Edward Dutton

Edward Dutton (1980–) is an alt-right eccentric English anthropologist, race and intelligence pseudoscientist,[2] Islamophobe, anti-semite and white supremacist. He is the current editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly and describes himself as the Jolly Heretic. Dutton has a degree in Theology from Durham University and a PhD in religious studies from the University of Aberdeen.[3] He is also a docent of the University of OuluFile:Wikipedia's W.svg in Finland.

Edward Dutton wearing a wig
“”It was 93 per cent of foreign rapists in Finland are Muslim.
—Edward Dutton[1]
The colorful pseudoscience
Racialism
Hating thy neighbour
Divide and conquer
Dog-whistlers
v - t - e
Frogs, clowns and swastikas
Alt-right
Chuds
Rebuilding the Reich, one meme at a time
Buzzwords and dogwhistles
v - t - e

Dutton claims to be a proponent of freedom of speech and thinks there should be no censorship in science, writing: "If someone forcefully insists that a certain area is out of bounds and you’re ‘immoral’ for even contemplating it, then that is where new discoveries are going to lie."[4] The problem is he's a huge hypocrite, for example he deletes any comments left on his YouTube videos that merely criticise him or his colleague Michael A. Woodley.

Unlike his closet racist associates such as Michael Woodley, Emil Kirkegaard, Nathan Cofnas and Noah Carl,[5] Dutton is more open about his racist beliefs. He has regular friendly podcasts and public discussions with alt-right, neo-Nazi, and/or white supremacist outlets. In late 2020, he was the main guest of a podcast run by neo-nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer on the topic "Making Sense of Race".[6]

Edward Dutton promotes the pseudoscientific spiteful mutant hypothesis. Dutton is also a supporter of the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative that promotes "White Lives Matter" banners around the UK.[7]

Racist pseudoscience

Dutton holds many crazy beliefs and most of them focus around eugenics and race and intelligence, but also penis-size. He bizarrely argues for a genetic origin of atheism, the so-called "Atheist Mutational Load Theory"[8] that says "modern-day atheism is caused by mutant genes." Dutton has no scientific qualifications whatsoever (his PhD is in the Anthropology of Religion), yet he publishes books and papers on intelligence, psychology and biology from a right-wing hereditarianism perspective, claiming, "I finally plucked up the courage to move into evolutionary psychology, human biological differences and intelligence in 2012 and have never looked back".[9] He has controversially co-authored books and papers with white supremacist Richard Lynn through the pseudo-scholarly Ulster Institute for Social Research, including Race and Sport: Evolution and Racial Differences in Sporting Ability (2015).

Dutton was found to be guilty of plagiarism in 2017 after a paper he authored with Lynn was found to contain data originally gathered by a University of Oulu student for his pro gradu in 2013. The data concerned intelligence tests performed on conscripts of the Finnish Defense Forces and was identical to the third decimal in the papers, yet the duo did not properly refer to the student's work and claimed to be under the impression that the data had been processed by the Defense Forces themselves. Another paper published by Dutton in 2014 was also suspected of plagiarism, but was not conclusively ruled such.[10]

He has been criticized for having links to the far-right, sitting on the Advisory Board of the Mankind Quarterly[11] and has himself made statements that are unambiguously sexist and islamophobic, for example writing on his personal website: "the nature of Islamic societies – and the religion itself – retards IQ in Muslim countries" and "sexual selection extends to nationality, with women being sexually attracted to males from higher status nations."[12] His 2009 book The Finnuit: Finnish Culture and the Religion of Uniqueness is notably criticized on a blog, that mentions Dutton's xenophobia and odd theories.[13]

In 2018, Dutton with Michael A. Woodley of Menie published At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future that argues human intelligence has gone into rapid decline since the Industrial Revolution. This sort of pseudoscientific work on dysgenics is popular among the alt-right's HBD community, for example the book is promoted on The Unz Review.[14] Dutton and Woodley partly blame the alleged lowering of IQ onto third world immigrants and women's rights, e.g. smarter females having no or fewer children to pursue careers when they should stay at home.

Dutton authored the pseudoscientific book, Race Differences in Ethnocentrism in April, 2019. It was published by the alt-right Arktos Media company.[15] In April 2019, Dutton appeared on neo-Nazi Mark Collett's "This Week on the Alt Right" podcast and gave offensive racist comments. He is also a fan of Richard Spencer and was interviewed on his podcast in May, 2019.[16][17]

Interracial pseudoscience
Edward Dutton (3rd right), next to Laura Towler at a Patriotic Alternative meeting

Dutton has a history of making pseudoscientific racist comments about interracial relationships.

In March 2019, Dutton criticized interracial relationships. He believes mixed-race adolescents are mentally unstable and have higher health and behaviour risks.[18]

In a July 2019 interview for the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, Dutton commented that "a black woman is not often regarded as particularly feminine or attractive, and so the white man is not selecting her based on physical markers."[19]

Penis-size pseudoscience

Dutton attended the London Conference on Intelligence in 2015 and delivered a controversial talk on J. Philippe Rushton's Differential-K Theory and hereditarianismFile:Wikipedia's W.svg hypothesis. Despite having been discredited,[20] Dutton defends Rushton's theories, including the pseudoscientific theory[21] Sub-Saharan Africans have significantly longer penis lengths than Caucasians and East Asians (using Rushton's outdated tripartite racial classification):

J. Philippe Rushton's Differential-K Theory (Rushton, 1995) applies this model to differences races, in other words human sub-species evolved to different environments. Rushton's theory predicts that levels of male hormones, i.e., androgen, differ across three large ethnic groups with Sub-Saharan Africans having the highest levels, East Asians the lowest, and Caucasians (Europeans, North Africans and South Asians) being intermediate. Rushton examined a number of hormone indicators in this regard, most notably average penis length. This provoked a great deal of controversy, with accusations that the sources of his penis data was unreliable and similar allegations were levelled when Lynn (2013) published further data on race differences in penis length. Clearly, Rushton's argument can be tested be examining race differences in more androgen measures. If these are in the expected direction and correlate then Rushton's argument is strengthened and, specifically, the reliability of the penis data is validated. In this study, therefore, we examined 6 national level indicators of androgen: (1) CAG repeats on the AR gene. (2) Androgenic hair (3) Prostate cancer incidence. (4) Sex frequency. (5) Number of sex partners and (6) Penile length. We drew upon data sets allowing us to compare national differences on these measures. We divided the nations up into the three main racial groups, based on the dominant ethnic group in any given nation. We found that the measures correlated in the expected direction, thus evidencing the reliability of the penis datasets presented by Rushton and later by Lynn. In addition, tests of the three ethnic groups showed that, compared to Caucasians, East Asians consistently showed signs of lower androgen level in each indicator. Comparisons involving Sub-Saharan Africans were mixed as this group displayed signs of having the highest androgen levels on some indicators (CAG repeats of the AR gene, penile length), but not on others (androgenic hair, prostate cancer incidence,). We argued that the findings in the unexpected direction can likely be explained by differences in diet and cold adaptation. A diet higher in fat is associated with prostate cancer while a hot environment may select against excessive hairiness. Overall, the present findings partially validate Differential-K Theory.[22]

Actual peer-reviewed studies on ethnicity and penis-size have shown: "there is no convincing scientific background to support the ascription of bigger penile dimensions to people of the black race",[23] for example in a study 115 Nigerian males, the average stretched penis length is 5.26 inches long, near identical to the worldwide average.[24] Rushton (followed by Richard Lynn, whom Dutton cites) used many dubious and erroneous sources on penis-size, including (unverifiable) self-reported data and an anonymous 19th century surgeon:

Lynn's claims about differences in penis length between races build on earlier claims by Rushton and Bogaert (1987). The Rushton and Boagert paper is striking for its use of non-scholarly sources (Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegler, 1991). These include a book of semi-pornographic "tall tales" by an anonymous nineteenth century French surgeon that makes wildly inconsistent claims about genital sizes in people of different races. Lynn also refers to this book without mentioning any problems with this as a source of information. Another odd data source cited by Rushton and Bogaert is an article authored by a certain "P. Nobile" published in Forum: International Journal of Human Relations. This publication is better known to the public as "The Penthouse Forum", a popular men's magazine. The data sources that Lynn uses in his recent paper are hardly much better. One of them is a book by Donald Templer (another self-professed race realist) called Is Size Important? Templer is not a urologist but a psychologist so why he would claim to be an authority on this subject is unclear. Lynn's other source is the world penis size website. These are both self-published sources that have not been independently verified. A blogger named Ethnic Muse has carefully examined this site's references and found that a number of articles listed on the site either do not exist under the name given or do not discuss penis size at all. There are also numerous discrepancies between the values provided by the website and the actual values given by the references. Therefore, the information on this website cannot be trusted and no conclusions should be drawn from it.[25]

Dutton hero-worshipped Rushton and assumed he was an iconoclastic genius. In 2019, however, Dutton finally acknowledged that Rushton was (in his words) "a liar and a fraud" and that all his research findings must be therefore considered suspect. Dutton had found a significant amount of evidence that contradicted Rushton's Differential-K Theory, including evidence that Rushton misrepresented and hid evidence against his theory, and had also found out that Rushton had lied about various aspects of his own life story.[26]

On atheism

In 2017, Dutton cowrote a paper (that somehow managed to get published) in Evolutionary Psychological Science "The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load" which is as crazy as the title:

'The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load' (Dutton, Madison, & Dunkel, 2017) set out to show that religious views outside the mainstream – disbelief in a god as well as belief in paranormal phenomena – result from genetic mutations that have allegedly occurred due to relaxation of natural selection for belief in a moral god that has occurred in these degenerate times we live in. The authors claim that atheism and paranormal belief are “deviations” associated with indicators of mutation load, including poor health, autism, fluctuating asymmetry, and left-handedness. However, this theorising is poorly thought out and largely unsupported by evidence.[27]

The paper has been criticized for citing non-academic sources as evidence such as social media posts, evangelical websites and the Daily Fail Mail.[28]

Like Jordan Peterson, Dutton is a strong believer in religion as a force for good in society, but also like Peterson, he is - embarrassingly for him and for what he is trying to promote - an atheist himself. He tries to alternately obfuscate this fact by coming up with all sorts of waffle about how things like a belief in objective truth are "really" religiousness of a sort (which they are not - opposition to postmodernist post-truth discourse has nothing to do with being religious), and justify it by claiming that geniuses will tend to be atheist and a society with a small proportion of geniuses is "evolutionarily optimal" (the implication being that his rules conveniently don't apply to people like him).

It is noteworthy how many lines of enquiry Dutton pursue that seem to - conveniently for him - lead Dutton to "scientific" conclusions which bolster his far-right beliefs - even to the extent of "confirming" his beliefs that:

(a) too much intelligence in a society is bad for a society, a belief which seems absurd given the outpouring of inventions that improve people's standard of living which - as he acknowledges - high intelligence has led to since the Industrial Revolution

(b) too much intelligence at an individual level is somewhat bad because it leads, he thinks, to "criminal-like" personality profiles, with low agreeableness, and to increasing detachment from "instinct" and "normality". Instinct is something that Dutton tends to think is evolutionary adaptive and therefore "good" (which ignores the fact that what may have been adaptive on the African savannah in humanity's evolutionary past is not necessarily adaptive in a modern, highly urbanised and technological society). Normality is something that far-right individuals like Dutton tend to be obsessive about.

In a slightly different way, the Nazis also believed that too much intelligence was a bad thing - although for them it was more about finding a justification for hating IQ tests which showed that some Jewish people were highly intelligent, because they hated Jews.

Antisemitism

Dutton wrote an article defending, and rehashing the arguments of, an infamous antisemitic book by the far-right intellectual Kevin MacDonald, which somehow got published in an academic journal, although the first journal he submitted it to rejected it because it was "unsubstantiated".[29] The journal subsequently published a rebuttal by Nathan Cofnas.[30]

When discussing his support for MacDonald's anti-Semitic theories that Jews undermine "white ethnic solidarity in the West", a journalist felt uncomfortable with Dutton asking whether he was Jewish:

When we spoke by Skype earlier this month, Dutton paused the conversation at one point to ask me where I came from. I told him that I didn’t quite understand the question. “Are you from Iran?” he asked. I explained that I was from Tennessee. “Your background — you look like you’re Iranian, or something like that.” When I asked him why the topic was relevant, he changed the subject.

At the end of the interview, Dutton raised the issue of ancestry again. “The reason I asked what your background was is because I infer from your surname that you’re probably Jewish,” he said, adding that he did not understand why I was covering this topic for Undark.[29]

On the sexual revolution

Dutton has advocated in his vlogs and on at least one pocast, the mostly debunked theory that the "sexual revolution caused incels".[31]

gollark: (memory fragmentation isn't real)
gollark: Wow, this is very ethical code.
gollark: Oh, like the helloboi state machine?
gollark: Is that some kind of Macron compilation target?
gollark: Oh, like Soviet Forth.

See also

References
  1. https://twitter.com/jollyheretic/status/1109164680042504192
  2. He writes for VDARE, see here, has appeared on Mark Collett's alt-right podcast and was interviewed by the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine.
  3. "Culture Shock and Multiculturalism". Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  4. https://edwarddutton.wordpress.com/
  5. Dutton regularly retweets Michael A. Woodley, Emil Kirkegaard, Nathan Cofnas and Noah Carl on his Twitter, and cites their "research" on his podcast.
  6. Richard Spencer & Ed Dutton
  7. Murdoch, Simon. (2020). Patriotic Alternative: Uniting the Fascist Right?. Hope Not Hate.
  8. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/unique-everybody-else/201806/defending-atheist-mutational-load-theory-the-authors-reply
  9. https://edwarddutton.wordpress.com/
  10. Oulun yliopiston dosentti syyllistyi plagiointiin –  kiistää tekonsa tarkoituksellisuuden, Aamulehti 16 June 2017 (in Finnish)
  11. Editorial Panel
  12. http://archive.is/z1qMS
  13. https://mundaneman.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/edward-dutton-the-finnuit/
  14. http://www.unz.com/article/why-is-intelligence-declining-our-rulers-dont-want-you-to-know/
  15. Race Differences in Ethnocentrism.
  16. The McSpencer Group Episode 11: Edward Dutton
  17. https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1132672436325847040
  18. Episode 12: Mixed Race Individuals and Personality Traits Episode 12: Mixed Race Individuals and Personality Traits
  19. A Conversation with Edward Dutton
  20. Graves, J. L. (2002). "What a tangled web he weaves Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory". Anthropological Theory. 2(2): 131–154.
  21. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/unique-everybody-else/201602/androgens-dodgy-penis-size-data-and-differential-k-theory
  22. "Population differences in androgen levels: A test of the Differential K theory". London Conference on Intelligence, 2015.
  23. "Oversized Penile Length In The Black People; Myth Or Reality". (2007). JC, Orakwe., GU, Ebuh. Tropical Journal of Medical Research. 11(1): 16-18.
  24. Orakwe, J. C; Ogbuagu, B. O; Ebuh, G. U (2006). "Can physique and gluteal size predict penile length in adult Nigerian men?". West African Journal of Medicine. 25(3): 223–5.
  25. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/the-pseudoscience-race-differences-in-penis-size
  26. J. Philippe Rushton: 'He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!', Edward Dutton, The Jolly Heretic, 2019
  27. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201803/the-fool-says-in-his-heart-atheists-are-mutants
  28. http://www.skeptophilia.com/2017/12/religious-mutants.html
  29. Kevin MacDonald and the Elevation of Anti-Semitic Pseudoscience, Michael Schulson, Undark Magazine (2018)
  30. Is Kevin MacDonald’s Theory of Judaism “Plausible”? A Response to Dutton (2018), Nathan Cofnas (2019)
  31. Edward Dutton (September 10th 2020) Robert Stark interviews Ed Dutton: The Jolly Heretic. 33:30. The Stark Truth With Robert Stark. Retreived September, 25th 2020
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