In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views (Ashley Smart, 03.26.2025, UnDark)
In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter that he was cancelling his lecture.Kirkegaard is perhaps best known for his provocative writing on genetics and race. On his blog, he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts; that affirmative action produces Black and Hispanic doctors who kill people with their incompetence; that Africans are excessively predisposed to violence; and that the hereditarian hypothesis of intelligence — roughly, the idea that races or ancestry groups differ in average intelligence in ways that are substantially attributable to genetics — is “almost certainly true.”
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Living in the Age of Risky Science: An Undark Special Series.At the time of the 2022 conference, “this guy was having a bad influence with the crap he was spreading, and the way he behaved online, and he was giving our scientific field a bad name,” recalled Abdellaoui, a geneticist working in the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Center whose research interests include the genetics of intelligence. Abdellaoui noted in a post on Medium that Kirkegaard had never been part of any credible research program or Ph.D. program, and had a reputation for publishing sloppy scientific work in dubious journals. “I just didn’t want to be associated with that, and I wanted to have that be clear — that he’s not on my team and I’m not on his.” (Kirkegaard did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview for this story.)
Shortly after Abdellaoui announced his withdrawal, he learned that Kirkegaard was scratched from the speaker lineup, and Abdellaoui decided to give the keynote after all. Yet just two years later, Kirkegaard would be back at the ISIR conference podium — a podium that has served as a platform for Kirkegaard and other proponents of the hereditarian hypothesis since long before Abdellaoui’s threatened boycott. Their presence at ISIR, alongside psychologists and geneticists from many of the world’s top research institutions, underscores a complicated reality in this fraught field of study: When it comes to the genetics of intelligence, the line between mainstream and fringe can be hard to pin down, and the work of the former can intertwine with that of the latter in ways that are difficult to disentangle.
…was to justify the Empire by showing “others” inferior.