In 2020, there were more than 45,000 gun deaths in the United States. But there was no major push for gun safety legislation.
Last year, there were nearly 700 mass shootings in America — and again, there was no major push for gun legislation. Is the disturbing truth of “psychic numbing” and the feeling of hopelessness upon ua?
And now, a researcher, Michael Woodley, claims there has been an I.Q. decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa. He has co-written a book about the global decline of intelligence.
And, wait for it, he postulates a relationship between ethnicity and cognitive abilities. And he argues that humans can be divided into subspecies, a cornerstone of white supremacist ideology.
So, it turns out that a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who Killed 10 Black people in Buffalo last month.
The discovery that the gunman had cited Mr. Woodley’s work shocked many academics, who said they hoped it might now force institutions to confront questions about their responsibility toward society, academic rigor and the space they give to extremist ideas.
So, a Spanish researcher in population genetics at the University of Bologna, Mr. Sandoval, said he was “appalled” when he heard that the Buffalo gunman had tried to use science to justify his actions.
Scientists involved in the field of population genetics and other related areas were “concerned about the misinterpretation of our findings,” he said, adding that he had scrutinized the manifesto for all references to his field.
He said that the killer misinterpreted the scientific conclusions. But, he added, one person cited by the gunman stood out for his extreme views: Mr. Woodley, whose expertise is in plant ecology, but whose work also includes research in human genetics and intelligence.
“Woodley has been explicitly racist,” said Mr. Sandoval. He went on to say that Mr. Woodley “has a history of spreading racist, white supremacist theories,” Mr. Sandoval said, adding, “He is questioning a consensus based on decades of research.”
All this, despite the fact that Mr. Woodley’s theories have been published in dozens of highly technical articles in a variety of respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals, which people who lack the specific scientific expertise would find very hard to evaluate.
At the core of Mr. Woodley’s research, cited by the gunman is an argument that human beings can be scientifically divided into subspecies.
Theories like the one Mr. Woodley asserted have long been a mainstay of pseudoscientific attempts to justify slavery, colonialism and Nazism that have been widely rejected by contemporary mainstream academics.
Mr. Woodley’s academic interests over the course of his career have been eclectic, including papers on ways to communicate with the dead and intelligence in parrots, in addition to human genetics and intelligence.
Further writings show that Mr. Woodley was a fixture in a group of far-right academics.
Things have changed dramatically in recent years, partly because of political discourse and with the rise of ethnic nationalism and the far right, we have become more aware of just how risky, how dangerous these people are.
Given all this, the NABWMT has always stood firm against racism and denounces scientific pseudoscience proposing racist theories.
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Source: The New York Times
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