Adam Perkins

Adam Perkins is a HBD pseudoscientist and Islamophobe who lectures in the Neurobiology of Personality at King's College London.[3] Perkins's has published in the controversial journal Intelligence and has been criticised for making "shockingly bad" errors in a science paper.[4] He is the author of the book The Welfare TraitFile:Wikipedia's W.svg (2015) that has been criticised for "statistical errors and incorrect conclusions",[5] as well as "misrepresenting studies to suit his thesis".[6]

Adam Perkins appeared on a white supremacist YouTube channel Reality Calls for an hour long discussion with Tara McCarthy to promote his book The Welfare Trait.[1]
Adam Perkins supports the far-right anti-Islam activist Anne Marie Waters and has retweeted her on Twitter.[2]
Frogs, clowns and swastikas
Alt-right
Chuds
Rebuilding the Reich, one meme at a time
Buzzwords and dogwhistles
v - t - e
Adam Perkins regularly retweets alt-righter Steve Sailer.

Perkins has recently published articles in the right-wing online magazine Quillette.[7]

Controversies

Racism and Islamophobia

Perkins holds Islamophobic, anti-immigration and racist opinions, and he sparked a racism row in February 2017 for offensive comments he had posted on Twitter such as Muslim-majority countries "tend to be over-represented in crime & unemployment stats" (using a dubious source of data) and "Somalians don't perform well either side of the Atlantic".[8][9][10] A petition (with 423 signatures) was created by the KCL Somali community demanding Perkins apologise for his Islamophobic tweets.[11] Perkins was involved in more controversy when he spoke on a alt-right YouTube channel to spout his opposition to Muslim immigration to the West and his support for Trump.[12][13]

London Conference on Intelligence
See the main article on this topic: London Conference on Intelligence

Perkins attended the pseudoscientific eugenics London Conference on Intelligence in 2016 alongside white nationalists and other far-right speakers, including James Thompson, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Richard Lynn and Emil Kirkegaard.

The Welfare Trait: how state benefits affect personality

Speaker: Adam Perkins

The welfare state has a problem: each generation living under its protection has lower work motivation than the previous one. In order to fix this problem we need to understand its causes, lest the welfare state ends up undermining its economic and social foundations – and endangering those of the nation as whole. In The Welfare Trait, I present data that suggest welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem. I base this theory on the discovery that childhood disadvantage promotes the development of an employment-resistant personality profile that is characterised by aggressive, antisocial and rule breaking tendencies; tendencies that in the jargon of personality research signify relatively low scores on the major personality dimensions of conscientiousness and agreeableness. The conclusion then, is that the of a welfare state which increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households will erode the nation’s work ethic by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an employment-resistant personality profile due to exposure to the environmental influence of disadvantage in childhood.

Free speech

In March 2018 Perkins was in the newspapers again after he was scheduled to speak about freedom of speech organised by KCL’s Libertarian Society, but protestors shut down the event over past controversies that Perkins has been involved in: "King’s College London spokesperson said that the event was assessed as 'high risk' and was postponed due to the 'current external environment and the recent violent protest.'"[14][15]

Alt-right

Aside from his anti-Muslim bigotry and support for Donald Trump, Perkins has appeared on Tara McCarthy and Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channels to promote his book The Welfare Trait,[16] while he follows alt-right individuals on Twitter (who follow him back), including: Mike Cernovich, Steve Sailer, Emil Kirkegaard and Paul Joseph Watson. Perkins also identifies as a proponent of hereditarianism and is a part of the alt-right's HBD online culture.

Another contributor to the London Conference on Intelligence was Adam Perkins of King’s College London, whose book The Welfare Trait proposed that “aggressive, rule-breaking and anti-social personality characteristics” can be “bred out” of society by reducing child support for those on the lowest incomes. Perkins actively engaged with far-right media outlets in promoting his book, appearing in hour-long interviews with Stefan Molyneux and Tara McCarthy. Molyneux doesn’t “view humanity as a single species because we are not all the same”, and argues that “ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism”. McCarthy was banned from YouTube for alleging a conspiracy to commit “white genocide”, and supports deporting naturalised citizens and “killing them if they resist”. Perkins himself attracted criticism last year for tweeting, alongside data from Kirkegaard, that Trump’s Muslim ban “makes sense in human capital terms”.[17]

Criticism

Perkins has been criticised for publishing studies using flimsy evidence and erroneous statistics:

One wonders (sadly, I doubt it) if any of the journalists responsible will be remotely embarrassed by reading a quite astonishing "corrigendum" (or correction), which appeared recently in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences (PAID). It deals with one of Dr Perkins’ papers, which directly underpins the argument in his book. The paper, which was published in 2013, concludes – on the basis of the most astonishingly flimsy, indirect and, it turns out, flatly erroneous evidence – that "the human personality profile in developed countries such as the USA may be gradually evolving by natural selection towards lower levels of personality traits that predispose an individual to be a solid citizen." The correction, which you can read in full here, identified at least seven errors. These included both the misreporting of results and the use of obviously inappropriate statistical techniques. The errors were pointed out two years ago by Dr Andy Fugard, but it's taken the journal this long to correct them.[18]

gollark: Oh hey, it DID finish!
gollark: It's not printing anything.
gollark: Is gcc frozen somehow or just really slow?
gollark: Hmm, hyperrogue is compiling quite apioformically slowly.
gollark: dwm appears bee, but I MAY consider awesome eventually.

See also

References
  1. https://archive.org/details/youtube-hnYInEkfhss
  2. http://archive.is/5JLKo
  3. Dr Adam Perkins, Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality King's College London
  4. Welfare critic under fire after correcting ‘shockingly bad’ errors. The Times Higher Education.
  5. Criticisms of Adam Perkins and The Welfare Trait.· PsychologyBrief.
  6. Welfare state critic savaged at LSE talk. The Times Higher Education.
  7. https://quillette.com/author/adam-perkins/
  8. King's lecturer sparks racism row. Felix. 2 Feb 2017.
  9. KCL Lecturer Adam Perkins Slammed As 'Racist' After Arguing Donald Trump's Travel Ban 'Makes Sense'. Huffington Post. 6 Feb 2017.
  10. A London University Lecturer Has Apologised For Saying Trump's Immigration Ban "Makes Sense". Buzzfeed. 4 Feb 2017.
  11. A formal apology to the KCL Somali community and beyond. Change.org.
  12. "KCL Professor appears on white supremacist talk show to attack Muslim migration". CUB Magazine. 18 Feb 2017.
  13. Adam Perkins The Welfare Trait
  14. King’s College London shuts its own lecturer's talk on free speech. The Telegraph.
  15. KCLSU censored a King’s lecturer at a Libertarian Soc event so they went to the pub instead. The Tab. 19 March 2018.
  16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rpsLGbxGDU
  17. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2018/02/it-might-be-pseudo-science-students-take-threat-eugenics-seriously
  18. How the "welfare trap" research championed by Toby Young crumbled under scrutiny. NewStatesman. 1 May 2018
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