Gerhard Meisenberg | |
---|---|
Born | Dortmund, Germany | 22 January 1953
Alma mater | University of Bochum (M.Sc), University of Munich (Ph.D) [1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Biochemistry |
Institutions | Ross University School of Medicine (c. 1984 – c. 2018) [2] [1] |
Thesis | (1981) |
Gerhard Meisenberg (born 22 January 1953) is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. [2] [1] He is a director, with Richard Lynn, of the Pioneer Fund, which has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [3] He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly , which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism. [4]
Meisenberg was on the editorial board for the journal Intelligence until late 2018. [5] [6] : 79 Geneticist Daniel MacArthur, writing for Wired , described a letter Meisenberg sent to Nature as advocating for the future use of selective breeding or genetic engineering if group genetic differences in intelligence are found. [7] Meisenberg attended and helped organize the London Conference on Intelligence, [6] : 81 [8] and was one of 15 attendees to collaborate on a letter defending the conference following media reports of its ties to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and racist pseudoscience. [9]
Meisenberg has proposed a model of economic development in nations that attempts to predict future development based on historical trends in intelligence, education and economic growth. [10]
Science journalist Angela Saini, in an opinion for The Guardian , has said that Meisenberg's views on race and intelligence are "unsupported by evidence" and "generally receive little to no attention from within the everyday scientific community". [11]
Meisenberg wrote and self-published the 2007 book In God's Image: The Natural History of Intelligence and Ethics, claiming that genotype determines both physiology and behavior. Evolutionary biologist and historian R. Paul Thompson, for The Quarterly Review of Biology , described the book as well written, but based on unsupported generalizations, saying "the overall program of the book [is] too extreme, too ideologically driven, and too biologically and anthropologically unsophisticated." [12] Anthropologist Jonathan M. Marks, for the International Journal of Primatology , criticized both the underlying premise of the work, and Meisenberg's "uncritical and cavalier approach" to the topic. Marks compared the book with those by J. Philippe Rushton and Immanuel Velikovsky. [13]
Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics, and a member of the Nazi Party. He served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and also served as rector of the Frederick William University of Berlin.
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. He was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.
Mankind Quarterly is a journal that covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", and "a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality". It is published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was presided over by Richard Lynn until his death in 2023.
Intelligence is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of psychology that covers research on intelligence and psychometrics. It is published by Elsevier and is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research. The journal was established in 1977 by Douglas K. Detterman. The editor-in-chief is Richard J. Haier.
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994).
The International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) is a scientific society for researchers in human intelligence. It was founded by Douglas K. Detterman of Case Western Reserve University in 2000.
Helmuth Sørensen Nyborg is a Danish psychologist, writer, far-right politician and former Olympic canoeist. He is a former professor of developmental psychology at Aarhus University. His main research topic is the connection between hormones and intelligence. Among other things, he has worked on increasing the intelligence of girls with Turner's syndrome by giving them estrogen. He has also stood as a candidate for the far-right party Stram Kurs. His publications have been described as scientific racism.
IQ and Global Inequality is a 2006 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen. IQ and Global Inequality is follow-up to their 2002 book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, an expansion of the argument that international differences in current economic development are due in part to differences in average national intelligence as indicated by national IQ estimates, and a response to critics. The book was published by Washington Summit Publishers, a white nationalist and eugenicist publishing group.
Angela Saini is a British science journalist, broadcaster and the author of books, of which the fourth, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, was published in 2023 and was a finalist for that year's George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Saini has worked as a reporter and presenter for the BBC and has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired UK. She has also produced and presented several radio and television documentaries, including a BBC Radio 4 documentary on biofuels and a BBC World Service documentary on the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. Saini's writing and reporting focus on how science interacts with society, especially on how it affects marginalized groups, and she has been acclaimed for her work by a diverse range of organizations and institutions.
The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.
The relationship between nations and IQ is a controversial area of study concerning differences between nations in average intelligence test scores, their possible causes, and their correlation with measures of social well-being and economic prosperity.
Heiner Rindermann is a controversial German psychologist and educational researcher.
Aurelio José Figueredo is an American evolutionary psychologist. He is a professor of psychology, Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, cognition, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals, and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates. He is known for his research on personality, such as a 1997 study in which he and James E. King developed the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire to measure the Big Five personality traits in chimpanzees.
Jan te Nijenhuis is a Dutch psychologist. He is a lecturer of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, known for his research on human intelligence. He studied at Groningen University and the Free University of Amsterdam.
The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is an invitation-only conference for research on human intelligence, including race and intelligence and eugenics. In 2018, Times Higher Education called it "an annual conference on eugenics and intelligence" and several news outlets have described the conference as having ties to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and scientific racism.
Noah Carl is a British sociologist and intelligence researcher who co-owns the Daily Sceptic blog. He was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his position as a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge after over 500 academics signed a letter repudiating his research and public stance on race and intelligence, calling it "ethically suspect and methodologically flawed", and stating their concern that "racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge." An investigation by the college concluded that Carl's work was "poor scholarship" which violated standards of academic integrity, and that Carl had collaborated with right-wing extremists.
OpenPsych is an online collection of three pseudoscientific open access journals covering behavioral genetics, psychology, and quantitative research in sociology. Many articles on OpenPsych promote scientific racism, and the site has been described as a "pseudoscience factory-farm". The journals were started in 2014 by a pair of nonprofessional researchers, Emil Kirkegaard and Davide Piffer, who had difficulty publishing their studies in mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journals. The website describes its contents as open peer reviewed journals, but the qualifications and neutrality of its reviewers and quality of reviews have been disputed.
Superior: The Return of Race Science is a non-fiction book by Angela Saini published in 2019. Built around interviews with experts, the scientific consensus, and the author's analysis, it argues that some fields of biology are still influenced by the discredited scientific racism theories of the 19th century.
Biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg, a 17-year veteran...