Race Science, IQ Hereditarianism, and “Genes for Wealth” in the Current Political Climate

Despite growing resistance, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is attempting to roll back decades of gains made by oppressed groups (women, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, etc.) under the thinly veiled cover of stamping out “DEI” (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs and beliefs. From libraries, the regime removes books documenting these and other groups’ struggles against oppression. Trump and others have invoked biology and genetics in support of these and other policies.

At a 2020 campaign rally in predominantly white Minnesota, Trump promoted junk science: “You have good genes, you know that, right?...You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” The “racehorse theory” is the idea taken from horse breeding that the selective breeding of human bloodlines can produce genetically superior offspring. In 2023, Trump, then running for reelection, spoke of immigrants as supposedly “poisoning the blood of our country.” At a 2024 campaign stop, Trump said, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” and that people commit murder because “it’s in their genes.”

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who publicly endorses far-right political views, is the de facto head of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk promotes the idea that birth rates are declining. “If birth rates continue to plummet,” he posted in 2024, “human civilization will end”—a puzzling statement because the world’s population continues to grow. Similar themes (implicit or explicit) can be found in the writings of some “natalist” authors and the conferences they speak at and attend. As of May 2025, the Natalist conference website featured Musk’s “human civilization will end” post near the top of its homepage.

Groundless fears of genetic and social “degeneration” are older than the eugenics movement itself. To cite one of countless examples, the dermatologist Hermann W. Siemens, a member of the German industrialist family and inventor of the still widely used “classical twin method,” wrote in 1924 during the Weimar period that “in all countries of European culture, fertility among the inferior is greater than that among those of more average capacity.” For Siemens, eugenic policies, often called “racial hygiene” in Germany and elsewhere, were urgently needed. “Race-destroying economic policies” must “be overcome before it is too late,” he wrote. Otherwise, the “cruel folly” of unchecked breeding patterns will lead to the genetic “exterminat[ion] of the most valuable elements of our people.” (In his Forward to the 1933 fifth edition of his German language book on genetics, racial hygiene, and population policy, Siemens welcomed the 1933 “national uprising” in Germany as a “decisive turning point in the destiny of the white race.”)

Contrary to fears among 1920s and 1930s psychologists and eugenicists that “national intelligence” was declining and that society was degenerating genetically, IQ scores worldwide made “massive gains” in the decades that followed (known as the “Flynn effect”). In addition, there is no valid scientific evidence that criminal behavior, violent or otherwise, is “in the genes.” Eugenics is not just morally wrong, but as I argue below and in publications going back to 1998, the premises of the eugenics movement are incorrect and have always been based on bad science.

Nevertheless, and despite decades of eugenic forced sterilization laws and procedures in the U.S. and even liberal European “welfare states,” eugenicists understand that right-wing authoritarian regimes provide the best opportunity for the rapid and unimpeded enactment of their plans. This was an implicit theme of race scientist Richard Lynn’s 2001 Eugenics: A Reassessment.

Although largely a product of how they view society politically, contemporary proponents of race science (also known as race realism, human biodiversity, and often IQ hereditarianism) insist that their claims are based on solid science, most often citing studies using reared-together twins (Siemens’s classical twin method) and so-called “twins reared apart” (TRA) studies.

In 2025, however, it is crystal clear that TRA IQ studies are a scientific smoke-and-mirrors show, and not only the well-documented TRA study fraud carried out by Cyril Burt in the mid-20th century. In the most famous and widely cited TRA study, published in 1990 in Science Magazine, University of Minnesota psychologists concluded in favor of 70% IQ heritability (h2). However, they could only reach that conclusion by omitting and bypassing (suppressing) their reared-apart fraternal (DZ) twin control group IQ correlations. When the control group correlations are included, the result of the Minnesota study is 0% IQ heritability (explained here). For this and other reasons, Science Magazine should retract this 1990 article. In the third most well-known TRA study, carried out in Sweden, almost half the time twin pairs were reared by different members of the same family, and the researchers counted twins as “reared apart” if they had been separated before the age of eleven.

Siemens understood that classical twin method studies, which are based on comparing reared-together identical (MZ) and same-sex DZ twins, depend on the assumption that both types of twin pairs grow up experiencing “equal environments.” This assumption is obviously false (see here and here), and even most twin researchers understand that MZ and DZ environments are very different. Environmental factors confound MZ-DZ twin behavioral and IQ comparisons; therefore, such comparisons should not be interpreted genetically.

Genetic interpretations of behavioral family, twin, and adoption study results are not supported due to environmental confounding, a reliance on questionable or false assumptions and concepts, the use of questionable research practices and the practice of p-hacking, and other problem areas. The argument that genetic factors substantially influence human behavioral differences sits atop a behavioral and psychiatric genetics house-of-cards that DNA-based (molecular genetic) results are in the process of toppling (see below). There certainly are threats to human civilization (for example, nuclear war, climate change, artificial intelligence, pandemics), but “plummeting birthrates” and non-existent “poisoned blood” are not among them.

The Bible of IQ Hereditarianism

IQ hereditarianism is the belief that IQ tests measure human intelligence and that intelligence is largely, though not entirely, determined at conception by hereditary factors passed from parent to offspring. IQ hereditarians believe that genetic influences largely determine individual IQ score differences, and often see ethnic group differences as partially resulting from such influences.

Last year marked 30 years since the appearance of a widely publicized and highly controversial 1994 IQ hereditarian book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Its authors were Harvard University animal-learning psychologist Richard Herrnstein and politically conservative U.S. political scientist Charles Murray. Herrnstein passed away shortly before the book was published in 1994. Murray has been active since then. In their 800+ page book, Herrnstein and Murray argued that IQ tests measure “intelligence” and that IQ strongly predicts school and career achievement. They claimed that IQ is “substantially heritable” (60% or higher)—a long-disputed yet standard conclusion found in most psychology textbooks. (The usefulness of the heritability concept itself has been the subject of controversy.)

Herrnstein and Murray, however, went further by claiming that IQ is largely unchangeable and by reviving IQ hereditarian and eugenic fears that “dysgenic” effects of higher birth rates among people and groups with lower IQ scores threaten to reduce intelligence levels in the U.S. “Something worth worrying about is happening to the cognitive capital of the country,” they wrote. Without referring to them as eugenic, they supported policies encouraging the reproduction of people with high IQ scores and discouraging the reproduction of people with low IQ scores. In Eugenics: A Reassessment, Lynn commented approvingly that Herrnstein and Murray’s “analysis is implicitly eugenic because, as they identified the underclass as a genetic problem, it calls implicitly for a eugenic solution.”

Like Musk, Herrnstein and Murray painted a bleak picture of the future, where differential reproduction patterns among what they called the genetically “dull” and the “cognitive elite” would lead to the creation of a U.S. genetic “custodial state” that would resemble a “high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population.” For Herrnstein and Murray, such an outcome would mainly result from heredity, not political decisions and policies causing greater economic inequality and poverty, which are especially on display in the U.S. as I write these lines in the Spring of 2025. Inequality by political “design,” as one group of Bell Curve critics aptly described it.

The most controversial aspect of The Bell Curve was Herrnstein and Murray’s position on IQ ethnic (racial) differences. “It seems highly likely to us,” they wrote, “that both genes and the environment have something to do with [IQ] racial differences” between U.S. whites and blacks (African Americans). Like psychologist Arthur Jensen before them, they claimed that genes for cognitive ability play a role in causing higher white versus black group mean IQ score correlation differences. They were only unsure about what the gene-environment “mix” might be. Many articles published during the 1990s “Bell Curve controversy” disputing this claim can be found here and here.

In 2024, I co-authored a preprint article with psychologist Ken Richardson entitled “The Bell Curve at 30: A Closer Look at the Within- and Between-Group IQ Genetic Evidence.” A slightly revised version of our article was published as a chapter in the 2025 book The Heredity Hoax: Challenging Flawed Genetic Theories of Human Development (Routledge, edited by Richard M. Lerner and Gary Greenberg). We focused on the genetic research cited in The Bell Curve, including some relevant history of the IQ genetics debate. The Bell Curve critique remains highly relevant because contemporary IQ hereditarians and race scientists cite similar research and make similar claims.

Like most previous reviewers, we concluded that Herrnstein and Murray produced no valid evidence that the IQ score “gap” between ethnic groups is caused in any part by genetic factors. IQ hereditarians often say the existence of the gap is undisputed and that the debate centers only on its causes. However, the gap’s existence is disputed by those who argue that “race” is invalid as a biological variable and that IQ tests don’t measure “intelligence.” Moreover, some critics argue that IQ tests are designed to reproduce assumed ethnic and class differences in intelligence.

In addition, unlike most previous reviewers, we argued that Herrnstein and Murray produced no valid evidence that genes influence within-group IQ score differences. The evidence they cited consisted of TRA studies and, to a lesser extent, family correlations, classical twin method studies, and adoption studies. Aided by concepts developed in science’s ongoing “replication crisis,” we showed that the genetic findings reported in these studies do not hold up under critical examination. In the language of psychometrics and behavioral genetics, we concluded that Herrnstein and Murray presented no valid evidence in support of above-zero within-group IQ heritability. This conclusion, of course, automatically invalidates claims about IQ genetic group differences.

IQ Hereditarians Paint Themselves into a Corner

Because DNA-based (molecular genetic) IQ research was at an early stage in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray did not cite any IQ-gene (genetic variant) associations or discoveries. Their claims in favor of substantial within-group IQ heritability (h2) were based entirely on “quantitative genetic” studies of families, twins, and adoptees. Contrary to Bell Curve predictions, the subsequent DNA-based IQ “candidate gene” era turned out to be an expensive and embarrassing flop. (The heyday of behavioral candidate gene research was roughly 1995-2010.)

Around the time of The Bell Curve’s publication, top behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin embarked on a “QTL” (quantitative trait loci) candidate gene search, where he and his colleagues attempted to identify genes associated with IQ and other behavioral areas. QTL research was a major focus of Plomin’s work and writings for over ten years, beginning around 1993-1994. Despite high expectations, the project failed, and the term “QTL” did not appear in Plomin’s 2018 book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.

Recent Developments

Subsequent DNA-based genome-wide association (GWAS) and polygenic index studies (PGI, also known as polygenic scores, or polygenic risks) are subject to low scores, population stratification and other types of environmental confounding, “associations” that are not causes (correlation ≠ cause), non-replication, and other major problems. A GWAS identifies genetic markers associated with a trait or disease by comparing DNA across the genomes of many individuals. The polygenic index method combines statistically significant and nonsignificant single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) associations identified in a GWAS to produce an index or score.

In a 2025 post, the psychologist and critical behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer discussed a carefully performed 2024 family-based GWAS meta-analysis by Tammy Tan and many prominent genetic researcher co-authors. A standard population-based GWAS is subject to many types of environmental confounding, he noted. A family-based GWAS, which produces “direct genetic effect” (DGE) heritability estimates, is much less vulnerable to confounding (see geneticist Sasha Gusev’s 2024 post).

Turkheimer noted that Tan and colleagues found that the average DGE h2 for the behaviors, abilities, and psychological characteristics they studied was around 5% (see Tan and colleagues’ Supplementary Table 5). We can compare this modest figure with reported twin study heritabilities for behavioral characteristics and psychiatric conditions, which usually fall in the 40-85% range. Since 2008, genetic researchers have referred to this large gap between twin-based and DNA-based h2 estimates as the “missing heritability problem.”

As someone fitting the description of what Turkheimer described in his 2025 post as a person having “a radical disbelief in twin studies,” I interpret the large gap between twin study and DGE h2 estimates as providing important additional evidence that behavioral twin studies are massively flawed and should be abandoned. The “missing heritability problem” is really a “twin study misinterpretation problem.”

Turkheimer then addressed the “fully unconfounded” PGI scores Tan and colleagues reported for 16 aspects of behavior. The two highest R2 values (the proportion of the behavioral variance explained by genetic influences) for the five PGI “educational attainment” (EA) measures were .011 and .018, “the only ones to make it over 1% of the variance.” Genetic researchers see EA as a “proxy measure” for IQ. Turkheimer concluded that PGI “genomic information is a statistically non-zero but all in all relatively minor contributor to behavioral differences” (see Tan and colleagues’ Supplementary Table 9).

The “cognitive performance” PGI R2s Tan et al. reported were close to zero, averaging around .0015 (.15%). For major depression and ADHD, both R2s came in at .001 (.1%). Moreover, as Turkheimer stressed in his 2024 book Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate, GWAS and polygenic index studies at best identify gene-behavior associations (correlations), not causes (see the preprint and journal versions of my review of Turkheimer’s book here and here). Due to his continuing belief that twin studies show that behavioral characteristics are “heritable” to some degree, Turkheimer concluded in his 2025 post that Tan and colleagues’ PGI results suggest that “polygenic scores for complex human behavior don’t work.” An alternative explanation holds that fully unconfounded PGI estimates do work (and that twin studies don’t work) and that they recorded little, if any, genetic influence on human behavioral differences.

At the same time, Turkheimer wondered whether Tan and her prominent colleagues’ DGE and PGI results signaled the “end of social science genomics.” He took the researchers to task for failing to discuss the meaning and implications of the very small genetic effects they reported. For more on the Tan et al. study, see Sasha Gusev’s 2025 post, “How Population Stratification Led to a Decade of Sensationally False Genetic Findings.”

The Bell Curve Finally Put to Rest

Given the above potential “end of social science genomics” results based on low DGE heritability estimates and negligible or zero “fully unconfounded” polygenic estimates, it’s worth noting that Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray predicted in a 2020 Wall Street Journal article that “polygenic scores will offer social scientists something they’ve never had before: a secure place to stand in assessing what is innate and what is added by the environment.” In his 2020 book Human Diversity, Murray made additional predictions based on his (misguided) faith in twin-based heritability estimates and earlier confounded polygenic score estimates. Murray wrote, “The impact of the genomic revolution will have importantly affected all of the traditional social science disciplines,” and that “the genomics revolution will affect just about everything in psychology that involves the analysis of quantitative data.” Finally, “There’s no longer any question whether the use of polygenic scores will be widespread.”

Addressing Murray’s predictions, Turkheimer wrote in Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate:

[Charles] Murray perennially expects a well-established genetic and neurological explanation of intelligence differences to be established any day now. He has been predicting the emergence of that theory continuously in the 30 years since The Bell Curve was published. He and I have a bet about whether such a theory will be available by 2025. By the time you are reading this book, you will be in a position to judge who was right.

The behavioral “genomics revolution” dud has hammered the final nails into the Bell Curve coffin. Eric, it’s time to collect your winnings.

As we have seen, critics have argued for decades that the family, twin, and adoption study evidence that contemporary behavioral geneticists cite in support of substantial within-group behavioral heritability is massively flawed and based on false assumptions. Decades of failed DNA-based causal gene searches, low DGE findings, and unconfounded PGI results suggest that the critics were right all along. The fields of behavioral genetics and psychiatric genetics are unraveling before our very eyes, and DNA-based research has driven the final stake through the heart of IQ hereditarianism and race science.

Do Rich People Have Better Genes Than the Rest of Us?

The “scientific” argument that the upper classes have better and smarter genes than the rest of us goes back to Francis Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius and earlier. Galton, the founder of the eugenics movement, attributed mainly to heredity his observation that British judges, commanders, scientists, and members of other highly regarded professions tended to produce high-achieving offspring. Galton and his followers attempted to place a scientific seal of approval on beliefs among the upper classes that they were of superior hereditary stock. For example, journalist Adam S. Cohen wrote that the wealthy Boston “Brahmin” families, who in the 19th and early 20th centuries supported eugenics at Harvard University and elsewhere, “were strong believers in the power of their own bloodlines…it was an easy leap for many of them to believe that society should work to make the nation’s gene pool as exalted as their own.”

The title of a 2019 article in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times read, “Scientists Find 24 ‘Golden’ Genes that Help You Get Rich.” The article cited a then-recent DNA-based study and speculated that “Britain’s richest man [James Ratcliffe] could have some of the 24 key genes.” Despite decades of causal gene discovery failure and false alarms, corporate media writers often react to new behavioral gene discovery claims like a five-year-old child reacts upon hearing that Santa came down the chimney last night. Given the dreadful half-century-long track record, we should assume by default that behavioral and psychiatric causal gene discovery claims are false-positive non-findings until proven otherwise.

Will the mainstream media now report that, based on calculations found in Tan and colleagues’ 2024 Supplementary Tables 5 and 9, the “individual income” DGE is 2.1%, while the PGI is zero percent (0%)? Don’t expect a Sunday Times “Golden Genes Appear to Be Fool’s Gold” headline anytime soon.

The general public is now less likely to accept that the world’s richest 1%, who own more wealth than the bottom 95% combined, obtained their wealth “by the grace of God.” The wealthy now try to sell the idea that they attained and deserve their wealth and status “by the grace of their genes.” However, they won’t be able to identify any genes using the direct-to-consumer 23andMe genetic test, because the company filed for bankruptcy in March 2025. Seven years earlier, in Blueprint, Plomin had promoted direct-to-consumer genetic tests such as 23andMe as “fortune tellers” that would provide a “child’s genetic blueprint” and help us “predict who we will become.” Undoubtedly, 23andMe would not have gone belly-up if “golden genes that help you get rich” and other alleged “blueprint” genes existed and could be identified.

A Faulty 2025 Analysis

People do different things very well, or perform their jobs in a similarly excellent way, and yet get paid very differently. At major U.S. universities, the head football coach’s salary literally could be 100 times greater than that of a Ph.D.-level physics professor. High school teachers in Luxembourg are paid almost seven times more than high school teachers in Lithuania. Low-achieving people can inherit a fortune from their wealthy relatives. Genes have nothing to do with it.

The latest attempt to use supposed scientific findings to argue that people of higher socioeconomic status got that way in part because of their genes was a 2025 Nature Human Behaviour article by genetic researcher Abdel Abdellaoui, the geneticist and well-known eugenics opponent Adam Rutherford, and their colleagues. The authors began by committing the colossal error of taking twin studies as gospel, as if 90 years of criticism did not exist. They believed that twin studies and accompanying heritability estimates have established “considerable” genetic influences on intelligence: “The considerable heritability of intelligence—that is, the extent to which genetic differences explain individual differences within a population—and its increase from childhood (about 0.43 [h2 = 43%]) to adulthood (about 0.65 [h2 = 65%]) have become among the most replicated findings in twin research.” As we have seen, the actual result (not the published Science Magazine p-hacked result) of the frequently cited and celebrated Minnesota “reared-apart” IQ twin study was 0% heritability.

In addition to twin studies, Abdellaoui and colleagues cited GWAS research on income and educational attainment in support of their positions. They discussed in some detail the many potential biases found in these studies, yet concluded, “Modern GWASs confirm that complex traits are influenced by a large number of genetic variants, each with a small effect.” We have seen that a GWAS might identify gene-behavior associations (potentially spurious correlations), but not the causes of the associations. After referencing DNA-based studies claiming gene associations, the authors subtly transformed “associated with” into “influenced by,” even though they are different concepts. The first concept is about correlation and does not imply cause; the second concept does imply cause.

Abdellaoui and colleagues argued that although the environment is important and that genetic and environmental influences interact, hereditary factors influence SES (socioeconomic status):

The genetic correlations between educational attainment, income and occupational status are about 0.9 in many developed countries, suggesting that mostly the same genetic signal is being picked up for all three traits—namely, that of SES in those specific societies. Of all traits investigated so far, intelligence shows the highest genetic correlation with SES.

If desirable genes contribute importantly to SES success, it logically follows that a lack of such genes contributes importantly to others’ SES “failure.” It is unlikely that Abdellaoui and colleagues intended to convey that message, but that’s how others will spin their article. Others will cite their analysis as providing GWAS/polygenic-era evidence supporting the European and U.S. elite’s old argument that people live in poverty and are members of the working class due in part to inferior heredity—and that some countries are rich and others are poor for the same reason. In support of such claims, Richard Lynn and other race scientists created a “National IQ dataset,” accompanied by maps frequently appearing in the social media, showing supposedly low national IQ scores in Africa and other areas of the Global South. Several analysts have demonstrated that these datasets are based on strong confirmation biases and highly flawed analyses, with population and health professor Rebecca Sear concluding in 2022, “No future research should use this dataset, and published papers which have used the dataset should be corrected or retracted.”

Abdellaoui and colleagues described the “serious violations of human rights” and atrocities of the earlier eugenics movement, cautioning that “mistakes from the past should keep us vigilant about the potential for harmful effects of genetically informed social policies.” However, they did not state that the premises and supposed scientific evidence on which eugenic theories were based are wrong, nor did they elaborate on the future “genetically informed social policies” they may have had in mind.

A False Narrative in Pictures. Rutherford promoted a cartoon (graphic) created for Abdellaoui and colleagues’ study to “explore the ideas within the paper.” Abdellaoui, who wrote the cartoon story’s text, said that according to twin studies, “traits that influence socioeconomic success—like mental health, personality, and intelligence—are influenced by both genes and environment.” He endorsed graphics conveying the idea that twin studies show that genetics contributes one-third to two-thirds of human behavioral trait variation (h2). Regardless of the format, the argument is based on twin studies and GWAS Manhattan plot “hits.” Twin study h2 claims are based on flawed TRA studies and the 100-year-old MZ-DZ “equal environments assumption” fallacy, and the GWAS hits are likely spurious or non-causal associations, similar to other “genes for behavior” discovery claims going back to the 1960s.

In the cartoon, Abdellaoui portrayed the eugenics movement as attempting to create “‘better’ people.” The movement, however, was “fueled by an overemphasis on nature over nurture,” which led to a “dangerous turn” when eugenics “was used to justify discrimination, forced sterilization, and even genocide.” These acts, he continued, remind us that “scientific ideas can be misused when taken to extremes.”

In reality, the “scientific ideas” of the eugenics movement at its height in the 1910s until the end of World War II were based on racial and ethnic prejudice, classism, and junk science. Eugenic “science” was funded by the wealthy and included pedigree charts and “eugenic family studies,” where U.S. eugenicists such as Charles Davenport and others mistakenly assumed that a (vaguely defined) behavioral trait “running in the family” was caused by heredity. The most infamous of such “studies” were the then-highly influential and now-discredited stories of “degenerate” family lines such as the “Kallikaks” and the “Jukes.” “Intelligence tests” of the era supposedly showed that the majority of Eastern European, Southern European, and Jewish immigrants in the U.S. were “feeble-minded” and that the average mental age of American adults was 14 years. Eugenic junk science in the first four decades of the 20th century was not just “used” or “misused” by political actors and others to commit atrocities. Eugenics movement leaders often advocated for and supported such atrocities.

A nicely drawn cartoon accompanied Abdellaoui and colleagues’ article, but the story it tells is a false one.

The Country Club and “Broligarch” Consensus ≠ Science

Some individuals in the top 1% of the SES scale engage in destructive, deceitful, and sometimes violent business practices. They profit from war, ignore laws and international sanctions, psychologically manipulate “consumers” through advertising to purchase their sometimes unhealthy products, and profit handsomely from psychiatric drugs that sometimes work not much better than a placebo and can cause dependence and severe side effects. They have unnecessarily increased international tensions at the risk of triggering a catastrophic nuclear war, are destroying the environment, want artificial intelligence to eliminate our jobs, support and arm violent authoritarian coups and regimes, and supply arms, aid, and political support to governments committing ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Most contemporary IQ hereditarians, eugenicists, and race scientists believe that heredity plays an important role in causing criminal and “psychopathic” behavior. If they were consistent in their beliefs, they would call for instituting policies aimed at restricting, rather than promoting, the reproduction of the top 1% of the SES scale.

The goal of many who fund “genes for income and SES” research is the production of studies published in top-tier academic journals and the creation of “golden gene”-type media headlines that help justify the status and privileges of the wealthy, and help keep the rest of us passive and divided so that they can become even more wealthy. The power they wield and the wealth they hoard help perpetuate and increase poverty and misery in the world. Then, they try to absolve themselves of responsibility by promoting highly questionable research claiming that bad heredity is, after all, a cause of poverty and misery. They do their best to extend the country-club cocktail lounge and U.S. “broligarch” chat group consensus into the scientific consensus.

I end with the words of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin from their groundbreaking 1984 book Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. They understood that science is not separate from or above the political and social arrangements found in the societies in which it is practiced:

We believe that it is possible to create a better society than the one we live in at present; that inequalities of wealth, power and status are not “natural” but socially imposed obstructions to the building of a society in which the creative potential of all its citizens is employed for the benefit of all.

Those who possess power and their representatives can most effectively disarm those who would struggle against them by convincing them of the legitimacy and inevitability of the reigning social organization. If what exists is right, then one ought not oppose it; if it exists inevitably, one can never oppose it successfully.