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The Harvard psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker appeared on the podcast of Aporia, an outlet whose owners advocate for a revival of race science and have spoken of seeking “legitimation by association” by platforming more mainstream figures.
The appearance underlines past incidents in which Pinker has encountered criticism for his association with advocates of so-called “human biodiversity”, which other academics have called a “rebranding” of racial genetic essentialism and scientific racism.
Pinker’s appearance marks another milestone in the efforts of many in Silicon Valley and rightwing media and at the fringes of science to rehabilitate previously discredited models of a biologically determined racial hierarchy.
Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at UK anti-racism non-profit Hope Not Hate, said that Pinker’s “decision to appear on Aporia, a far-right platform for scientific racism, provides an invaluable service to an extremist outlet by legitimising its content and attracting new followers”.
He added: “By lending his Harvard credentials to Aporia, Pinker contributes to the normalisation and spread of dangerous, discredited ideas.”
The Guardian emailed Pinker for comment using his Harvard email address but received no response. Nor did he reply when approached through his university press office or his publishers.
In the hour-long recording published this week, Pinker engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about economic progress, artificial intelligence and social policy with host Noah Carl.
During the podcast, Pinker expressed agreement with claims made by Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve, a prominent figure in the “human biodiversity” movement that seeks to promote race-based theories of intelligence, and like Pinker a one-time participant in a human biodiversity email list convened by Steve Sailer.
When Carl cited “evidence collected by sociologists like Charles Murray suggesting that part of the family breakdown in some communities in America seems to be attributable to the state taking over the traditional function of the father”, Pinker responded: “I think that is a problem.” He added: “It is a huge class-differentiated phenomenon, as Murray and others write it out.”
Reporting last October in the Guardian revealed that Aporia operates within a broader network of groups and individuals seeking to mainstream racial pseudoscience.
The initiative had been secretly funded by US tech entrepreneur Andrew Conru until he was contacted for comment on the reporting, and Aporia’s editors are connected to far-right extremists, including Erik Ahrens, whom German authorities have designated a “rightwing extremist” posing an “extremely high” danger.
The investigation also found that Aporia was owned by the Human Diversity Foundation, a Wyoming LLC founded in 2022 by Emil Kirkegaard, a Danish self-described eugenicist and race scientist who has spent years attempting to access genetic datasets, and maintaining publishing platforms including OpenPsych and Mankind Quarterly that serve a network of race-science researchers.
The same reporting revealed that in secretly recorded conversations, Aporia co-founder Matthew Frost expressed ambitions for it to “become something bigger, become that policy, front-facing thinktank, and bleed into the traditional institutions”. He also said that the publication had recruited mainstream writers for the purposes of “legitimacy via association”.
Carl, listed as editor on Aporia’s masthead, was dismissed from a Cambridge fellowship in 2019 after an investigation found that he had published articles in collaboration with far-right extremists. He spoke at least twice at the eugenicist London Conference on Intelligence and in a 2016 paper wrote that anti-immigrant stereotypes were “reasonably accurate” in relation to their propensity for crime.
The 2016 conference program, which Carl attended, featured a quote from early 20th-century psychologist Edward Thorndike stating: “Selective breeding can alter man’s capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy.”
Aporia’s podcast has previously featured prominent white nationalists including Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish psychologist who was suspended and reinstated in 2006 as a professor at the University of Aarhus over his research linking gender and intelligence, and who in 2017 spoke to the white nationalist American Renaissance conference.
In his Aporia appearance, Nyborg connected immigration and crime, claiming that “the more genetically inhomogeneous a population is, the more critical it becomes in terms of social unrule, or what you’ll call that social disturbance, criminality and so on”.
Another former guest, Jared Taylor, is American Renaissance’s founder.
Pinker is world famous as the author of bestselling books including The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. His work has emphasized themes including universal human cognitive abilities and the decline of violence over time, and has previously advocated for “colorblind equality”.
His appearance on Aporia, however, follows a recent pattern of controversy around his connections to figures promoting eugenics and scientific racism, including Steve Sailer. Pinker included a Sailer essay in a collection of American science writing. According to science writer Angela Saini’s Superior, a history of the revival of race science, Pinker was in turn an early participant in Sailer’s Human Biodiversity email discussion group. His ties to Sailer drew criticism from other writers including Malcolm Gladwell.
The Guardian has previously reported on the recent revival of Sailer, a “white supremacist” and a “proponent of scientific racism”, by the far-right publisher Passage Press.
A 2021 academic study led by UCLA academics identified Pinker as one of the “political centrists” who have “played a role in legitimizing the ideas of the human biodiversity movement” in a way that has benefited white nationalists, despite not being core proponents themselves.
Hermannson, the Hope Not Hate researcher, said: “Considering the coverage Aporia has received and its long list of racist contributors, it’s hard for Pinker to argue he engaged with it unknowingly.”
