Just So Stories

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Eugenics and the Nihilism of Law-and-Order Politics (Terence Keel, September 6, 2026, LA Review of Books)

His conclusion was, however, fatefully turned on its head in 1912 by Arthur H. Estabrook, working out of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Estabrook “reanalyzed” Dugdale’s data and decided that heredity mattered more than Dugdale realized. With Charles Davenport, one of the nation’s leading eugenicists and the director of the Eugenics Record Office, Estabrook published a study of another “degenerate” family, entitled The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics. Unsurprisingly, the two men concluded that there was nothing to be done to correct the genes of a criminal. “The rural communities of ‘degenerates,’” they argued, suffered from “an unusual lack of industry, retardation in school work, and a failure to observe the conventionalities in sex-relationships. There is reason for concluding that the first and second traits are hereditary and are, in a measure, the raison d’être of the foundation of such communities.” They used the term “cacogenics” (derived from an earlier concept developed by British physician and biologist E. E. Fournier d’Albe) for the generational deterioration of a (white) family. The sentiment behind the concept had considerable staying power, even if the term itself fell out of use.

Estabrook and Davenport helped normalize the notion that some families were burdened with an insurmountable defective inheritance. The state, it followed, could do nothing against a “cacogenic” family’s slide into criminal degeneracy and poverty. Combining policing, incarceration, segregation, and sterilization was the best course of action to protect the privileged from the hopeless.

Reducing complex social problems to a hereditary defect—to “bad genes”—had the virtue of sounding scientific while hiding a profound pessimism about American people. Conservative ideologues seized on this “diagnosis” to argue against state and philanthropic investment in the lives of people like the Jukes. Similar arguments about Black people were made during the period of Jim Crow segregation, with advocates of Darwinian evolution arguing against investing in a population destined to become extinct once forced into open competition with whites. In their 2009 book Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore describe how “natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. […] Europeans were the agents of Evolution.” Political pluralism and multiracial democracy effectively stood in the way of evolution. State investment could not possibly make a meaningful difference in the lives of inferior people—a view that has generated a lingering apathy plaguing US policy decisions around medical care, employment, and poverty ever since.

IT’S NOT JUST THAT FOLKS BUILT CAREERS ON THE FAIRY TALE…:

Do we need a new theory of evolution? (Stephen Buranyi, 28 Jun 2022, The Guardian)

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

…but that they and many more made the fantasy their religion. You can’t expect them to be rational about it.

DARWIN HARDEST HIT:

Why it is reasonable to label Nathan Cofnas’ race realism as pseudoscientific (Pieter Beck, 25th September 2026, Skeptic)

Nathan Cofnas, the self-professed “race realist” who made international headlines when he accused Cambridge academic Jason Arday of plagiarism, has defended his “hereditarianism” position as scientific. I would argue, instead, that such beliefs are pseudoscientific.

Cofnas is mostly known for his controversial blogpost “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, in which (among other things) he claims that “[In a meritocracy] Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Cofnas believes races are real (hence “race realism”) and that differences between races are due to genetic factors (hence “hereditarianism”). He puts most of his emphasis on differences in IQ, but also refers to other properties. Cofnas never makes explicit to what degree he thinks genes contribute to observed differences, but based on statements which suggest that he believes environmental interventions are useless, the role he confers to genetic factors must be very high.

Cofnas has received his fair share of criticism from relevant experts. When asked to comment about the claims Cofnas is making about race, IQ-expert Han van der Maas said that “Exceptional claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and I don’t see Cofnas providing such evidence.” Biologist Kevin Bird wrote: “Cofnas & all other scientific racists fail to meet basic academic standards. They don’t read or engage with evidence.” Biologist Gregory Kohn wrote that “Cofnas consistently resists even approaching the modern scientific literature. […] He traffics in shallow controversy and shallow controversy alone.” Geneticist Adam Rutherford: “Cofnas’ work is crap, and should never have been granted scholarly credibility.” And statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has called Cofnas a “shallow thinker” and “racist” and said his work is based on “zero evidence whatsoever”.

However, to date I am not aware of any discussion of Cofnas’s pseudoscience in depth. People on both sides of the debate (pro and contra Cofnas) have a tendency to argue in the abstract, rather than discussing concrete passages from Cofnas’s work, as I will do here, citing Cofnas extensively. Since I am making quite a strong claim by using the term pseudoscience, I have an obligation to provide enough evidence.

There’s no such thing as specxies.

IDEOLOGY, NOT SCIENCE:

Misinformation in Intro Psych Textbooks: We’re still misleading students, the general public, and ourselves (Steve Stewart-Williams, Jun 23, 2026, Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter)

Among other things, many intro psych textbooks gloss over flaws in famous studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment; misrepresent areas like evolutionary psychology; present highly contested but left-friendly ideas like stereotype threat as settled science; promote psychological myths such as that violent video games cause real-world violence; and ignore exaggerations and distortions in famous case studies like that of Phineas Gage and Kitty Genovese.

JUST A CHOICE OF WHO YOUR GOD IS:

The Irony of Richard Dawkins and AI Consciousness (John Mac Ghlionn, 5/12/26, Splice Today)

Richard Dawkins made his living telling religious believers that their feelings weren’t facts. The calming influence of prayer, the sense of being heard, the conviction that some greater mind was paying attention—none of it counted as evidence, he argued, because human brains are pattern-recognition machines that hallucinate agency in the static. He helped popularize a name for the bug: hyperactive agency detection. We see intent in coincidence. We see God in the gap.

Recently, the 85-year-old biologist published an essay in UnHerd announcing that he’d spent an ungodly amount of hours chatting with an Anthropic chatbot named Claude. He decided the chatbot was conscious, renamed it Claudia, and felt he’d made a friend. There’s comedy in this…

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Nearly Half of Italy’s Wolves Are Part Dog Now, Thanks to Hybridization. Is That a Threat to the Species? (Gennaro Tomma, May 6, 2026, bioGraphic)

Lorenzini’s research looked at genetic material collected from 748 wolves that had been found dead between 2020 and 2024, and 26 more that had been collected between 1993 and 2003. The team found that 47 percent were wolf-dog hybrids. And while some of these animals are the descendants of hybridization events that took place generations ago, others are more recent crosses, showing that hybridization is still occurring.

They are dogs.

SILLINESS EVOLVES:

If wings came before flight, what were they for? (Lily Burton, 5/08/26, Science News)

In the experiments, Jablonski, now at the Museum and Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and his colleagues focused on small, feathered dinosaurs called pennaraptorans. The animals’ “protowings” were unlikely to have supported flight, says Minyoung Son, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

The surface area of the wings, he says, would have been too small to create the aerodynamic force needed to lift pennaraptorans off the ground, and the ranges of their wing joints would also have limited their movements. Plus, Son says, feathers need to have an asymmetrical shape to be aerodynamic, and based on the fossil record, these dinosaurs “don’t have the aerodynamic feathers yet.”

THE SILLINESS OF DARWINISM:

Most Bird Wings Aren’t Optimized for Flight (Jake Currie, May 7, 2026, Nautilus)

To investigate the optimization of bird wings, researchers from the University of Bristol essentially decided to design some from scratch. They created a “theoretical morphospace” of all wing shapes that could appear in nature, regardless of whether they’re actually found there or not (and they really covered their bases—some of the imagined wings were almost round while others were spindly wisps). They then tested each wing to discover which shapes performed the best in different flight modes (soaring, hovering, diving, and so on).

After identifying the ideal theoretical wings, they mapped real bird wings on top to see how they measured up. Most birds don’t have the “best” wing shapes, they discovered. In fact, the majority of birds were in the middle to low end of the optimization space. “It turns out for many birds, including most of the ones you see every day, that good enough is good enough when it comes to flight,” study author Benton Walters said in a statement. 

It’s ideology, not science.

DARWINISTS ARE AN ENDLESS SOURCE OF AMUSEMENT:

The Father of Memetics Has Become a Meme About AI Psychosis: One more unfortunate soul falls for The Claude Delusion. (AJ Dellinger, May 5, 2026, Gizmodo)

Dawkins says he spent three days with Claude (renamed Claudia, and if you want to read anything into why Dawkins responded so positively to a woman who told him everything he wanted to hear, we’ll leave that to you). He apparently handed his chatbot instance a copy of his novel and asked it questions about the text, for which it happily heaped praise onto him.

By the end, Dawkins was insisting to Claude that it had consciousness, even though it apparently rejected the idea.