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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

He really does have strong competition (as evidenced above) but “the music on the bus is too loud” and “no one can swim professionally” as evidence for the innately low intelligence of inhabitants of lower income countries has to win some kind of prize

• In general, it is often too noisy: On the bus, the movies and music are too loud.
Also, the movies shown on the bus for all passengers, including children, are often too violent (e.g., John Wick). (Both represent too much sensory stimulation or low sensitivity). Buses, trucks, cars and motorcycles are sometimes extremely noisy. There is a lot of honking and often you can hear car alarms.

All this can also be compared to swimming skills. In three different public swimming pools near Quito, no one could be observed who could swim professionally (for example, breaststroke or crawl). It must be added, however, that admission to an outdoor pool costs $4 per adult and $3 per child (ages 2–12; 2021 Ilaló near Quito); there is also no family pass. Even in direct comparison with Germany (without taking into account differences in average income), this is more expensive.Footnote 11 Hardly anyone can afford to go swimming; moreover, there seem to be no professional swimming lessons.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Though I REALLY hope he’s serious about forming a splinter evolutionary psychology society, and leaving HBES to people who actually want to science

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

His intro is truly remarkable. A race scientist wrote the chapter on evolutionary psychology and anthropology because there isn’t an evolutionary anthropologist in the world who is anti-woke enough to write about ev psych

There are also personal anecdotes, extremely close to home, that equally demonstrate the exceedingly politically activist nature of the current generation of anthropologists. As you will see, Part Ill of the current Handbook includes chapters that survey evolutionary psychology's relationship with and influence on neighboring social sciences. For the chapter on 'Evolutionary psychology and anthropology, I wanted to recruit a young evolutionary anthropologist who could write on the topic in an objective and scientific manner, without any political bias. I looked long and hard for such a person - trust me, I really tried and looked everywhere - but, in the end, I was not successful. The extensive, worldwide, and ultimately unsuccessful search for an anthropologist to author a chapter on evolutionary psychology and anthropology purely from a scientific perspective, without political agenda, delayed the completion of the current volume by six months. In the end, however, I was not able to find a single junior anthropologist anywhere in the world to author such a chapter, so I had to recruit a senior psychologist instead. Such is the very sad current state of scientific anthropology.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A new Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology has just been published, in which it is claimed that the human species is polytypic: not only is race biologically meaningful but the races are distinct enough to be considered subspecies. Published by Elgar. In 2026.

Chapters in Part III take stock of the current state of evolutionary psychology, by casting wider attention to other social and behavioral sciences and assessing the field's influence on them. In Chapter 11 ('Evolutionary psychology and anthropology'), Heiner Rindermann identifies three major forces that oppose scientific anthropology: Religion, National Socialism ('Nazism'), and woke leftist ideology. Ironically, in this sense, woke left ideologues, who include most anthropologists themselves, geneticists, and other university academics, share much in common with the Nazis in their common opposition to scientific anthropology.
Rindermann's extensive review of the literature leaves no doubt that humans are genetically polytypic and contain different biological races or 'subspecies' At the end of the chapter, Rindermann delivers devastating rebuttals to all potential arguments against the notion of races/subspecies among humans.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Extreme heat is raising risks for pregnant women and babies, and Wellcome is calling for the needs of pregnant women and their babies to be reflected in national climate and health plans www.ft.com/content/f943...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/.
https://www.ft.com/content/f9439ec0-f591-42b8-b376-015be62aad24?emailId=6157b41d-749b-40ba-8b38-98ceb569de40&segmentId=22011ee7-896a-8c4c-22a0-7603348b7f22&syn-25a6b1a6=1

The poll of midwives, obstetricians and others in the field by Wellcome, one of the world’s biggest scientific funders, found that 73 per cent had seen an increase in heat-related complications affecting pregnant women over the past five years. More than three-quarters reported an increase in harm to foetal or newborn health from high temperatures over the same period.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Since we’re talking about the politicisation of science, another laughably bad “national IQ” paper has just been published in Evolutionary Psychological Science. This paper barely even pretends to be science yet is published by a mainstream publisher, with prominent academics on the editorial board

Screenshot of new paper

Evolutionary Psychological Science > Article
Democratic Peace, Intelligent Belligerence: Evolutionary Psychological Foundations of Interstate Wars
Research | Published: 12 September 2026

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

If I’m reading this correctly, Henrich assumes that an increase in calls for change in a discipline are evidence for increasing politicisation of that discipline (negative). His most highly cited paper - the WEIRD people paper- does just that!

Section of text describing Henrich’s methods

Abstract of “The weirdest people in the world?”, lead author Henrich. Last two sentences read “ Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.”

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

A deep dive into one of the pieces of evidence provided in the anthropology section of the Vanderbilt report

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

To use the discussion about women hunting (everyone’s agreed women hunt, the debate is about how much) as an example of anthropology’s downfall was always baffling, to put it mildly, since the episode simply didn’t support the strong claims in the report about the politicisation of research

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If you want hot takes about fertility decline, my money's on this one

The famous New Yorker cartoon by Tom Toro showing a man in a threadbare suit telling children sitting around a fire "yes, the planet got destroyed but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders" edited to read
"yes fertility has collapsed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders"

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Reading the Acknowledgents section of a book can be quite informative

Extract from the Acknowledgements section of Stewart-Williams’ book:

“On top of that, I'd like to thank the many others who contributed their expertise, encouragement, or constructive scepticism, or who otherwise helped me to the finish line: Musa al-Gharbi, Angelos Antonatos, John Barry, April Bleske-Rechek, Paul Bloom, Michael Britt, Diana Broccardo, David Buss, Jimmy Carr, Stephen Ceci, Laurie-Maude Chenard, Logan Chipkin, Nicholas Christakis, Kai Li Chung, Cory Clark, Jerry Coyne, Sabhbh Curran, Alan Davison, Rolf Degen, Marieke de Vries, Janet Dreyer, Lucie Ewin, Emma Finn, Alexander Graul, Katie Greally, Julie Gunz, Lewis Halsey, Martie Haselton, Rob Henderson, Harold Herzog, Carole Hooven, Rosemary Hopcroft, Jeremy Hopes, Coleman Hughes, Victoria Hunt, lona Italia, Kathryn Jarvis, Lee Jussim, Scott Barry Kaufman, David Keeble, Razib Khan, Ruth Killick, Louisa Gee Ling Lee, Claire Lehmann, Louise Liddon, Ricardo Lopes, David Lubinski, Pablo Malo, Paul Marsden, Geoffrey Miller, Yascha Mounk, James Nuzzo, Rebecca Owens, Lionel Page, Steven Parton, Steven Pinker, Helen Pluckrose, Jess Price, Sam Reynolds, Matt Ridley, Larry Rifkin, Sally Satel, David Schmitt, Yael Schonbrun, Timur Sevincer, Todd Shackelford, Daniel Sharp, Michael Shermer, Sarah Shrubb, Rob Sica, Jack Smyth, Christina Hoff Sommers, Beatrice Stewart, Jolyon Stewart, Andrew Stewart-Loughnan, Will Storr, Josh Szeps, Andrew Thomas, Andy Thomson, Barbara Williams, Brian Williams, Wendy Williams, Chris Williamson, Colin Wright, Xiu Ling Wong, Claire Yoo, and Cathy Young”

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Meanwhile, in the US, there are still some academics trying to push that stereotypical media narrative that academia’s real problem is “politicisation” from the left, even as the state dismantles scientific infrastructure around them.

Cover of new book to be published in October by Pitchstone Publishing:

Virtuous Nonsense: Progrssive America’s Epistemic Crisis

Foreword by Michael Shermer
Edited by Lawrence M. Eppard
Jacob L. Mackey &
Lee Jussim

About the Book
Many American liberals believe that misinformation is
just a right-wing problem. As a result, they ignore a
similar crisis of misinformation occurring on the left-
particularly within higher education-and reflexively
dismiss any such claim as just another right-wing
talking point. Yet, as Virtuous Nonsense makes clear,
the epistemic problems in blue America are not only
real but also worsening and can no longer be ignored.
With contributions from a wide range of liberal-minded
scholars and thinkers, including Musa al-Gharbi,
Jonathan Haidt, Carol Tavris, and Matthew Yglesias, among many others, the volume demonstrates how large segments of the academy-namely, in the social
sciences, the humanities, and education-have become
captive to progressive ideology.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

And it’s not just Twitter. The far-right have their thumb on the media ecosystem’s scales

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

And a closing plenary from Stuart MacDonald talking about mortality trends in the UK, both the remarkable improvements in lifespan over the past 100 years and more recent, less cheerful trends

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Great talks continued with @joestrong.bsky.social’s Anne Shepherd New Investigator plenary, thanking his mentors and influences, and giving us his vision for critical demography

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Wendy Sigle ends the presentations with an explanation of why she won’t talk to policy-makers about fertility rates until she can do so without being complicit in problematic narratives which instrumentalise fertility decisions, and will focus on reproductive justice instead

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Kelsey Wright presents an analysis of US media articles on fertility, finding relatively little difference between more progressive and more conservative outlets in the frequency of alarmist framing, but progressive outlets were more likely to present counter-alarmist narratives

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Next up is Honorata Bogusz, presenting research on pronatalist discussions in Parliament and on Reddit in Poland, where “demographic depression” is apparently a common used phrase

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

We’re now in a session of presentations, starting with Daniel Goodkind, retired from the US Census Bureau, on “Objective estimation among political partisanship?”. Tl;dr - demography is NOT boring

Objective Estimation Amidst Political Partisanship?
Three Tales from a Statistical Monastery
Daniel Goodkind
US Census Bureau, retired
Presented at the
Annual Meeting of the British Society for Population Studies
Canterbury, UK
September 09, 2026
Disclaimer - This presentation reflects the views of its author alone

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

The strand kicked off yesterday with a great panel discussion, with the excellent Shireen Kanji, Oki MacPherson, Wendy Sigle, Annabel Sowemimo and @joestrong.bsky.social

Panellists: Shireen Kanji, Oki MacPherson, Wendy Sigle, Annabel Sowemimo, Joe Strong
This panel will focus on the need for demographers to consider the politics of demographic research when conducting and communicating their research. Demographic indicators and trends can be used, and misused, for political purposes, and so this panel will discuss how demographers can constructively contribute to political debates, and promote a better public understanding of demographic trends and their consequences.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Co-organising (with Wendy Sigle and Sarah Walters) a new strand at the @bspsuk.bsky.social conference this year on the Politics of Demography, to encourage more discussions among demographers about the political implications of their work, and about the politics of producing demographic knowledge

Banner of the BSPS at the entrance to the conference venue

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Philip Kreager summing up the book: all low fertilities are not the same, and a historical perspective helps us understand low fertility

Some General Themes in LFP& P
1. Longer-term perspectives are necessary to a balanced understanding of the causes, processes and outcomes of low fertilities.
2. Heterogeneity of vital trends and their correlates is an enduring property of fertilities at pre/mid/post transition. Low fertility is not one behaviour.
3. Low fertilities often existed in some constituent populations making up states prior to main periods of decline (e.g. before 1870 in NW Europe).
(cf Hajnal)
4. No one level (macro/meso/local) is adequate to capture all the key processes inducing declines.
5. Agencies endogenous to constituent groups arise both from indigenous social and cultural structures and wider macro trends.
Their agencies commonly combine both, and the how and why of this is an open question for inquiry.

Some General Themes in LFP&P (Continued)
6. Constituent populations therefore need to be specified in two ways (i.e. via mixed methods)
- standard demographic census and registration units/categories
- functioning groups that cut across or sub-divide standard demographic units (e.g- genders, cultural minorities, supply chains, etc.)
7. Outstanding issues include e.g.
-- many factors shaping vital trends work in contrary ways in coexisting groups, often in the same periods
- People belong to multiple networks that may be influential and combine in various ways to shape values and behaviour. As populations their memberships are cannot be decided by prior classification as closed units as demography normally requires.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Hilde Bras’ chapter in the book sounds fascinating. She demonstrates that low fertility is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. Using (a lot of!) historical Dutch data, she shows a substantial minority of women had low fertility and that different trajectories to low fertility could be identified

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Nice to see a book launch at @bspsuk.bsky.social, especially when that book is open access 😊: Low Fertilities in the Past and Present, part of the Proceedings of the @britishacademy.bsky.social

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Alessandro di Nallo showing that in the UK, political homogamy within partnerships is not associated with fertility, but a mismatch in political engagement is associated with lower fertility

Text from concluding slide

Conclusion
• We expected partners who match politically to have more children. That is what homogamy predicts on education, religion and gender-role attitudes.
• On these couples it holds far more narrowly. The party carries nothing. A mismatch of engagement does: one partner attached, the other not.
• Two readings stay open. A party name may be a poor record of what a couple actually shares: in Britain, social conservatism predicts completed fertility and a party label does not (Carlsson 2025). Or political markers may matter less for family life than recent work assumes.
Political sorting is visible when partnerships form, and again when they end.
Between those two moments it works differently.
16/17|

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

@alyceraybould.bsky.social talking about how the new ESRC cohort study - Generation New Era - is trying to ensure the survey is inclusive

Text from slide

Inclusivity in Generation New Era
ESRC application: "Provide a plan for how you will engage with and retain seldom heard families in the study"
Accessibility barriers: parents with low literacy, disabilities including neurodiversity and mental health conditions, poor English fluency
Trust barriers: evidence more prevalent among some ethnic minority groups
Time/situational barriers: more prevalent among low-income parents, younger parents and vulnerable/at risk parents, parents with sick babies
Study design barriers: fathers, ethnic minorities, non-nuclear/multigenerational households, non-heteronormative and gender-diverse families, the devolved nations
Inclusivity measures:
- Sample design (boost groups)
- Mode design (flexible participation)
- Accessibility best practice (translation, materials design)
- Inclusivity review of questionnaire, materials and study design by those with lived experience
UCLImI

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

@tizianaleone.bsky.social quantifying how fertility decline reshapes women’s reproductive careers, specifically by increasing their number of menstrual cycles

Title slide from Tiziana’s talk:

Juliet McEachran, Independent researcher
Tiziana Leone, LSE

Recounting lifetime menses: the overlooked impact of fertility transition

Concluding slide

Why this matters and what next
Fertility transition has fundamentally changed women's reproductive careers
Why this is useful
• Replaces a circulated constant with a demographically adjustable estimate of lifetime menses
• The count is heavily driven by reproductive span: -77 cycles of variation from menarche and menopause timing, and -44 lost to childbearing
• A 13-fold spread in postpartum suppression between settings, so no single global figure holds
Gives an exposure denominator for endometriosis.
970 6 9 endometrial cancer and menstrual-related productivity
loss.

What next

• Trace change within countries, using the seven
Philippines rounds as the test case

• Express results as a rate per reproductive year. separating span effects from fertility effects

• Add the missing terms: contraceptive suppression, adolescent and perimenopausal irregularity not feasible

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Md Anwer Hossain showing that age at menopause is increasing over time in South and Southeast Asia

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Lots of interesting presentations at the @bspsuk.bsky.social conference this year, including Aijie Zhang showing considerable heterogeneity in the composition of fertility decline in high income countries: not all fertility declines are the same

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Period measures of fertility, like TFR, are less stable than cohort measures and are currently overstating fertility decline. New paper out on The Long-Term Trends in Cohort Fertility: Global, Regional and National Estimates and Projections for Cohorts Born in 1935–2055 doi.org/10.1111/padr...

Graph from paper comparing period and cohort measures of fertility since 1950 projected to 2100. Lines are similar until around 1990 when period drops below cohort measure and stays below cohort measure

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Something to ponder anytime you’re asked to engage with adversarial collaborations

Adversarial Collaborations Usually Produce Findings That Require Walking Back Social
Justice Narratives

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

China's Cohort Fertility Rate is declining but latest CFRs (for women born in late 1960s) are still around 1.8. Number of children ever born by age 39 for women born in the 1970s shows further decline then plateaus out between 1.6 and 1.7. All compared to a Total Fertility Rate of around 1

Graph showing averaged number of children ever born (CEB) by birth cohort, with separate lines plotted for CEB at age 29, 39 and 49.

CEB is just over 2 for the earliest birth cohort of 1957 and declines to 1.8 for subsequent cohorts (latest completed fertility cohort - CEB at age 49 - born around 1968.). CEB at age 39 looks very similar to CEB at age 49 and continues to decline and then plateaus out between 1.6 and 1.7 for women born in the 70s

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The UK's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech Act) 2023 defines academic freedom essentially as free speech, without reference to appropriate standards of academic rigour, effectively meaning there should be no policing of academic work. Seems there was lobbying to keep expertise out of the act

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Keeping myself entertained while writing (and yes, I know this is too niche to make it into the final draft as a sub-heading)

sub-heading within a draft article: What's the deal with fertility?

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I'm also not sure it should be necessary for anyone to have to explain that you cannot calculate a national average from a sample of 20 people, but apparently we have to seriously engage with every argument from scientific racists and not simply laugh them out of academia

Section of text

Small sample sizes are not a problem
Parra and Kirkegaard (2025; p9) claim “a sample of 20 can provide a reasonably precise estimate of a population mean”. Warne (2023; p202) argues a sample size of 96 is sufficient “to have a 95% confidence interval width of +/- 3 IQ points”, and that only five countries in the 2019 dataset fail to meet this criteria. Neither claim takes into account the need for national averages to be calculated from data which is representative of citizens of those nation-states. Data collection exercises which aim to be nationally representative involve much larger sample sizes, typically several thousand individuals, such as the example of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) mentioned above (Corsi et al, 2012). At their inception in the 1980s, DHS sampled between 3,000-5,000 participants, and in the 2020s include 5,000-30,000. Nation-states often involve many millions of citizens, and considerable diversity across demographic and economic factors. Sample sizes of 20 or 96 individuals cannot hope to adequately reflect this diversity.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This one goes out to those who think we should engage with scientific racists, who I'm sure will be happy to see this piece 👀 I personally don't think it should have been necessary since Lynn's methods have been critiqued since *1994*. But apparently we have to debate these guys til the end of time

Section of text from the introduction:

Such dramatic claims require an extremely strong evidence base, yet the ‘national IQ’ datasets have been extensively criticised on multiple grounds, including cherry-picking of evidence and inadequate primary data sources (Barnett & Williams, 2004; Dickins, Sear, & Wells, 2007; Ebbesen, 2020; Ervik, 2003; Hunt and Sternberg, 2006; Kamin, 2006; Richardson, 2004; Volken, 2003; Wicherts and Wilhelm, 2007; Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010). These criticisms emerged even before the publication of the first ‘national IQ’ dataset (Lane, 1994), given that Lynn earlier used the same methods to calculate IQs for racial groups (Lynn, 1978; Lynn, 1991). One set of critics produced evidence that Lynn and Vanhanen biased the ‘national IQs’ for sub-Saharan Africa by selectively including samples with lower scores and excluding those with higher scores, raising the possibility that the dataset is not just deeply flawed but fraudulent (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010).

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Just updated my critique of Lynn's 'national IQ' data; a core plank of scientific racism for decades. Includes a response to recent defences of the datasets. Conclusion remains the same: ‘National IQ’ datasets do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability worldwide

Abstract of the critique:

In 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen produced a dataset which claimed to provide average ‘national IQs’ for nation-states worldwide. Despite extensive critique, this dataset, and subsequent updated versions, have been used in many empirical publications. Here I evaluate the latest version, produced in 2019 by Lynn and Becker, and show that this dataset is not fit for purpose. The primary data sources are inadequate for calculating ‘national IQs’. Most data originates from samples which are wholly unrepresentative of their national populations. Many are convenience samples with small sample sizes, collected over a wide date range (the oldest from the 1940s), often including only children and often including individuals selected because they had particular characteristics (i.e., were deliberately chosen to be unrepresentative). The transformation of cognitive test data from these sources into ‘national IQs’ involved a series of questionable assumptions and arbitrary adjustments. Some of these assumptions were based on Lynn and Becker’s prior beliefs about intelligence, including that regional and racial differences in IQ exist. These methods will result not just in error in the dataset but systematic bias. Even if representative data and appropriate methods were available for constructing ‘national IQs’, it is impossible to generate comparable measures of cognitive ability from culturally diverse populations across the globe. ‘National IQ’ datasets therefore do not provide comparable, accurate and unbiased measures of cognitive ability worldwide, and should not be used to draw inferences about global variation in intelligence.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

This is one reason why it’s better not to employ race scientists rather than deal with them once they have a job. There are editors who will publish their work, despite its lack of scientific merit. This gives editors considerable power yet processes for appointing them are wholly untransparent

Bluesky post:

Flat earthism seems to me to be a clear case of hackery. I think Cofnas would dispute that what he is doing is "racial supremacy theory" (even if he is a despicable racist)
His work has been published in top journals. The should entail a prima facie presumption of non-hackery...

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Which is why the “academic freedom” crowd spend so much time insisting academia should NOT take ethics into account (ethics is censorship!). Would like to see them argue for giving a modern-day Mengele free rein to murder people at will while conducting his experiments

Screenshot of paper published in PNAS

Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
Cory J. Clarka,b,1 (, Lee Jussim', Komi Frey", Sean T. Stevens", Musa al-Gharbi® (D, Karl Aquino' (D, J. Michael Bailey?®, Nicole Barbaro" Roy F. Baumeister', April Bleske-Rechek ®, David Buss" (D, Stephen Ceci'®, Marco Del Giudice", Peter H. Ditto", Joseph P. Forgas°, David C. GearyP , Glenn Geher9, Sarah Haider', Nathan Honeycutt" ®, Hrishikesh Joshi", Anna I. Krylov', Elizabeth Loftus"®, Glenn Loury".
George Yancey" (D, and William von Hippel™ D
Edited by Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Interesting. Here’s the full list, for posterity. For psychologists and evo behavioural scientists, note not just Pinker but Todd Shackelford - pretty concerning given the many gatekeeping roles he has

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

The flat earth paper was published by the journal Intelligence which prompted New Scientist magazine to give the journal its first Reverse Nominative Determinism Award

Its thrust is that, when some Homo sapiens populations first migrated outside Africa, they encountered all sorts of novel conditions, like different climates. This prompted them to evolve a greater level of intelligence. What this means for African populations is left to the reader to infer.
If this all sounds like something from the bad old days of Victorian science, Feedback regrets to inform you that this paper was actually first published online in 2007.
However, if you swallow your nausea and look closer, a true delight emerges.
The first issue is that the author calculates the distances populations travelled "as the crow flies"
. You can't use straight-line
distances as even a first approximation for the history of human migration, which involved people journeying to the far northeast of Asia, crossing into North America and onwards to the southern tip of South America.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Cofnas’ work is only “congruent with the mainstream academic consensus” if you believe the consensus is that the earth is flat. Here he cites a paper famous for using methods which assume the earth is flat (to claim that people who live further from Africa are more intelligent) as if it were science

Extract from a paper by Cofnas:

“Hypothesis 2 Populations that lived in colder climates in the last hundred thousand years tended to evolve greater intelligence in order to handle the survival challenges posed by winter.
Supporting this is the fact that mean brain size and measured intelligence of populations are highly, negatively correlated with the temperature of the region in which they lived during the last ice age (28,000 to 10,000 years ago) (Kanazawa 2008; Lynn 2006; Rushton 1995, 2010;
Templer and Arikawa 2006). Europeans score more than two standard deviations higher than
New Guineans on "culture-fair" IQ tests (Lynn 2006).”

Details of paper

Published: 01 February 2015
Science Is Not Always "Self-Correcting"
Fact-Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence
Nathan Cofnas M
Foundations of Science 21, 477-492 (2016) | Cite this article
1895 Accesses 28 Citations 178 Altmetric Metrics

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Tonight BBC radio 4 ran an hour-long advert for “suicidal empathy” (the idea and book) on the Moral Maze, describing its author simply as a Canadian professor, without mentioning his enthusiasm for Great Replacement ideology nor calls for civil war in the UK. That does not seem ok.

Elon Must amplifying a tweet by Gad Saad “There will be civil war”

Musk’s comment: Civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when

Tweet from Gad Saad:

What you are seeing in Britain is precisely what I have been warning about for decades. It is not rocket science. If you take two cultures that are fundamentally antithetical to each other, you'll eventually find out that progressive coexistence is not going to work well. There is 1,400 years of unbelievably clear data that Westerners are choosing to ignore. Read chapters 6 and 7 of The Parasitic Mind and it will all become clear for you. Cure yourself of Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome. See the world as it is rather than the Unicornia that you wish existed.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

That the guy who coined the term “suicidal empathy” refers to himself as an evolutionary behavioral scientist ought be a cause of deep and lasting shame to the discipline

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

“DEI” did not politicise academia, exhibit #589,301 Exchange published in a mainstream evolutionary psychology journal in 2006: EP1: the future of psychology is in Asia because of Asian high IQs & “relaxed pragmatism about eugenics” EP2: “it ain’t gonna be like that” because “Asians can’t think”

Screenshot of the title of a paper published in the Sage journal Evolutionary Psychology in 2006

The Asian Future of Evolutionary Psychology

Screenshot of the title of a paper published in the Sage journal Evolutionary Psychology in 2006

No, it Ain’t Gonna Be Like That

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I really need to turn off AI search in Chrome (which I never asked for in the first place). Did a quick search to find the link to a paper and it came up with this complete & utter nonsense. The paper in question was retracted because it used data which contain "substantial inaccuracies and biases"

AI overview after searching for a retracted paper:

The highly controversial 2010 study "Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability" authored by Christopher Eppig, Corey L. Fincher, and Randy Thornhill was officially retracted by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on March 6, 2024.

The Retraction Overview
Original Publication: The paper was published online on June 30, 2010. It argued that regional variations in infectious disease stress dictated variations in national average IQ scores worldwide.

Reason for Retraction: The editorial team of Proceedings B issued the retraction after discovering major, unresolvable methodologies errors. “Following the publication of this article, Proceedings B was recently made aware of...” severe anomalies involving data duplication and inconsistencies that fundamentally invalidated the paper's original statistical conclusions.

Additional text from the AI overview:

Key Data and Methodology Failures

Data Duplication: Investigation revealed that the authors inadvertently duplicated multiple blocks of data within their primary datasets.

Invalidated Conclusions: Correcting for these duplication errors entirely eliminated the statistical significance of their models, meaning "parasite stress" was no longer a viable statistical predictor of intelligence.

Lack of Access: The original raw data files were no longer completely accessible or verifiable by the journal, preventing any corrective corrigendum.

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Interesting to see the President of the Heterodox Academy pop up in the book

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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Just finished Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, a highly informative read about how a tiny group of ultra-wealthy radicals have shifted US politics to the far right. Notable is their emphasis on academia as a “delivery system for their conservative ideology”

Front cover of the book Dark Monet by Jane Mayer, with endorsement by Naomi Klein

Quote from the book:
“The growing emphasis on academia as a delivery system for the donors conservative ideology and as a long-range strategy to change the country's political makeup was, in fact, another major focus of the donor summit.”

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