Earlier: NPR Genetics Guest Adam Rutherford: Galton a 'Genius', but 'Massive Racist.' How Could He Be Both?

Matthew Bullock [Email him] Master of Cambridge University’s St Edmund’s College in Britain has just announced that it is firing its 28-year-old research fellow, Dr Noah Carl, because he had “collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views.” These “individuals” were other scientists. The Master added that “the ideas [Carl] has expressed have had a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the College with feelings of hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief that the College could be associated with such views” [Cambridge college sacks researcher over links with far right, by Richard Adams, Guardian, May 1, 2019].

Scientific research, on subjects that might in any way “trigger” Cultural Marxists to doubt their own dogmas, is under sustained attack in Western countries. Scientists who organize conferences that, in part, explore the overwhelming evidence for race differences in IQ are publicly smeared as Nazis , stripped of honorary academic affiliations, hounded by a baying MSM , and potentially forced out of their jobs as has happened to Noah Carl.

I wrote of this outrage back in December:

Every single person who signed the anti-Carl petition [an Open Letter Google Doc] is Hell-bent on making Cambridge University more like the University of Baghdad and, in shutting down free speech, making Britain more like an Islamic state. These Neurotic quasi-schizophrenics are the enemies of civilization.

I added that when the announced “investigation” was complete, we’d know if the authorities of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge—specifically its head, Matthew Bullock, should be added to their number.

Now we know. And we also know a lot about the enforcers who bullied Bullock into this cowardly capitulation.

The Journofa campaign against the world’s leading CrimeThink academic conference, the London Conference on Intelligence held at University College London between 2015 and 2017, was sparked by a privileged private school boy called Ben Van Der Merwe and his student journalism. Many readers will dismiss him as the callow youth that he is.

However, in the real, grown up MSM, there is a particular “science writer and broadcaster” whom our rulers wheel out again and again to add authority to fallacious criticisms of the concept of “race” and to condemn key areas of scientific enquiry as “dangerous.” His insidious influence over the scientific illiterates who constitute such a large portion of the West, including of its elite, is substantial. His name: Dr. Adam Rutherford.

When the media frenzy surrounding the London Conference on Intelligence began, Rutherford [Email him]was on hand as a fallacy generator. He told the rabidly CultMarx Guardian newspaper that the views of certain participants were “deeply obnoxious . . . pseudoscientific nonsense,” appealing to insult and making assertions without evidence. He even repeated the long-discredited “Lewontin’s Fallacy” [PDF]: “Human variation is, of course, real. But the proportion of genetic difference that is reflected in the characteristics that we can see is minuscule,” he said. “There is more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world. Two black Africans are more likely to be more different to each other than they are to a white person or even an east Asian”. [UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus, By Kevin Rawlinson & Richard Adams, Guardian, January 11, 2018]

Surely it’s obvious that the genetic difference between an averagely good painter and a Da Vinci will likely be tiny, but that difference can have significant consequences. Also, if lots of tiny differences push in same direction, as is the case with races as they vary in gene frequencies according to different environments, then this can build up into substantial differences which can allow correct predictions to be made – about response to certain medicines or prevalence of genetic illnesses.

Allowing correct predictions to be made is the essence of a scientific category. But Rutherford’s pronouncements have power because, if you don’t think about them too hard, they may just about be persuasive.

Rutherford is the host of BBC Radio’s Inside Science and the author of popular books on genetics and evolution. He was born in 1975 in Ipswich in the east of England and actually has an extraordinary amount in common with Ben Van der Merwe. It’s almost as if anti-science scientific journalists are a certain social type.

Like half-Afrikaans/half-Jewish Van der Merwe, Rutherford is foreign to the land in which he was born. He is the second of two children of a Guyanese Indian mother and a (white) New Zealander father . Perhaps this sense of not really belonging in the country of your birth leads you to be hostile to ideas such as nationalism and, by extension, anything associated with “tradition,” including established concepts such as “race” and “intelligence.”

Also, as I’ve explored before, being “mixed race” appears to be correlated with being emotionally unstable. This would presumably help to explain how thoughtful, cerebral, open-minded scientist Dr Adam Rutherford could write on Twitter:

“Oh, piss off. Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud, a muddled thinker uninterested in truth, who deploys glib science factoids that he doesn’t understand, jammed into a word salad of pick and mix sophistry. He is literally making people stupider” [June 1, 2018].

Oh piss off. Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud, a muddled thinker uninterested in truth, who deploys glib science factoids that he doesn't understand, jammed into a word salad of pick and mix sophistry. He is literally making people stupider. https://t.co/XngbsTib2d — Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) June 2, 2018

Consistent with this personality type, Rutherford has tattoos and piercings [One of Zany Men In White, East Anglian Daily Times, October 4, 2006] The possession of piercings is weakly associated with poor impulse control, meaning a quick temper, while individuals with tattoos are not only impulsive but also low in altruism [Personality correlates of tattooing and body piercing in a college sample, By J. Tate & B. Shelton, Personality and Individual Differences, 2008].

In other words, you should probably avoid them.

Like Van der Merwe, Rutherford, who frequently writes for The Guardian, attended a plush “public school”--British English for a very prestigious private school, like Eton—in Rutherford’s case, Ipswich School in Suffolk, founded in 1399. It is, perhaps, little wonder that Rutherford takes to Twitter to mock the relatively nationalistic and substantially Brexit voting English white working class; Suffolk not yet being especially “enriched.”

In April, snobbish Rutherford shared a tweet on how Brexit would damage the British economy adding, “But blue passports! Bluuuue Paaaaaassssports!!,” a snide reference to how some Brexit voters expressed a desire to revive traditional British “blue” passports rather than the “red” European Union ones.

But blue passports! Bluuuue Paaaaaassssports!! https://t.co/GSjSxN6CCw — Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) April 3, 2019

In 2009, Rutherford, like so many privileged and educated Leftists, was living in the then-poor East London borough Hackney, which has a large black population [Nicky Gumbel interview transcript, By Adam Rutherford, Guardian, August 28, 2009]. People like Rutherford gentrified Hackney, pushed up house prices, and thus began the ongoing process of driving out the its black, working class inhabitants. [Hackney hipsters' disposable income soars along with property prices in gentrified East End, By Lucy Tobin, Evening Standard, August 2, 2018]

Like Van Merwe, despite Rutherford’s parents having spent a fortune on his education, presumably considering him above the mere “state schools” attended 93% of English children, he failed to attend one of England’s two great universities: Oxford and Cambridge, the approximate equivalent of the Ivy League. Instead, just like Van der Merwe, he went to University College London (the subsequent unwitting home of the London Conference on Intelligence) to study medicine, before switching to evolutionary genetics.

Perhaps his attendance at UCL, despite his colossal childhood advantages in life, would help to explain his pursuing a doctorate (in genetics, believe it or not); in other words: overcompensating for youthful failure by becoming far too educated for his level of logical ability which, as his tweets and newspaper interviews attest, is less than sparkling.

Possibly due to this less than sparkling intellect, Rutherford eventually dropped out of academia to become a “science writer and broadcaster”: in other words, a popularizer of the Multicultural Church’s view of “good science.” He produces the kind of “science-light” tomes which tend to grace airport bookshops in order to occupy the less organized traveler on a long-haul flight: Creation: The Origin of Life; A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived…

In 2017, John Derbyshire described Rutherford’s attack on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance as cracking the “race-denialist whip.” Rutherford had written (in the Guardian, of course):

We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone? … There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in bigotry. Why racism is not backed by science, Guardian, March 1, 2015 Emphasis added

Hard science, like every other organ of influence in the West, is in a state of war and ideologues dressed up as scientists have scored victory after victory in academia since the mid-twentieth century. Their power is now so strong that scientists are increasingly compelled to pledge their commitment to “diversity,” and even to set out how they’ve managed to achieve more of it, in order to gain tenure or even a university position at all.

Commitment to the Truth is irrelevant. Leftist “scientists” have taken over and now, as was the case at Oxford and Cambridge until 1871, you are unwelcome without the relevant “Confession of Faith”. [The new religion on secular college campuses, The College Fix, April 29, 2019]

In this war, we must follow the precept “Know Your Enemy.” We must understand the social type that poses the clearest present danger to science: those who influence public and political opinion.

It appears that this type is from a wealthy background, privately educated, in the academic B team, snobbish, ethnically mixed, emotional in nature, and (based on their media interests) relatively high in verbal intelligence, meaning they can sound profound while being logically superficial.

Beware . . . for there are many Adam Rutherfords. And those genuinely interested in understanding the nature of the world must not let them triumph.