Grégoire Canlorbe

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard is a Danish intelligence research and freelance data scientist. No connection with existentialist philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. But Emil Kirkegaard’s great-grand father, Harald Rudyard Engman, was a Danish dissident, anti-Nazi artist, who was exiled to Sweden during WW2.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your name is notably attached to the study of stereotype accuracy—especially those stereotypes underlying immigration policy preferences in Danes. How do you sum up your research in the field?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: It began some years ago, around my dad’s 50 years birthday (in 2014), I was visiting Sweden because his girlfriend is Swedish and my dad decided to rent a house in Skåne, occupied East Denmark, for the birthday party. Some years prior I had read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (from 2002) and recalled that he made some reference to the accuracy of demographic stereotypes. Checking out the supporting references, I found the same names repeated many times: Lee Jussim and Clark McCauley (all the cited works are in an edited book, Lee et al., 1995). I googled the names of the authors and found a copy of a book chapter with the great title The Unbearable Accuracy of Stereotypes. It contained a neat summary of the evidence, as it was at the time (Jussim et al., 2009). I realized there was a whole scientific literature on this topic, one that wasn’t as stupid as my general impression of social psychology. Recall this was in the middle of the early years of the replication crisis, with priming results falling left and right. Just after, I checked out the library (that is, Library Genesis, the Russian pirate library), and found that Lee Jussim had written a book in 2012, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and I immediately started reading it (Jussim, 2012). While reading this book, I immediately saw the connection to Bayesianism, which I was familiar with because I had long been reading the blogs from people in the Sillycon Valley rationalism movement (focused on LessWrong in those days, now mostly reduced to the Scott Alexander-verse). Say you’re judging some person for some trait, say antisocialness. The prior belief is the initial guess about some individual based on whatever demographics one can immediately glance, whether this is sex, age, country of origin, race, name, clothing and so on. As such, the question of stereotypes was easy to attack scientifically: simply ask subjects to estimate the group means of various groups, and see how well these line up with reality. In fact, a decent size but haphazard set of studies had been done like this, and they pretty much invariably turned up strong evidence of accuracy (the exception being when the data assumed to represent reality was questionable, see (Heine et al., 2008)). At the same time, I had just started studying immigrant outcomes in Europe, and had in my possession a big dataset from Denmark, where we had crime rates, mean incomes, rates of use of social welfare, educational attainment, and unemployment for some 70 immigrant groups in Denmark, as grouped by country of origin (or of their mothers; (Kirkegaard & Fuerst, 2014)). In other words, I had the perfect criterion data to study stereotype accuracy in Denmark, and I knew that similar data existed for other European countries, so there was a way to expand afterwards (Kirkegaard, 2014b, 2015). I then found a way to buy survey data fairly inexpensively. We first conducted a pilot study and found quite large accuracy, despite recruiting unrepresentative people online (such as from my Facebook!). I then managed to raise some funding from friendly sources, and our first big study was published in Open Psych journals in 2016 (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016a, 2016c). I tried to do things right from the start: large sample size (about 500), pre-registered analyses, and open science practices (open access, data, code, and reviewing). As mentioned above, I was familiar with the replication crisis issues in social psychology and did not want to contribute to such poor practices. I also knew that my results would get attacked by leftists, and thus had to be extra strong to withstand scrutiny (Gottfredson, 2007; Kirkegaard, 2020). However, our results were crystal clear — the main aggregate stereotype correlated r = .70 with real differences — and the results were closely in line numerically with the findings that Lee Jussim had summarized. The idea of linking these data to the immigration preferences was good, and obvious in hindsight, but it wasn’t mine. Noah Carl was the first to combine the two ideas in his 2016 paper, also in Open Psych (Carl, 2016). After reading his paper, I knew the next step forward was to measure all three variables in a single study: real group differences (insofar as government data can tell), stereotypes (estimates of those differences), and finally policy preferences for the same groups. When looking at immigrant groups, it was obvious that popular opposition to immigrants was closely in line with the actual immigrant groups with high rates of social problems, whether crime or welfare dependencies (so in practice, against Muslim groups). I teamed up with Noah for a study like this, and we wanted to get it out somewhere ‘mainstream’, so we tried a bunch of social psychology journals, not with much luck. One editor, Karolina Hansen, at a Polish university told us we needed to explicitly state, multiple times, that Muslims were not causing their own misfortunates, whereas our study was agnostic on this topic. I guess I should not be so surprised since, despite being in Poland, she has a Danish last name, so was probably infected by the Woke memeplex. Unfortunately, it was around now that the time of troubles began for Noah Carl, and he had to divert time to defending himself against the communist campaign and their friends in the media (Carl, 2019). It didn’t end well and he was fired (Quillette Magazine, 2019). We managed to finally publish this work in 2020 (Kirkegaard et al., 2020). To return to the question, I would say that my work in this field has just begun and I expect to publish a bunch of more studies on immigrants, stereotypes and their links to intelligence. We are currently finishing up a big study in the Netherlands, with similar results. The last part is important because from an intelligence research perspective, having accurate stereotypes is simply a manifestation of the general factor of intelligence, already strongly correlated with general knowledge. So, one should see pervasive correlations between stereotype accuracy and intelligence, and in fact, that is the case. Some left-wing psychologists and their media cheerleaders hilariously tried to brand this as a negative aspect of intelligence (Khazan, 2017; Lick et al., 2018; Sputnik News Staff, 2017).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A well-known investigation on your part deals with the dataset of OKCupid’s users. You especially focus on the association of cognitive ability with self-reported criminal behavior—and with religiousness. May you tell us more about it?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: Back in 2010, or thereabouts, I discovered the OKCupid dating site, and used it myself. The dating site really was very special, as no other dating site collected so much interesting data on their users. Most dating sites attempted only crude social matching, or even dumber things like astrological signs. However, OKCupid was started by a mathematician, and he had a better idea despite no background in psychology. As a big fan of open science, I was wondering how to get a copy of the data for my own curiosity. I teamed up with a programmer to do a scraping (automatic download) of the website, and we managed to download data from nearly 70,000 users. Mind you, a lot of these profiles are essentially empty and not useful, but still, the dataset is amazing, and one can typically use about 10-30k users in a study, depending on which variables are desired and which subgroups. Again, in the spirit of open science, we wanted to share these data with the world, so we sent our paper to review at Open Psych (Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016b). I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but some mainstream social psychologists started retweeting my tweet to the data (e.g. Brian Nosek of OSF), and eventually the SJWs joined in (Oliver Keyes was a notable nutty blogger who wrote some rambling blogpost on this, since apparently deleted), or maybe the other way around. In any case, it ended up with a global media event of sorts where we got featured in various big outlets: Wired, Forbes, Vox, Vice, even Fortune magazine. A guy I went to school with in 2006 called me and wanted some input for an article he was writing for the Danish state media. The data on the website was really already public, and just required a free user (some of it). It’s just that when it sits in 70,000 profiles, it is not as useful for analysis as when they are in a spreadsheet type format. The task of scraping could be done by a chimpanzee, and involves visiting random profiles and copypasting the data into a big spreadsheet. In fact, the website itself wrote in their user agreement that users should consider the data public (“You should appreciate that all information submitted on the Website might potentially be publicly accessible. Important and private information should be protected by you.”). In the end, OSF deleted the copy of the dataset on their service, following a copyright complaint from OKCupid’s owners. Someone reported me to the Danish data protection agency, and they sent me some questions in a threatening manner, which I didn’t answer, and then after some months gave up the case. The media never reported on this dropping of the case, so in the eyes of the media and the public, it appears I was accused and presumed guilty of some crime, and in fact, a case was not even filed against me in court.

Aside from this origin story, the dataset is really quite something. This is because the questions on the site were mostly made by users themselves, and because of this, some of them asked about things that psychologists would not dare to ask about. They are also a lot more diverse in topics than what interests psychologists. We have published some studies looking at intelligence estimation based on some 14 questions with high g-loadings, and intelligence scores from these do in fact relate to religiousness, crime (self-reported, not optimal), political interest and so on in the usual ways (Kirkegaard, 2018; Kirkegaard & Bjerrekær, 2016b; Kirkegaard & Lasker, 2020). This is doubly interesting because the data were filled out by users well-knowing that other users would be reading their answers, thus suggesting that social desirability bias should be large here. Evidently, it is not large enough to remove the usual associations. Later on the website got bought by Big Dating, that also owns Tinder and others, and the website is now a low quality clone of Tinder, a shell of its former glory. Sad! The most interesting remnant of the website, aside from this (unfortunately) partial copy of the site’s database (and others that exist), is that the founder wrote a book on some analyses he did (Rudder, 2015). It’s really a commercialization, and not a good one, of the old OKTrends blog. Fortunately, internet polymath Gwern has archived the blog, so people can and should read the unredacted analyses https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/index.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Your university background is linguistics. Do you believe race differences may be manifested in language? What are your thoughts about Umberto Eco’s remark that “the language of Europe is translation”?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I did a bachelor degree in linguistics, starting in 2010. Before that I studied 2 years philosophy, but I was disillusioned with that department and the field, and did not finish the degree. I was always good with language in school, and since I was already interested in philosophy of language, branching out to linguistics was not a big step. Honestly though, studying linguistics had a big advantage: there were no class attendance requirements, so I could avoid going to classes (these are a waste of time). This freed up a huge chunk of time, and allowed me to sleep in the day and work in the night, whenever this was practical (I have non-24 disorder). Passing the exams is really mostly a matter of writing 3 essays of 10-15 pages every 6 months, one for each class one’s taking that semester. Each class is usually based on some book or some papers, so one will have to read these. All in all, writing a paper takes perhaps 2 days, editing included, and reading the required material takes maybe another 3 days, so we’re looking at about 15 days of work every 6 months. In Denmark, the state pays students a stipend to study, about 800 USD, and there is low-cost, subsidized student housing available too, so this income is livable, and one can even invest some of it in Bitcoin on the side (Moon Inc.). The rest of the time I used unwisely to play too much on the computer, but still a large proportion of the time, I used to self-study psychology, genetics, statistics and programming. When I was doing the master’s (candidate) in linguistics in 2015, I was already good enough that a high profile professor wrote me to recruit me for his startup in genetics. That ended my career in academia, not that I was keenly interested in pursuing a linguistics PhD.

So, with my unusual linguistics background aside, what about race and language? It’s hard to say because linguists are generally speaking non-quantitative people, and don’t look at these things, except in bland ways. There are some findings on how the physical shape of the humans differ by race, and this affects the sounds they produce. Africans have notably larger lips and a broader nose (for cooling), and this results in slight differences in the sounds they make. I don’t think this is very important, however. More interesting in the big picture are associations between culture and language (an extreme version is called linguistic relativity), and of course, some cultures are vastly more complex than others. Some languages are really quite simple, lacking words for most scientific concepts, some even basic mathematics like counting. I am not aware of any formal study of ethnic group IQs and their language features. Economists conduct these kinds of studies, trying to spot relationships between psychological traits and languages, and how this should be reflected in economic outcomes. Best thing they have come up with is that languages that allow dropping of pronouns are higher in some good stuff (Feldmann, 2019; He et al., 2020; Mavisakalyan & Weber, 2018). There is a big dataset of language features called The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS), which is used to study this stuff (the field is called linguistic typology). It has data for some 2700 languages last time I looked, and these are given geographical coordinates, countries and so on. One could match this to ethnic IQs and national IQs failing that, and maybe something useful would come out of this. Honestly, I have not looked because I don’t think much interesting will come out of this. I did take an initial look at the data from a quantitative perspective in a preprint never published (not even submitted anywhere, (Kirkegaard, 2021), I posted it as a formal preprint for the purpose of this interview). The national data are kind small for languages because of the extensive family relationships between them, so the effective sample size is less than the number of countries. Biologists are familiar with this problem, and have standard phylogenetic regression methods to handle it, and linguists also (they do it in a worse way), but economists less so. I think it is better to proceed here with ordinary national IQs work, and expanding to the genetics of these, á la what Davide Piffer has been doing since 2013 (Piffer, 2013, 2015, 2019, 2020a, 2020b), and what we did in our big 2016 paper looking at the genetic ancestry of countries and their subdivisions (Fuerst & Kirkegaard, 2016). I am not familiar with Umberto Eco, so I have no comment on that quote.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: As an avowed proponent of eugenics, do you share the belief in COVID-19 pandemic’s purifying role? What is your assessment of the reservations on negative eugenics that Charles Darwin—while acknowledging the attenuation of natural selection in Victorian England—expressed in The Descent of Man? Namely that “the surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: COVID-19 almost only kills old people who are no longer reproducing, so it has no eugenic or dysgenic effect. If one wanted to be really cynical, one could say that by killing off a bunch of unproductive people, it is easing the state’s welfare budgets, though causing large initial costs in healthcare. I agree with Darwin. There is an uneasiness with realizing the problem of dysgenics and doing anything about it. Galton himself commented on this in his autobiography (1908): “Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he also has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.”. So how can we do things more merfically? Many have thought about this problem (Glad, 2004). I submit that we don’t need to do too much. Some countries have already managed to reduce the intelligence-fertility relationship to a quite weak negative or null association through existing social policies and cultural changes (Kolk & Barclay, 2019; Meisenberg, 2008; Reeve et al., 2018). Aside from that, we have the tools at hand to reverse the problem: embryo selection and genome editing. With the latter, we can edit embryos to remove some known errors, insofar as these are known (typically well-known genetic disorders). The former technology has been here for years, but needs to be augmented with a modern genomics approach, and get rid of the communist ethos that prevents this from happening (Anomaly, 2018, 2020; Anomaly & Jones, 2020). Interestingly, survey evidence shows that large fractions of the world population, with notable differences between countries, are already in favor of such technology, and this fraction is increasing over time, just as it did when the original IVF technology emerged (Pew Research Center, 2020; Zigerell, 2019). On the technology side, we need to figure out how to produce a lot of egg cells (sperm are plenty!), and combine these with the best sperm cells if possible (sperm selection), nurture the resulting embryos, and pick the best combination of genes among the sibling embryos according to the best genetic prediction models. This approach was outlined in Gattaca back in 1997, so this is hardly new, we just need to get serious about it. Galton suggested the same more than 100 years ago (“I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilised nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets.”, same source). If we let the power of capitalism achieve this, we can all have healthier, smarter, prettier, more creative children, and work towards improving our Kardashev score. Considering the current way Western elite thought is moving, there is probably not so much hope for this. Richard Lynn made similar forecasts in his 2001 book Eugenics: a reassessment (Lynn, 2001).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A nation’s collective intelligence partly lies in its average IQ. It also lies in its ability to network the various individual IQs within it in an efficient way, i.e., in a way allowing the nation to solve the faced challenges and to prevail in intergroup competition. Efficient networking within a national brain notably includes intragroup competition for innovation—and the shifting of resources towards sound innovators, i.e., individuals bringing a way of thinking which is different, novel, but also more efficient than the previous admitted thought patterns. Do you sense a correlation between average IQ and efficient networking? Historically, which nation performed best in terms of intragroup cognitive collaboration?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: It’s a tough question because competing nations throughout history have not generally been so easy to compare, since they differ in population size, and change their borders and thus populations over time as well (e.g. modern Austria vs. Austria-Hungary vs. Greater Germany). The ultimate test of inter-group competition is warfare, and so one can look at which countries are very good at this, or have good standing militaries (Karlin, 2020). One can go beyond looking at who won a lot of wars. One can look at efficiency specifically, and for World War 2, there are some numbers here on the combat efficiency of soldiers from the warring states. Though these were calculated by the US army after the war, it probably won’t surprise many to learn that Nazi Germany soldiers were the most efficient in per capita terms. Specifically, the research computed the worth of a solider, setting the Nazi German one to 1.00, yields values of 1.10 Americans, 1.45 British, and >4 Slavic (Polish or Russian) (Kretaner, 2020; Turchin, 2007). Details of the calculations are hard to find, and I have been unable to find numbers for World War 1 or any other wars, but I admit to not being a military historian and not having spent more than a few hours looking. Peter Turchin talks a lot about this collective efficiency, he uses the term Asabiya for this, from the great Islamic golden age thinker Ibn Khaldun. We can make some guesses though, group efficiency is higher when people have a feeling of belonging. Most academic research finds negative effects of ethnic/race diversity on social trust (Dinesen et al., 2020), and given the ubiquitousness of ethnic voting in democracies, and the endless anti-European hatred from the European left, it’s hard to disagree with diagnosis of an overall negative effect of ethnic diversity on collective effectiveness. We currently live in a time of extreme political polizationation (mostly Europeans versus other Europeans in the same countries), mostly caused I think by the radicalization of the global media by communist Woke theories from academia. Zach Goldberg is doing great work on this topic (Goldberg, 2019a, 2019b). China, on the other hand, is going strong in terms of collective efficiency, insofar as their human capital allows (corruption is endemic outside WEIRD populations; (Henrich, 2020)). All this aside, collective efficiency is positively affected by national average intelligence, and this shows up in any kind of analysis one does. Intelligence is at the individual level related to trust, honesty, competence at any job, patience and so on, so it is not surprising that countries with smarter people outcompete others by large margins (Kirkegaard & Karlin, 2020).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You dedicate yourself to exploring the relationship of personal names to factors like social status, intelligence, age, and country of origin. What are your conclusions at it stands? Do you subscribe to the Jewish belief that someone’s name predicts his destiny?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I never heard of this Jewish belief, but it is certainly true that names have associations with outcomes in life. You see when most social scientists discover such patterns, they immediately think it results from some kind of discrimination (the so-called second sociologist fallacy: any group difference is caused by discrimination by the above average groups). They devise experiments to show that people preferentially hire people with higher status names, and so on (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Oreopoulos, 2011). Yes, I am sure one can find some evidence of this stuff. It goes back to the stereotype discussion initially. People act in a crudely Bayesian matter, they use whatever information about an individual they can find. Sometimes researchers give people only names, and so of course people will use such information until they can get some better information. This is both rational and not a big mystery. My entry into this topic was, again, due to nice data presenting itself but in a less useful format. A Danish newspaper bought government statistics about first names of people living in Denmark, specifically about their average incomes, crime rates, and so on. These data were then published on a website, sort of. There was a search function and one could look up any name to see the stats for that name, but no way to download all the data. Together with a friend, we figured out how to get the entire dataset behind this website. We then carried out a bunch of analyses of this. We confirmed the usual “S factor” pattern. Maybe we should call this Thorndike’s rule, as he wrote in 1920: “a still broader fact or principle—namely, that in human nature good traits go together. To him that hath a superior intellect is given also on the average a superior character; the quick boy is also in the long run more accurate; the able boy is also more industrious. There is no principle of compensation whereby a weak intellect is offset by a strong will, a poor memory by good judgment, or a lack of ambition by an attractive personality. Every pair of such supposed compensating qualities that have been investigated has been found really to show correspondence.” (Quoted from Gwern’s page on correlations). Anyway, in our data names with higher mean incomes were also, on average, less crime prone, and worked better jobs and so on (Kirkegaard & Tranberg, 2015). So for every name, one can score it on this composite measure of social status, or “general socioeconomic factor” as I called it in 2014 (Kirkegaard, 2014a) in a study of countries. I got the idea from reading Richard Lynn and Gregory Clark’s books in short succession (Clark, 2014; Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012). Clark talks about how everyone is born with a latent, genetic score for this generalized social status, and the various social status indicators in life are an imperfect indicator of this (and the other part being mostly luck). However, if one relies on last name data, one can actually see that the heritability of the latent general social status is about 75%. This finding replicates across many datasets from different countries, even in Maoist China, it’s really quite astonishing. I realized then, that the same thing can be said for countries and subpopulations inside countries, such as immigrant groups (Kirkegaard & Fuerst, 2014). In our follow-up study we were also able to show that average intelligence measured in the Danish army correlated quite well with this general social status of names (Kirkegaard, 2019). Personally, I don’t think having a funny name does much to harm one’s career, and it’s a quite simple matter to change it these days, if one really thinks so. The fact of the matter is rather than funny parents give their kids funny names, and low status parents their kids low status names, and so on. This results in first names being differentiated by genetic propensity for social status, despite not being a family. One can even see dysgenics this way in our Danish data, as higher social status names had fewer ‘kids’, a kind of pseudo-fertility measure, and so these reduce their share of the population over time. Elite families dying out is a familiar finding to many historians.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is sometimes asked whether our ontological concepts (causality, identity, quantity, and so on) are intended in the human mind to relate to objective properties of the observed things. Or, on the contrary, only serve as molds allowing the human mind to clarify, organize the empirical datum; but having nothing to do with the content of reality. It is also asked whether the human mind is able to draw its concepts from an immaterial dimension reached through suprasensible perceptions. Or, on the contrary, is condemned to rely on itself—and on sensible experience. What is your take on such issues?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: That philosophy is a waste of time. For those few who still want to wade into this territory, I highly recommend Alan Sokal’s writings on ontological realism, quantum mechanics and postmodernism (Sokal, 2008; Sokal & Bricmont, 1999). In my opinion, the best philosophy is written by working scientists or philosophers with a very close relationship to science (and I don’t mean doing some pop-neuroscience). For those wanting to put a label on me, I like to refer to myself as a neo-positivist scientific realist. This is essentially the view that evolution favors organisms that have some level of accuracy of their perception of the real world, comes equipped with a bunch of mostly adaptive cognitive biases (“tinted glasses”), and that through rigorous application of the scientific process, we can better see reality as it really is. Unfortunately, I don’t think that social science is close to this scientific ideal, being staffed by the wrong people, with the wrong incentives. Social science would do better if we fired everybody who works there, and hired some random physicists to figure things out. This is essentially what Dominic Cummings did in order to win the 2016 Brexit vote, his blog has a bunch of stuff on this.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Going back to linguistics, you may have heard of the proposition “Est vir qui adest.” Namely the anagram for Pilatus’s question to Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” What does such connection inspire to you? Which one of Jesus or Pilatus is the chad—and which one the virgin?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: I generally don’t read fiction, so I am not overly familiar with the Bible stories. Considering that Jesus supposedly died as a childless Virgin (if we disregard the Mary possibility), and Wikipedia tells me that Pilatus apparently had a wife, and we don’t know anything about any potential children. So it boils down to the interesting question of whether Jesus was as holy as he claims to be (i.e., the Gospels claim him to be!), considering the base rate of fertility rates among cult leaders. On the balance of probabilities, I am going with Chad Jesus and the groupies theory, and may God forgive my atheist sins.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add something?

  Emil O.W. Kirkegaard: These were some very far reaching questions. You certainly have a talent for interviewing. Maybe you can get a job at Playboy.

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That conversation was initially published in The Postil Magazine‘s March 2021 issue

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These are generated by Zotero.

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Frank Kemp Salter is an Australian academic and researcher. Most of his career was at the Max Planck Research Centre for Human Ethology, in Andechs, Germany. Salter is best known for his writings on ethnicity and ethnic interests. Originally trained at Sydney University as a political scientist, his doctoral and subsequent research focused on ethology. He studies political phenomena using the methods and theories of behavioral biology in addition to conventional methods. Those phenomena include hierarchy (Emotions in Command, 1995), indoctrination (Ethnic Conflict and Indoctrination, 1998, edited with I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt), ethnic altruism and conflict (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism, 2002, Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity, 2004), and genetic interests (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration, 2003). Salter has also been employed as an adviser to Australia’s populist One Nation party.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides the tenor and the scope of collective genetic interests in humans, your field of investigation covers the universal biological underpinnings of the obedience to one’s hierarchical superior—especially in the framework of bureaucracy. May you tell us more about your theory as it stands?

  Frank Salter: In writing Emotions in Command I observed command-giving in many organizations, from the military, to courts and parliaments, to nightclub doormen and theatrical rehearsals. The methods and observational categories were very much in the ethological tradition of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who I later joined as a colleague at his Max Planck Research Centre.

  Observing the organizations, I expected to find dominance behaviours, which I did, but also found friendly conduct. In ethology these are designated “affiliative”. Effective leaders take care to soften commands and bind subordinates to them through acts of generosity and fairness. In doing this they are helped by what I called the “dominance infrastructure”, this being the organization’s set of rules backed by inducements and punishments. My observations confirmed part of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy—that it is a rule-governed hierarchy. Being rule governed, with obedience largely ensured by the dominance infrastructure, administrative positions can be filled by a wide range of personalities. Domineering behaviour or brilliant leadership have negative and positive effects respectively, but are not required for the organization to tick over.

  It was the discovery of the affiliative component of hierarchy that led me to search for an “affiliative infrastructure”. That search resulted in me studying ethnic ties, which can bind large populations. Is there such a thing as an “ethnic infrastructure”?

  Grégoire Canlorbe: A popular claim by J. Philippe Rushton is that racial differences are displayed in ethnocentrism, which strictly arise from those in genetic similarity: the least genetically heterogeneous ethnic groups being those most inclined to an ethnocentric behavior, and reciprocally. The truth of such assertion notably requires the validity of these two premises: namely that race differences are attested in the field of genetic homogeneity; and that ethnocentric behaviors cannot be high in national groups with genetically distant members, i.e., cannot be selected beyond the level of kinship. Do you endorse such couple of ideas?

  Frank Salter: Philippe Rushton’s theory was not the basis of my research into ethnic kinship. Instead, it was William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness, which is generally accepted in ethology and evolutionary biology. The theory states that kinship bonds promote the reproduction of shared genes. Hamilton extended his theory to ethnic groups. I’m not aware of the finding you describe (the variations in genetic homogeneity, and the fact the degree of genetic similarity predicts the level of ethnocentrism), though they have a certain plausibility. What I am aware of is that the degree of genetic homogeneity is related to solidarity, a sense of social cohesion; or, to put it differently, that conflict increases when society becomes more diverse genetically. That finding, which is compatible with Hamilton’s theory, has been repeated again and again. The work of the late Tatu Vanhanen is an excellent example.

  Nonetheless it seems that a more diverse society can actually lead to greater ethnocentrism: not at the level of society taken as whole, though, but instead at the level of the different ethnic components of society. As you can see in the case of America especially (but this is a universal trend in the West), white majorities are now increasingly ethnocentric, but it clearly doesn’t compare to the very high ethnocentrism of black or Latino minorities. This is an issue the media and the universities don’t understand, and never talk about. I remember a recent interview with political scientist George Friedman, in which he agreed that contemporary America is based on a racial caste system ruled by a racist, ethnocentric oppressive white majority. Conversely it is maintained that non-white minorities are oppressed and free from any racial feelings. The exact opposite is true. Whites are generally more individualistic and less ethnically motivated than minorities. This is evident in surveys and degree of bloc voting in elections. Europe and its settler societies score lower in collectivism than other civilizations. Those differences make multiculturalism possible, because if whites were as ethnocentric as minorities, they would quickly end affirmative action and replacement-level immigration.

  This interpretation contradicts the current mantras of the Black Lives Matter movement and its ideology derived from Marxist whiteness theory. They would have us believe that white societies are profoundly racist because they privilege white people. At the same time they deny that whiteness and by implication blackness and Hispanicness have objective ethnic dimensions. They have no theory to explain why some minorities in the U.S. have substantially higher average incomes than whites (Chinese, Japanese, Indians). Neither can they explain why a racist society fixated on white power would allow indiscriminate immigration policies to put whites on track to become a minority, or why such a society would accept anti-white curricula in universities and schools.

  This and other messages current in the mass media and educational establishment indicate the wholesale politicization of the university system, resulting in a collapse of rationality in elite public discourse.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Does the cultural, political assimilationism of the ancient Roman empire (which neoconservative America has basically inherited) come as an efficient, sound “group evolutionary strategy”? As regards the flourishing of white virility in a multi-racial context: how do you assess the Crocodile Dundee trilogy’s comparison of the situation in Australia with that in the USA?

  Frank Salter: It could be argued that the Roman Empire was the outcome of the Roman group strategy, though the Empire took on a life of its own with the adoption of imperial rule. The best work I’ve seen on the Roman Empire’s evolutionary impact is by Peter Frost and the late Henry Harpending. They argued that the Empire and Medieval states inadvertently genetically pacified their populations by using the judicial system to execute violent males. Up to one percent of each generation was executed or died in the legal process. The European homicide rate fell steadily from the 14^th to the 20^th century. To utilize a metaphor from Crocodile Dundee, genetic pacification results in fewer and fewer interactions between men ending with the words, “that is a knife”.

  As for white virility, the multiculturalist reality across the West since the 1970s has been that the founding ethnic group is subordinated and reduced demographically. The character Crocodile Dundee was played by an Anglo Australian (Paul Hogan), and Anglos have been the big losers from large scale indiscriminate immigration introduced from the 1970s. The same is true in the United States. For Americans, one of the attractions of the film is that Mr. Dundee reminded them of their frontier ancestors—rugged, direct, masculine. He even carried a knife that resembled the one made famous by Jim Bowie. The reality is that Australian Anglos, like American whites, are not virile, but henpecked by the nanny state. They are pecked by affirmative action. Their history is falsified in the movies. Their children are turned against them by PC history classes. They are vilified by the mainstream media. In England their young women are raped en masse by immigrant Pakistani men. “Henpecked” is an inadequate metaphor, because these pathetic nonentities are on their way to become minorities in their own homelands.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: When it comes to The Biology of Peace and War Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt judged the inter-group military conflict to occur as the product of cultural (rather than biological) evolution, while being partly predisposed at a genetic level through the instincts for xenophobia and aggression. He also contended the human species to be jointly endowed with a “biological filter” forbidding humans from taking the life of another human (in the framework of the “ritualization” of intra-group aggressiveness); and a “cultural filter” asking humans to kill their opponents in the framework of human wars. How do you assess those claims in view of the present data? After several decades of a prevalence of inter-group economic competition, do you expect a strong resurgence of the mode of group selection that is war?

  Frank Salter: I think that Eibl’s core insights remain valid, though warfare needs to be distinguished from conflict. The latter occurs between individuals and groups and can occur spontaneously due to xenophobia and aggression. Warfare, on the other hand, is an organized activity. Individual soldiers need only follow orders to kill others, and those giving the orders can be motivated by a variety of motivations, including aggression but also the wish to be reelected, to make a profit or to spread an ideology. Eibl was right to emphasise the inborn taboo against killing, though there is variation in this trait; psychopaths exist in various degrees.

  (Classical ethology did not handle individual variation very well. Especially with Konrad Lorenz it was focused on describing “species typical” behaviours.)

  Eibl’s distinction between innate and culturally-directed sociality was a major contribution to behavioural biology. This distinction was also taken up by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox in their book, The Imperial Animal. Humans are evolved for small-scale ritualized fighting and ambushes. Modern armies demand systematic killing. The traumatic effects on soldiers is only partly mitigated by modern weapons which allow killing at a distance. No wonder that soldiers returning from combat often suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a species we are not fully evolved for this activity. Tiger and Fox extend this principle further. In their view humans are not evolved to be Weberian bureaucrats who treat other humans according to a set of formal rules.

  Is warfare a form of group selection and is it likely to return on a large scale? Much modern warfare is unconnected with genetic selection, whether at the individual or group levels. Napoleonic soldiers on both sides died in their millions probably without benefiting their reproductive fitness, whether at the individual or ethnic level. The same goes for many wars. However, I think there are exceptions. Ethnic groups contain a large number of copies of their member’s genes, which can make it adaptive for individuals to sacrifice their lives to prevent genocide or displacement. The Russian soldiers who died resisting the Nazi invasion in the Second World War saved their ethnic kin from large scale replacement, which was Hitler’s war aim.

  As for the future of warfare, it continues to be an instrument of foreign policy, though hopefully diplomatic methods for resolving conflicts will continue to develop.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In order to make sense of the long-established scientific helplessness of China (which has never delivered a genius veritably comparable to Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, or Benoît Mandelbrot), it has been sometimes advanced that the cognitive backwardness of Chinese civilization as a “group evolutionary strategy” should be connected to an insufficient masculine martial spirit. Yet Chinese history is one full of epic warlike males: let one think of Xiang Yy, Xue Rengui, Mao Zedong, or Jet Li; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is universally praised and studied. Another regularly invoked factor lies in the lack in creativity (both at a genetic and cultural level); but Chinese food or the Hong Kong movie industry—with masters like Tsui Hark or John Woo—are notoriously virtuoso. Do you see a valuable remaining explanation?

  Frank Salter: I’m optimistic about China’s scientific potential. They and kindred populations have a high average mathematical IQ and a strong work ethic. What is remarkable is their delayed industrialization and democratisation. The evidence that China has a huge scientific potential is strong. As immigrants to democratic Western societies, they outperform whites in school and university. Their contribution to fundamental research appears to lag but is happening, for example in biomedical and computing fields. Also relevant is Taiwan’s relatively high scientific and technical innovation compared to the mainland. Another line of evidence is comparison of cultures and religions. China’s relatively low inventiveness, as indicated by the rate of patents, is probably the result of collectivist institutions. Confucious conformity was replaced by communist conformity. Constraints on free speech have not much improved with the transition to ethnic nationalism managed by a one party state.

  This relates to a matter of equity that is rarely discussed. We are seeing a large scale transfer of intellectual property from the West to Asian economies, such as Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. Japan and lately Korea and Taiwan have been contributing to that knowledge for several decades. That vast body of knowledge took centuries for the liberal world to develop, often at large material and human cost. (By ‘liberal’ I mean rule-of-law and civil rights, which led to representative democracy.) Now that vast store of knowledge is treated as part of the global commons, something that should be free for all. That seems unfair. China is a regimented, undemocratic low wage society that has taken away jobs and wealth from the West. It has not adopted the democratic and liberal institutions compatible with creativity; instead it has been parasitic on Western liberalism. Liberalism has a price. It yields creativity and innovation, but also causes conflict and disorganization.   Is it right that China has free access to Western intellectual property? I’m not sure if this is feasible, but it would be good to see the creative cultures of the world join together to collectively bargain with the less creative cultures. In effect our centuries-long investment in civil rights and democracy should be made to pay dividends.

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That conversation was initially published in American Renaissance, in October 2020