Russell T. Warne

Russell T. Warne (right) with Bo Winegard

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Russell T. Warne is an American psychologist, hereditarian, eugenicist and pro-natalist who has defended race realism pseudoscience and is a writer for the far-right Aporia Magazine.^[2][3] He is also a speaker on their podcast with white nationalist Bo Winegard. Between 2011 and 2022, he taught at Utah Valley University.^[4] Warne has written for the Mankind Quarterly, a pseudo-journal known for publishing racist material.^[5][6][7] In April 2024, Warne was employed as a research psychologist for the US Army.^[8]

Warne is supportive of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.^[9] He also writes for Quillette.^[10][11]

Race and intelligence research[edit]

Warne's race and intelligence research is popular with white nationalists such as Emil Kirkegaard and Steve Sailer.^[12] Kirkegaard has claimed to have verified his research with John Fuerst in the Mankind Quarterly and has uploaded a paper by Warne to his own website.^[13][14][15] In regard to Warne's involvement with the Mankind Quarterly, historian John P. Jr. Jackson has commented that "Dr. Warne is either unable to recognize a racist journal when he sees one or, worse, he sees it and just doesn’t care. In either case, he has lent his name, his university’s name, and his discipline’s name to a disreputable journal of shoddy scholarship".^[16] In 2022, Warne resigned from Utah Valley University and on his website has described issues he had with the university.^[17]

Warne is on the editorial board of the Intelligence journal.^[18] He is supportive of Charles Murray's race and intelligence research and positively reviewed his 2020 book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.^[19] In 2021, Warne was interviewed by Holocaust denier Lipton Matthews.^[20]

In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence[edit]

Warne argues for biological races in his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, published in 2020. It has been promoted by the International Society for Intelligence Research and was positively reviewed by James Thompson on the anti-Semitic website The Unz Review.^[21][22] However, his claims about race have no scientific basis and have been debunked by clinical psychologist Michael R. Jackson.^[2]

On pp 248-50, Warne attempts to establish a “biological basis” for race by defining it in terms of geographical/migrational ancestral groups. He cites forensic and genetic studies indicating that such groups correlate with ordinary visible markers of race (skin color, hair type, etc.). But this amounts to nothing more than saying “People identified with a common ancestry show signs of a common ancestry.” In order to truly designate these groups as “races” in the biological sense that Warne intends, he would have to show not only that some visible traits are correlated with ancestral populations, but also, among other things, (1) that naturally selected traits other than visible markers are identified with the same ancestral populations; (2) that these other traits tend to follow the same geographical/migrational distributions as those of the visibly identified “races”; and (3) that these other traits include at least some behavioral ones (e.g. intelligence) that result from genetic rather than environmental differences among the groups. Regarding number (1), there is evidence for a few such traits (e.g., the sickle cell variant); but number (2) is false (see Brace, 2005, for several counterexamples, including the sickle cell variant); and there is no support for number (3)—except for consistently bogus arguments by Warne and other ideological hereditarians (see below). This is why the “race” concept is considered biologically meaningless by most researchers who study human variation (e.g., biological anthropologists).

Ignoring the above and embracing his definition of race, Warne begins his argument for racial differences in IQ by attacking Lewontin (1970), who first revealed the between-group fallacy in Jensen’s original (1969) article. But Warne misrepresents Lewontin’s critique (or perhaps he doesn’t understand it) because he states that Lewontin claims that heritability between racial groups is zero (p. 251). In reality, Lewontin makes no such claim—indeed, he explicitly rejects it (1970, p.7), as does anyone who truly understands the environmentalist critique here, because the inadequacies of the ACE (and other) quantification models preclude measuring genetic and environmental influences in any definitive way. In fact, the question of “how much” influence is genetic and “how much” is environmental may well be meaningless, given the interactivity described above, the unraveling of simple models of the genome (Charney, 2012), and the likelihood that neither human genomes nor human environments can ever be exhaustively decomposed, measured, and experimentally manipulated. While there are strong reasons to conclude that environmental factors alone account for racial difference in IQ (Nisbett, 2005; 2009), neither this, nor any other claim favoring either genes or environment, can be unequivocally proven, much less given exact quantitative specification (see Nisbett, para. 3, in Turkheimer et. al, 2017).

Warne, however, persists in misrepresenting not only Lewontin but all “environmentalists” as insisting that the heritability of race differences is measurably “zero,” and he even underlines his claim by portraying the alleged insistence as a mathematical formula (!). Not only does this distort the facts and create a strawman; it also lets Warne portray himself as the reasonable one in the debate—the only one who is not making a definite claim—and from this faux-reasonable position, he presents five arguments for a genetic black-white IQ gap. Three of these arguments are trivial and can be quickly put to rest. One is a variation of “Spearman’s hypothesis” that differences in g among races proves white superiority, and it entails all the fallacies about g discussed above; another is a technical argument about the validity of IQ tests across races, and it is relevant only to the naive claim that IQ differences reflect nothing but test factors; and the third concerns IQ patterns in racially admixed populations—patterns which imply nothing because genetic and environmental influences are hopelessly entangled in them.^[2]

International Society for Intelligence Research[edit]

Warne was a speaker at the 2017 and 2019 and International Society for Intelligence Research annual conferences.^[23][24] His work was presented at the 2018 conference.^[25]

Pro-natalism and eugenics[edit]

He wrote a pro-natalist article for the far-right Aporia Magazine titled "The West's Fertility Crisis".^[26] Warne is also supportive of eugenics and has stated: "Everybody becomes a eugenicist when they have to choose a sperm of egg donor".^[27]

Warne has described women who are voluntarily childless as "selfish". For example, he has remarked:

Very telling that the authors never use the word "selfish" to describe this attitude. Until the culture frowns upon childlessness as a choice again, the decrease in birth rates will not reverse.^[28]

Riot Labs[edit]

Warne is listed as Chief Scientist on the website of an organization called RIOT Labs - "We are a team building the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test (RIOT)"^[29] During the 2024 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research, the RiotIQ Twitter/X account tweeted information about the conference including presentations. One of the tweets, quickly removed, showed Emil Kirkegaard making a presentation at the conference.

Selected publications[edit]

• In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020

See also[edit]

• Monitoring Bias - American white nationalist who Warne follows on x.com.
• Helmuth Nyborg - Danish white supremacist who promotes race pseudoscience.

References[edit]