Some science reporters are weirdly enthusiastic about the prospect of living in a dystopian future where a person’s whole life is prefigured by a DNA test.

“Intelligence could be measured with a swab of saliva, or drop of blood, after scientists showed for the first time that a person’s IQ can be predicted just by studying his or her DNA,” wrote Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton in an article in March.

A Daily Mail piece covering a study on genetics and social mobility featured the following attention-grabbing headline:

Being rich and successful really IS in your DNA: Being dealt the right genes determines whether you get on in life.

Maybe it’s asking too much to expect nuanced, cautious science journalism from a tabloid whose covers are notorious for their comical alarmism and overstatement:

IS THERE NO ONE LEFT IN BRITAIN WHO CAN MAKE A SANDWICH?

But, sadly, publications with better reputations often don’t do much better. In fact, the Guardian ran an abridged version of the same article verbatim.

Clickbait and Switch

An unfortunate side-effect of the cutthroat competition in 21st-century media is that truth often becomes secondary to keeping the lights on.

Science is a long slog that progresses in baby steps toward a better understanding of society and the natural world. Rarely does a single study produce an earth-shattering revelation that overturns everything we thought to be true, so science reporters embellish to give stories a little punch.

Research can be exciting, but scientific papers usually come with a host of boring qualifications and warnings that tend to get lost on the way to press.

It’s hard to get clicks from a bland but accurate headline that reads:

Study tentatively identifies weak but significant association between genes, social mobility.

In the Daily Mail article referenced above, the writer refers to “success genes” in quotation marks as if it were directly citing the researchers, but the phrase appears nowhere in the paper.

It kicks off with statements like, “The study lends weight to the theory that nature rather than nurture largely determines how well people get on in their lives.”

But further down the page, sandwiched between several more bold pronouncements, the author gets around to quantifying exactly just what the word “largely” means—4 percent.

According to the researchers, only 4 percent of variance in social mobility can currently be predicted by genetics.

The Daily Mail deserves some credit for at least including this information, even if they buried it deep in the body. The Telegraph totally neglected to report the similarly underwhelming figures from the study it was covering—around 4 percent to 7 percent of IQ can be predicted by DNA tests.

The danger of reckless science reporting becomes clear when one tracks what happens to these stories after they’re published.

A Google search for the Telegraph piece shows the fourth most popular result is the website of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance, which reprinted Knapton’s piece in full without modification.

Other hits in the top 10 included the Stormfront forum as well as various white nationalist communities on Reddit and racialist blogs.

From Gatekeepers To Gateways

The sequencing of the human genome in 2003 was a huge blow to the concept of race, accelerating its decline within fields like population genetics and anthropology. Yet essentialist ideas about race persist among the general public, and in some segments of society, they are growing more entrenched.

This contradiction can partly be explained by the structural changes in the media in the past two decades or so. The internet’s democratizing effect has benefited a variety of marginalized viewpoints, including those justifiably banished to the fringes.

The rehabilitation of scientific racism parallels the rise of a series of bizarre, irrational conspiracy theories, like flat earth, Pizzagate, and QAnon.

As the media landscape became multipolar, there was a seismic shift in the broader dynamic. Instead of functioning as a gatekeeper policing access to the center, the mainstream media began signal-boosting the margins.

The flaw of the “marketplace of ideas” is that media is also a market in the literal sense, and it responds to demand for bad ideas: Right now, the outlook for junk science is bullish.

A flat-earth map created in 1893 by Orlando Ferguson of South Dakota

Controversy has always been a moneymaker, but the ability to get people talking about content is more important than ever in the age of new media, where success is measured in metrics of engagement—likes, shares, and comments.

Challenging taboos and bucking “political correctness” have become so romanticized that people who are essentially defenders of the status quo are portrayed as rebels, as they were in the New York Times writer Bari Weiss’ heavily scrutinized piece, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.”

Scientific racism—euphemized as “race realism” or “human biodiversity (HBD)”—is the quintessential Dark Web idea. It’s a perennial hot topic for YouTube channels and podcasts like the one hosted by Sam Harris, one of Weiss’ “renegades.”

Last year, Harris invited Charles Murray, a conservative political scientist and author of the controversial book The Bell Curve, to be a guest on his “Waking Up” podcast, drawing criticism from leading intelligence researchers Richard Nisbett and Eric Turkheimer, who took him to task for his uncritical acceptance of Murray’s claims about race and IQ.

Harris belies his self-presentation as a tough-minded skeptic by failing to ask Murray a single challenging question.

The authors point out that Harris refers to Murray’s treatment on college campuses as the “canary in the coal mine.” But, they argue, being disliked by liberals doesn’t make him right.

Harris’ inclination to turn Murray into a martyr may be what leads him to pay insufficient attention to the leaps Murray makes from reasonable scientific findings to poorly founded contentions about genetics, race, and social policy.

The original “Intellectual Dark Web”

Murray could be considered the prototype for the Intellectual Dark Web. He established the playbook they would one day follow, casting himself as a champion of fearless academic inquiry pitted against the stifling PC orthodoxy of liberal academia.

His 1994 book The Bell Curve drew on the work of academics affiliated with the Pioneer Fund, a racist research organization with roots in the eugenics movement. Murray gamed the controversy surrounding the book for free publicity, spawning a cult following among some of the less savory segments of the newly emerging Internet culture.

The HBD movement began to rebrand scientific racism shortly thereafter under the leadership of conservative blogger Steve Sailer, who established the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group (HBDG) in 1997. The group was little more than an email list, but it included the founders of VDARE and The Unz Review, laying the groundwork for an alternative media infrastructure that would play a crucial role in rehabilitating scientific racism online in the 21st century.

The Bell Curve also paved the way for a series of pop science books with racial themes, like Jon Entine’s Taboo, about race and sports, and The 10,000-Year Explosion by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, which offered a racial theory for Western superiority. Entine and Cochran were both part of Sailer’s email list, and the latter’s book was funded by a generous grant from HBDG member Ron Unz.

The most notable of these was A Troublesome Inheritance, a book released in 2014 by former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade, whose claims about a biological basis for race were roundly condemned by many of the geneticists he cited.

The book’s relative commercial success—its Amazon rank briefly climbed to 21—signaled that the market for such ideas was growing mature.

And it’s hard not connect the ferment of racialist ideas in popular science over the past 20 years to the concurrent racial polarization that gave rise to both the alt-right and Trump.

A Dangerous Divide

Scientific racism is still thankfully far from clawing its way back into classrooms and laboratories, but its revival among the general public is no less troubling.

Much of social research is only useful insofar as its findings have the potential to become the basis for social policy, and in that regard, the alienation of laypeople from the scientific community poses a major problem.

Sociologist W. Carson Byrd observed in a 2015 study that support for corrective policies like affirmative action unsurprisingly tended to fall among white people who believe negative traits of black people are genetic.

This graph from a 2012 study by Bobo et. al. shows that white Americans are as opposed to corrective government aid for black people as they were in the 1970s.

The consequences of similar gaps in understanding in other domains of science have been dire. The weak public acceptance of human explanations for global warming—about 60 percent vs. almost unanimous consensus among scientists—has given the Trump administration a mandate to slash budgets for climate science, appoint administrators hostile to environmentalism, and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Like climate denial, scientific racism is politically useful to a range of actors on the right side of the political spectrum. Racist extremists and mainstream conservatives have a common interest in promoting the idea that inequality is natural.

Conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, which employs Murray, work to depict early childhood intervention programs as wasteful and the welfare state as “dysgenic.” At the same time, on the far-right, organizations like Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute look to scientific racism to support their more radical aims of racial separatism.

Add to that opportunistic authors and controversy-hungry news outlets, then you have a recipe for a public that is critically misinformed about the science on race.

The job of science journalists is to narrow the gap between researchers and laypeople, so great care must be taken to avoid doing the exact opposite—especially on a topic with so many far-reaching implications.

The media needs to recognize that paradigms rarely become dominant in science arbitrarily and that challenging them isn’t necessarily a virtue. Those who do should be met with skepticism rather than platformed and mindlessly celebrated as courageous iconoclasts. Academic exploration should not be stifled, but intellectual adventurism for no other reason than to participate in a vogue academic trend should be disincentivized.

Furthermore, balance is an inferior substitute for the truth because sometimes the truth cuts one way. The desire to present “both sides” equally can give undue weight to unsubstantiated claims.

As for scholars, they should place a greater emphasis on the social missions of education and outreach to bring the views of policymakers, media, and the general public on race into alignment with those of academics.

Scientists also need to hold journalists and authors accountable for abusing or misrepresenting their work, as geneticists did with A Troublesome Inheritance, while taking steps to translate research results into a more accessible form to reduce the potential for misunderstandings.

Preventing the return of eugenics, social Darwinism, and scientific racism takes vigilance. These ideas can never be allowed to become anything other than a dark footnote in the history of science.