International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur. Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups...

An international network of “race science” activists seeking to influence public debate with discredited ideas on race and eugenics has been operating with secret funding from a multimillionaire US tech entrepreneur...

...HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”. While it remains a fringe outfit, HDF is part of a movement to rehabilitate so-called race science as a topic of open debate. Labelled scientific racism by mainstream academics, it seeks to prove biological differences between races such as higher average IQ or a tendency to commit crime. Its supporters claim inequality between groups is largely explained by genetics rather than external factors like discrimination.

Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences. “Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.

In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times...

The US National Institutes of Health describes scientific racism “an organised system of misusing science to promote false scientific beliefs in which dominant racial and ethnic groups are perceived as being superior”.

The ideology rests on the false belief that “races” are separate and distinct. “Racial purity is a fantasy concept,” said Dr Adam Rutherford, a lecturer in genetics at University College London. “It does not and has not and never will exist, but it is inherent to the scientific racism programme.” Prof Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Harvard University, said that “broadly speaking there is essentially no scientific evidence” for scientific racism’s core tenets.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss