81. The Re-emergence of Eugenics and How to Fight Back with Science, with Rebecca Sear

"I used to think eugenics had died out after the Second World War. I no longer believe that, unfortunately." — Rebecca Sear

Most of us think of eugenics as a horror confined to the past. It isn't. This episode examines the worrying re-emergence of eugenics and scientific racism, from discredited claims about race and intelligence to the far-right money funding them, and asks how we defend good science against bad-faith actors. Along the way, Rebecca overturns another myth, that the isolated nuclear family is "traditional", and explains why demographers are far calmer about falling birth rates than the headlines suggest.

Our guest is Professor Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioural scientist and demographer at Brunel University London, where she directs the Centre for Culture and Evolution. She is co-founder of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association and a Fellow of the British Academy.

In this conversation we cover:

• The re-emergence of eugenics and biological essentialism, and how old ideas are being repackaged for a modern audience
• Richard Lynn's discredited national IQ database, the far-right money behind scientific racism, and how to spot bad-faith science
• Why cooperative childrearing is the human norm, and how "population panic" over falling fertility has been used to justify real human rights abuses

In this conversation we cover:

• Why cooperative childrearing is the human norm, and what the "male breadwinner" nuclear family gets wrong
• Why demographers are not panicking about falling fertility, and how "population panic" has been used to justify real human rights abuses
• The modern resurgence of eugenics and scientific racism, from Richard Lynn's discredited national IQ database to how to spot bad-faith science

LINKS & REFERENCES

Rebecca Sear

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccasear.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-sear-8183551
• Sear, R. (2021) The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the 'traditional' human family. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376: 20200020. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0020
• Sear, R. (2021) Demography and the rise, apparent fall and resurgence in eugenics. Population Studies 75(Suppl 1): 201-220. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.2009013
• Samorodnitsky, Bird, Carlson, Lingford, Phillips, Sear & Townsend (2024) Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles. STAT. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/

Mentioned in this episode

• Sarah Hrdy (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674060326
• Quinn Slobodian (2025) Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781890951931/hayeks-bastards
• The Guardian / Hope not Hate investigation into a US-funded 'race science' network (October 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss

Transcript

Cooperative childrearing and the nuclear family myth

James Hodgson 2:10

How humans raise children, not just as parents, but as wider communities. And it's something that is very familiar across humanity, but but probably something that uh we don't stop to think about that much in terms of the the academic and the research side that's involved. What has your research and the science tell us about how humans raise children?

Rebecca Sear 2:31

So if we look at the evidence cross-culturally or throughout history, what we see is that children are raised in quite a variety of different family forms, but one constant is that they're raised by many different individuals. So in the West, we have this idea that the traditional human family is a nuclear family where mothers and fathers alone raise children. That's actually a very rare family form worldwide, and it's probably pretty novel in human history. We seem to be a species which in which reproduction raising children involves a lot of cooperation. So most mammal species mothers alone will raise children. That's definitely not what happens in how species. We're quite unusual in that fathers in our species invest a lot in their children. There's a lot of paternal investment, but it isn't just mothers and fathers alone raising children. We know that across cultures, the grandparents, older children, and other family members, other group members too are all involved in raising children. In fact, uh Sarah Hurdy is an anthropologist. She's written a fantastic book on our cooperative reproduction system called Mothers and Others. She argues that we are a very cooperative species. This is pretty obvious, right? We we know how to get along with each other pretty well. She argues that our ability to cooperate actually stems from this system of cooperative reproduction. So raising children cooperatively involves learning a lot of skills, and it basically involves learning how to get on with people. And by developing those skills when raising children, we can then apply those skills in cooperation to all other kinds of domains. So that's what the human family has looked like throughout human history, a very cooperative family in which mothers and fathers get a lot of help for raising children.

James Hodgson 3:58

So if I understand correct, the Western expectation of mother and father raising a child alone is quite uh unique or a bit of an outlier in human history. What are uh you know, some of the the uh benefits and all and also some of the potential disadvantages of that strategy?

Rebecca Sear 4:14

First it's worth pointing out that even in the West, mothers and fathers don't raise children alone. There is a lot of help around. Obviously, people like grandparents are still heavily involved uh in looking after their kids, as are older siblings, incidentally. If you happen to have a younger sibling, you probably will have done a bit of child care as a as a child. Mothers and fathers are still relying on sibling caretakers, something that has been absolutely universal throughout human history. But also we have private, sorry, public systems which help parents raise children as well. We have things like the NHS, which provide a lot of health care, we have education systems which provide schooling for children. So in fact, parents do have a lot of support, but it doesn't involve the kind of interpersonal interaction necessarily that it has done in the past. We're kind of buying in care or we're outsourcing care to the state, so it's a bit more hidden. So in the West, even in the West, parents do not raise children alone. In terms of the outcomes, well, I don't want to demonize the nuclear family because children are raised in a wide variety of family forms worldwide and they're they're basically fine. I think that's one uh very important takeaway that our behaviour is very flexible as a species. That's one of the key characteristics of our species, too. However, Sarah Hurdy does suggest that if children are not being raised by these cooperative family networks, it may become harder for them to develop the social and cognitive skills that they need to get on with others in adulthood. That's a bit of a dramatic suggestion for um for the potential outcome of how we're raising kids these days, and I wouldn't want to push it too far, but I think it is it is important to recognise that that kind of cooperative childcare system does have real benefits for children in in learning these skills and how to get on with people. Maybe one final point to really emphasize is that something I think that children don't get so much now in childhood is practice with parenting. We're going to talk about fertility in a little while, and I think something that might feed into uh fertility decline is that we just don't have very much experience with with child rearing these days in the West until we are given our first baby to hold. Often when we've given birth or uh partners given birth ourselves. That again is a very unusual thing in human history. Because there was so much sibling caretaking throughout human history, that's how you learn to be a parent by looking after kids when you were a kid yourself.

Falling fertility: panic vs the data

Rebecca Sear 6:26

So that might be one specific aspect that we are sort of losing in the nuclear family model that practice with parenting.

James Hodgson 6:33

That's very interesting. Yeah, let's come on to fertility then as well. Because I think this was something that was um uh very interesting, uh, you know, looking at your areas of research uh prior to this conversation. Um and and particularly looking at birth rates around the world. We hear a lot of alarm about falling birth rates. How much of that concern is driven by the data of what's genuinely occurring in the world and how much of that is more of a uh media creation or a political argument?

Rebecca Sear 7:03

You will see a lot of panicked headlines about plunging fertility at the moment. What's noticeable if you read the articles under those headlines is that they rarely quote demographers, and that's because demographers are not on the whole panicking about fertility at the moment. So fertility rates are declining worldwide, that much we know, but they're not plunging. The dramatic graphs that you might see in some news articles about fertility are based on total fertility rates. So these are what's called a period measure of fertility. They're based on births that are happening right now. And that makes sense, right, if you want to know the number of births that are happening right now. What it doesn't tell you is what fertility trends are going to be in the long term. One thing that we know about period fertility rates is that they tend to be underestimated during periods when the timing of fertility is changing, specifically when women are having births later. And one thing we do know is that recent declines in fertility are at least partly driven by declines in teenage fertility. Teenagers are not having so many births now. It may well be that those teenagers do have kids just later in their lives. So if you look at current dramatic drops in fertility, bear in mind that those numbers may be underestimating long-term fertility patterns. If we look at long-term fertility patterns, we see much less dramatic declines in fertility. Rather than fertility doing that, it's it's much less dramatic. Demographer's best estimate at the moment is that fertility is declining, but long-term fertility trends will be much less dramatic than current period fertility measures suggest. So the data that fertility is declining is there, but it's not something that we need to panic about.

James Hodgson 8:38

It seems that there's almost like concurrent panics,

Overpopulation panic and human rights abuses

James Hodgson 8:40

one of overpopulation at the same time that people are very concerned about dramatic falls in fertility. And given that the human population has at least quadrupled in the last hundred years, why would there be concern specifically about a dramatic fall in fertility rates, given that we are at 8 billion? And I said you also hear of alarm of you know potential overpopulation going above 10 billion by 2050 and the problems that that will cause?

Rebecca Sear 9:07

That's a very good question. I think another reason why demographers don't panic about fertility rates is that we know what happens when people panic about fertility because it happened in the mid-20th century. There was the overpopulation panic. There were fears that human populations were growing out of control, that we'd we would all start starving to death because there just weren't enough resources on the planet to feed so many people. Fertility growth in the last 150 years uh or so years has been incredibly dramatic. Global population size has doubled just in my lifetime, more than doubled, in fact. That's a massive increase in population. And yet we're still here, we're still basically fine. So overpopulation was never really something to panic about. We uh developed new agricultural strategies which allowed us to more efficiently farm, for example. All these fears about us starving to death just never came to pass. However, that overpopulation panic did cause a lot of human rights abuses. So it resulted in population control. This is people, particularly in lower and middle-income countries, being encouraged, sometimes forced to use contraception in order to reduce their fertility rates in order to save the planet. That involved a lot of coercion. Um there are examples like the sterilization campaigns in India, which in which people were forcibly sterilized against their consent or knowledge that caused death and injury in some cases. There were many examples of these human rights abuses worldwide where essentially women in poorer parts of the world were being forced to use contraception that they didn't necessarily want to accept in order to push back against this so-called population panic. Demographers don't want to see that happening again. When you start to make fertility the target of policy, you're going to start stepping on people's human rights. You can't change fertility without changing people's reproductive behavior. And the UN states that part of human rights are reproductive rights. We all need to have the freedom to choose the number of children that we want to have and whether we have children or not. How are we going to encourage women to have children if they've decided this is not a good time to have kids? Some countries are trying to do things like restrict abortion, restrict reproductive health care, for example. This this is interfering with people's human rights. So one reason not to panic about population is that if you make fertility the target of control, you're going to start trampling on people's rights, and that is very problematic. There are, however, I think, political gains to be made from pronatalist panic, from over-exaggerating fertility decline, and these political gains are often about controlling women. Again, political parties who want to restrict women's access to reproductive health care might find it convenient to use population panic to do so. There is a conference that's been run a couple of years in the States called Natal, and it has pronatalists coming along to talk about how they can encourage women to have more children. And some of these people have very extreme ideas, for example, restricting women's access to education and work in order to increase fertility. I think I've even heard a far-right politician in the UK argue that declining fertility means we need to get rid of the welfare state, because if we get rid of the welfare state, then people will be forced to have children in order to have support in their old age. I strongly suspect that getting rid of the welfare state would not increase fertility because that would be removing even further support from child from parents to raise children. But in any case, morally speaking,

Overpopulation panic and human rights abuses

Rebecca Sear 12:28

we shouldn't be getting rid of the welfare states. But there are political actors who benefit from creating underpopulation panic.

James Hodgson 12:35

That's so fascinating. And I know you've written about the history and the resurgence of political interference, fertility. And I guess when we do talk about that, what we're what we're talking about is the rise and resurgence of eugenics and eugenic ideology. Usually when we hear that term, we think of this as something that happened in the past. But your research and writing would would tell a different story. You've explained some of the areas now, but but where in particular are we seeing a rise and what is its effect?

Rebecca Sear 13:04

So I used to think eugenics had died out after the Second World War. I no longer believe that, unfortunately. Eugenics is underpinned by a very sticky belief, one that's very attractive to a lot of people. It's the belief that some types of people are inherently inferior and some types of people are inherently superior, and that we can engineer societies to be better if we get rid of the inferior types of people and we promote the superior types of people. That thinking, I think, has been around long before the eugenics movement of the 20th century, and it's still attractive to many people today. Although it's also worth saying that the eugenics policies that were actually put in place in the early 20th century weren't immediately repealed after the Second World War, despite the horrors of the Nazi regime. There were eugenic sterilization laws, for example, put in place in the early 20th century, which involved sterilizing people without their consent, if they were deemed to be inferior, often if they had low intelligence, for example. Some countries didn't repeal these laws until the 1970s. There's a philosopher, Rob Wilson, I met recently, who works on eugenics now, and he does so because when he was teaching eugenics in his classroom one day, one of his students put up their hand and said, Yes, one of my aunt or my uncle, they they were sterilized against their consent too. One of their living relatives had actually experienced this eugenic sterilization law because in Alberta, a province in Canada, the laws weren't repealed until the 1970s. So in fact, eugenics didn't die out after the Second World War. Even the very explicit sterilization laws put in place in the early 20th century. I think it was the terminology of eugenics more than the actual belief system itself that disappeared. But we are also seeing a resurgence of that thinking right now. And unfortunately it's underpinned by, as it was in the early 20th century, a resurgence of biological essentialism. This is basically the idea that your genes determine who you are. So this is the idea that there are genetically determined differences which really impact important behavioral characteristics between different races, between men and women, even between social classes, and that we need to implement policies which support the good people and not the bad people. One way this plays out at the moment is in migration discussions. So there's a belief that biogenesists, that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, and therefore that we should keep migrants from black countries out of white countries in order to protect the gene pool of white countries. All of this is scientifically nonsense, but it's one way in which

How eugenics is being repackaged

Rebecca Sear 15:25

uh eugenics is coming back into mainstream discourse, unfortunately.

James Hodgson 15:29

In this re-emergence, is it repackaged? Are we uh yeah, I'm I'm thinking here, what are we what should we be looking out for in the language that people use? Given that anyone who's trying to promote these ideas probably will be aware that the language that was used in the last century would be quite obvious to people. I would just wonder is there a different approach? Are people um packaging this up in a different way to make it more appealing to people?

Rebecca Sear 15:52

I think yes is the short answer to that question. It also plays out in slightly different ways than it did in in the 20th century. Think in I would hope that many countries are unlikely to go back to eugenic sterilization laws, for example, although maybe I shouldn't discount that possibility. Um again, there were some that were in place against, for example, marginalized groups of women, indigenous women in Greenland, for example, also in parts of South America, again, into the 21st century, really quite frighteningly recently. But it has been repackaged. And what one way it's slightly being repackaged, although again this was something that was happening in the early 20th century, is through the misuse of science. So I mentioned that some eugenicists have beliefs about different genetic abilities regarding the intelligence of black and white people. There's a real resurgence of scientific racism in recent years, which claims there is scientific evidence that black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. This is scientifically nonsense. The scientific consensus is that race is not biologically meaningful. Human genetic diversity is very complex and it simply doesn't fall neatly into socially determined racial categories. So race isn't biologically real, therefore you cannot have genetically determined differences, racial differences and things like intelligence or criminality or sexuality, these claims are also made. Unfortunately, there are a very small group of people who have succeeded in getting these arguments published into the academic literature, giving scientific legitimacy to these claims. And these claims are then used in public discourse as evidence that certain types of people are just inferior and some are superior. Another way it plays out is in discussions around equality, diversity, and inclusion. There's been a pushback against these policies recently. These policies are intended to give equal opportunities to everyone, regardless of your background, your privilege, your identity. So they're designed to equalize opportunities across different groups. Contemporary eugenicists will argue that in fact what they do is falsely promote people who are inherently inferior. And so we should get rid of these EDI policies. They argue that in a true meritocracy, the privileged would be at the top, because privileged people are simply inherently better than the rest of us. White people are superior to black or brown people, men to women, rich people to poor people. Some of the discourse

Richard Lynn's national IQ database

Rebecca Sear 18:01

is is really quite that that blatant, although it's often packaged a little more palatably, I think, in wider discussions.

James Hodgson 18:07

Circles, could you explain what that is and the impact that it's had?

Rebecca Sear 18:12

So this was produced by the psychologist Richard Lynn, who wrote very openly about eugenics. He wanted to rehabilitate eugenics, and this wasn't at all hidden. One of the ways that he tried to promote eugenics was by claiming that there is scientific evidence for differences in cognitive abilities between the races. He did this by producing a national IQ database, so he claims this is a database which gives national average intelligence quotients for all nation states worldwide. And surprise, surprise, what it shows is that white and Asian East Asian populations have high intelligence and South Asian populations and African populations have much lower intelligence. If you actually look into the construction of this database, it's very clear it is not science. So data on intelligence that you could use to create a national average for nation states worldwide just doesn't exist. It's really hard to get nationally representative data on anything, which you would need in order to calculate national averages. This is actually done in demography, countries which don't have strong systems of vital registration, registering births, deaths and marriages and so on. Efforts have been put in place to collect survey data on fertility and mortality so that we can estimate these rates, because it's really important to know demographic rates in different countries worldwide. It isn't important to know average intelligence in nation states worldwide. It's a pretty meaningless thing to do. Intelligence is a complex topic, it's hard to define, it's hard to measure. I mean, if I gave you a room full of people and asked you to order them in terms of height, you could do it very easily. Height is a really easily observable measure. Intelligence is not height. I couldn't give you a room full of people and ask you to organize them in terms of intelligence by eye. That would be simply not something you could do. In order to measure intelligence, you need to define it. There are no agreed definitions of intelligence. You also need to come up with a way of measuring it. With height, I can give you a tape measure and you can measure somebody very easily. If you want to measure somebody's intelligence, you have to come up with a range of different complex tests, which is measuring their cognitive ability. And we can do that. Intelligence researchers have put a lot of effort into developing these cognitive tests, but they are culturally specific. One very obvious compound is that they often rely on paper and pencil tests, so they rely on people to have some kind of formal education. In populations where people have less formal education or no formal education, you can't really give people IQ tests because they're not familiar with paper and pencil. It's a pretty obvious thing to say, but it's something that was completely ignored in Richard Lynn's national IQ database. And I can give a specific example of that in that one of the papers that Lynn does talk about in his work is a paper that collected data from children in Sudan in the 1950s. And the psychologist was interested in doing an exploratory study with these kids just to understand how they dealt with Western intelligence tests. He wasn't actually trying to measure their IQ. And he gave them four different intelligence tests. There aren't many different types of cognitive tests you can use to measure intelligence. And he wrote in quite a lot of detail how the kids reacted to these tests. And some of these kids had a little bit of formal schooling, some of them had absolutely no formal schooling whatsoever. In three of the tests, the kids really struggled because they were paper and pencil tests, and some of the kids just haven't seen those kinds of materials before. So they really didn't do very well at all. There's one called the draw a man test where you get kids to literally draw a man on a bit of paper, and then the kids get points for whether they've got two arms and two legs in the right places and so on. And there were illustrations of these uh pictures in in the paper that the psychologist wrote up. And you can see these clear differences between the kids who had schooling and those who didn't. The ones who didn't have schooling, they didn't know what they were doing. They were just putting marks on a bit of paper. So with those kinds of tests, the kids did really badly. Their IQ would have come out at something like, you know, in the 60s or 70s. I think the draw a man test, their IQ came out as in the that would mean that they those kids had pretty severe intellectual disabilities. So the reason the scores were coming out so low is the kids were just not very familiar with those tests. The fourth test was one that used blocks. The kids had to create a shape by moving blocks around. And the psychologist wrote that the kids really seemed to be motivated by that test. They find it quite fun, so they actually did quite well at it. He also said the blocks were used colours that were quite common in clothing in that area, so it was just everything about the test was just more familiar than the paper and pencil tests. Test had an IQ of something like 98. It was pretty much the average that you'd see in the West. Average IQs always come out as 100. So the psychologist wrote in a lot of detail about how these IQ tests are cross-culturally not transferable. These kids did perfectly well on a test that they found fun, that motivated them, that was familiar to them, did really badly on all the others, not because they had low intelligence. They were just not familiar with those kinds of tests. And the psychologist was very clear about that, that these tests were not really evaluating the underlying intelligence. Of these kids. Richard Lynn took that study and said, according to these tests, the average IQ of people in Sudan is 73, because he simply averaged out the results of all of these four different tests, despite the fact the kids obviously couldn't do three of the four tests. So that's an example of how these IQ tests are cross-culturally non-transferable, but also how Richard Lynn distorted the literature and used it to promote his own argument that people of certain races are less intelligent than others. And there are many, many more examples that I could go into with the IQ database, but maybe I will stop there for that.

James Hodgson 23:25

I feel like we could we could really spend a lot of time deconstructing the research. What when was this published as well?

Rebecca Sear 23:31

So Richard Lynn actually started writing about racial differences in intelligence in the 1970s. The very first paper he actually wrote on this referred to subspecies differences in intelligence in the first sentence. So he clearly had strong beliefs about racial differences. He started publishing the data in the 1990s. Critiques of the dataset began to be published in the 90s, but he first published the full national IQ dataset in 2002. It was then reprinted or updated in several several times. The last version was published in 19. And this database is being very actively used, sadly, by others in the academic community. Lynn himself used it very widely. His first book in 2002, which published the database, he used the database to argue that intelligence determines economic development. So he ran a very basic regression analysis with intelligence, national intelligence against GDP. There is unsurprisingly an association in that countries with higher economic development also have higher intelligence and interpreted this as intelligence determines economic development. Countries which are richer are richer because they are more intelligent. So Lynn himself used the database very widely for those arguments, but unfortunately, other academics have seen the database being used in the literature and simply assumed it was actually science and have used it themselves. So the database is now being used in something like 180 publications apart from the ones Lynn produced. This week I discovered it was even published in a nature journal. Not nature itself, but Nature Sustainability, one of the nature stable of journals. So these are meant to be highly prestigious journals in academia. Somehow in 2026, a paper got published in Nature Sustainability, which used this obviously deeply flawed and likely fraudulent database.

James Hodgson 25:14

And this has been discredited for some time.

Rebecca Sear 25:16

The first critique was published, I think, in 1994. Many, many, many critiques have been published since.

James Hodgson 25:21

That's fascinating as well, because that really bridges that entire time frame you said when when we felt as though these were uh these ideas were a thing of the past and it brings us all the way from the 70s through to

Is the pull toward hierarchy innate?

James Hodgson 25:31

the present day. There is now much more of a mainstream resurgence of these ideas. Uh I'm interested in your your views coming from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Do you think there is something innate in our psychology that draws some people to these ideas of hierarchy and control? Or is is this is it purely a product of social conditioning?

Rebecca Sear 25:55

So there are three broad groups in evolutionary behavioral science. One is evolutionary psychology as a very broad generalization. They're interested in human universals, what what are the universal psychological characteristics that we share and how did they evolve? The other two branches are behavioral ecology and cultural evolution. Those two branches of the evolutionary behavioral sciences are about behavioral flexibility and what explains why our behavior varies. And our behavior is incredibly flexible as a species. One of the most important things about us is how able we are to change our behavior to suit our environment. My preferred explanation for these ideas would be to look to the environment rather than to our innate predispositions. I think we do have some innate psychological predispositions, but I think they're on the whole not very interesting, and probably not too many of them. I think something like cultural evolution could be much more interesting to explore why these ideas are so sticky and why they spread and why they spread at some times, or why they're particularly why they spread particularly well sometimes and sometimes not so well. Cultural evolution is about the way that cultures evolve, the way that ideas move between societies, how we learn ideas, the processes of social learning, how we learn from other individuals. So I would look more to ideas about how do we learn, where do we learn

Eugenics, the far right and its funding

Rebecca Sear 27:06

ideas from, why are these ideas spreading in certain types of society? Why do they they peak and peak and fall?

James Hodgson 27:13

Thank you for explaining that. And I think that does bring us through to the question of why why is this re-emerging now? And a connected question. You know, you spoke about the rise of scientific racism and these uh eugenic ideologies again. Do you see a connection with the rise of the far right? And what role does disinformation and the media landscape play in the re-emergence of these beliefs?

Rebecca Sear 27:35

So the historian Quinn Slobodian has a very interesting book called High X Bastards about the relationship between scientific racism and the rise of the far right. And I'm going to incredibly oversimplify his argument, so I recommend everyone reads that book. Um, but he he argues that scientific racism helped unite the old school right, the old school neo-Nazis, with the emergence of far right beliefs amongst much wealthier people, amongst billionaires who are now swinging to the right, because it provided, it gave legitimacy to racism. If people can turn to science to say, oh well, certain types of people are just different from us, that means we have to put certain social policies in place to ensure that the right kind of people are supported and the wrong kind of people are not. Scientific racism gives a sheen of legitimacy to those kinds of ideas, just as it did in the early 20s. So I think there is a link between scientific racism and the rise of the far right. I think scientific racism has really helped the resurgence of the far right. But I'm sure the relationship is is two-way. I think their resurgence as the far right becomes more acceptable, then scientific racism also becomes more acceptable. So it's an interdependent relationship, I'm sure.

James Hodgson 28:45

And I presume as well that would also mean that we'll see more funding going into those types of studies or scientists who support those ideas if again they are convenient for those who have the funds.

Rebecca Sear 28:54

So the issue of the funding of scientific racism is quite interesting, um, and it has invariably been done by extremely wealthy people. There's um there was a fund called the Pioneer Fund that was set up in the 1930s. It was set up by a textile magnet, an extremely wealthy man who decided to devote a lot of his wealth, unfortunately, to simply promoting racism. He did a lot, he put a lot of money into fighting desegregation in the US, but he also put uh money into scientific racism. The Pioneer Fund funded a lot of people who were deliberately or otherwise trying to promote the idea that there are inherent differences between racial groups. The Pioneer Fund, it actually still exists. There's not very much money left. It seems a lot of it was embezzled away by a scientific racist in the early 21st century, interestingly enough, but there is a little bit left and it is still supporting scientific uh racists. The Guardian and the organization Hope Not Hate recently published an undercover investigation where one of the Hope Not Hate reporters went undercover with a network of scientific racists and found evidence that these people were working together to produce things which looked like scientific publications but are deeply flawed scientifically and get them into the scientific literature. Not only were they using some of the leftover pioneer fund money, they were also funded by another wealthy individual who had given them quite a large sum of money to support this work, although that individual withdrew their funds after the investigation because he claimed not to know what it was being used for. So there is unfortunately funding for this type of work.

James Hodgson 30:23

It sounds like

How To Push Back On Bad Science

James Hodgson 30:23

a you know a tsunami of disinformation and um bad faith science that is coming our way. This may be uh an unfair question and and one we don't have enough time for, but how do you advise uh that we counter this uh bad science that's that's that's designed to cause division?

Rebecca Sear 30:44

I think that's a very difficult question. I think there are things that we can do though. I mean, one thing that I am trying to do is push back against the bad science. I'm trying to get the national IQ papers retracted from the scientific literature, for example, because we have to maintain the the integrity of the scientific literature. Most science is good science. Most scientists are trying to advance our knowledge of the world, and we have to protect science from the bad faith actors who are trying to misuse it. So I think actively critiquing the bad science is a really important part of what we can do. But I think there are other things that we can do as well. I think something to be aware of, perhaps if you're reading about research, is to be aware that not all research is done in good faith. Maybe to switch back to the demography example, I said that when you see um news articles which have panicked headlines about plunging fertility, they often don't cite demographers. However, they do sometimes refer to people as demographers and then quote panicked statements about plunging fertility. Often these people have no training in demography, they're not employed as demographers, and yet either they call themselves demographers or the journalists call them demographers, but that they're actually not. They're essentially professional opinion havers who have very strong opinions about plunging fertility and want to give themselves a sheen of legitimacy. So it might be worthwhile if you do see dramatic headlines about collapsing fertility, check the institutional affiliation of people who are being quoted. Are these actually trusted scientists or are these just professional opinion havers who want you to believe a certain thing about fertility? So I do think there are things that we can do to try and counter this, as you say, it's disinformation, it's misinformation, both about race and about demography in some cases.

James Hodgson 32:22

Thank you so much, Dr. Tia. This has been absolutely fascinating. And thank you for tying together these really complicated, complex issues that you work on, but explaining them in

A day in the life, and what's next

James Hodgson 32:29

i i in in in in such detail. I mean, there's there's so much more we could talk about, and I I implore everybody to to uh follow Rebecca's work. As such, I I'd love to know what what does a typical day look like for you when you are working on these topics?

Rebecca Sear 32:42

So I'm quite lucky in that my job is quite varied. I I do research, um, which I really love to do, but I also teach, I have various other roles as well to do. So my typical typical work day is quite varied. However, all of those different roles involve a lot of email. So if you were to actually watch me, if you're doing some behavioural observation of what I do, it is largely to sit at a computer all day. But the research that I do is generally desk-based as well. I have done more exciting types of work in the past, but yes, I'm afraid as a behavioural observation of me, it would not be very interesting me answering emails.

James Hodgson 33:13

Fair enough. And what are you working on next?

Rebecca Sear 33:15

So I'm becoming really interested in the sociology of science. Most, as I said, most scientists are good faith scientists trying to do their best, but there are a small number of scientists and people outside of science who are not. And although I think there are quite a small number of bad faith scientists, they are facilitated by social norms in some disciplines which facilitate their bad science, which doesn't sufficiently counter the bad science. So the intelligence community within psychology is a good example of this. Richard Lynn, when he retired, he organized a dinner of many academic colleagues, some still in academic positions right now. And at that dinner, he was given a sword for his services to eugenics. In that field, what Lynn did was absolutely out in the open. And the field, by and large, seemed fine with it. If you were to give some of Lynn's writings to other disciplines, like demographers, for example, if you gave Lynn's national IQ database to a demographer, they would they would laugh at you that anybody would think this is science. I find it really interesting why some disciplines facilitate scientific racism, the production of bad science, and some really don't. So I'm I'm thinking of working more with philosophers of science to try and understand cultures of

Changing minds

Rebecca Sear 34:23

science. What why are some scientists fine with scientific racism and some are not? Is a very broad summary, I think, of what I'm interested in right now.

James Hodgson 34:30

Well, before we go, we have our standard closing question, which is what's something which you've changed your mind on recently and what inspired that change?

Rebecca Sear 34:36

So again, this is about science, but as an early career researcher, I used to think science was a free marketplace of ideas. So people would throw out ideas, they would get tested, the good ideas would survive, the bad ideas would just die the bad death, bad ideas deserve to die. And I still mostly believe that is how science happens, but I'm now very well aware that there are a small number of bad faith actors who are deliberately trying to misuse science. And I think it is really important to be aware of that, that the science that science isn't a totally free marketplace of ideas. There are some ideas that will persist, like the National IQ database, even though there is absolutely no scientific merit in them whatsoever. I think it is really important to understand that those that is happening, that there is some disinformation being spread through science and misinformation in order to maintain the integrity of the scientific record, to make sure that most science is good faith science, which is advancing our knowledge of the world.

James Hodgson 35:32

Yes. Thank you for all the work that you're doing to maintain the integrity and the reputation of good faith science. And thank you, Dr. Thea, for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Humanism Now. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave us a rating and review. And why not share this episode with a friend? It really helps more people hear about the show. And we're building a growing community over on Ko-Fi. Special thanks to our supporters. If you would like to join them, link to them in the show notes. You can follow us on all social media at humanism, and then you can see that.