The following is a guest post by Pieter Beck, a postdoctoral researcher in history and philosophy of science at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University in Belgium.

Beck has been highly critical of Nathan Cofnas, especially since this racist pseudoscientist was recruited to Ghent University in March 2026, and then became a central figure in the Jason Arday affair, which soon caused US Government’s direct interference into the academic affairs of a Belgian university on Cofnas’s behalf.

Before proceeding to Beck’s guest post explaining why Cofnas is not a scientist and why his “race science” is not based on any science, but on fraudulent claims by fellow racists who in turn misrepresent, fabricate and deny scientific evidence, a short introduction into what made Cofnas such a media celebrity. For further context, after Beck’s guest post, I added a Coda about his host at Ghent University, Bouke De Vries. That material previously featured in July 2026 Shorts, August 2026 Shorts and another August 2026 Shorts.

Cofnas and Jason Arday

In March-April 2026, Cofnas was sacked from his fellowship at the University of Cambridge in UK following student protests against his racism. In July 2026, accusations arose that Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who happens to be Black, committed various kinds of fraud, And Cofnas decided to take revenge on his “woke” former employer and published a blog post exposing the plagiarism in Arday’s PhD thesis while accusing Cambridge and other universities of favouring Blacks over whites.

I have some clues how Cofnas obtained that plagiarism evidence. According to my first-hand source, the magazine Times Higher Education (THE) received hints about issues in Arday’s PhD thesis and invited a plagiarism expert, David Sanders (professor at Purdue University in USA) to provide an analysis. Indeed, Sanders found extensive plagiarism and submitted his dossier to THE, which in turn forwarded it to the University of Cambridge, which chose against investigating also because Arday’s alma mater in Liverpool claimed not to find any issues with his thesis. Arday himself kept inventing crazier and crazier stories about his achievements, and engaged an elite law firm to threaten THE, which then abandoned its planned reporting.

And then, either by sheer coincidence or maybe rather because some fellow racist in Cambridge sent him the Sanders dossier, Cofnas published that same evidence of Arday’s plagiarism on his blog post in July 2026. The scandal exploded, fed by the far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and Nigel Farage’s far-right party Reform UK (their then-head of policy and Cambridge professor of divinity, James Orr, played a key role). Cofnas’s networks of racist pseudoscientists fed fuel into the fire: Emil Kirkegaard, Nazi pseudoscientist who promoted paedophilia, white nationalists Bo Winegard and Steve Sailer (about whom Guardian wrote here), white supremacist historian David Starkey, etc.

The right-wing media in UK and abroad kept publishing daily several articles denouncing Arday’s dishonesty, Cambridge announced an investigation, Arday resigned from his professorship and on 14 August he was found dead, likely having committed suicide.

Normally, research fraudsters never commit suicide. But Arday became a victim of an unprecedented national and international right-wing media campaign and a massive racist lynch mob, which certainly made his already unstable mental state worse.

But the academic community saw Cofnas as the real victim.

The Cofnas Campaigns

Having been sacked in Cambridge, Cofnas found a new employment in Ghent. There, the protests started immediately. And then the protests against the protests started.

The first signature campaign was set up by a group of British academics who call themselves “Committee for Academic Freedom“, and its board member Abhishek Saha, a mathematics professor in London.

This is the letter from April 2026, it was signed by many academics known for their racist and eugenics views, others less so. But then again, Saha eventually had to admit that some people were added to it without their knowledge or approval (Enzo Rossi was one of them). Here is the current version and a copy I archived:

When Cofnas was recruited to Ghent, the faculty protested in this open letter, available online and below:

After Cofnas led the lynch mob against Arday and helped drive that mentally unstable Black academic into suicide, his employment in Ghent became an issue once more. On 20 August 2026, Cofnas rallied his supporters because the Ghent University announced an investigation of his employment in a public statement by university rector Petra De Sutter. Here are Cofnas’s posts on X:

Immediately, a second, even bigger support letter was set up by yet another London mathematician, John Armstrong. It was addressed to De Sutter and protested against “retaliation […] for publicizing academic misconduct that occurred in British universities” and Cofnas’s “being punished for exercising his academic freedom“.

It had 955 signatories when the campaign closed on 29 August 2026 and was signed again by the same academic racists and eugenicists, and many more others: Peter Singer, Richard Haier, Steven Pinker, Amy Wax, Heiner Rindermann, Robert Plomin, Geoffrey Miller, Eric Rasmusen, J. Michael Bailey, Lee Jussim, Eric Kaufmann, Russell T Warne, Garett Jones, Marco Del Giudice, Emily Willoughby, Guy Madison, Gregory Clark, Timothy Bates, Rosalind Arden, Alessandro Strumia, Axel Meyer, even Philippe Rushton’s widow Elizabeth Weiss. Also the toxic evolutionary biologists Lawrence Krauss, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins joined, and on the very far end of racist spectrum the organisers even allowed the Nazi “anthropologist” Edward Dutton to sign, as a phony professor in a phony university Poland. The old godfather of racism Charles Murray tried to sign both letters, but was only invited to sign Saha’s letter from April 2026.

Among those racists are also Cofnas’s personal friends, mentors and role models: Satoshi Kanazawa, Eric Kaufmann, Russell T Warne, Neven Sesardić (Cofnas’s PhD mentor) and Richard Haier Editor-in-Chief of the eugenics journal Intelligence, who also wrote Cofnas’s letter of recommendation for Ghent. And of course his current employer Bouke De Vries, see Coda below.

Also co-signing were research integrity influencers who themselves proved to be at least open-minded towards racists or eugenicists: Daniele Fanelli, Vinay Prasad, Michael Shermer, Alan Sokal, Jeffrey Flier and Sabine Hossenfelder, the latter even started retweeting Cofnas’s friends and horrible racists like Jordan Lasker (aka Cremieux) and Richard Hanania.

Here is the original and the archived copy:

There’s also a counter signature campaign organised by the Ghent faculty including the author of the guest post below, Pieter Beck. It is much more successful, standing now at over 4,500 signatories. It explains why Cofnas is not a victim:

“It is Cofnas himself who makes it impossible to separate his criticism of Jason Arday from his views on race. He was invited to a plethora of podcasts to talk about the Arday case and on multiple (if not most) occasions he combined this with an exposé on his views on race (e.g. here and here and here).  […]
Cofnas himself seems less concerned with the issue of academic freedom. In his own writings, we find numerous passages calling for the expulsion of those who disagree with him rather than engaging in rational dialogue with them.”

Cofnas then met with the Trump-appointed US Ambassador in Belgium, Bill White, who publicly threatened the Ghent University with all possible things unless the rector De Sutter gives Cofnas his job back. White soon announced victory, Cofnas was allowed to continue with his fellowship into 2027. The investigation however continues and he is banned from campus, paid not to work.

A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution

The main reason for protests in Cambridge which let to Cofnas’s sacking and his grievance campaign against Black academics, was his blog post from February 2024, titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution“, which Beck will address below.

Cofnas infamously wrote there:

“Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Right after Arday’s death, Cofnas joked that “After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard“, and then indicated that he meant the need for such a department seriously.

Cofnas also clearly advocated for racial segregation and laws against “miscegenation”:

“Those who truly value diversity should favor the preservation of racial distinctions. There must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius.”

For Cofnas, the danger is clearly in the White Genocide and the Great Replacement, plus of course in transgender people:

“While race realism may be less dangerous than we think, the DEI devil may be more dangerous. Brainwashing generations of children to believe that intractable group differences are the fault of a particular race (whites) that will soon be a shrinking minority can end in a dark place. […] White children are brainwashed to despise themselves because of their skin color. Anecdotally, white children are sometimes driven to transgenderism in an attempt to escape the shameful status of oppressor.”

Cofnas himself is of Jewish origin, but he is most eager to feed every antisemitic theory to please his Nazi friends about Jews being a super-intelligent, evil and unnatural race which conspires to control humanity, as Daily Nous quoted him in 2022.

Now we finally arrive at Pieter Beck’s guest post about Cofnas’s pseudoscience.

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Why I call Nathan Cofnas’s race realism pseudoscience

by Pieter Beck

(The views expressed in this piece are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my institution) 

Introduction

In this text, I will explain why I think Nathan Cofnas’s defence of “race realism” or “hereditarianism” (he uses the two terms interchangeably) can be labelled as pseudoscience. Cofnas is mostly known for his controversial blogpost “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” from February 2025, in which (among other things) he claims:

“In a meritocracy, […] Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Cofnas believes races are real (hence “race realism”) and that differences between races are due to genetic factors (hence “hereditarianism”). He puts most of his emphasis on differences in IQ, but as I will discuss below, Cofnas also refers to other properties. Cofnas never makes explicit how much he thinks genes contribute to observed differences, but based on statements which suggest that he believes environmental interventions are useless, the role he confers to genetic factors must be very high.

Cofnas has received his fair share of criticism from relevant experts. When asked to comment about the claims Cofnas is making about race, IQ-expert Han van der Maas said that “Exceptional claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and I don’t see Cofnas providing such evidence.” Biologist Kevin Bird wrote: “Cofnas & all other scientific racists fail to meet basic academic standards. They don’t read or engage with evidence.” Biologist Gregory Kohn wrote that “Cofnas consistently resists even approaching the modern scientific literature. […] He traffics in shallow controversy and shallow controversy alone.” Geneticist Adam Rutherford commented: “Cofnas’ work is crap, and should never have been granted scholarly credibility.” And statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has called Cofnas a “shallow thinker” and “racist” and said his work is based on “zero evidence whatsoever”.  

However, as to date I am not aware of a text that discusses Cofnas’s pseudoscience in depth. With this text I hope to fill that lacuna. The text is quite long because I try to cite Cofnas extensively. I think people on both sides of the debate (pro and contra Cofnas) have a tendency to argue in the abstract, rather than discussing concrete passages from Cofnas’s work. Also, since I am making quite a strong claim by using the term pseudoscience, I have an obligation to provide enough evidence. 

Strategic ambiguity

The first thing I want to discuss is the fact that Cofnas is often presented as someone doing research on race and IQ. This is incorrect. Cofnas has two academic papers related to the topic, but these are articles in the field of philosophy of science:

• Nathan Cofnas, “Science Is Not Always “Self-Correcting” – Fact–Value Conflation and the Study of Intelligence“, Foundations of Science (2016) DOI 10.1007/s10699-015-9421-3
• Nathan Cofnas, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” Philosophical Psychology (2020) doi: 10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803 

In these articles, Cofnas argues that scientists should be free to investigate the potential connection between race and IQ. This is not the same as doing research on race and IQ himself. A philosopher of biology is not a biologist. Cofnas does not analyse IQ-datasets, does not perform GWAS, etc. In other words: Cofnas is not a scholar doing research on race and IQ. 

Most of Cofnas’s writing on the topic can be found on his blogs. Again, these blogposts do not contain reports of ongoing empirical research on race and IQ. They are are ideological manifestos based on pseudoscience. A first reason why the term pseudoscience is applicable here, can be found by comparing the statements Cofnas makes in his academic papers (which undergo peer review) with those made in his blogposts. 

In Cofnas 2020 mentioned above, he writes: 

“Let us turn to the second method for investigating the role of genes in development: genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Unlike heritability studies, GWAS can uncover specific genetic variants – or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – associated with IQ. In just the last couple years, GWAS has identified hundreds of such SNPs (Davies et al., 2018; Savage et al., 2018; Sniekers et al., 2017), which together explain around 11% of the variance in IQ (Allegrini et al., 2019).

If we find that the SNPs implicated in IQ are differentially distributed across racial groups, this would not necessarily imply that race differences in intelligence are genetic. SNPs might have different effects across races and environments due to gene–gene and gene–environment interactions. SNPs with no causal relation to intelligence can be genetically linked to SNPs that do have a causal relation in some populations but not others, so SNP–intelligence correlations may not always hold across races (Rosenberg, Edge, Pritchard, & Feldman, 2019). But if we find that many of the same SNPs predict intelligence in different racial groups, a risky prediction made by the hereditarian hypothesis will have passed a crucial test. Even then, however, GWAS will only establish a correlation between SNPs and IQ without revealing the causal chain linking SNP to phenotype. It would still be theoretically possible that these SNPs lead to differences in intelligence as a consequence of environmental factors (e.g., parenting effects) that can be manipulated so as to eliminate race differences. But if work on the genetics and neuroscience of intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced, it may soon become possible to give a convincing causal account of how specific SNPs affect brain structures that underlie intelligence (Haier, 2017). If we can give a biological account of how genes with different distributions lead to race differences, this would essentially constitute proof of hereditarianism. As of now, there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component. If this possibility cannot be ruled out scientifically, we must face the ethical question of whether we ought to pursue the truth, whatever it may be.”

I cite this long passage to show how many ifs and buts Cofnas is obliged to add before he comes to his main claim. Also note that Cofnas himself admits that all of the scientific results that would tip the balance in favour of hereditarianism lie in the future. The claim itself is thus not very strong: “there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component.”

Compare this to this passage from the introduction of Cofnas’s most controversial blogpost, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”: 

“Here I argue that, without hereditarianism, the fight against wokism is futile, and that a hereditarian revolution is both feasible and desirable. “Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position. When the elites accept race realism, we can construct a better world.”

First note that Cofnas himself makes it explicit that his blog is a political manifesto: it is a call for a revolution which he deems “desirable”. But what is even more striking is the contrast with the way Cofnas presents his position in his academic paper. It is no longer a position that might, potentially, turn out to be correct in the future, no: Cofnas pretends it has already established itself as “the scientifically correct position.” 

This ambiguity regarding the position that is defended is used by Cofnas and his defenders. When I criticised Cofnas for the way he supports his racist statements by misrepresenting the science, Cofnas and/or his defenders pretend that he is being criticised for merely formulating a hypothesis. Critics are framed as people trying to suppress Cofnas’s research. 

This is a typical pseudoscientific strategy. In an article discussing pseudoscientific argumentation strategies philosophers Maarten Boudry and Johan Braeckman call this strategy “deflationary revision”, in which pseudoscientists strategically switch between a strong and specific version of their claims and a more moderate or trivial version (Boudry & raeckman 2010). They add that this can also be used to accuse critics, in the way I mentioned above: “A skilled pseudoscientist switches back and forth between different versions of his theory, and may even exploit his own equivocations to accuse his critics of misrepresenting his position.” 

Let me now turn to Cofnas’s blogposts and why I say that Cofnas tries to substantiate his claims by relying on pseudoscientific sources. 

Investigative journalism outlet @apache.be , who were the first to discuss the topic of race science in Ghent, have translated their main articles to English apache.be/2026/03/05/s… /1

— Pieter T. L. Beck (@ptrbck.bsky.social) 2026-08-29T09:39:49.364Z

The blogposts 

Throughout his “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” blogpost, the truth of “race realism” is not argued for, but taken as a given. It should also be added that Cofnas’s claims regarding genetically caused differences between black people and white people are not limited to IQ. In another blog-post (from January 2024) he writes:

“The persistence of race differences in income, IQ, education, health, crime rates, etc., almost all disfavoring blacks, triggers an increasingly hysterical effort to find and correct the environmental cause.”

Again, no evidence or argumentation for this claim is provided, it is taken as a given. To closest Cofnas comes to providing an argumentation for the genetic nature of these differences in “A Guide..” is the following passage: 

“[C]ulture” is not the reason why we see the same basic pattern of racial disparities among population-representative groups of sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, and East Asians wherever they go all over the world. Furthermore, culture generally reflects the average characteristics of the community that generates it. A culture of doing homework is more likely to arise in a mean IQ 105 population that is genetically adapted to the arduous demands of the rice paddy than it is in a mean IQ 85 population that is adapted to hunting and gathering on the savanna.”

Statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has rightly described this passage as providing a “just so” story which does not provide any evidence for the claims Cofnas makes. In the discussion with Gusev, Cofnas can be seen employing the same deflationary revision strategy mentioned above. When pressured, Cofnas retreats to claiming that it is just a “plausible adaptive story.” 

For someone who gave one of his posts the title “Beating Woke with Facts and Logic”(October 2025), Cofnas provides surprisingly little factual evidence for the claims he makes in his blogposts. The closest Cofnas comes to an attempt at providing evidence is in his blogpost on the Black US economist Thomas Sowell (“Thomas Sowell’s Wishful Thinking about Race”, August 2024). In this post, Cofnas writes:

“Sowell flat-out ignores the strongest evidence for hereditarianism. He doesn’t say a word about the substantial differences in brain size among races, which track differences in IQ (African << European < East Asian).”

The hyperlink directs the reader to an article by Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton. 

In this regard, Richard E. Nisbett explains in his 2009 Presidential Column on the website of the Association for Psychological Science why one cannot use observed differences in brain size to jump to the conclusion that differences in average IQ are genetic in nature: 

“[T]he brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on IQ tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.”

Rushton’s research on brain size has received severe criticism. Already in 1990, Donald P. Cain and C.H. Vanderwolf presented the following devastating assessment of Rushton’s work: 

“[T]he methods employed and data obtained by the cited studies are seriously flawed. Additional studies not cited by Rushton suggest a different ordering of brain size than that concluded by him. Strained logic, a failure to take into account alternative explanations, and contrary data seriously limit Rushton’s effort. We conclude that there is no credible evidence to support Rushton’s claimed relation between race, brain size, and intelligence.”

(Cain and Vanderwolf 1990)

Several papers of Rushton on race have been retracted. These retractions include two papers on race, brain size, and intelligence which the editors of the journal described as “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.” The Department of Psychology where Rushton worked has posthumously issued a statement on his work and legacy:

“In addition to ethical concerns about the nature and funding of his research, Rushton’s work is deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint. […] What Rushton described as “races” are socially created categories that do not reflect patterns of human inheritance or genetic population structure.”

Both Jensen and Rushton have received money from the Pioneer Fund, an organization known for spreading Nazi propaganda in the 1930s (Miller 1995). It presents itself as an organization for “race betterment”. In this capacity it has been funding racist pseudoscience for decades. Rushton also regularly wrote for American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine which also hosted events attended by Klan members and Neo-Nazis. Rushton attended these events as well. The Southern Poverty Law Centre designates American Renaissance as a hate group. American Renaissance also describes itself as “race realist”, the word Cofnas also uses to refer to his own position. In his “A Guide…” blogpost, Cofnas refers to American Renaissance as “an important centre for high-quality discussions of race.”

In his Sowell blogpost Cofnas not only refers to Rushton on brain size, but also refers to “the more recent evidence from genetics, which wasn’t available when Sowell’s book was published in 2013.” If one clicks the hyperlink that Cofnas provides, one arrives at the Substack of Emil Kirkegaard, a notorious pseudoscientist. Geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui describes him as follows: 

“[Kirkegaard is] known for an unhealthy obsession for trying to prove that race differences in IQ and other social traits were due to inborn and immutable genetic differences. Besides a reputation for sloppy scientific work in dubious journals, he was also well known for an obnoxious social media presence, regularly posting messages and memes denigrating a wide range of marginalized groups. This behavior has garnered him a large following of, largely anonymous, online fans. He is a leading figure and major contributor to the bad reputation of intelligence and genetics research. On top of this reputation, this individual has never been part of any credible research program, PhD program, or university.”

Kirkegaard only has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and no clear qualifications for the fields he purports to do research in. He claims to be affiliated with the non-existent “Arthur Jensen Institute”. Kirkgaard heads the Human Diversity Foundation (now Polygenic Scores), a continuation of the aforementioned Pioneer Fund. In this capacity, it took over Mankind Quarterly, a journal known for publishing racist pseudoscience. Kirkegaard also started his own online race pseudoscience journal OpenPsych.

The “recent evidence from genetics” that Kirkegaard refers to, consists of two papers. First, a paper from psychologist Russell T. Warne (Warne 2021), who acknowledged in one of his other papers that his research had been paid by Human Diversity Foundation (Warne & Larsen 2024). The second paper is a paper co-authored by Kirkegaard and published in the aforementioned pseudoscience journal Mankind Quarterly (Fuerst, Shibaev & Kirkegaard 2023).

To summarize, in his blogposts Cofnas takes the truth of his strong version of “race realism” as a given. If he provides evidence (which rarely happens), he is clever enough to mostly avoid mentioning the names of his sources. But when one takes the effort of actually clicking on the hyperlinks, one falls into a rabbit hole of racist pseudoscience. 

I will now turn to a lecture Cofnas gave in Ghent, which provide further examples of the way he misrepresents the existing science and the way he uses pseudoscientific strategies to defend his race realism. 

The lecture

On April 2, 2026 Cofnas gave a lecture for the far-right students’ organization KVHV. The lecture has been recorded and put on YouTube. I will use the YouTube video as a reference, adding the time of the relevant sections between brackets.  In the lecture, Cofnas only starts talking about the so-called evidence for race science after discussing woke for half an hour (33:00). 

Throughout the second half of his lecture, we can see Cofnas applying several pseudoscientific strategies which are described in the literature on pseudoscience. The first is the strategy of the “switcheroo”, a term from philosopher of science André Kukla, who is cited in Braeckman & Boudry 2010 as follows:

“One commits a switcheroo by starting with a hypothesis that’s amenable to a range of interpretations, giving arguments that support a weak version, and thenceforth pretending that one of the stronger versions has been established.”

What Cofnas provides can at best be interpreted as suggestions that the weak version of his claim (“there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component”) is correct. But Cofnas uses the ambiguity about what claim he is actually defending to create the illusion that he is actually providing arguments for the strong claim (““Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position”). 

In this lecture, Cofnas also uses the work of pseudoscientific scholars, but as he does in his blogs, he does not explicitly mention names (and only did so after repeated questions during the Q&A). 

Let me give some examples. My apologies to the reader: I will eventually provide long citations from the lecture. I do this to make it clear that I am not misconstruing the way Cofnas develops his arguments. 

At one point, Cofnas makes the following bold statement (54:13): 

“And uh – in recent years, now we’ve uh – with what are called genome-wide association studies where we administer uh – we try to correlate specific genetic variants in very large samples with performance on IQ tests or with educational attainment – um – have found that there are thousands of genetic variants which are associated with – uh – with IQ. Um – and these genes vary by race. Uh – um – that there are stable uh race difference in IQ which – uh, well appear to have a genetic basis.”

Cofnas does not provide any references for this, no studies, nothing. He does follow up with the following long citation from David Reich (55:14): 

“People who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among populations across a range of traits are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. In the last couple of decades, most population geneticists have sought to avoid contradicting the orthodoxy. When asked about the possibility of biological differences among human populations, we have tended to obfuscate, making mathematical statements in the spirit of Richard Lewontin about the average difference between individuals from within any one population being around six times greater than the average difference between populations … But this carefully worded formulation is deliberately making the possibility of substantial average differences in biological traits across populations.”

Note that Reich here is formulating a version of Cofnas’s weak claim (it is a possibility) and that he is not talking about intelligence per se, nor does he use the term “race”. He is just making a very broad statement about the possibility of finding “substantial biological differences”, whatever those may be. But then Cofnas reframes the citation as if Reich is subscribing to the views on race and IQ he just discussed. He does this explicitly. Immediately after reading the citation, Cofnas continues (56:23): 

“We are finding the genes that underlie differences in intelligence between individuals. And they are not distributed equally among populations. And even the world’s leading population geneticist can say this in the New York Times, although obviously David Reich doesn’t want to get canceled, he doesn’t want to get fired. […] But you don’t have to work too hard to read between the lines to see what he’s saying.”

So Cofnas himself is aware that he is reading something into Reich’s text. Cofnas is not only switcheroo-ing here, he is also cherry-picking. What Cofnas doesn’t cite, is the following passage in which Reich denounces Cofnas-style race science: 

“[W]e should take the cautionary lesson not to trust our gut instincts or the stereotyped expectations we find around us. If we can be confident of anything, it is that whatever differences we think we perceive, our expectations are most likely wrong. What makes Watson’s and Wade’s and Harpending’s statements racist is the way they jump from the observation that the academic community is denying the possibility of differences that are plausible, to a claim with no scientific evidence that they know what those differences are and also that the differences correspond to  long-standing popular stereotypes – a conviction that is essentially guaranteed to be wrong.”

David Reich, cited by Sasha Gusev

As Gusev summarizes: “Reich is very clear: the typical hereditarian claims about innate differences — Jewish IQ, black musicality, Asian obedience, etc– are harmful pseudoscience. Anyone arguing that Reich secretly endorses such views is ignoring his actual writing and hoping you won’t notice.” This clearly applies to Cofnas. 

During the Q&A (1:09:27), I asked Cofnas a question about the fact that he seemed to subscribe to the discredited “Cold Winters Theory”, which is often linked to Richard Lynn. This theory states that people in colder climates are more intelligent on average because cold winters are more difficult to survive and hence select for greater intelligence. Lynn was also a racist pseudoscientist linked to the aforementioned Pioneer Fund, so it is no surprise that Lynn developed this theory to argue that African people (who mostly live in warmer climates) have a lower IQ and that this is due to genetic reasons. There are numerous problems with the theory (that I won’t discuss, but an overview can be found here). It can safely be said that the theory is not accepted in mainstream science, but is still popular in the race science circles in which Cofnas operates. There, it is most often associated with Richard Lynn (see this paper by race scientist Bryan Pesta for example (Pesta & Poznanski 2014).

We have written a statement in support of Ghent Uni's decision to suspend Nathan Cofnas. We resist attempts to frame this as a punishment for "whistleblowing" or censorship of "controversial research". We invite all academics who share our views to sign our letter. forms.gle/qwN8xzEM5C7Q…

— Pieter T. L. Beck (@ptrbck.bsky.social) 2026-08-25T18:12:24.164Z

The reason I asked about this was that Cofnas himself had written a post on X which was highly critical of Richard Lynn. He was prompted to write this post because Lynn’s so-called national IQ-datasets (which form the bread and butter of race science) had been the subject of fatal criticism (Cofnas referred to this 2024 article). Cofnas saw that the datasets were a lost cause and urged his fellow race scientists not to fall into the trap of defending them. 

In his reply to my question, Cofnas was even more explicit and stated (1:10:03) that “Lynn is a pseudoscientist and people shouldn’t defend him” and (1:13:12) that he “[doesn’t] take Richard Lynn seriously”. This is surprising, because this apparently didn’t stop Cofnas from referring to Lynn’s work in three of his papers (Cofnas 2018, Cofnas 2021, and Cofnas 2023). In an attempt to distance himself from Lynn, Cofnas added (1:10:12) that cold winters theory was not invented by Lynn. This remark shows that Cofnas knows his Kirkegaard well, because this is a very niche point (even with race science circles) made by Kirkegaard in his blogpost from 2022.

In a follow-up question, I asked Cofnas whether he could mention other scholars that accepted the Cold Winters Theory. He tried to dodge the question (demonstrating the point I made before that Cofnas is reluctant to be open about his pseudoscientific sources), but after some prodding gave us the name of Satoshi Kanazawa (1:13:30). Kanazawa’s work has also often been labeled pseudoscience, he caused several controversies with his racist statements, even prompting a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists to write a statement with the title “Kanazawa’s bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology”. Kanazawa’s work has been criticised by statistician Andrew Gelman and sociologist David Weakliem because his use of statistics suffers from basic flaws. Kanazawa’s publications have even been used as a case study in a paper discussing problems with peer review (Wicherts et al 2012). One of the papers discussed is where Kanazawa defends a version of cold winters theory (Kanazawa 2008). In his calculations, Kanazawa apparently believes that the earth is flat and also assumes travel routes of ancestral populations from Africa which contradict the existing consensus in evolutionary population genetics (a consensus which ironically is discussed in one of the books that Kanazawa cites himself). 

This list is not exhaustive, and there are other examples in the lecture where Cofnas misrepresents scientific findings (for example Reich’s paper Akbari et al 2026) as if they provide evidence for his strong claim on the truth of “race realism”, but as this text is already so long I’ll leave those as an exercise for the reader. 

Fact-checking will take some time (I have a recording for those who want to help), but this already stood out. Cofnas: “the black-white IQ gap in the United States, where there is a 15 point IQ gap in the average IQ which has not changed since cohorts born since the 1970s”. Dickens & Flynn 2006: /19

— Pieter T. L. Beck (@ptrbck.bsky.social) 2026-04-05T21:33:40.949Z

Conclusion 

To summarize, I have tried to show how Cofnas employs several typical pseudoscientific strategies that can be found in the literature. The most important one was the strategic use of ambiguity, with Cofnas continuously shifting between a weak version (“there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component”) and a strong version (““Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position”) of his claims. 

I believe this is an important point to make and should be kept in mind by all those involved in the debate (both pro and contra Cofnas). The controversial (and I would argue racist) statements made in the “A Guide” blogpost are based on the strong claim. Cofnas presents this claim – incorrectly – as being a scientific truth. The blogposts are not reports of ongoing empirical research performed by Cofnas, but have a clear ideological nature (Cofnas himself is quite clear about this). Countering Cofnas’s ideological statements and criticising his sloppy arguments cannot be seen as attempts to censor scientific research. If there’s someone having a negative impact on science, it is Cofnas, not his critics. 

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CODA – Who wants to date Bouke De Vries?

Not that you know about Cofnas, you might wonder who recruited him to Ghent University. Meet the associate professor, who also co-signed the support letters: Bouke De Vries.

The project De Vries invited Cofnas to work on, is utterly racist. It’s called “Liberalism’s fertility problem“, addresses the “problem” of Great Replacement, and is funded by the Ghent University. In May 2025, the Ghent student newspaper Apache published an open letter by faculty and students protesting De Vries’s own teaching of racism and eugenics. He doesn’t really hide it.

When De Vries recruited Cofnas in March 2026, it caused the aforementioned faculty protests. The Ghent professor explained in his interview to the Belgian media:

“I have myself been criticized for the statement that there is a loss of intelligence at a collective level in various countries, because individuals with higher intelligence have, on average, later and fewer children. Yet studies indicate that countries such as the US, UK and Iceland have seen a long-term decline in gene variants associated with educational success, which in turn strongly correlates with intelligence.“

In December 2025, the magazine Apache reported that De Vries participated in August 2024 in the infamous “London Conference of Intelligence (LCI)“, which used to be organised by academic racists at UCL in London, until a public outcry in 2018 forced that university first to pretend the conference happened without their knowledge, and then to prevent any further occurrences.

In 2023, LCI moved to Budapest, Hungary, because Victor Orban supported such things financially, now it will probably have to go elsewhere again. Apache wrote (translated):

“The 2024 three-day conference kicked off on August 16 at the “fashionable and cozy” Muzikum Klub & Bisztró , right next to the Hungarian National Museum, with welcome words from organizers Emil Kirkegaard and James Thompson . The brochure shows that philosophy professor Bouke de Vries from Ghent University was also on the conference program.

On day two (17/8/24) Bouke de Vries gave a lecture on gender differences and moral status. According to the short description, De Vries reflected on an assumption that is central to feminism and liberalism: the idea that men and women have equal status. De Vries believes it is high time to question this assumption. He refers to other “factors” that can have an influence, including IQ.”

The Budapest conference was “was a tribute to the psychologist Richard Lynn“, from whom Kirkegaard inherited Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund which he quietly transformed into Human Diversity Foundation (HDF), which in turn has its own magazine, Aporia.

Next to Kirkegaard, other Nazis and racists at the Lynn-Trubute conference included the aforementioned Edward Dutton and Davide Piffer.

Aporia also re-published De Vries’s preprint, which later appeared in the Elsevier journal Futures (De Vries 2024), which is basically his screed about the so-called “Great Replacement”. De Vries’s main worry is that non-white and often Muslim migrants have more children then whites like him:

“the populations of post-industrial countries are becoming less intelligent due mostly to the negative relationship that has emerged within these societies between intelligence and fertility and to the proclivity of intelligent people to delay parenthood.”De Vries 2024

The paper ends with De Vries basically equalling non-white people to monkeys:

“For while it is widely accepted nowadays that all human beings, including our descendants, have equal moral status, […] one struggles to see how reductions in humanity’s intelligence that bring us closer to the intelligences of other species commonly believed to possess a lower moral status, including those of our primate cousins, could not come to matter morally and normatively eventually. “

And to stop the Great Replacement, De Vries demands radical measures (hyperlink added by me):

“The most promising ways of doing so appear to be to invest in education; introduce policies that incentivize and encourage intelligent people, especially women, to have (more) children as well as have them at a younger age; and to develop and deploy technologies such as embryo selection and gene-editing to make respectively future and current people smarter (cf. Anomaly, 2020)”

De Vries’s reference list is basically a who-is-who parade of academic racists: the aforementioned racist and eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly, plus Dutton, Kirkegaard, Lynn, Piffer, Kaufmann, Rindermann, Michael Woodley of Menie, Arthur Jensen, Ian Deary, Gerhard Meisenberg (Editor-in-Chief of Mankind Quaterly), etc.

Like Cofnas, De Fries postulates “intelligence differences between groups” to be a scientific fact, and he himself suggested that Jews and Chinese are more intelligent than Blacks, in an interview to Belgian media in March 2026 (translated):

“ignoring such disparities can fuel conspiracy theories and hostility toward groups that perform above average academically and economically, such as Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians. It also suggests that unequal outcomes may be less the result of discrimination and racism than many contemporary progressives claim.”

Apache revealed in December 2025 even more:

“Meanwhile, De Vries went one step further. Apache identified himself as the author of the article Refugees’ IQs are Normatively Consequential in the Journal of Controversial Ideas , which was published under the pseudonym Tavren Oshal. In it, the philosopher argues that the assumption that the IQ of refugees is lower has moral consequences, and that there are reasons to exclude refugees with a low IQ. The article, which appeared on November 11, 2025, is part of the polemic that arose following an article by the controversial racial scientist Heiner Rindermann in the same magazine, about the IQ of refugees in Germany.”

All this from a scholar who until 2019 worked at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany. One wonders how they liked his views there.

It is very unlikely that the peer community didn’t know that De Vries was a racist and a eugenicist, but they still helped him the highly competitive and prestigious ERC grant, which he obtained in 2023. The EU Commission gave De Vries over €1 million for “Protecting people from loneliness“. De Vries was then recruited to Ghent and given tenure.

A big fat ERC grant makes everyone very attractive, thus De Vries must have decided to address his own loneliness. In April 2026, he published an academic paper which sounds like a screed of a far-right incel:

Bouke De Vries It’s a High-IQ Match! Using Dating Apps to Make Societies Smarter Social Theory and Practice (2026) doi: 10.5840/soctheorpract202654266 

Apparently, only genetically superior academic sperm can save the white race, thus dating tools are needed to get all these young white women to have sex with white professors like De Vries.

At least in his lab, nobody is queueing, quite the opposite. De Vries’s collaborators jumped ship, nobody wants to work with him. The website of his research group “GRELP – Ghent Research in Ethics, Law and Politics” lists now only De Vries:

The fertility problem of white Belgian women will be solved by De Vries all alone: even his postdoc Maarten Boudry (mentioned by Beck above) left Ghent University. Noteworthy, Boudry was caught last year partying with Kirkegaard, Kaufmann, Pinker and Claire Lehmann (founder of the far-right magazine Quillette) at the racist Heterodox Conference.

But then again, Cofnas is still around.

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