There’s Eugenics In Them Preprints
Seeking legitimacy, racists and eugenicists turn to preprint platforms
A recent study by Evan J. Giangrande in Behavior Genetics details how he traced recognized eugenicists as they sought to create false legitimacy around their views first via journals ultimately disgraced and sidelined, then turning more recently to preprint servers to get their pseudoscience out under the pretenses of legitimate scientific publishing practices.
I came across this thanks to reporting in PsyPost shortly after eugenics crashed out of the Trump Administration in the wake of a Supreme Court decision narrowly affirming birthright citizenship, including a plan to address pregnant immigrants — called “weapons of mass reproduction” — so that “illegals” don’t “dilute” American citizenship.
Eugenics is a really creepy admixture of racism and sexism.
What Giangrande found is that authors known for pushing eugenics pseudoscience have largely expanded from their cadre of marginalized journals to platforms like bioRxiv, PsyRxiv, SocRxiv, and OSF Preprints to push their bigoted junk.
These are not the only preprint servers platforming this garbage — I was able to find works by the same individuals and racist topics on Preprints.org and ResearchSquare.
- It’s worth noting that all of the preprint servers Giangrande studied are funded by two philanthrocapitalists — CZI LLC and Arnold Ventures LLC. They are not non-profits or charitable efforts, but little ventures in open science their funders are willing to fund to see if something more emerges from them.
- It’s also worth noting that resurgent eugenics has made it into mainstream journals, with the eugenics-infused study about fluoride and IQ in JAMA Pediatrics still out there, unretracted.
This is not the first time we’ve seen preprints used to drive bigotry. In fact, using preprints appears to have some advantages for bigots. In 2020, a study found groups like this were:
. . . especially active in their engagement with preprints concerning the genetic architecture of behavioral traits, human population genetics, and ancient DNA research, and the neurological and physiological variation across sexes and genders, among a plethora of other topics.
In a follow-up interview, the authors speculated that preprints carried a special magic:
. . . the preprint form of a given article will tend to receive relatively more attention from extreme right wing audiences due to the influence of a pseudointellectual community that promotes “human biodiversity” (a more palatable phrase for scientific racism), or “HBD” for short. There’s been a lot written about the HBD community already and their role in giving the alt-right a veneer of scientific validity (e.g., here and here), and I speculate that they are particularly fond of editorializing preprints because (a) this projects to their audience that they are on the bleeding edge of scientific progress, just like mainstream scientists, reinforcing their status within the broader far-right community and (b) there is virtually no competition with news media or science communicators in delivering a “public-friendly” interpretation of the research, effectively inflating their scope of influence.
Open science itself is a feeder of racist, alt-right, and eugenics views, with open databases abused to fool unsuspecting audiences into believing there is a scientific basis for racism or sexism, as Giangrande notes:
Preprints commonly used publicly available data and federally funded sets from countries including the United States (e.g., the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health)), the United Kingdom (e.g., Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS)), and Poland (e.g., data from the Polish National Census . . .
Entire books have been written about the abuse of data to spin up, impose, and perpetuate eugenics programs, including Anita Chan’s excellent Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for An Independent Future.
- You can see our interview with her here.
- The way right-wing media has been carved off from mainstream media so these fever dreams can take root has also been the subject of a book.
- This makes the recent reporting from Nature about the politicization of trust in science far less surprising — the media space of those on the political right was carved away years ago.
- The way right-wing media has been carved off from mainstream media so these fever dreams can take root has also been the subject of a book.
Today, eugenics is animated by new, Silicon Valley-inspired “-isms” — long-termism, effective altruism, transhumanism, extropianism, rationalism, singularitarianism, and cosmism. This is the TESCREAL bundled outlined by Timnit Gebru and Emile Torres and explored further by Adam Becker in his book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.
And then we have Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller, and others basically parading around spouting eugenics rhetoric while these racists march through Washington, DC, on the 4th of July weekend:
All of this is happening right in front of our eyes, and the preprint servers Giangrande interrogated are far from our first glimpse of it. It’s a good addition, but at this point, we have to ask: What are we doing to thwart a resurgence of pseudoscience eugenics?
