At this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, US President Donald Trump stated that people from Somalia have low IQs. “I always say these are low-IQ people,” he said in his speech. His son, Donald Trump Jr, made a similar statement about Haitian people in 2024 (Trump’s government has since ended the protected status of both Somali and Haitian migrants in the US).
Authors
- Jonathan R. Goodman
Assistant Research Professor, Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
- Rebecca Sear
Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University of London
These statements and their consequences are symptoms of a growing trend in Western politics: the re-emergence of racial views of human nature that have been largely in hiding for the past 70 years. Narratives about the innate intellectual inferiority of black or brown people compared with white people – which can still be found in academic journals today – are fuelling far-right propaganda in some of the world’s largest democracies. Such claims underpin misinformation strategies on social media and bolster political movements.
These narratives are sometimes euphemistically referred to as ” race science ” or more recently “race realism”. But, as we argue, they are not actually scientific. One member of this community, Nathan Cofnas , recently attracted public attention by accusing the late Jason Arday of plagiarism.
What got less attention was that Cofnas has links to a network of people who make supposedly scientific claims about the innate intelligence, criminality or sexuality of different racial groups. Some within this network are affiliated with universities, giving their work the mask of legitimacy.
This group produces work which has the appearance of science, but which is methodologically deeply flawed and fails to engage with rigorous scientific research . Yet they regularly succeed in publishing this work in (a handful of) mainstream academic journals.
How do they manage to do this, and what are the consequences?
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Scientific shortcomings: biology and genetics
Contemporary race scientists position themselves as persecuted but legitimate scientists who are prevented from pursuing their work for ideological reasons . They sometimes refer to what they defend as hereditarianism. This is the idea that genetic differences play a key causal role in determining differences in human behaviour and intelligence between human groups – such as races – over purely environmental differences.
Yet scientific evidence has shown repeatedly and from many points of view that hereditarian thinking is both flawed and wrong. Race scientists make extremely simplistic claims such as: “Black people have innately lower intelligence than white people, because selection pressures resulted in the evolution of higher intelligence in white people”. No part of this claim can be scientifically supported; not from the point of view of genetics, evolutionary biology or psychology.
In the 1970s, the influential evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin famously showed that there is more genetic variation within human groups than between them. Socially defined racial groups just aren’t that genetically different from one another. There is genetic variation – though we’re actually a relatively genetically similar species compared to closely related primates. But this variation doesn’t fall neatly into clusters which correlate with how we typically categorise races.
Skin tone and colour do vary between geographical locations. So do some other physiological features like hair texture, or the ability to process oxygen or milk products. But these differences are associated with characteristics of the environment rather than with racial groups. Some genetic variants associated with white skin colour , for example, may have originated in Africa. Similarly, the ability to digest milk is seen in some populations in Europe, Africa and Asia , rather than being an exclusively “Aryan” characteristic, as far right groups sometimes claim .
We now know considerably more about the human genome than Lewontin did in the 1970s, but his conclusions are supported today . Knowing someone’s race just doesn’t tell us a great deal about their genetics .
Recent scientific advances allowing us to examine ancient DNA from archaeological sites help explain why genetic differences do not fall neatly along racial lines. This research paints a picture of constant mixing between human groups, as waves of migration washed to and fro across the globe. It ultimately makes any belief in the genetic “purity” of European or African populations meaningless.
While human genetics is fascinatingly complex, race scientists ignore this complexity in favour of a far-too-simplistic view of humanity. And this view is not supported by the work of scientists who have used rigorous scientific methods to further our understanding of our species.
Challenges from social science
When race scientists say that black people have lower intelligence than white people, they typically base that on claims of differences in IQ test results. But the data underlying these claims is often shaky, to say the least.
Hereditarians have relied heavily on a database which claims to provide average IQs for countries worldwide: the “national IQ” database. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that this database is deeply methodologically flawed . It isn’t possible to measure intelligence in the same way in very different cultures, with different exposure to formal education. That’s because we know that education is one of several other factors linked to differences in IQ.
The methods used to put the database together did not come even close to meeting typical standards of scientific rigour. There’s even analysis suggesting that low IQ samples were deliberately chosen to represent sub-Saharan Africa, to make the IQ for black populations artificially low.
Meanwhile, the Flynn effect , showing that IQ has risen considerably during the 20th and 21st centuries, clearly demonstrates that IQ scores are heavily determined by the environment we’re in. Such a rapid rise over a short period of time must have environmental, not genetic, causes.
What’s more, intelligence is a contested topic – something which is hard to define and measure. IQ tests only measure specific cognitive abilities, ignoring things like social intelligence or creativity, for example. In fact, social intelligence features heavily in mainstream research on the evolution of human intelligence.
As one of us recently outlined in a peer-reviewed paper , race scientists are largely silent on the social brain hypothesis – the view that humans evolved remarkable intellectual abilities to manage social issues. In every group, there is strong social competition around resources, mating and status. These are the things humans spend the most time navigating – the complexities of our rich social lives.
Not one of the prominent mainstream views on the evolution of human intelligence concludes there are innate cognitive differences between racial groups. Factors that have been put forward range from our cooperative child rearing to our heavy reliance on culture and learning . These all involve our social relationships and all have received equal lack of attention from race scientists.
Mainstream opinion in the evolutionary behavioural sciences is that cognitively, all human groups are the same, though of course individuals within groups differ. Our amazing behavioural diversity stems from our species’ ability to adapt flexibly to our environment. This is especially because of our reliance on culture and social learning – not because we have evolved different psychologies to suit different environments.
Rather than drawing on this mainstream research, race scientists use simplistic “just-so” stories to explain how race differences in traits such as intelligence supposedly evolved. Their “cold winters theory”, for example, claims that the challenges of cold winters in Europe and east Asia created evolutionary selection pressures for greater intelligence after human groups migrated out of Africa. In doing so, they make unsupportable assumptions about environmental differences between Africa and the rest of the world. They also fail to acknowledge half a century of research on the evolution of human cognitive ability.
Yes, we needed to learn new food gathering practices and methods for dealing with environmental challenges as we migrated across the world. But the same was true as humans migrated across the large and ecologically diverse continent of Africa. Race scientists provide no evidence for their arguments. They don’t rely on archaeological evidence, nor do they use typical methods from evolutionary biology to understand evolutionary processes. Using the methods of race scientists, it would be equally easy to make the argument that challenges posed by hot summers drove the evolution of higher intelligence, and equally without scientific backing.
No matter which way you look at these issues – from the view of genetics, anthropology, evolutionary biology or psychology – hereditarianism does not hold up.
A short history of race science
To understand the potential consequences of these views, it is important to see them in historical context. Early in the 20th century, race science was mainstream . Overly simplistic and biologically deterministic views about the origins of differences between human groups – not just race but class – were widespread (if not universal) and important to the eugenics movement.
If disadvantaged groups owe their disadvantage to some fault within them, and not to the structural conditions they experience, then some argue society is not responsible for helping those people. Such arguments led to eugenic sterilisation laws which aimed to “improve” society by preventing – without their consent – the reproduction of those considered likely to pass on their innate “defects” to future children. And it was ultimately behind the Nazis’ “solution” of trying to eliminate “undesirables” entirely.
In the decades after the second world war, the horrors of the Nazi regime led to a decline in the popularity of eugenics in mainstream research and a rejection of race science. But the belief that science supported eugenic claims was already collapsing, even as the Nazis were trying to implement a race-based society. As we learned more about human biology and genetics during the 20th century, it became obvious that human genetic variation was too complex to be mapped into socially recognised racial (or class) categories. Advances in science meant race science dropped out of mainstream thinking.
Yet those committed to a belief in a biological hierarchy of races, regardless of what the science said, wanted venues in which they could continue their discussions. In the 1960s, the pseudo-scientific journal Mankind Quarterly became their venue. Mankind Quarterly was funded by the Pioneer Fund , a non-profit foundation set up in the 1930s by a US textile magnate who chose to use his fortune to fund research on race science and fight desegregation in the US.
The Pioneer Fund continued to fund race science into the 21st century – including supporting Mankind Quarterly – when it was taken over by the current network of race scientists. They channelled its remaining funds into a new company, the Human Diversity Foundation, subsequently rebranded as Polygenic Scores LLC .
How race science still persists
Given all this, how is race science still being published in mainstream academic journals? To be clear, race science does not typically get published in genetics or evolutionary biology journals. Most academic journals operate peer review, meaning papers only get published after evaluation by experts in the field. The overall absence of race science in genetics or biology journals is a clear signal that it does not meet contemporary standards of scientific rigour in genetics or biology.
Instead, race scientists continue to publish in para-scientific journals. But race science also makes it into a growing number of mainstream social science or humanities journals . Psychologist Andrew Winston, an expert in the history of race science in psychology has described it as a “community project … with its own networks, mentorships, journals, funding, conferences, heroes, origin myths, martyrs, defenders and historiography.
Behind the network of writers producing race science sits a community of editors, peer reviewers and others in gatekeeping roles which too often allows race science to be published in mainstream journals. This is particularly in the subfields of psychology interested in intelligence and individual differences, and evolutionary psychology.
Editors of Intelligence, the mainstream journal which has probably published the largest quantity of race science, have occasionally published editorials defending their publication of race science in the name of ensuring robust academic debate even on controversial topics.
There have been sanctions. Philippe Rushton , one of an earlier generation of race scientists, faced sanctions from his university in Canada but kept his job apparently owing to the intervention of Edward O. Wilson , arguably the most famous biologist towards the end of the 20th century.
Cofnas created justified controversy over his call for a “hereditarian revolution” after which it will be acknowledged that black people are innately intellectually disadvantaged compared to white people. But he kept his postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University (though his affiliation with a Cambridge college was ended). He has also kept his postdoctoral position at Ghent University after using the opportunity provided by excessive news coverage of Arday to publicise his hereditarian views (though some sanctions have been imposed, such as restrictions on teaching). Cofnas has defended his views by saying he’s been misunderstood and is entitled to free inquiry.
Moreover, when University College London discovered that the race science community had been holding conferences on its premises (the “London Conferences on Intelligence”), without their knowledge of the subject of the conferences, they acted to prevent further such conferences being held. The publisher of the journal Intelligence, Elsevier, has recently appointed new editors, who have stated their commitment to publishing both rigorous and socially responsible science. Race scientists are increasingly publishing in evolutionary psychology journals rather than Intelligence.
However, the London Conferences on Intelligence continue, though not at UCL. Race scientists also have a media arm, Aporia magazine, which promotes race science using much more overt language and with more obvious policy focus than publications in academic journals. One Aporia article, for example, argued for eugenics as a solution to Africa’s lack of economic development, noting in a post that some may find it “distateful”. It claimed – relying on race science’s unscientific arguments – that artificial selection for higher intelligence is needed to improve the continent’s innately unintelligent populace.
Race science may not have the respect of the scientific community, but it does have funding and influential backers. A report by Hope not Hate revealed that the network of race scientists received significant funding from the US businessman Andrew Conru , who withdrew his funding after the report was released.
The US Ambassador to Belgium even intervened when Ghent University set up an investigation into how Cofnas was hired .
Race scientists are far from the victims they claim to be. Race scientists in this and previous generations have worked hard to ensure their messages are heard beyond academia. And in this generation, they are successfully using social media to spread their beliefs, especially Elon Musk’s X.
But what about academic freedom? Isn’t it good for science to discuss any hypothesis to ensure free exchange of ideas? Academic debate is productive only if it involves methodologically rigorous research. Science will not progress if one side of any debate consistently uses poor-quality, methodologically flawed work. Nor is it necessary to continually debate topics which have long since been settled.
We believe it is unequivocal that race science is fundamentally pseudoscience . In our view, it’s critical to call attention to not only the scientific flaws underlying this body of work but also the real target it’s aimed at: political actors and everyday readers who ultimately decide the direction that science, and society, goes in.
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