Just So Stories

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

From India to Iran: How Hitler redefined ‘Aryan’ for Nazism: According to Nazi ideology, an ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed with athletic features. The term is still tied to Nazi Germany, but its origin lies elsewhere. (Suzanne Cords, May 5, 2026, Deutsche-Welle)

The racist reinterpretation of the term Aryan began in the middle of the 19th century. In his four-volume work “An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,” French writer and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau divided humanity into three groups, the white, yellow and black races. His conclusion was that the white, Aryan original race was superior to the others, characterized by its “immeasurably superior intelligence,” and was destined to rule over the others. He also warned against “racial mixing,” as this would endanger both the quality of the Aryan original “race” and humanity as a whole.

Gobineau’s theory was largely ignored by his contemporaries but later found traction after being appropriated and altered to serve nationalist, far-right ideology. A large number of scientists and academics subsequently used Gobineau’s racial theory as a basis for their own writings on the subject.

IT’S THE POINT OF DARWINISM:

What I Learned from Teaching Darwin (C. Brandon Ogbunu, 04.23.2026, undark)

On the first day of class, I joked with students that I would play the role of their politically conservative uncle. That is, there would be no trigger warnings and none of the cushioning that has become standard in college courses that include exposure to ideas and readings with offensive language or content. I told them that we would read Darwin’s books as they were written and try to understand them, and if they didn’t like that, to enroll in a different course. The larger lesson was simple: To study a complex world, you must read difficult material and learn to interpret it with rigor and empathy.

I was priming the class for Darwin’s views on race and gender, ideas that complicate many of our largely positive opinions of him (mine included). Some of my selective memory, which demotes his problematic takes, has support: There is a literature on how progressive he was compared to scientists like his cousin Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. But reading Darwin’s 1871 book “The Descent of Man” in a classroom with several young women from around the world softened my rigid stance that the right response to backward takes is to simply get over them. I still believe that refusing to read or interpret such work is unscholarly. But I also came to admit something I had been too eager to brush aside: Even when we consider historical context, there is still something painful about reading a giant of science describe human differences in the language of hierarchy, rank, and levels of civilization.

If his ideology did not place white men at the pinnacle, no one would ever have heard of him.

APPLYING DARWINISM:

Trump, his ‘low IQ’ slur, and the right’s race obsession (Michael Mathes, with Raphaelle Peltier in New York, 4/22/26, AFP)

“Trump’s characterization of people of color as ‘low IQ’ is a racist dog whistle with a long history in the US,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, told AFP.

During the periods of colonialism and 19th century slavery, “white male elites took for granted that they were cognitively superior to women and people of color and, thus, divinely appointed for leadership.”

Trump’s recent repeated use of the expression dovetails with the American far-right’s apparent obsession with genetics and phrenology, a pseudoscience of cranium size and shape as a supposed marker of intelligence.

THEY ARE DARWINIST BECAUSE OF, NOT DESPITE:

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s (Clarence Lusane, April 16, 2026, Fair Observer)

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those Trump promoted for decades. Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and developed friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and white nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from white supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically-based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the 19th century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined. It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom, with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, DC, had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, blacks and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the white race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of white Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-white immigrants from the Global South.

Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Trump.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

The Creator of the SAT Was an Infamous Eugenicist (Jake Currie, April 6, 2026, Nautilus)

Was Carl Brigham a racist? The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, and his racism led him to twist his own data to arrive at faulty—and bigoted—conclusions.

During World War I, Brigham was tasked with developing psychological tests to measure the cognitive abilities of newly drafted soldiers representing a cross-section of American military-aged men. It was a golden opportunity to gather data, and the tests Brigham developed were the ancestors of the modern SAT exam.

During the early 20th century, there was also a eugenics movement sweeping the country, and like many white Americans of the era, Brigham bought into the notion that some races were superior to others. While he viewed Blacks as inferior to whites, this wasn’t his primary concern. Instead, he was focused on the influx of “inferior” white immigrants coming into the country.

Brigham and other eugenicists of the day split white people into three groups: Nordic, from Northern Europe; Alpine, from Central and Eastern Europe; and Mediterranean, from Southern Europe. Based on his testing, Brigham came to the conclusion that the Nordics had the highest intelligence, followed by the Alpines, with the Mediterraneans scoring the lowest. Because of this, he warned that the waves of newly arriving Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants threatened to lower our collective national intelligence level.

Never “just trust the science.”