eugenics

A conversation with Heiner Rindermann, for Man and the Economy

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Nov 28, 2019

Heiner Rindermann PhD, is Professor of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany). He is psychologist (PhD University of Heidelberg). His work deals with education and ability development, intelligence and student achievement, economy and politics, evolution and culture, and their interplay at the level of individuals and societies. His recent major contribution is Cognitive capitalism: Human capital and the wellbeing of nations published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.

Grégoire Canlorbe: An early contribution on your part in establishing the connection between cognitive ability and human development (in the broadest sense) was to show how the spread of AIDS among ethnicities of different continents is greater as the cognitive ability is lower. Could you remind us of your analysis?

Heiner Rindermann: In two publications from 2007 and 2009 with my German colleagues Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff, a sociologist, and Gerhard Meisenberg, a biologist, I showed that education (as a proxy for intelligence and knowledge) and cognitive ability (comprising intelligence and knowledge) reduce the impact of the HIV spread.^[i] If wealth and modernity are added in analyses at the level of nations – comparing different countries – the effects of wealth and modernity even turned positive, increasing HIV rates! Disproving the usual theory, that AIDS is a disease of the poor, the data robustly showed that AIDS is a disease of the low intelligent. But why? Isn’t this result biased or mad?

In closer consideration not at all: Studies from other authors on AIDS or on diabetes at the level of individuals also show that income and even education are not crucial for health. The crucial factor is intelligence. Again: Why? Here the Piagetian approach can help us as used by Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff and cognitive hermeneutics of everyday life as I tried to explain in my Cognitive capitalism book: People at lower levels of cognitive development and intelligence, especially if living in a social environment with a similar low level, tend to think and act irrationally, e.g. they believe in magic and behave in ineffective or even self-damaging ways. I.e., AIDS is not seen as being caused by HIV transmitted by unprotected sex but being caused by God, magical powers or sorcery and consequently can be cured by magical treatment, e.g. by having sex with a virgin. And these aren’t excuses for sexual abuse or own failings but people really believe this.

For instance, a quote from a study by African researchers in Mali underscores this: “Accidents are never attributed to faults or incompetence of the people in charge or machine failure, they are always orchestrated by certain superstitious powers.”^[ii] Such a mindset will not lead to more cautiousness or better maintenance reducing accidents.

A conversation with Laurent Alexandre, for The Council of European Canadians

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Août 16, 2019

Laurent Alexandre is a French surgeon-urologist, essayist, and entrepreneur. The founder of the Doctissimo website, he is interested in the transhumanist movement and in the upheavals that humanity could experience, along with the progress of science in the field of biotechnology. His latest book is L’IA va-t-elle aussi tuer la démocratie [Will AI kill democracy as well]?

Grégoire Canlorbe: It should be remembered that Nietzsche saw in birth control, as well as in the non-assistance of weak elements (in terms of physical or mental abilities) in our society, an unavoidable aspect of the superhuman culture which he was calling for. As a supposed transhumanist, do you regret the collapse of the eugenic movement in the 1950s?

Laurent Alexandre: I do not believe that the 1950s are a period of decline of eugenics, they are rather a period of mutation of eugenics. When Julien Huxley invents the word “transhumanism” in 1957, it is for the purpose of creating left-wing eugenics… namely egalitarian eugenics. The 1950s did not see eugenics receding after the horrors of Nazism: they saw right-wing eugenics mutate into a leftist eugenics, dubbed “transhumanism” by Huxley.

Grégoire Canlorbe: The alleged responsibility of human carbon emissions for contemporary warming is a subject that is conducive to raising the temperature in debates. Could you remind us of the main lines of your Promethean (or Faustian) reassessment of climate policy: namely a reassessment that does not deny the need to mitigate the greenhouse effect supposedly linked to CO2 emissions, but which attempts to conciliate climate action, the industrial and cognitive domination of nature, and materialistic enjoyment?

Laurent Alexandre: Controlling CO2 emissions is going to be incredibly complicated. One is going to spend several very difficult decades. And if indeed, as I believe, there is a link between CO2 and climate, we will not be able to reduce CO2 emissions before 2050. We will have climate concerns probably until the end of the century.

First of all, collapsologists overestimate the social body’s acceptance of a CO2 reduction policy. We have seen what means a tiny drop in the purchasing power of Yellow Vests to fight against the greenhouse effect: one imagines what would give a drop of 30 to 40% of the purchasing power of the lower classes. One would have a real revolution, which would probably be a far-right revolution rather than an extreme-left one in the current context. A degrowth policy will therefore be very hardly accepted… and one can see that all the polls show that the priority of the French is the purchasing power before the ecological transition.

A conversation with Richard Lynn, for American Renaissance

by Grégoire Canlorbe · Juin 22, 2019

Richard Lynn is an English psychologist and author. A former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University and assistant editor of the journal Mankind Quarterly, Prof. Lynn is perhaps the world’s foremost proponent of eugenics. He is also well known for his studies of racial differences in intelligence. Many of his books have been reviewed at American Renaissance.

Grégoire Canlorbe: When assessing both your personal and intellectual lifetime retrospectively, what may have been your equivalent of Isaac Newton’s Annus Mirabilis—namely the year 1666 when he theorized the law of universal gravitation after he allegedly saw an apple falling—; or Albert Einstein’s one… namely the year 1905 when he published his four papers in Annalen der Physik shaking the notions of space, time, mass, and energy?

Richard Lynn: It was in 1977 when I discovered that the intelligence of the Japanese was 3 IQ points higher than that of white Americans. Hitherto, virtually all discussions of race differences in intelligence had been concerned with the problem of why white Americans and British had higher IQs than other peoples, and this was generally attributed to the tests being biased in their favor. My discovery about the Japanese set me thinking about whether other Northeast Asian peoples (Chinese and Koreans) have higher IQs that Europeans. I began collecting studies on this and found that they did.

Grégoire Canlorbe: The 2005 review by Rushton and Jensen on race and cognitive ability had a huge impact and has now over 500 citations. What are more recent discoveries—in life history theory, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, or evolutionary anthropology—that you feel should be documented?

Richard Lynn: I regard the most important to be what I have called “the cold winters theory” to explain the evolution of race differences in intelligence. The theory explains the relation between the IQs of the races and the coldness of the winters. Thus, the Northeast Asians had to survive the coldest winters and evolved the highest IQs (105) followed by the Europeans (100), North Africans and South Asians (84) and sub-Saharan Africans (70). I first proposed this theory in 1991 and it has become widely accepted.

Grégoire Canlorbe: You make no secret that you worry about “dysgenic immigration” and the great replacement with which both the white race and national IQs are threatened in the West. What is the current extent of the danger?

Richard Lynn: In 2016 Rindermann & Thompson have calculated that the intelligence of immigrants in all European countries is lower by an average 6 IQ points than that of indigenous populations. Further data confirming this conclusion for a number of economically developed countries have been reported by Woodley of Menie, Peñnaherrera-Aguire, Fernandes & Figueredo in 2017.

It can be anticipated that in the decades that lie ahead migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will continue to try to get into Europe. There has been a huge increase of the population in sub-Saharan Africa from approximately 230 million in 1960 to approximately one billion in 2018 and it will likely continue to grow. There are high rates of unemployment and poverty throughout sub-Saharan Africa that are likely to continue and inevitably large numbers will seek a better life in Europe and many will succeed.