Nathan Cofnas, the self-professed “race realist” who made international headlines when he accused Cambridge academic Jason Arday of plagiarism, has defended his “hereditarianism” position as scientific. I would argue, instead, that such beliefs are pseudoscientific.
Cofnas is mostly known for his controversial blogpost “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, in which (among other things) he claims that “[In a meritocracy] Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Cofnas believes races are real (hence “race realism”) and that differences between races are due to genetic factors (hence “hereditarianism”). He puts most of his emphasis on differences in IQ, but also refers to other properties. Cofnas never makes explicit to what degree he thinks genes contribute to observed differences, but based on statements which suggest that he believes environmental interventions are useless, the role he confers to genetic factors must be very high.
Cofnas has received his fair share of criticism from relevant experts. When asked to comment about the claims Cofnas is making about race, IQ-expert Han van der Maas said that “Exceptional claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and I don’t see Cofnas providing such evidence.” Biologist Kevin Bird wrote: “Cofnas & all other scientific racists fail to meet basic academic standards. They don’t read or engage with evidence.” Biologist Gregory Kohn wrote that “Cofnas consistently resists even approaching the modern scientific literature. […] He traffics in shallow controversy and shallow controversy alone.” Geneticist Adam Rutherford: “Cofnas’ work is crap, and should never have been granted scholarly credibility.” And statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has called Cofnas a “shallow thinker” and “racist” and said his work is based on “zero evidence whatsoever”.
However, to date I am not aware of any discussion of Cofnas’s pseudoscience in depth. People on both sides of the debate (pro and contra Cofnas) have a tendency to argue in the abstract, rather than discussing concrete passages from Cofnas’s work, as I will do here, citing Cofnas extensively. Since I am making quite a strong claim by using the term pseudoscience, I have an obligation to provide enough evidence.
Strategic ambiguity
Cofnas is often presented as someone doing research on race and IQ. This is incorrect. Cofnas has two academic papers related to the topic (here and here), but these are articles in the field of philosophy of science. In these articles, Cofnas argues that scientists should be free to investigate the potential connection between race and IQ. This is not the same as doing research on race and IQ himself. A philosopher of biology is not a biologist. Cofnas does not analyse IQ-datasets, nor does he perform genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In other words: Cofnas is not a scholar doing research on race and IQ.
Most of Cofnas’s writing on the topic can be found on his blogs, which again do not contain reports of ongoing empirical research on race and IQ. They are ideological manifestos based on pseudoscience. This is clear when comparing the statements Cofnas makes in his academic papers (which undergo peer review) with those made in his blogposts.
In one of his two published papers, Cofnas writes:
Let us turn to the second method for investigating the role of genes in development: genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Unlike heritability studies, GWAS can uncover specific genetic variants – or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – associated with IQ. In just the last couple years, GWAS has identified hundreds of such SNPs (Davies et al., Citation2018; Savage et al., Citation2018; Sniekers et al., Citation2017), which together explain around 11% of the variance in IQ (Allegrini et al., Citation2019).
If we find that the SNPs implicated in IQ are differentially distributed across racial groups, this would not necessarily imply that race differences in intelligence are genetic. SNPs might have different effects across races and environments due to gene–gene and gene–environment interactions. SNPs with no causal relation to intelligence can be genetically linked to SNPs that do have a causal relation in some populations but not others, so SNP–intelligence correlations may not always hold across races (Rosenberg, Edge, Pritchard, & Feldman, Citation2019). But if we find that many of the same SNPs predict intelligence in different racial groups, a risky prediction made by the hereditarian hypothesis will have passed a crucial test. Even then, however, GWAS will only establish a correlation between SNPs and IQ without revealing the causal chain linking SNP to phenotype. It would still be theoretically possible that these SNPs lead to differences in intelligence as a consequence of environmental factors (e.g., parenting effects) that can be manipulated so as to eliminate race differences. But if work on the genetics and neuroscience of intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced, it may soon become possible to give a convincing causal account of how specific SNPs affect brain structures that underlie intelligence (Haier, Citation2017). If we can give a biological account of how genes with different distributions lead to race differences, this would essentially constitute proof of hereditarianism. As of now, there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component. If this possibility cannot be ruled out scientifically, we must face the ethical question of whether we ought to pursue the truth, whatever it may be.
I cite this long passage to show how many ifs and buts Cofnas is obliged to add before he comes to his main claim. Also note that Cofnas himself admits that all of the scientific results that would tip the balance in favour of hereditarianism lie in the future. The claim itself is thus not very strong: “there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component.”
Compare this to this passage from the introduction of Cofnas’s most controversial blogpost, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”:
Here I argue that, without hereditarianism, the fight against wokism is futile, and that a hereditarian revolution is both feasible and desirable. “Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position. When the elites accept race realism, we can construct a better world.
Cofnas himself makes it clear that his blog is a political manifesto: it is a call for a revolution which he deems “desirable”. But what is even more striking is the contrast with the way Cofnas presents his position in his academic paper. It is no longer a position that might, potentially, turn out to be correct in the future: Cofnas pretends it has already established itself as “the scientifically correct position.”
This ambiguity regarding the position that is defended is used by Cofnas and his supporters. When criticised for the way he supports his racist statements by misrepresenting the science, Cofnas and his defenders pretend that he is being criticised for merely formulating a hypothesis. Critics are framed as people trying to suppress Cofnas’s research.
This is a typical pseudoscientific strategy. In an article discussing pseudoscientific argumentation strategies philosophers Braeckman and Boudry call this strategy “deflationary revision”, in which pseudoscientists strategically switch between a strong and specific version of their claims and a more moderate or trivial version. Braeckman and Boudry add that this can also be used to accuse critics, in the way highlighted above:
A skilled pseudoscientist switches back and forth between different versions of his theory, and may even exploit his own equivocations to accuse his critics of misrepresenting his position.
Beyond this strategic ambiguity, Cofnas also tries to substantiate his claims by relying on pseudoscientific sources.
The blogposts
Throughout the “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” blogpost, the truth of “race realism” is not argued for, but taken as a given. It should also be added that Cofnas’s claims regarding genetically-caused differences between black people and white people are not limited to IQ. In another blogpost he refers to “race differences in income, IQ, education, health, crime rates, etc., almost all disfavoring blacks”. Again, no evidence or argumentation for this claim is provided – it is taken as a given. The closest Cofnas comes to providing an argument for the genetic nature of these differences in “A Guide” is the following passage:
[C]ulture” is not the reason why we see the same basic pattern of racial disparities among population-representative groups of sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, and East Asians wherever they go all over the world. Furthermore, culture generally reflects the average characteristics of the community that generates it. A culture of doing homework is more likely to arise in a mean IQ 105 population that is genetically adapted to the arduous demands of the rice paddy than it is in a mean IQ 85 population that is adapted to hunting and gathering on the savanna.
Statistical geneticist Sasha Gusev has rightly described this passage as providing a “just so” story which does not provide any evidence for the claims Cofnas makes. In the discussion with Gusev, Cofnas can be seen employing the same deflationary revision strategy discussed above. When pressured, Cofnas retreats to claiming that it is just a “plausible adaptive story.”
For someone who gave one of his posts the title “Beating Woke with Facts and Logic”, Cofnas provides surprisingly little factual evidence for the claims he makes in his blogposts. The closest Cofnas comes to an attempt at providing evidence is in his blogpost on Thomas Sowell (“Thomas Sowell’s Wishful Thinking about Race”). In this post, Cofnas refers to research “about the substantial differences in brain size among races, which track differences in IQ”.
In a column on the website of the Association for Psychological Science, Richard E. Nisbett explains why one cannot use observed differences in brain size to jump to the conclusion that differences in average IQ are genetic in nature:
[T]he brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on IQ tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.
As evidence for his brain size claim, Cofnas directs the reader to an article by Arthur Jensen and Philippe Rushton. Rushton’s research on brain size has received severe criticism. Already in 1990, Cain and Vanderwolf presented the following devastating assessment of Rushton’s work:
[T]he methods employed and data obtained by the cited studies are seriously flawed. Additional studies not cited by Rushton suggest a different ordering of brain size than that concluded by him. Strained logic, a failure to take into account alternative explanations, and contrary data seriously limit Rushton’s effort. We conclude that there is no credible evidence to support Rushton’s claimed relation between race, brain size, and intelligence.
Several papers of Rushton on race have been retracted. These retractions include two papers on race, brain size, and intelligence which the editors of the journal described as “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.” The Department of Psychology where Rushton worked has posthumously issued a statement on his work and legacy, stating that his work “is deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint.”
Both Jensen and Rushton have received money from The Pioneer Fund, an organisation known for spreading Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. It presented itself as an organisation for “race betterment”. In this capacity it has funded racist pseudoscience for decades. Rushton also regularly wrote for American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine which also hosted events attended by Klan members and neo-Nazis – events Rushton attended. American Renaissance also describes itself as “race realist” – the word Cofnas also uses to refer to his own position. The Southern Poverty Law Centre designates American Renaissance a hate group. In another blogpost, Cofnas refers to American Renaissance as “an important centre for high-quality discussions of race.”
In his Sowell-blogpost Cofnas not only refers to Rushton on brain size, but also refers to “more recent evidence from genetics.” If one clicks the hyperlink that Cofnas provides, one arrives at the Substack of Emil Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard is a notorious pseudoscientist. Geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui describes him as follows:
[Kirkegaard is] known for an unhealthy obsession for trying to prove that race differences in IQ and other social traits were due to inborn and immutable genetic differences. Besides a reputation for sloppy scientific work in dubious journals, he was also well known for an obnoxious social media presence, regularly posting messages and memes denigrating a wide range of marginalized groups. This behavior has garnered him a large following of, largely anonymous, online fans. He is a leading figure and major contributor to the bad reputation of intelligence and genetics research. On top of this reputation, this individual has never been part of any credible research program, PhD program, or university.
Kirkegaard has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics, and no clear qualifications for the fields he purports to do research in. He claims to be affiliated with the non-existent “Arthur Jensen Institute”. Kirkgaard heads the Human Diversity Foundation (now Polygenic Scores), a continuation of the aforementioned Pioneer Fund. In this capacity, it took over Mankind Quarterly, a journal known for publishing racist pseudoscience. Kirkegaard also started his own online race pseudoscience journal OpenPsych.
The “recent evidence from genetics” that Kirkegaard refers to consists of two papers. First, a paper from psychologist Russell T. Warne, who acknowledged in one of his papers that his research had been paid for by the Human Diversity Foundation. (For critiques of this paper by Warne, see here, p. 7 and Eric Turkheimer, p. 141-143.) The second paper is a paper co-authored by Kirkegaard and published in the aforementioned pseudoscience journal Mankind Quarterly.
To summarise, in his blogposts Cofnas takes the truth of his strong version of “race realism” as a given. If he provides evidence (which rarely happens), he is clever enough to mostly avoid mentioning the names of his sources. But when one makes the effort of actually clicking on the hyperlinks, one falls into a rabbit hole of racist pseudoscience.
This behaviour is not merely limited to Cofnas’ writing – his lecture in Ghent provides further examples of the way he misrepresents the existing science and the way he uses pseudoscientific strategies to defend his race realism.
The lecture
On April 2, 2026 Cofnas gave a lecture at Ghent University for the far-right students’ organisation KVHV. The lecture has been recorded and put on YouTube. I will use the YouTube video as a reference, adding the time of the relevant sections between brackets. In the lecture, Cofnas only starts talking about the so-called evidence for race science after discussing ‘wokeness’ for half an hour (33:00).
Throughout the second half of his lecture, we can see Cofnas applying several pseudoscientific strategies which are described in the literature on pseudoscience. The first is the strategy of the “switcheroo” (a term from philosopher of science André Kukla, who is cited in Braeckman & Boudry as follows:)
One commits a switcheroo by starting with a hypothesis that’s amenable to a range of interpretations, giving arguments that support a weak version, and thenceforth pretending that one of the stronger versions has been established.
What Cofnas provides can at best be interpreted as suggestions that the weak version of his claim (“there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component”) is correct. But Cofnas uses the ambiguity about what claim he is defending to create the illusion that he is actually providing arguments for the stronger claim (““Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position”). As in his blogs, Cofnas also uses the work of pseudoscientific scholars, but again does not explicitly mention names (he only did so after repeated questions during the Q&A).
To give some clear examples, we can examine some fairly long citations from the lecture – this is unfortunately necessary, to make clear that I am not misconstruing the way Cofnas develops his arguments.
Just before the hour mark (54:13), Cofnas makes the following bold statement:
And uh – in recent years, now we’ve uh – with what are called genome-wide association studies where we administer uh – we try to correlate specific genetic variants in very large samples with performance on IQ tests or with educational attainment – um – have found that there are thousands of genetic variants which are associated with – uh – with IQ. Um – and these genes vary by race. Uh – um – that there are stable uh race difference in IQ which – uh, well appear to have a genetic basis.
Cofnas does not provide any references for this – no studies, nothing. He does follow up with the following long citation from David Reich (55:14):
People who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among populations across a range of traits are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. In the last couple of decades, most population geneticists have sought to avoid contradicting the orthodoxy. When asked about the possibility of biological differences among human populations, we have tended to obfuscate, making mathematical statements in the spirit of Richard Lewontin about the average difference between individuals from within any one population being around six times greater than the average difference between populations … But this carefully worded formulation is deliberately making the possibility of substantial average differences in biological traits across populations.
Note that Reich here is formulating a version of Cofnas’s weak claim (it is a possibility) and that he is not talking about intelligence per se, nor does he use the term “race”. He is just making a very broad statement about the possibility of finding “substantial biological differences”, whatever those may be. But then Cofnas reframes the citation as if Reich is subscribing to the views on race and IQ he just discussed. He does this explicitly. Immediately after reading the citation, Cofnas continues (56:23):
We are finding the genes that underlie differences in intelligence between individuals. And they are not distributed equally among populations. And even the world’s leading population geneticist can say this in the New York Times, although obviously David Reich doesn’t want to get cancelled, he doesn’t want to get fired. […] But you don’t have to work too hard to read between the lines to see what he’s saying.
So Cofnas himself is aware that he is reading something into Reich’s text. Cofnas is not only switcheroo-ing here, he is also cherry-picking. What Cofnas doesn’t cite is the following passage in which Reich denounces Cofnas-style race science (cited by Sasha Gusev:):
[W]e should take the cautionary lesson not to trust our gut instincts or the stereotyped expectations we find around us. If we can be confident of anything, it is that whatever differences we think we perceive, our expectations are most likely wrong. What makes Watson’s and Wade’s and Harpending’s statements racist is the way they jump from the observation that the academic community is denying the possibility of differences that are plausible, to a claim with no scientific evidence that they know what those differences are and also that the differences correspond to long-standing popular stereotypes – a conviction that is essentially guaranteed to be wrong.
As Sasha Gusev summarises: “Reich is very clear: the typical hereditarian claims about innate differences — Jewish IQ, black musicality, Asian obedience, etc– are harmful pseudoscience. Anyone arguing that Reich secretly endorses such views is ignoring his actual writing and hoping you won’t notice.” This clearly applies to Cofnas.
During the Q&A (1:09:27), I asked Cofnas a question about the fact that he seemed to subscribe to the discredited “cold winters theory”, which is often linked to Richard Lynn. This theory states that people in colder climates are more intelligent on average because cold winters are more difficult to survive, and hence select for greater intelligence. Lynn was also a racist pseudoscientist linked to the aforementioned Pioneer Fund, so it is no surprise that Lynn developed this theory to argue that African people (who mostly live in warmer climates) have a lower IQ, and that this is due to genetic reasons. There are numerous problems with the theory (an overview of which was published in Psychology Today). It can safely be said that the theory is not accepted in mainstream science, but is still popular in the race science circles in which Cofnas operates. There, it is most often associated with Richard Lynn (see this paper by race scientist Bryan Pesta, for example).
I asked this question because Cofnas himself had written a post on X which was highly critical of Richard Lynn. He was prompted to write this post because Lynn’s so-called national IQ-datasets (which form the bread and butter of race science) had been the subject of fatal criticism (Cofnas referred to this article). Cofnas saw that the datasets were a lost cause and urged his fellow race scientists not to fall into the trap of defending them.
In his reply to my question, Cofnas was even more explicit and stated (1:10:03) that “Lynn is a pseudoscientist and people shouldn’t defend him” and (1:13:12) that he “[doesn’t] take Richard Lynn seriously”. This is surprising, because this apparently didn’t stop Cofnas from referring to Lynn’s work in three of his papers (in 2018, in 2021, and in 2023).
In an attempt to distance himself from Lynn, Cofnas added (1:10:12) that cold winters theory was not invented by Lynn. This remark shows that Cofnas knows his Kirkegaard well, because this is a very niche point (even within race science circles) made by Kirkegaard.
In a follow-up question, I asked Cofnas whether he could mention other scholars that accepted cold winters theory. He tried to dodge the question (demonstrating the point I made before that Cofnas is reluctant to be open about his pseudoscientific sources), but after some prodding gave us the name of Satoshi Kanazawa (1:13:30). Kanazawa’s work has also often been labelled pseudoscience. He caused several controversies with his racist statements, even prompting a group of 68 evolutionary psychologists to write a statement with the title “Kanazawa’s bad science does not represent evolutionary psychology”.
Kanazawa’s work has been criticised by statistician Andrew Gelman and sociologist David Weakliem because his use of statistics suffers from basic flaws. Kanazawa’s papers have even been used as a case study in a paper discussing problems with peer review. One of the papers discussed is a paper in which Kanazawa defends a version of cold winters theory. In his calculations, Kanazawa assumes the earth is flat and also assumes travel routes of ancestral populations from Africa which contradict the existing consensus in evolutionary population genetics (a consensus which ironically is discussed in one of the books that Kanazawa cites himself).
This list is not exhaustive, and there are other examples in the lecture where Cofnas misrepresents scientific findings (for example the Akbari et al. paper) as if they provide evidence for his strong claim on the truth of “race realism”, but as this text is already so long I’ll leave those as an exercise for the reader.
Conclusion
To summarise, I have tried to show how Cofnas employs several typical pseudoscientific strategies that can be found in the literature. The most important one was the strategic use of ambiguity, with Cofnas continuously shifting between a weak version (“there is nothing that would indicate that it is particularly unlikely that race differences will turn out to have a substantial genetic component”) and a strong version (““Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position”) of his claims.
I believe this is an important point to make and should be kept in mind by all those involved in the debate (both pro and contra Cofnas). The controversial (and I would argue racist) statements made in the “A Guide” blogpost are based on the strong claim. Cofnas presents this claim – incorrectly – as being a scientific truth. The blogposts are not reports of ongoing empirical research performed by Cofnas, but have a clear ideological nature (Cofnas himself is quite clear about this).
Countering Cofnas’s ideological statements and criticising his sloppy arguments cannot be seen as attempts to censor scientific research. If there’s someone having a negative impact on science, it is Cofnas, not his critics.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their institution.
