Losing My Nonreligion
As an evolutionary biologist, I joined the Freedom From Religion Foundation because I supported its work guarding the wall of separation between religion and government, educating the public about how to be moral without faith, and, most important, upholding science and rationality over dogma and superstition. I served on an FFRF advisory board, and the foundation gave me its annual 'The Emperor Has No Clothes' award in 2011.
I resigned because the foundation has abandoned science. Two other board members, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, joined me.
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Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Yahoo
Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism
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. Related: Revealed: International 'race science' network secretly funded by US tech boss 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.'
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Forbes
What Would A 1925 Time Traveler Think Of Today's ‘Meme Culture'? A Psychologist Explains
Ironically, the word meme predates the internet. It was coined in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe how ideas spread from mind to mind, much like genes pass traits from body to body. He pointed to things like melodies, catchphrases and architectural techniques as early examples of 'memes' — carriers of culture that replicate, mutate and survive through imitation. The earliest memes may have been gestures, patterns carved into stone or phrases passed down orally that carried more than just its literal meaning. What is new about today's internet meme culture is the speed, format and absurd specificity with which they now travel. Today, a meme can reference a global event, an existential mood and a pop culture trope — all at once, in under two seconds. Just saying the word 'doge' reliably triggers an entire emotional script, from irony to nostalgia to economic anxiety. It may even conjure bureaucratic reform: In 2025, the U.S. government launched the Department of Government Efficiency — officially abbreviated as DOGE — complete with a logo nodding to the Shiba Inu meme that once symbolized crypto-fueled chaos. In a twist no one saw coming, a meme is now embossed on federal documents. But to someone from 1925, who lived in a world of slow information, telegrams and typewritten letters, that kind of information density would be nearly indecipherable. Not because they weren't intelligent, but because they lacked the context scaffolding we now take for granted. When the internet first entered public consciousness in the 1990s, its adoption was gradual and far from universal. Like early personal computers, the web was initially explored by a small, tech-savvy minority. It took years before it became a daily fixture of modern life. When it finally became a daily fixture, the internet evolved into a vast digital mirror of human culture. The early Web 1.0 era was static and text-heavy — home to personal blogs, bulletin boards and clunky HTML pages. But even then, it hinted at what was coming: a world where jokes, beliefs and shared moments could spread like wildfire. The introduction of image files (like GIFs and JPEGs) into browsers allowed users to share visual content — from scanned photos to rudimentary graphics — marking the early foundations of meme culture. Even with nothing more than ASCII characters and raw imagination, internet users at the digital frontier were creating absurdly relatable, experimental forms of humor. Text-based memes like 'roflcopter' (see image below) spread through message boards. It captured a uniquely internet-native blend of irony, randomness and communal in-joke. By the mid-2000s, broadband connections and platforms like YouTube (launched in 2005) unlocked a new phase: internet culture became visual-first. Short clips, reaction images and viral videos quickly became the internet's new emotional currency. This visual leap was pivotal. For the first time in human history, people could react to global events with a shared visual language — one that was remixable, fast-moving and capable of carrying tone, timing and irony in a single frame. It's easy to imagine someone from 1925 struggling to decode a modern meme. But their confusion would stem from a lack of meme literacy, not a lack of raw mental horsepower. This isn't just about internet familiarity. It's about the brain's ability to process layers of meaning at speed. Psychologists refer to this as context-dependent cognition — our ability to make sense of new information based on prior cultural exposure. Meme comprehension demands an internal library of references: political events, celebrity scandals, generational slang, even the rhythm of how memes 'usually' flow. Without that scaffolding, the punchline falls flat. This is exactly why modern IQ tests are calibrated by age, education and exposure. Intelligence is shaped by the cultural operating system we grow up with. Decades of research on the 'Flynn effect,' the observed rise in IQ scores by roughly three points per decade, show that intelligence test performance is highly sensitive to changes in environment, education and cultural complexity. In other words, the mind adapts to the world it grows up in. A meme, then, is like a joke that assumes you already know the setup. Eerily, Meta billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, whose platforms helped fuel meme culture, doesn't seem to think so. In a recent appearance on comedian Theo Von's podcast This Past Weekend, Zuckerberg had this to say: 'I think a big part of the internet is that stuff just gets more fun and funnier and the memes get weirder and more specific. That's advancement too, right? The ability to express these complicated ideas in a very simple piece of media… I think we're going to get better and better at that. And that advances our understanding of ourselves as a society. I think we'll get superintelligence, and I would guess that it will be a continuation of this trend.' Whether we find this take strangely comforting or downright frightening, one thing seems to be clear: Just as someone from 1925 would struggle to keep up with memes today, we might be even more lost if we were suddenly dropped into the meme culture of 2125. And if our progress over the past century is any indication, tomorrow's memes will irreversibly reshape the way humans think, feel and connect. Most of us consume and share memes on our phones. Want to know if you might be a little too attached? Take the science-backed Nomophobia Questionnaire to find out.
Wall Street Journal
30-03-2025
- Wall Street Journal
Losing My Nonreligion
As an evolutionary biologist, I joined the Freedom From Religion Foundation because I supported its work guarding the wall of separation between religion and government, educating the public about how to be moral without faith, and, most important, upholding science and rationality over dogma and superstition. I served on an FFRF advisory board, and the foundation gave me its annual 'The Emperor Has No Clothes' award in 2011. I resigned because the foundation has abandoned science. Two other board members, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, joined me.
