Michael Woodley

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Michael A. Woodley

of Menie, Younger
Born
Michael Anthony Woodley

(1984-05-16) 16 May 1984 (age 37)
NationalityBritish
Education Royal Holloway, University of London (PhD in biology, 2011)
Scientific career
Fields Ecology, psychometrics
Institutions Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Younger (born 16 May 1984 [1] ) is a British ecologist and intelligence researcher. Woodley has published a book and papers on cryptozoology but has since dropped cryptozoological research. As of 2019, Woodley was a junior fellow with the far-right Unz Foundation. [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Woodley is the eldest son of Caroline Cuthbertson and Michael Woodley of Menie, 28th Baron of Menie. [4] [5]

He received his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011, with a dissertation on the life history ecology of Arabidopsis thaliana . [6] Since then, he has focused his research on the evolution of human intelligence and life history traits. [1] In January 2013, he became a permanent research fellow with the Center Leo Apostel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. [7] From 2015 to 2017, he was scientist in residence at Chemnitz University of Technology. [8]

Research

Intelligence

Woodley is primarily known for his research on secular trends in human intelligence. He first gained widespread attention in 2013, when he authored a study reporting that average general intelligence (g) had decreased by about 1.16 intelligence quotient (IQ) points per decade, possibly due to dysgenic selection, since the Victorian era. This was based on a meta-analysis of studies measuring simple visual reaction time, starting in the late 19th century. [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]

Woodley authored a 2014 study arguing that the Flynn effect is, in part, a result of people becoming better at using simple rules for identifying solutions to IQ test items, rather than a true increase in g. [16] In 2016, he authored a study which found a negative relationship between a population's level of a polygenic score linked to educational attainment and fertility rates. [17] A study he authored in 2017 reported that polygenic scores linked to both educational attainment and g are more common among Europeans now than was the case earlier in the Holocene epoch, three to five thousand years ago. [18] In 2018, he joined the editorial board of the journal Intelligence. [19] Woodley's 2018 book At Our Wits' End, coauthored with Edward Dutton, arguing that there is a decline in "g.h. [heritable general intelligence]". [20]

Cryptozoology

In his 2008 book In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans, Woodley proposed that the "many-humped" sea monsters documented by Bernard Heuvelmans might be supersized otters. His eccentric claims were criticized by the ecologist Robert L. France who stated they were one of the "most blatant displays of cryptozoological fancy" and a "ridiculous bit of science fiction". [21]

In 2011 Woodley, along with Cameron McCormick, and Darren Naish argued against William Hagelund's claim of capturing a baby "Cadborosaurus" sea serpent. [22] Hagelund's discovery was challenged by Woodley and his co-authors via comparison of the characteristics recorded by Hagelund with those of known animals. It was concluded that the description of the sea serpent provided by Hagelund closely resembles that of an ordinary pipefish instead of a mystery monster or a reptile. [23]

On 12 July 2011, the Zoological Society of London hosted the presentation "Cryptozoology: science or pseudoscience?". Woodley was a speaker alongside palaeontologist Darren Naish and Charles Paxton, a research fellow at University of St Andrews. [24]

In a 2014 interview with the magazine Maisonneuve Woodley stated that he had dropped cryptozoological research on the basis that "[e]ssentially cryptozoology is not science". Woodley further noted that "[t]here is an irony, an irreducible pluralism, between these objectives of cryptozoology: to obtain some kind of mainstream credibility on the one hand, whilst on the other hand there's this large following who are non-technical in orientation and who don't really want their mysteries to be taken away from them." [25]

Eugenics

Woodley was affiliated with the far-right Unz Foundation. [3] As of November 2019, Woodley described himself as an "Unz Foundation Junior Fellow". [26] [2]

Books

Related Research Articles

Cryptozoology is a pseudoscience and subculture that searches for and studies unknown, legendary, or extinct animals whose present existence is disputed or unsubstantiated, particularly those popular in folklore, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, the chupacabra, the Jersey Devil, or the Mokele-mbembe. Cryptozoologists refer to these entities as cryptids, a term coined by the subculture. Because it does not follow the scientific method, cryptozoology is considered a pseudoscience by mainstream science: it is neither a branch of zoology nor of folklore studies. It was originally founded in the 1950s by zoologists Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T. Sanderson.

Cadborosaurus, nicknamed Caddy by journalist Archie Wills, is a sea serpent in the folklore of regions of the Pacific Coast of North America. Its name is derived from Cadboro Bay in Greater Victoria, British Columbia, and the Greek root word "saurus" meaning lizard or reptile.

Bernard Heuvelmans French cryptozoologist

Bernard Heuvelmans was a Belgian-French scientist, explorer, researcher, and writer probably best known, along with Scottish-American biologist Ivan T. Sanderson, as a founding figure in the pseudoscience and subculture of cryptozoology. His 1958 book On the Track of Unknown Animals is often regarded as one of the most influential cryptozoology texts.

Karl Shuker is a British zoologist, cryptozoologist and author. He lives in the Midlands, England, where he works as a zoological consultant and writer. A columnist in Fortean Times and contributor to various magazines, Shuker is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cryptozoology, which began in November 2012.

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, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.

Darren Naish Palaeontologist and science writer

Darren Naish is a British vertebrate palaeontologist, author and science communicator. As a researcher, he is best known for his work describing and reevaluating dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles, including Eotyrannus, Xenoposeidon, and azhdarchid pterosaurs. Much of his research has focused on Wealden Group fossils from the Isle of Wight. He is founder of the vertebrate palaeozoology blog Tetrapod Zoology, and has written several popular science books. Naish also makes frequent media appearances and is a scientific consultant and advisor for film, television, museums and exhibitions. Naish is also known for his skepticism and work examining cryptozoology and sea monster sightings and beliefs from a scientific perspective.

<i>On the Track of Unknown Animals</i>

On the Track of Unknown Animals is a cryptozoological book by the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans that was first published in 1955 under the title Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées. The English translation by Richard Garnett was published in 1958 with some updating by the author and with a foreword by Gerald Durrell. A revised and abridged edition was published in 1965, and a further edition in 1995. It is credited with introducing the term cryptozoology and established its author as the "Father of Cryptozoology."

Jason Matthew Richwine is an American political commentator and author. He is best known for his doctoral dissertation entitled "IQ and Immigration Policy," and a Heritage Foundation report he co-authored on the economic costs of illegal immigration to the United States which concluded that passing the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 would cost taxpayers more than $6 trillion.

Heiner Rindermann is a German psychologist and educational researcher.

Alika Lindbergh, commonly known by her former name Monique Watteau, is a Belgian fantasy fiction writer and artist.

Sherrie Lynne Lyons is an American author, science historian and skeptic.

Gerhard Meisenberg

Gerhard Meisenberg is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. 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. He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which the SPLC has described as a "racist journal".

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.

Edward Croft Dutton is a British far-right author and vlogger. He has written controversial racialist articles for fringe far-right journals such as Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych, as well as articles for mainstream scientific journals such as Personality and Individual Differences and Intelligence.

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. A 2019 study found him to be the 11th most controversial intelligence researcher.

Wordsum is a 10-item vocabulary test that has been included as an item on the General Social Survey (GSS) in most survey years since 1974. Each of the test's items ranges in difficulty from very easy to very difficult. It is widely used in research in the social and behavioral sciences. It is taken by about 1,000 people in each year in which it is included as part of the GSS. Its administration involves showing respondents a card containing 10 words, and then asking them to find the synonym for each of them out of a set of five choices. Although most researchers have implicitly assumed that each item on the test deserves equal weight, its validity can be improved by considering the variance for each word separately.

The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is an invitation-only conference for research on controversial aspects of human intelligence, including race and intelligence and eugenics. Founded in 2014, it was secretly held in the Pearson Building at University College London (UCL) in London, England, on four occasions. It was hosted by James Thompson, an honorary UCL senior lecturer in psychology. The existence of the conference, as well as the names of some of the attendees, was revealed by the London Student on January 10, 2018. In a statement released in response to news of the conference, UCL said that it had been unaware that the conference had occurred on its campus, and that the speakers there "were not approved or endorsed by UCL". Their statement also said that "We are an institution that is committed to free speech but also to combatting racism and sexism in all forms." The UCL also announced that it would investigate whether the organizers breached the University's room booking procedures as well as the circumstances that led to awarding of an honorary senior lectureship to Thompson.

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References

  1. 1 2 Figueredo, Aurelio José; Sarraf, M. (2019). Shackelford, Todd K.; Weekes-Shackelford, Viviana A. (eds.). Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr. Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. pp. 1–9. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3838-2. ISBN   978-3-319-16999-6. S2CID   239844994.
  2. 1 2 Jackson Jr., John P.; Winston, Andrew S. (7 October 2020). "The mythical taboo on race and intelligence". Review of General Psychology. 25:1: 3–26. Finally, we should be alarmed when the claim of taboo in a peer-reviewed psychology journal is made by an author [Michael Woodley] who lists his affiliation as an 'Unz Foundation Junior Fellow' (Carl & Woodley of Menie, 2019), given that the Unz Foundation is an antisemitic and racist website that promotes Holocaust denial.
  3. 1 2 Panofsky, Aaron; Dasgupta, Kushan; Iturriaga, Nicole (28 September 2020). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 175 (2): 387–398. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.24150 . ISSN   0002-9483. PMID   32986847. Michael Woodley is listed as an affiliate of the far right Unz Foundation . . . .
  4. ↑ Dewar, P. B. (2001). Burke's Landed Gentry of Great Britain: The Kingdom of Scotland. Vol. 1 (19th ed.). Wilmington, Delaware: Burke's Peerage and Gentry. p. 1530.
  5. ↑ "Michael Woodley of Menie, 28th of Menie". ThePeerage.com.
  6. ↑ Woodley, Michael A. (2011). On the community ecology of Arabidopsis thaliana (Columbia 0): an experimental investigation into the domains of co-existence, competition and life history (Ph.D). University of London.
  7. ↑ "Michael Woodley". VUB.ac.be. Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
  8. ↑ "When the Brain Grows, the IQ Rises". www.tu-chemnitz.de. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
  9. ↑ Woodley, M. A.; te Nijenhuis, J.; Murphy, R. (November–December 2013). "Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time". Intelligence . 41 (6): 843–850. doi:10.1016/j.intell.2013.04.006.
  10. ↑ Konnikova, Maria (April 2014). "Does thinking fast mean you're thinking smarter?". Smithsonian .
  11. ↑ Collins, Nick (13 May 2013). "The Victorians were smarter than us, study suggests". The Telegraph .
  12. ↑ Moss, Stephen (14 May 2013). "Were the Victorians cleverer than us? It depends which way you look at it". The Guardian .
  13. ↑ "Last century: Western nations lost an average of 14 IQ points". United Press International . 23 June 2013.
  14. ↑ Gregoire, Carolyn (11 May 2014). "Is Human Intelligence Rising with Each Generation?". The Huffington Post .
  15. ↑ "Our IQ is on the decline: A study suggests Victorians had higher IQ than us". Hindustan Times . 19 July 2017.
  16. ↑ Robb, Alice (2 December 2013). "Our IQs are climbing, but we're not getting smarter". New Republic .
  17. ↑ Moody, Oliver (16 July 2016). "Age of stupidity dawns as clever parents have fewer children". The Times .
  18. ↑ Moody, Oliver (18 July 2017). "Class of 2017 dumber than Victorians". The Times .
  19. ↑ "Editorial Board". Journals.Elsevier.com. Intelligence subsite.
  20. ↑ Delhez, Julien (2020). "Review of At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future". Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. 14 (2): 210–212. doi:10.1037/ebs0000159.
  21. ↑ France, R. L. (2019). Disentangled: Ethnozoology and Environmental Explanation of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. Wageningen Academic Publishers. p. 169. ISBN   978-9086863358
  22. ↑ "A Baby Sea-Serpent No More: Reinterpreting Hagelund's Juvenile "Cadborosaur" Report".
  23. ↑ "Mysterious Species Are Out There, So Why Not Bigfoot?". Slate Magazine . 23 November 2012. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
  24. ↑ Naish, Darren. Cryptozoology at the Zoological Society of London. Cryptozoology: time to come in from the cold? Or, Cryptozoology: avoid at all costs?. Scientific American (19 July 2011).
  25. ↑ "On the Trail of Ignored Beasts". Maisonneuve . 20 February 2014. Retrieved 28 July 2021.
  26. ↑ Carl, Noah; Woodley, Michael A. (November 2019). "A scientometric analysis of controversies in the field of intelligence research". Intelligence. 77.
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