 17, 319–335. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-019-09413-x

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Written by Peter Frost.

The dominant view is that we evolved by changing our environment rather than ourselves; genetic evolution gave way to cultural evolution. For instance, we “adapt” to the cold by making clothes or having a fireplace in our home. Culture allowed us to inhabit a diverse range of circumstances, and it diversified us accordingly. Yes, we too have diversified — in shape, color and size — but those differences are trivial.

That view has been now challenged by two studies of human genetic evolution. In both cases, the research team measured the speed of evolutionary change by estimating how fast new SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) have appeared in the human genome. Both teams came to the same conclusion: cultural evolution did not replace genetic evolution or even slow it down. In fact, the growing importance of culture caused the human genome to evolve faster.

The first study was led by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. There were two main findings.

Changes to the genome accelerated more than a hundredfold when hunting and gathering gave way to farming and other cultural changes (sedentary living, growth of towns and cities, rise of social complexity). And the faster pace of genetic evolution lasted well into the time of recorded history, reaching a peak of 8,000 years ago in Africa and 5,250 years ago in Europe.

Genetic evolution began to accelerate at a time when humans had already spread from the equator to the Arctic. The impetus for acceleration came from people adapting, not so much to new natural environments, as to an ever-wider range of cultural environments. They were no longer just adapting to new places. They were adapting to new ways of life in the same old places.

In sum, the faster pace of cultural change made genetic change more necessary, not less so. The two modes of evolution complemented each other, with one spurring the other forward.

The rate of genetic change may have actually peaked later than the above dates of 8,000 and 5,250 years ago. As that rate increases, so does the difficulty of distinguishing between adaptive and non-adaptive genetic changes. More and more of the adaptive changes are just rising above the background noise of random mutations. If you screen out that noise, you also screen out much of recent evolution.

This sort of study is biased against recent evolution in another way. It uses data from a limited number of present-day human groups. Thus, as you go forward from the time of early humans, you capture less and less evolutionary change within the entire human species.

Let me explain. John Hawks took his data from the HapMap project, which has samples from eleven groups: Americans of northwest European ancestry, Tuscans, Han Chinese, Chinese Americans, Japanese, Mexican Americans, Gujarati, African Americans, Luhya, Maasai, and Yoruba.

Those eleven groups, and all other humans, are descended from a founder group that lived somewhere in East Africa some 100,000 years ago. As that group expanded and spread beyond Africa, it split up into new groups, which in turn split up into yet newer groups. Over time, more and more of the these groups would not be directly ancestral to the eleven HapMap groups. Consequently, their evolutionary change cannot be inferred from the HapMap data. This problem is not specific to HapMap. It is a problem with any dataset that does not include all present-day human groups.

It seems, then, that our species has undergone more genetic change over the past ten thousand years than over the previous million. Human evolution has not been a straight line of steady change. It has been an exponential curve.

This sort of study may be biased against not only against recent evolution but also against early evolution. A selection event is dated by measuring the decay of linkage disequilibrium (the extent to which the variants of different SNPs are associated with each other). Early events may thus be missed if the linkage disequilibrium has already completely decayed.

To find those missing selection events, you can try using a larger and denser dataset. Hawks and colleagues used a version of HapMap that was twice as large as the original one. That increase in size, however, provided only a marginal increase in the number of early events. The researchers concluded that “most events coalescing to ages up to 80,000 years ago have been detected” (Hawks et al., 2007, p. 20754).

The above findings are partly supported, and partly challenged, by a study that came out in 2023 and was finally published last year. It was led by Ilan Libedinsky, a geneticist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Like Hawks and colleagues, he and his team used SNPs to estimate the speed of evolutionary change at different times in the past. Unlike Hawks and colleagues, they used the Human Genome Dating (HGD) dataset, which is more than three times larger than HapMap. Unfortunately, they did not control their data for ethnic/geographic origin.

Libedinsky and colleagues also focused on those SNPs with real phenotypic effects on mind or body. They then identified the domains of mind and body that underwent the most evolutionary change. There were three main findings.

Human evolution went through two periods of rapid change. The first one was between 2.4 million and 280,000 years ago, with a peak around 1.1 million years ago. The second period was between 280,000 and 1,700 years ago, with a peak around 55,000 years ago.

The second period saw rapid evolutionary change in three domains. In order of importance, they were: vision; mental function; and nutrient absorption, digestion and storage. There was much less evolutionary change in metabolism, skeletal development, and the immune system.

Evolutionary change in the neocortex seems to have been more recent, on average, than evolutionary change elsewhere in the brain.

This study, like Hawks and colleagues’, shows a recent burst of accelerated evolution that extends into recorded history. It, however, shows the recent burst beginning earlier and peaking earlier. In fact, the peak occurs long before historic times, back when modern humans were spreading out of Africa.

The reason for this discrepancy seems to be the different datasets. Although Hawks and colleagues’ dataset was much smaller, it was divided equally among several human groups: two of European descent; three of East Asian descent; one of mixed European/Amerindian descent; one of South Asian descent; and four of African descent. It thus provides a fair cross-section of the human gene pool.

By contrast, Libedinsky and colleagues’ data was mostly from people of European descent (Hawks, 2023). It thus provides a poor cross-section of the human gene pool. Moreover, these authors did not look for different geographic trajectories after the Out of Africa event.

If an SNP dataset is not geographically representative, it will provide reliable data on humans only up to the time when they began spreading out of Africa some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. From then onward, the data will come from a progressively smaller proportion of the human gene pool. Genetic evolution thus seems to peak 55,000 years ago. That “peak,” however, is illusory.

When I was preparing this article, I asked John Hawks for his thoughts on Libedinsky’s and colleagues study. His thoughts partly overlap with mine:

• There is a bias in the methodology against recent adaptive changes. Such changes tend to be lower in population frequency and thus more difficult to make out against the background of random non-adaptive mutations. The result is an apparent “deficit” of recent mutations with real phenotypic consequences.

• The dataset is mostly from people of European descent. It thus excludes much, if not most, of recent human evolution.

Hawks sees evidence of recent genetic evolution being fueled, at least in part, by introgression of genes from archaic humans (Neanderthals and Denisovans). In his opinion, such introgression might explain the first period of rapid genetic change, which peaked 1.1 million years ago.

I disagree. The first peak occurred among the common ancestors of humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. It was only later, between 800,000 and 500,000 years ago, that the ancestors of humans parted company from those of Neanderthals and Denisovans. So the burst of rapid genetic evolution was in our direct ancestral lineage, not in an archaic sideline.

Hawks cites a paper by Chad Huff and colleagues to argue that the ancestral Homo line lost much of its genetic diversity when it underwent a roughly 50% reduction in population size between 0.9 and 1.5 million years ago. Some of that genetic diversity may have later returned to humans through admixture from Neanderthals or Denisovans. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Remember, the human/Neanderthal split happened long after the reduction in population size. So the presumed loss of genetic diversity would have been irretrievable, and not preserved in the Neanderthal/Denisovan line.

It’s interesting to note that the reduction in population size occurred during the first burst of rapid genetic evolution 2.4 million to 280,000 years ago. The genome was evolving unusually fast at the very time when the effective population size fell from 14,500-26,000 to 8,100-8,750 individuals. I have often seen it stated that smaller populations have less potential for evolutionary change because they have less genetic variability for evolution to draw upon. But how true is that? The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr took the opposite view:

The factor that seems to make by far the greatest contribution to rate of speciation is population size. A species with millions of individuals has a gene pool of such enormous size that the replacement of a gene by another allele is a very slow process, and the replacement of an entire well-balanced epistatic system by another one is almost impossible. Species with large populations are, therefore, from the evolutionary point of view, highly inert. (Mayr, 1970, 348-349)

I agree with most of John Hawks’ major criticisms. As for his minor ones, they often amount to quibbling, and sometimes not even that. One gets the impression that he is trying to distance himself from this study and its conclusions, even though he is largely in agreement with both.

Libedinsky and colleagues used a much larger dataset and could thus identify an earlier peak of rapid evolution around 1.1 million years ago. However, with no control for geographic or ethnic origin, they could not examine evolutionary change over the last 50,000 to 60,000 years — when humans were spreading not only over the entire globe but also into new cultural environments.

Future researchers should divide up the HGD dataset by geographic and ethnic origin to examine the different trajectories of human evolution in Africa, Eurasia and elsewhere. Different trajectories may have different peaks of evolutionary change during historic times. A single trajectory may even peak several times between intervening periods of stasis.

And what, exactly, was the recent evolutionary change? How much of it was change to mental function, and how much of it was change to other traits?

One thing is sure: the recent acceleration of genetic evolution was real. If it were some kind of glitch in the methodology, all domains of human biology would show the same acceleration, and not just a few. Mental function would have evolved at the same rate as skeletal development. Recent human evolution seems to have been driven by changes to a relatively small number of abilities and capacities.

Yes, human evolution did accelerate, and it did so primarily to meet the challenges of culture rather than nature.

A different version of this article was previously published on Aporia.

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

Hawks, J. (2023). Did two pulses of evolution supercharge human cognition? John Hawks Weblog, May 15. https://johnhawks.net/weblog/did-two-pulses-of-evolution-supercharge-human-cognition/

Hawks, J., Wang, E. T., Cochran, G. M., Harpending, H. C., and Moyzis, R. K. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 104, 20753-20758. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707650104

Huff, C.D., Xing, J., Rogers, A.R., and Jorde, L.B. (2010). Mobile elements reveal small population size in the ancient ancestors of Homo Sapiens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 107, 2147-2152. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0909000107

Libedinsky, I., Wei, Y., de Leeuw, C., Rilling, J., Posthuma, D., and van den Heuvel, M.P. (2023). Genetic timeline of human brain and cognitive traits. February 6. bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.05.525539

Mayr, E. (1970). Populations, Species, and Evolution. Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap Press.

Written by Hannah Gal.

Economist Thomas Sowell has been shaping the discourse for six decades and counting. A maverick black American, he remains defiant of the education system’s prevailing victimhood mentality. Mainstream media and left-wing intellectual circles have largely ignored his work, but that hasn’t stopped him from influencing millions. Why have some cultures survived while others perished? Does affirmative action actually benefit the disadvantaged? And why was the Harlem of his childhood so drastically different from today’s? These are some of the questions Sowell has tackled.

“Harlem was a safe place even at night,” he told Peter Robinson, “when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would get up, get dressed and go out to a corner newsstand where there was a little old man who was white, selling newspapers at midnight — today, he and I would both be taken in for mental observation.” Joking aside, Harlem’s schools were arguably better in the 1940s, when Sowell was growing up there, than they were in subsequent decades. So what led to their drastic decline? “Teachers became social workers, social theorists,” he argues, “propagandists for all kinds of new fads”.

For more than half a century, American education has been dominated by dogma, with history taught through the prism of oppression. Generations of Americans were led to perceive slavery as something that only affected blacks — racially motivated exploitation, invented by the White Man. They came to consider every problem in the black community as a legacy of slavery. Any hardship or failure was pinned on centuries of persecution at the hands of whites. Yet as Sowell argues, this twisted view of history is dangerously devoid of context, leading black Americans down a path of resentment, division and blame.

But a real change in outlook may be here. Countless black Americans are discovering the real history of slavery through Sowell’s online videos. A wave of Gen Zers are coming to the stark realisation that they have been misled.

Numerous viral reaction videos reveal their shock upon learning that slavery is not an exclusively black issue, that it has always been part of human society, that countless whites were enslaved, and that the very word ‘slave’ is derived from 9th century Slavic folk.

The Cartier Brothers, boasting nearly 2 million followers, have put out videos noting that slavery did not necessarily or even usually involve exploitation of people from other races, that certain aspects of current black subculture are indeed damaging to blacks, and that the devastation caused by Lyndon Johnson’s “well intentioned” welfare reforms of the 1960s persists to this very day.

They watched Sowell explain that “more whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States, or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed”, and that white slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire decades after blacks were freed in the United States. What’s more, “the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists, people who would today be called ‘the religious right’, clearly, this story is not ‘politically correct’ in today’s terms, hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.”

Particularly potent is the revelation of black Americans’ post-emancipation century of growth. Starting in 1865, it saw unemployment fall and a record number of newly freed illiterates gain education. Sowell describes this social progress as unequalled in human history, yet very few black Americans are aware of it. Hence the question on these Gen Zers’ minds is: Why did it take Thomas Sowell to provide this perspective? Why were we taught that slavery was a black-American issue when in fact it has existed in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, both before and after the transatlantic trade?

Sowell’s revelations are so powerful because of they context they provide. This context exposes the degree to which school curricula are led by ideology, rather than facts. It also puts into question the entire mainstream media narrative and exposes agenda-driven reporting on practically all issues related to blacks, from the economy, housing and education to welfare, affirmative action and poverty. Commenters on these YouTube channels speak of shedding their “victimhood armour” and losing the “oppression prism”.

This, in turn, makes it possible for them to process key social trends. One example is the tragic dismantling of the black family. Black single-parent households went from 22% in the 1960s to 74% today, a rise characterised by the media and academia as a “legacy of slavery”. Yet as Sowell explains, “for more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, most black children were born to women who were married and the children were raised in two-parent homes”. This changed in the 1960s with the introduction of welfare policies that excluded the father from the family. “Centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the black family but one generation of the welfare state did.”

Sowell goes on to list statistics from various European countries where welfare reforms have had a similar impact — places such as the UK where slavery was never widespread. “Black or white American or British” he concludes, “the studies show the same things”.

For these YouTubers, then, Sowell’s research is an eye opener. They have listened to his remarks on such topics as black subculture, the conflicts of visions that set liberals and conservatives apart, affordable housing, Detroit’s decline, Obama’s record, why Marxism fails, DEI, anti-Semitism, wage disparities and even Sowell’s iconic conversation with William F. Buckley — where he explains how white liberals’ narrative stymies black progress.

Sowell’s common sense seems to be striking a cord. One example is Tinashe Peter reading from a hard copy of Black Rednecks and White Liberals: “blaming others for anything in which blacks lag has become standard operating procedure among white liberals”. Whether you agree with this assertion or not, it is a sight to behold. Another example is LFR Family’s followers hearing of freed slave Booker T. Washington, who wrote that “to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise”. Incidentally, LFR Family was viewing Joe Rogan’s podcast on Sowell’s wisdom, which is itself a big deal.

These videos are impacting viewers’ outlook on a host of issues. They consider the importance of personal responsibility, equal opportunity versus equal outcome, and looking to the future instead of demanding apologies for historical wrongs. As Sowell states in regard to the latter, “If you’re going to have reparations for slavery, it’s going to be the greatest transfer of wealth back and forth, because the number of Whites who were enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States.”

Tinashe Peter again reads from Black Rednecks and White Liberals: “mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by Europeans, the white man and their descendants in the southern Americas ... no other historic horror is so narrowly constructed … no one thinks of war, famine or epidemics in such localised terms”. Wondering why we still see slavery as a uniquely American experience, Peter’s concludes that “we got there because essentially we have been programmed and conditioned by this liberal ideology to do exactly that, because if it’s white, it ain’t right ... because it is Western, it is seen as the greatest evil.”

This YouTube-led enlightenment raises serious questions about the value and purpose of US education. Is it not schools and universities’ responsibility to deliver the unvarnished truth? Shouldn’t teachers and administrators, as Sowell suggests, test their beliefs against evidence — rather than letting “educational dogmas of the day reign supreme until new dogmas come along?”

His contention is that academics and policymakers wrongly view this one specific minority group as a single entity that “requires treatment”. He characterises their interference, well-intentioned or otherwise, as messing with the order of things. Prime examples are the mass admission of black students into higher education in the name of equality, or Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s welfare reforms. Here Sowell quotes Frederick Douglass’s uncanny reflection on the matter:

Everybody has asked the question—what shall we do with the Negro? I have had but one answer from the beginning, do nothing with us. Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. If the apples do not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone.

Such insights have no doubt led some viewers to rethink black American leaders’ narrative and to question the worth of their leadership. Do they empower and achieve real results, or are they self-serving?

The bottom line is that Sowell is succeeding where schools have failed — delivering genuine knowledge that impacts individuals in their everyday lives. Viewers of these YouTube channels are engaging in independent thought and questioning their oppression mindset. It’s worth noting that Sowell’s work is not beyond criticism (though much of it remains invaluable). Also, it is not welfare per se that he rejects but the culture of dependence, especially when carried on for generations.

Left-wing intellectuals have never embraced Sowell, despite him being one of America’s most accomplished black scholars. But thanks to the social media pundits mentioned here, his insights are now filtering through to the mainstream. The YouTubers spreading Sowell’s message are encouraging black Americans to rethink the quest for equality of outcome, the virtue of black leadership, and perhaps most importantly, the victimhood that’s become integral to so many black Americans’ identity.

Hannah Gal is a London-based journalist and award-winning documentarian. Her credits include Quillette, the Critic, the Spectator, UnHerd, Creative Review, The BBC, Channel4 and the Jerusalem Post.

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Written by Ichimoku Sanjin.

The problem of making peace with our anarchic impulses is one which has been too little studied, but one which becomes more and more imperative as scientific technique advances.
—Bertrand Russell

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx famously proclaimed, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Yet in escaping the bondage of industrial capitalism, have we welcomed the fetters of domestication?

This article presents a theory of political psychology that argues the left–right divide can be captured along a single axis: more versus less domestication. The left is more domesticated and the right is less. First, let’s clarify our terms:

Domestication encompasses a whole suite of genetic changes that arise as a species is bred to be friendlier and less aggressive. In dogs and domesticated foxes, for example, many changes are physical: smaller teeth and skulls, floppy ears, and shorter, curlier tails.

When it comes to behaviour, domestication is associated with reduced stress/fear responses and decreased aggression. This manifests in a longer socialization window, during which young animals become familiar with humans without developing a fearful response.

How does domestication happen? Humans may well be the only species that domesticated itself (though some contend that dogs, cats, bonobos and marmoset monkeys have all self-domesticated). Many theories exist for how it do so, though it’s generally agreed that selective pressures on tameness and docility were prerequisites. In other words, highly aggressive males became significantly less favored for mating.

Of course, the extent of domestication may vary among individuals, social classes and races. It is possible that living in better conditions triggers epigenetic switches. This was demonstrated by the famous study of fox domestication conducted by the Novosibirsk group (although the study has been critiqued).

Could it be that developed societies — which are well-protected from disease, violence, famine and social unrest — triggered epigenetic changes resulting in a dramatic increase in domestication over a few generations? After all, the decrease in most types of violence over the last century happened too quickly to be attributable to DNA changes. The same is true of the various left-leaning cultural movements such as feminism, gay rights, racial equality, animal rights and veganism.

If the increase in domestication was initially caused by epigenetic switches, it later took on a life of its own, creating a runaway process of cultural evolution that cannot be explained in terms of genetics or epigenetics alone.

Additionally, technological development fostered living conditions where social tolerance is more adaptive: overcrowding; increased contact with other ethnic groups; faster communication and transportation. Values of social tolerance, in turn, favored technological progress through the promotion of formal education. Technological and social evolution thus mutually reinforced each other and have been increasing at roughly the same pace in a positive feedback loop.

The situation was significantly different prior to the Neolithic Revolution or even the Industrial Revolution — when technological and social evolution were both slow enough for genetic evolution to keep up.

Furthermore, natural selection has weakened. Today, there is little correlation between socioeconomic and reproductive success (indeed, the correlation is often negative). As a result, there is a gap between the optimal domestication level and the actual domestication level of modern humans. This gap produces various social and psychological problems, such as depression and social exclusion.

Let’s test the theory that left–right ideology is a manifestation of different degrees of domestication. It should be noted that what follows are merely generalisations and there are probably many exceptions.

System thinking versus empathy. The left puts more emphasis on empathy as a social value. And indeed, self-domesticated primates such as bonobos are known to be more skilled at solving theory of mind tasks and those involving an understanding of social causality, whereas chimpanzees are more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality.

Individualism versus collectivism. The left is associated with collectivism, which involves working together to achieve common goals, while the right is associated with individualism, which prioritises freedom and independence. Once again, bonobos are known for their ability to cooperate to solve new problems, whereas chimpanzees are more individualistic in their behavior.

Redistribution. The left believes that the government should redistribute income from rich to poor in order to create a more equal society. This is reminiscent of the relationship between humans and dogs, where the human master provides for his pet regardless of the latter’s work output. In modern human society, the role of the master is played by the government, which is responsible for providing resources for its citizens.

Intergroup tolerance. The left is strongly opposed to racism and advocates higher levels of immigration. This is in contrast to the behaviour of wild primates such as chimpanzees, who are xenophobic and territorial, engaging in aggression to protect their territory from outsiders. On the other hand, self-domesticated primates like bonobos are more tolerant and cooperative, even engaging in voluntary sharing of resources with unfamiliar individuals.

Feminism. The left supports equal rights for women and, increasingly, special privileges. This resembles the behaviour of self-domesticated primates like bonobos, where male–female aggression is much lower and females are often the highest-ranking members of the group.

LGBT. The left supports equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgender people, and indeed such people are more likely to be leftists themselves. This resembles the pattern in domesticated primates, where sexual dimorphism is greatly reduced. Bonobos even display “a substantial emancipation of sexual behaviour into nonconceptive functions” and higher rates of homosexuality. (Chimpanzees only tend to masturbate in captivity.)

Declining testosterone levels in men. Over the last fifty years, average testosterone levels in men have declined considerably. There is no scientific consensus as to why, but a reduction in testosterone is the chief biological mechanism underlying domestication. Something similar occurred during human evolution with the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and was associated with morphological and behavioural changes.

Lockdowns and masking. During the pandemic, the left was generally more supportive of lockdowns and masking than the right — even when the scientific evidence was highly questionable. This behaviour could be explained by the tameness of domesticated individuals, which leads to following orders without questioning.

Censorship. The left generally supports the idea of censorship, as free speech enables individuals to display verbal aggression or at least to be offensive toward others. This verbal aggression is then redefined as actual violence, a definition expansion process known as concept creep.

Gun Control. The Second Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the right of citizens to bear arms, allowing them to protect themselves and their property. The right strongly supports the Second Amendment. The left’s opposition may stem from low levels of reactive aggression and tameness that are associated with domestication.

Urban-rural divide. Left-wing voters are concentrated in metropolitan areas, whereas right-wing voters are more likely to live in rural areas. People who are more domesticated seem to prefer living in environments that are very different from our ancestral living conditions, such as the centres of large cities. Indeed, dense populations are evolutionarily quite recent, and may have given rise to the morphological and behavioral changes associated with domestication.

The domestication theory does a good job of predicting beliefs and behaviours associated with left–right ideology. It is arguably more successful in this regard than competing theories, such as the empathic versus systemic thinking paradigm espoused by Jonatan Pallesen. For brevity, I have left many questions unanswered. But I have sketched the broad outlines.

A different version of this article was previously published on Aporia.

Ichimoku Sanjin is an evolutionary anthropologist who works on intelligence, creativity and behavioural genetics. He once published poetry but now prefers the language of R.

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Written by Noah Carl.

Since returning to office, President Trump has been outspoken in his criticism of mass migration into Europe. Speaking in Scotland last July, he referred to a “horrible invasion” and said that “immigration is killing Europe”. In a UN speech a few months later, he proclaimed, “I love Europe and I hate to see it being devastated by immigration”. Then in December he told Politico, “What they’re doing with immigration is a disaster”, adding that some European states “will not be viable countries any longer”.

Vice President Vance has echoed the same talking points. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he stated, “Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration”. In a follow-up interview, he noted that “if you have another few million immigrants come in from countries that are totally culturally incompatible” then “Germany will have killed itself”. And in a CPAC speech, he said that western leaders have sent “millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries”, describing this as “the greatest threat”.

In light of such rhetoric, you might assume the administration would be doing everything possible to avoid making Europe’s immigration problems any worse.1 Apparently not.

Read more

Written by Peter Frost.

Whites made up 96% of euthanized Canadians in 2024. I couldn’t believe it. Yes, euthanasia mostly involves seniors, and older Canadians are whiter. But the 65+ age bracket was only 86% white at the last census in 2021 and is less so today (Statistics Canada, 2025).

I looked up the latest report on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada. Here is the relevant paragraph:

A total of 15,927 of the 16,499 people who received MAID in 2024 responded to this question, the vast majority of whom (95.6%) identified as Caucasian (White). For context on how this compares to the overall population of Canada, approximately 70% of people in Canada identified as Caucasian in the most recent Census. (Health Canada, 2025, p. 32)

Why are Euro-Canadians “over-euthanized”? Let me answer by examining how their risk of euthanasia varies by medical justification and place of death. Why is the risk higher when natural death isn’t near? Why is it higher when the recipient lives in an institution, rather than at home? And why is it higher in certain provinces than in others?

When natural death is near versus when it isn’t

A request for MAID follows one of two tracks: Track 1 for recipients whose death is “reasonably foreseeable”; and Track 2 for those whose death is not “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2024, whites were 94.8% of Track 1 deaths and 97.4% of Track 2 deaths (Health Canada, 2025, p. 32). Track 2 deaths also had a lower median age, 75.9, even though younger seniors tend to be less white.

Euro-Canadians are thus over-euthanized for reasons that run counter to the natural processes of aging and illness — the former preconditions for MAID. Whiteness matters less when the decision is to hasten a natural death. It seems to matter more when the decision is to hasten death independently of medical justification.

So who is making whiteness a risk factor: those who request euthanasia, or those who approve the request?

Are whites more likely to request MAID? Let’s begin with the requesters. Euro-Canadians are more individualistic than other Canadians. They are more likely to live on their own after retirement with neither a spouse nor children to help. So they may be less motivated to continue living, regardless of their medical condition.

Euro-Canadians may also feel alienated in a country that scarcely resembles the one of their youth. This factor, like the preceding one, would matter more in MAID requests when death isn’t near.

Are their requests more readily approved? A MAID request must be approved by two medical professionals. Approval, once granted, is not reviewed by anyone else. Medical professionals can have personal biases, like anyone, and such biases are less constrained if MAID approval isn’t reviewed or requires no medical evidence. Personal biases may include resentment against Euro-Canadians for past or present discrimination or for banal reasons, like a dispute with a neighbor.

For that matter, a personal bias might harm Euro-Canadians without specifically targeting them. It could simply be a more favorable attitude toward one’s in-group. For instance, a physician may be more willing to sit down and discuss alternatives to MAID if the requester comes from the same culture, shares the same religion and is perhaps a relative. This is less likely if the two people come from different backgrounds. The request will then be more readily approved — not out of animosity but because the physician has less time or ability to talk the requester out of it.

If both are Euro-Canadians, the physician may insist on treating all requesters equally — or even overcompensate by showing more concern for those of a different culture. This desire to talk the requester out of it can vary from one situation to another and from one province to another, as we will see. It is especially critical when time is limited and the physician must choose between talking with the current patient or moving on to the next one.

Keep in mind that primary care physicians see about a hundred patients a week and are always under pressure to keep their caseload at a manageable level. If the desire to dissuade isn’t strong enough, approval will inevitably be granted for reasons of convenience.

Trudo Lemmens (2025) documents the case of a man who, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, feared he would end up in long-term care. He signed a waiver of final consent for MAID that would take effect in three and a half years, subject to certain preconditions: difficulty eating or swallowing, bodily tremors, inability to verbally communicate, etc. Less than a year later, he was hospitalized after a fall and became delirious. During “a period of cognitive improvement,” he was deemed capable of consent and given a lethal injection. His previous wishes, as stated in his initial consent, were ignored.

The system invites abuse because a wrongly euthanized person cannot lodge a complaint. The complaint must come from a surviving family member, and this is where the individualism of Euro-Canadians may play a role. If a physician has a heavy caseload, who is easier to “unload”? Someone with ties to many relatives or someone with none?

Death in an institution versus death at home

Table C.5 of the above report provides a breakdown of MAID deaths by ethnicity and province or territory (Health Canada, 2025, p. 80). We previously saw a national total of 15,226 deaths among whites or “Caucasians” (Health Canada, 2025, p. 32). Yet if we add up the provincial and territorial subtotals, we now get a total of 14,215 deaths among whites. The second total is 6.6% lower.

It isn’t unusual for death statistics to show a discrepancy between the national total and the combined regional total. The discrepancy arises because the form filler is unsure what to write for the deceased’s address and leaves the field blank. Yes, the province of death can be inferred from other fields, and even from the form itself, but such inference requires manual intervention when the forms are processed.

While the address is seldom left blank on a death certificate filled out at the deceased’s home, either a private residence or a retirement home, it often is when the certificate is filled out at an institution, such as a hospice, hospital, palliative care facility, residential care facility, correctional facility or shelter.1

Institutions account for 10.5% of Track 1 deaths and 18.4% of Track 2 deaths (Health Canada, 2025, p. 55). If missing addresses explain the discrepancy between the national total and the combined provincial total, we can infer that the address field was left blank in about half of institutional MAID deaths.

This discrepancy reveals another. Whites are 95.6% of the national total but only 86.2% of the combined provincial/territorial total. If the second total does exclude many institutional deaths, we can infer that Euro-Canadians are more at risk of euthanasia in an institutional setting.

A gap of 9.4 percentage points separates the white share of institutional MAID deaths from the white share of at-home MAID deaths — a gap almost equal to the one between the white share of MAID deaths and the white share of Canada’s senior population (i.e., 9.6 percentage points). The higher risk of euthanasia for whites seems to be confined almost entirely to those institutional deaths, where the form filler did not bother to fill in the address field. Are the addresses of Euro-Canadians harder to look up?

We will return to this point. For now, let’s use the provincial totals while remembering that they understate the white over-representation in MAID deaths. This understatement should, if anything, reduce the differences between provinces in white over-representation, making them seem smaller than they really are.

Whiter provinces versus less white ones

Canada’s ten provinces differ linguistically, politically and ethnically. Quebec stands out not only as an overwhelmingly French-speaking province but also as a highly secular one where public policy is no longer shaped by the Catholic church or even Christianity in general.

The provinces also differ in ethnic makeup. Canada’s population was about 97% of European descent in 1961, but this percentage has fallen since the shift to global immigration in the 1960s, particularly in British Columbia and Ontario — where most non-European immigrants have settled. In contrast, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces have received much less immigration and are now the whitest areas of Canada.

Do these provincial differences have any bearing on MAID deaths? Are whites more over-represented in some provinces than in others? We can answer this question by comparing the white percentage of MAID deaths in each province with the white percentage of the senior population. The following table shows how much whites are over-euthanized by province:

MAID deaths were not whiter than the 65+ bracket in the Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Alberta. But they were very much so in Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

The same pattern appears if we compare the white share of MAID deaths with the white share of the general population. Euro-Canadians are more likely to be euthanized in those provinces where they are proportionately fewer — except for Alberta. Its demographics are like Ontario’s, yet the two are poles apart in terms of white over-representation in MAID deaths.

As with the Track 1/Track 2 differences, these interprovincial differences may be due either to the requester or to the physician approving the request.

Are whites less likely to request MAID in whiter provinces? Euro-Canadian culture may be less individualistic in whiter provinces. Poorer provinces attract fewer immigrants and thus tend to be whiter, more traditional and more culturally resistant to market forces. Their residents prefer to stay near relatives in a stable community, rather than move elsewhere for a better-paying job. Québécois also wish to preserve the French language and culture even if the result is slower growth.

In such provinces, older Euro-Canadians receive more emotional and material support from other family members and the community at large. These factors may explain why Euro-Canadians are less likely to seek euthanasia in some provinces than in others.

Again, Alberta is an exception. Its demographics are like Ontario’s: 66.5% white versus 62.9% white in 2021. It is also one of the provinces with the fewest locally born residents — only 52%. Yet it is also the province where whites are the least likely to be euthanized compared to other groups. Are they more religious? Actually, self-identified Christians are less common in Alberta than in the country as a whole, and other measures portray the province as average in terms of religiosity (Cornelissen, 2021).

Quebec is another exception. It is the province where whites are the second-least likely to be euthanized compared to other groups. It is also the least religious province by any measure, with the lowest percentage of people participating in group religious activities at least once a month (Cornelissen, 2021).2

Something else seems to explain the Alberta and Quebec exceptions. Both may simply be less “woke.” They have not gone as far as other provinces in normalizing anti-white thinking, discourse and behavior. We will return to this point.

Are requests from whites less readily approved in whiter provinces? In whiter, more traditional provinces, Euro-Canadians may encounter more pushback during the MAID approval process because their physicians are more often of the same cultural background. Although we lack provincial data on physicians by country of birth, we can use the percentage of Canadian-educated physicians as a rough proxy. Unfortunately, the latest figures date from 2004:

Quebec has the highest percentage of Canadian-educated physicians, at about 90%. It also has, proportionately speaking, the fewest MAID requests that actually lead to MAID — many are withdrawn or deemed ineligible, or the requester dies before euthanasia can be provided (Health Canada, 2025, p. 76). Perhaps Quebec physicians are more likely to sit down with the requester and discuss the pros and cons of euthanasia.

Conversely, Saskatchewan has the lowest percentage of Canadian-educated physicians, and its MAID deaths are disproportionately white, surpassed only by Ontario and British Columbia in this regard. Saskatchewan is otherwise more like neighboring Alberta or even Atlantic Canada — comprising mostly small towns, with nonwhites being largely Indigenous people on reserves. Traditional small-town living, in itself, does not seem to protect Euro-Canadians from euthanasia.

If we compare the percentage of foreign-educated physicians with white over-representation in MAID deaths across provinces, we get a modest but non-significant correlation of 0.30. We therefore cannot draw any conclusions about this factor, although it deserves further study with better and more recent data.

Discussion

MAID was legalized in Canada as a human right, that is, everyone has the right to choose the time and place of their death. Nonetheless, this choice — and its subsequent approval — should be viewed within a broader context.

In general, the more freedom physicians have to authorize MAID deaths, the more such deaths become disproportionately white. Specifically, this happens:

• when approval isn’t subject to review (currently, all cases)

• when no medical justification is needed (Track 2 cases)

• when the requester is kept in an institution

• when the requester and the physician are not bound by a shared culture and religion

• when the broader ideological environment permits anti-white bias

It would be politically easier to say that Euro-Canadians are over-euthanized because they want to be. They are less traditional than other groups, more solitary and thus more open to euthanasia when old age creeps up on them. Yet this explanation doesn’t fit certain patterns in the data.

First, euthanasia is most often preferred at home and as a means to hasten natural death. We see the opposite pattern, however, with white over-representation in MAID deaths. The reason does not seem to be personal choice, at least not by itself.

Second, MAID deaths are disproportionately white in institutional settings — so much so, that this one factor may explain most of the white over-representation. The “home turf” of a private residence or a retirement home seems to offer seniors more freedom to make up their mind — and not have it made for them.

Finally, there are the interprovincial differences: in whiter and more traditional provinces, Euro-Canadian seniors are euthanized at the same rate as other seniors, perhaps even at a lower rate. This might reflect personal choice, that is, a more conservative attitude toward euthanasia among traditional Euro-Canadians. But how do we explain the exceptions of Alberta and Quebec?

Alberta is the province where whites are the least over-represented in MAID deaths and may even be underrepresented. Yet it is not much whiter than Ontario, and almost half its residents are born elsewhere. Nor is it very traditional, at least if we use religion as a metric.

Quebec is the province where whites are the second-least over-represented in MAID deaths, and yet institutional resistance to euthanasia is almost absent there. In addition to having more unique MAID practitioners than all other provinces combined, it has the lowest percentage of hospitals that report no MAID deaths on their premises. Nor is there much resistance from organized religion.

However, Alberta and Quebec are similar in one respect: their estrangement from Canadian political culture. For different reasons, neither province feels wholly part of Canada, and neither feels bound by the country’s current political culture, including the belief that anti-white bias is normal and justified.

Is wokeness a factor? Woke ideology does seem to play a role: the more prevalent it is, the more euthanasia is disproportionately white. This factor is noticeably less prevalent in French Canada, apparently because of the language barrier, the existence of separate institutions and a general mistrust of Canadian political culture. An analogous mistrust may have had similar consequences in Alberta.

In the rest of English Canada, wokeness seems much more prevalent, even more so than in most of the United States. In a sense, English Canadians get the worst of both worlds: they easily absorb American culture but possess none of the immunity to its worst aspects that Americans have acquired to varying degrees.

Yet this is not the whole story. According to a recent report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canadians aren’t more woke than Americans; In fact, public opinion on cancel culture, critical race/history, and transgender issues is almost the same in Canada, the UK and the US.

But the report does reveal two differences: Although younger people are considerably more woke in Canada than older people, the generation gap isn’t as large as in the UK or US; and Canadians are much more trusting of journalists than Brits and Americans (Kaufmann, 2024). Both findings indicate a higher level of group conformity.

In general, Canadians are less confrontational and more deferential, especially toward representatives of authority, such as government officials, university professors, church leaders and journalists (Lipset, 1986). Once these authority figures have been ideologically captured, everyone else falls into line (Kaufmann, 2024, pp. 61-63). Canadians may feel unhappy about the woke revolution, but they generally keep their unhappiness to themselves.

This reluctance to disagree with authority is reinforced by the fear of job loss and reputation loss (Kaufmann, 2024, pp. 38-44). The same report found that “55 percent of Canadians say they feel less free than they did 5 years ago to express their views on immigration; 61 percent say that the political climate prevents them from expressing their views as it might offend others; and 78 percent say political correctness has gone too far” (Kaufmann, 2024, pp. 38-39).

Canadian deference and non-confrontation may also help wokeness spread within the country’s institutions, which have adopted woke discourse more readily than their American counterparts. Another factor is that Canada’s elite is smaller, more centralized and more interconnected (Brodie, 2001; Clement, 1975; Savoie, 1999). Because Americans have a larger, less centralized and less interconnected elite, on top of being less deferential and more confrontational, they have had less trouble pushing back and building anti-woke institutions.

French Canadians and Albertans seem to be just as deferential and non-confrontational as other Canadians, but they have less trust in the federal government (Leger, 2025). They are thus more likely to challenge wokeness, which has become identified with federal policies.

French Canadians also diverge from other Canadians on certain issues. While they lean further left on economic and foreign policy, in addition to being more republican and anticlerical, they are less woke than English Canadians on gender and racial diversity. In particular, they are more opposed to measures for racial or gender diversity at university, and to transgender rights and flying the pride flag on public buildings. In sum, French Canadians are generally further to the left, but their leftism is much more pre-woke (Kaufmann, 2024, pp. 36, 49).

To what extent does wokeness, in relation to other factors, explain white over-representation in MAID deaths? Can we parcel out the relative importance of each factor? The question is difficult to answer because the different factors interact.

Take the fact that whites are not over-euthanized in Quebec. Is the main reason the lower prevalence of wokeness? Or is it the language barrier, the existence of separate institutions or the lower percentage of foreign-educated physicians? There is no easy answer because these factors are entangled with each other. The French language has hindered the inflow of woke ideology while leading to the creation of separate institutions and a political culture that favors the training of local physicians, rather than the licensing of foreign ones.

Whatever the cause or causes of white over-representation in MAID deaths — woke ideology, contemporary Anglo culture, white individualism, lack of rapport between immigrant physicians and Euro-Canadians — MAID could be the tip of the iceberg. The anti-white bias we see in medically assisted death is probably just as present whenever and wherever a Canadian physician has to make life-or-death decisions.

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

Brodie, I. (2001). Interest group litigation and the embedded state: Canada’s court challenges program. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 34(2), 357-376. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423901777931

Clement, W. (1975). The Canadian Corporate Elite. McGill-Queen’s University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qf2rw

Cornelissen, L. (2021). Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019. Insights on Canadian Society, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2021001/article/00010-eng.htm

Hahn, R. A., Wetterhall, S. F., Gay, G. A., Harshbarger, D. S., Burnett, C. A., Parrish, R. G., & Orend, R. J. (2002). The recording of demographic information on death certificates: a national survey of funeral directors. Public Health Reports, 117(1), 37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4598716

Health Canada. (2025). Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/annual-report-medical-assistance-dying-2024.html

Kaufmann, E. (2024). The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary Canada. Macdonald-Laurier Institute, February. https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/20240129_Culture-wars-Kaufmann_PAPER-B-v2-FINAL.pdf

Leger (2025). Trust in Government and Views on Provincial Sovereignty, May 12. https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Special-report-May-20th.pdf

Lemmens, T. (2025). What Ontario MAID Death Review Committee reports tell us about Canada’s MAID policy and practice—and about the overhaul it needs. Canadian Journal of Bioethics, 8(4), 88-94. https://doi.org/10.7202/1121339ar

Lipset, S. M. (1986). Historical traditions and national characteristics: A comparative analysis of Canada and the United States. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 113-155. https://doi.org/10.2307/3340795

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Singapore is admired for its ability to attract exceptionally bright individuals into public service. In 2025, the country ranked first on both the Chandler Good Governance Index and the Elite Quality Index. This state of affairs is not some accidental by-product of growth. It is the result of deliberate policy choices. Singapore has a deep commitment to administrative competence.

To see how this commitment operates, let’s begin with education. Singapore’s school system is designed to identify cognitive outliers through standardised testing, ensuring gifted students are recognised regardless of family background. These students are channelled into accelerated tracks that emphasise abstraction, analytical reasoning and problem-solving.

The process does not end with schooling but rather feeds into a broader talent pipeline. Singapore operates a large number of public-sector talent programmes that recruit top performers into ministries and statutory boards and then rotate them through demanding policy environments. In addition, such individuals are routinely sponsored to participate in foreign talent programmes and executive courses, exposing them to global best practices.

All these arrangements reflect a specific theory of state capacity. Lee Kuan Yew, modern Singapore’s founding father, was familiar with intelligence research and understood that general intelligence becomes increasingly important as work grows more complex.

Today, senior public administration is among the most cognitively demanding forms of work. It requires sustained information processing, long planning horizons, coordination across policy domains, and the ability to make decisions under uncertainty. It is highly g-loaded. We know that as task complexity rises, g explains a greater share of the variation in performance. Hence small differences in ability produce large differences in organisational effectiveness over time. States that consistently select for high ability in public service will eventually diverge from those that don’t.

Against this background, the UK’s current trajectory is striking. Britain was once associated with administrative competence. It now has a low-productivity public sector that is estimated to cost the country £80 billion a year. Instead of addressing this problem through meritocratic recruitment, the current Labour government has decided to restrict civil service internships to university students from working class backgrounds. Although framed as an overdue reform, the policy rests on a misreading of how ability, class and performance relate to each other.

The literature shows that cognitive ability is a stronger predictor of job performance, training success and long-term occupational attainment than is social class — particularly for complex roles. This point bears emphasis because it’s often misunderstood.

Acknowledging the predictive power of intelligence does not imply that talent is absent from the working class. Rather, it implies that class is a weak and imprecise proxy for the traits that matter most in cognitively demanding roles. Socioeconomic status is correlated with IQ because intelligent people are better able to get ahead in every domain of life. Richer people are often smarter people. Selection rules that prioritise background over ability therefore lower the average cognitive ability of entrants, even if they benefit the subset of exceptional individuals who have working class origins.

Evidence from intergenerational studies reinforces this conclusion. As Linda Gottfredson notes: when sons have higher IQs than their fathers, they tend to surpass them in occupational attainment. Sons scoring roughly one standard deviation above their fathers are substantially more likely to move into higher-status occupations, even when they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds. Conversely, sons scoring roughly one standard deviation below their fathers are much more likely to experience downward mobility. The overall father–son correlation is moderate in size, leaving ample room for IQ-driven mobility. Indeed, cognitive differences account for a large share of movement within the social hierarchy.

More recent work lends further support to the conclusion above. Using Australian longitudinal data, Felix Bittman showed that when cognitive ability is taken into account, the apparent effects of social class on educational and occupational outcomes become substantially smaller. This replicates an earlier study by Michael O’Connell and Gary Marks, demonstrating that intelligence measured in adolescence strongly predicts later educational attainment, occupational status and income. Notably, these patterns hold across cohorts, suggesting they reflect real, structural relationships.

Recent genetic evidence points in the same direction. Polygenic scores for educational attainment predict academic achievement, persistence and later socioeconomic outcomes. And crucially, these effects operate within class categories rather than merely between them. Children from working class backgrounds with high polygenic scores consistently outperform peers with lower scores and often match or exceed higher-class peers with average scores. The explanation is not mysterious: highly intelligent individuals can extract more value from a given environment. They learn more from the same level of instruction and respond more effectively to training.

This matters because Britain already offers an extensive array of access schemes, upskilling programmes and training initiatives for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. When highly intelligent individuals from such backgrounds engage with these schemes, their outcomes are generally good. But the same is rarely true of their counterparts with low intelligence. “Underrepresented” sociological categories are no substitute for comprehensive measures of ability.

What’s more, the way class is operationalised in public policy has become increasingly incoherent. Under current definitions, a train driver earning £80,000 per year may be classified as “working class”, even if his income exceeds that of many professionals. (The fact that train drivers out-earn many people working in professional occupations is the result of unusual collective bargaining agreements.)

The risks of allowing politics to override meritocracy are clearly illustrated by the case of Jamaica. During the colonial period, Jamaica operated a civil service exam that aimed to select the best candidates for public service. As Henrice Altink notes, this exam was abolished in the early 20^th century when segments of the white elite complained that too many black Jamaicans were securing prestigious administrative positions. Meritocratic selection proved politically unacceptable precisely because it allowed talent to surface regardless of racial background.

After independence in 1962, Jamaica became more corrupt and the civil service was no longer insulated from political pressures. Appointments and promotions were determined by party loyalty rather than administrative competence. This process intensified during the Manley years of the 1970s, a period marked by ideological polarisation, capital flight and the emigration of economic elites. The result was a substantial depletion of the country’s human capital. Jamaica’s civil service today is more working class than in earlier periods, yet it is arguably less effective.

Singapore’s experience stands in sharp contrast. By identifying talent early, cultivating it through education and training, and rewarding it generously, the country has been able to build world-class institutions. Britain’s current approach risks moving in the opposite direction. For a state already struggling with productivity, this could prove dire.

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.

White culture is a good thing and worth fighting for.

In a recent confirmation hearing, Democrats interrogated Jeremy Carl about white culture. They seemed befuddled by his claim that modern immigration policy and elite attitudes are a threat to that culture. Indeed, the very notion of “white culture” was puzzling to them. What could this mean?

On X, many echoed this bemusement, attacking the idea that white culture is a coherent idea. Perhaps there is Italian culture, Irish culture, German culture, but there is not white culture. Yet for many progressives, the argument that white culture is some illusion, some racist will-o-the-wisp, disappears once it is the subject of criticism rather than praise. In that case, white culture, or “white supremacy culture” as it is sometimes called, is not only real but a monstrous force for evil that must be resisted and ultimately abolished.

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