Satoshi Kanazawa and other racist “Galileos”

Racism in academia mellowed with age, but it never went away. The old generation of outright racists who busied themselves measuring skull shapes and average national IQ to prove the supremacy of the white race, is either dead or if still alive, at least unwelcome. Their successors now practice more subtle forms of eugenics theories, for example by using trash IQ genetics to claim that, for example, poverty has biological and not social causes. Like that University of Edinburgh paper from last year in Nature Communications, widely applauded by the academic community (read here and here).

I would like you to meet someone who is too young to have fully profited from the networks of Nazi sympathisers and old-school racists among the post-WWII university professors, and too much of a bare-faced racist himself to reach the respected rank of his more successful contemporary colleagues: Satoshi Kanazawa, reader at the London School of Economics (LSE) and self proclaimed “modern-day Galileo”. The fact that Kanazawa is faculty member at a fancy London university (and you, dear reader, are not), is scientific proof that his unsavoury views on POC, women and homosexuals are still held in high regard by enough fellow bigots in academia.

Very reassuring, isn’t it?

Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist. This is a science area populated mostly by white men (as a Japanese, Kanazawa is basically qualified). The main purpose of evolutionary psychology is to use scientific-sounding arguments and methods to prove that women are inferior to men, and that men drive human sexual selection by evolving sexually attractive traits like intelligence, art, sports, innovation and wealth, while women evolved breasts and buttocks for this same purpose.

Another popular branch of evolutionary psychology postulates that some ethnic groups are intellectually superior to others. The human populations distinction usually goes along skin tone, the main target of this “race realism” which all scholars of “race differences” agree on, are always Black Africans (respectively, African-Americans), although everyone with darker skin is seen as genetically inferior, intellectually deficient and sexually unattractive. The favourite scientific tool of these psychologists is the IQ test, which can never be questioned or they will tear you to pieces. In addition to the IQ test, there are nowadays neuroscience tools like fMRI, but the most favourite tool is genetics, like genome-wide association studies (GWAS) which can be used to correlate any social or personality trait with random genome snippets, inherited over generations. Obviously evolutionary psychologists are not interested to use GWAS in order to find gene candidates for eating cheese or playing video games, they use the tool to correlate things like IQ, educational attainment or even wealth to some inheritable gene loci. Thus, IQ research always goes hand in hand with eugenics.

Kanazawa’s body of “research” covers both these branches of evolutionary psychology, the racism and the misogyny. In all his papers, he does nothing else but rant at women, Black people and especially Black women. Why is he still employed then, at at LSE even? One reason is that these views are still shared, for example the climate-denialist movement is quite strong in academia, and because it also attracts all sorts of bigots, Kanazawa’s views on women and Blacks are not that fringe in those circles. His other secret to sticking out in academia may beKanazawa’s main message, which is eugenics. And eugenics is something too many in academia still subscribe too, sometimes personally, sometimes as part of their academic research or other activities. After all, children of professors (or more generally, children of wealthy middle and upper classes) often become professors themselves. Unsurprisingly, both generations believe it was due to their quality genes.

And this is why academia will always have a place for eugenicists like Kanazawa. If only he dampened his outright racism and misogyny a bit, he would have been full professor and regularly on the telly, instead of subject of protests in Guardian and bans from fancy intellectual blogs.

This is Kanazawa, on the right, with friends:

Kanazawa’s friends are the who-is-who of academic racism. His beloved idol, the late John Philippe Rushton, used to be psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, his research on race and its relation to brain size, intelligence and crime (you can imagine what kind of racist crap Rushton published in this regard) was funded by the infamous Pioneer Fund, which was founded by actual Nazis with the sole purpose of financing research in support of white supremacy and eugenics.

Next to Kanazawa in the picture is Richard Lynn, the undead Pioneer Fund board member and founding editor of the notorious journal Mankind Quarterly, which is definitely not a Nazi race theory propaganda outlet, no way, no matter what it might look to low-IQ degenerate subhumans who disapprove of it. Kanazawa of course contributed a chapter to a book published by Lynn’s own institute at Ulster University in Belfast: “Race and Sex Differences in Intelligence and Personality: A Tribute to Richard Lynn at Eighty“

Yes, it is about the supremacy of the white race and racist hatred for Black people, Lynn’s legacy in the nutshell, the title is not really hiding it, does it? The book’s editor was the Aarhus University professor Helmut Nyborg (above in picture), whose own research focuses on proving that women are intellectually inferior (something Lynn also dabbled in when not busy being a rabid racist), for which Danish authorities acquitted Nyborg of all suspicions of research misconduct and reinstalled him in his chair. He later was again found guilty of misconduct for plagiarising others when trying to warn of the dangers of genetic degeneracy to the Nordic Aryan race due to the immigration from Middle East. But also there, Nyborg was acquitted by a committee consisting, among others, of Ian Deary (who now published the aforementioned study on wealth genetics). Deary by the way is an offspring of academic loins of Chris Brand, a rabid women-hating eugenicist, racist, antisemite and (fortunately deceased) professor at University of Edinburgh.

The last one in the picture is James Flynn, professor at University of Otago in New Zealand, discoverer of the Flynn effect (that average national IQ increases with each generation thanks to education). Lynn is officially a left liberal, and yet look which company he placed himself into. Maybe it puts things in context to consider Lynn’s book from last year, “Defence of Free Speech: The University as Censor”. When the book’s original publisher pulled out, Flynn cried censorship, even though his opus appeared soon after with a different publishing house. Apparently, Flynn’s view on race and gender are not that liberal after all, since the infamous Charles Murray himself endorsed it, the author of every racist academic’s bible, The Bell Curve.

But back to Kanazawa’s own scientific activities. Angela Saini wrote in her book Superior, quoted by Wired:

“In 2011, Satoshi Kanazawa, of the Department of Management at the London School of Economics – who writes widely on evolutionary psychology – speculated that black women are considered physically less attractive than women of other races. “What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women?” he blogged for Psychology Today, racking his brain. “Black women are on average much heavier than nonblack women… However, this is not the reason black women are less physically attractive than nonblack women. Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI [body mass index]. Nor can the race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women,” he continued, in the manner of a drunk uncle. […]

Kanazawa, whose published work has since looked at ­intelligence and homosexuality among other things, had his online post promptly pulled down under the weight of public and academic outrage. The London School of Economics banned him from publishing any more non-peer-reviewed articles or blog posts for a year.”

That Psychology Today blog by Kanazawa (titled “The Scientific Fundamentalist”) has been deleted, even Wayback Machine purged it (but here is a backup, linked in this critical article). There are also backups of Kanazawa’s follow-up blog at Big Think, titled “E pur si muove” (yes, the famous quote Galileo allegedly, but not really, said to the Inquisition).

The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis http://t.co/XQFgtP3p

— Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa (@SatoshiKanazawa) September 10, 2012

Kanazawa’s first post there in 2012 was: “The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis“, a surprisingly scientifically correct and objective description, unusual for Kanazawa. There is also a 2012 obituary to Rushton, whom Kanazawa equals to Galileo (apparently all these racist academics see themselves as Galileos). Here a quote from Kanazawa in another post:

“In fact, intelligence is one of the most heritable of all human traits and characteristics.  For example, intelligence is just as heritable as height.  Everybody knows that tall parents beget tall children, and nobody ever questions the strong influence of genes on height, yet they vehemently deny any influence of genes on intelligence.  Nobody ever claims that playing basketball makes you taller just because basketball players are very tall.  Yet they claim that education makes you more intelligent just because more educated people are more intelligent.“

Here are some more blogposts on this kind preserved in internet archives. I am sure Kanazawa’s much more popular and academically more successful British colleagues like Ian Deary, Robert Plomin, Stuart J Ritchie, Ewan Birney, Adam Rutherford or Steve Jones would agree with these, too (judging from their occasionally shared views on the genetic nature of IQ and wealth inheritance):

Common Misconceptions About Intelligence IV: Genes Don’t Determine Intelligence, Only the Environment Does
Common Misconceptions About Intelligence III: IQ Tests Are Unreliable
Common Misconceptions About Intelligence II: Nobody Knows What Intelligence Is, Because Intelligence and IQ Are Not the Same Thing
Common Misconceptions About Intelligence I: IQ Tests Are Culturally Biased

As I opined above, while bare-faced racism is more or less out these days in academia, eugenics is not. And IQ studies have always been the foundation of all eugenics. The general claim of Kanazawa, that IQ is the scientific indicator of your genetic quality, is something some academics, even those who prance about as anti-racists, eagerly subscribe to. After all, they all know that their own genes are of special quality. They merely disagree which groups can be said to have lower IQ and hence lower quality genes. Is it the Blacks, or just the poor?

Top ten articles of 2012: Number 9 in our countdown is an interview about intelligence with Satoshi Kanazawa http://t.co/P1FGjAjP

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 23, 2012

Kanazawa never learned or never bothered to play by the new rules, he continued being his old racist misogynous self, even if it apparently prevented him from becoming full professor. For all we know, this “Reader in Management” (how is that his expertise???) brings no funding whatsoever, and might have evaded the sack by playing the Asian ethnic minority card. For sure at least in this way this Japanese faculty member is useful for LSE performance reports.

In 2015, LSE even issued a press release about Kanazawa’s research (it was eventually deleted, but here backup):

“The researchers also found that the link between ethnic composition of an area and life satisfaction was significantly stronger among individuals with lower IQs. Among more intelligent individuals, there was a much smaller difference in life satisfaction between those living in an area with a high proportion of their own ethnicity and those living in an area with a low proportion.

Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, Reader in Management at LSE, said: ”More intelligent individuals may face less difficulty in understanding and dealing with evolutionarily novel situations and be able to recognise an ethnically diverse society for what it truly is today – a benign and safe situation.”

He added: ”Our findings are emphatically not a prescription for life. We are not advocating that individuals move to areas where they would be in the ethnic majority and our conclusion is in no way a justification or endorsement of ethnic segregation.”

That was Kanazawa’s deal with LSE apparently: I continue with my blatantly racist stuff, but will add a phony disclaimer in a press release.

Since his publication ban and troubles with blogs, Kanazawa moved on from outright racism to “safer” topics, like misogyny and homophobia. How about this Kanazawa classic, which can be also called In Praise of Wife-Beating, published in the book “Pathological Altruism” (edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan and David Sloan Wilson):

Kanazawa, Battered Women, Happy Genes (2011) Oxford Scholarship Online DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199738571.003.0217

Quote from the abstract:

“….battered women’s decision to stay in their abusive relationship may represent psychological altruism but evolutionary selfishness, because such women may gain the evolutionary benefit of conceiving violent sons who will be intrasexually competitive. Data show that violent men, and battered women who stay married to them, are slightly more likely to produce sons than are others.”

It is none of my business if Kanazawa is married or in a relationship, by the thought of it worries me. The LSE scholar also discovered a new and perfectly safe target to hate: obese people. After his one-year publication ban in 2011, Kanazawa published peer-reviewed studies like these:

Kanazawa, Intelligence and obesity: which way does the causal direction go? Curr Opin Endocrinol Diabetes Obes (2014), DOI: 10.1097/MED.0000000000000091

We are educated that

“The direction of causality goes from intelligence to obesity. Less intelligent individuals are more likely to gain weight and become obese throughout adulthood than more intelligent individuals. The strongly negative effect of intelligence on obesity explains the association between the two.”

And then, the microwave ovens. Kanazawa hates those and everyone who uses them.

Satoshi Kanazawa and Marie-Therese von Buttlar A Potential Role of the Widespread Use of Microwave Ovens in the Obesity Epidemic, Clinical Psychological Science (2019) DOI: 10.1177/2167702618805077

“we believe that the predominant mechanism behind the association between microwave ownership and higher BMI and weight may be the possibility of consuming otherwise cold food at higher temperatures.”

Obesity being a safe and a “hot” topic, Kanazawa went with the zeitgeist and inserted his expertise into the climate change debate:

Satoshi Kanazawa, Does global warming contribute to the obesity epidemic? Environmental Research (2020) doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2019.108962

So many opportunities to go full racist after a decade of abstinence again, and it passed peer review (by fellow racists, presumably):

“individuals living in colder climates, who breathe in and then must expend energy to warm up cold air in their lungs, may on average weigh less than individuals who live in warmer climates.This logic suggests, among other things, that global warming might exacerbate the current obesity epidemic […] Only being black, education, mean household income, and frequency of participating in individual sports have greater impact on obesity than atmospheric temperature“

And then there is of course Kanazawa’s obsession on the superior beauty and attractiveness of the white race, him being the peer-reviewed expert:

Kanazawa, Satoshi and Still, Mary C. Is there really a beauty premium or an ugliness penalty on earnings? Journal of Business and Psychology, (2018) DOI: 10.1007/s10869-017-9489-6

“Physically more attractive workers may earn more, not necessarily because they are more beautiful, but because they are healthier, more intelligent, and have better (more Conscientious, more Extraverted, and less Neurotic) personality conducive to higher earnings“

and this:

Satoshi Kanazawa, Shihao Hu, Adrien Larere, Why do very unattractive workers earn so much? Economics and Human Biology (2018) doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2018.03.003

where we learn that

“very unattractive women were significantly more likely to be married at Age 29 than unattractive or average-looking women, and their spouses or partners earned significantly more than those of unattractive or average-looking women. If intelligent men have historically preferred to marry very unattractive women generation after generation, then, because both general intelligence and physical attractiveness are highly heritable, this can explain why very unattractive workers are more intelligent and achieve higher education, thereby earning more. It can also explain why the positive correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness is not larger despite assortative mating of intelligent men of higher status and physically attractive women over many generations.”

On his own LSE profile website, Kanazawa provides proof that his racism and misogyny are not really a problem as long as he focuses his scholarly attacks on Black women, and maybe also on obese white women. Look at him literally embracing his white female collaborators here, who seem quite happy. Maybe academic feminism is not inclusive after all.

Men mostly kill other men. They typically don't kill strange women, only wives and girlfriends.

— Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa (@SatoshiKanazawa) May 30, 2014

Finally, this most recent masterpiece:

Satoshi Kanazawa, Father absence, sociosexual orientation, and same-sex sexuality in women and men, International Journal of Psychology, (2020) DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12569

“A recent evolutionary theory of female sexual fluidity suggests that women may not have sexual orientations in the same sense that men do, and that women’s apparent sexual orientation may instead be a byproduct of their sociosexual orientation. One developmental factor that has consistently been shown to influence sociosexual orientation is father absence in childhood. Consistent with the prediction of the theory, the analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data show that father absence significantly increases women’s, but not men’s,same-sex sexuality in adulthood, whether it is measured by self identity, sexual behaviour, or romantic attraction. Further consistent with the theory, the association between father absence and same-sex sexuality in women is entirely mediated by their sociosexual orientation.”

Shall I translate this for you? Mr Kanazawa believes that lesbian teenagers and young lesbian women are not really homosexual. These lascivious young nymphs are just playing a social role, and all they need is a big strong virile father figure to turn them the right way. You do see which direction this is going? LSE seems happy with Dr Kanazawa apparently transcribing incest porn fantasies into peer reviewed literature.

Excuse me, I need to puke.

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PS: I strongly recommend the aptly named books Inferior and Superior by Angela Saini)

PPS: If you want to read the real story of Galileo, as opposed to the mythological Jesus-like figure which racist, misogynous, climate-denialist scientists love to compare themselves with, read this blog by Thony Christie.

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