Human Biodiversity

Human biodiversity (HBD) is an umbrella term for the hereditarian claim that human populations differ in genetically rooted traits, including average intelligence and behavioral disposition, along racial lines. Mainstream genetics and anthropology reject the framework as a repackaging of scientific racism, holding that "race" is not a valid biological category for such claims and that observed group differences in test scores reflect environmental and social factors. The term was popularized by the journalist Steve Sailer in the late 1990s, and the doctrine became a connective tissue linking the Rationalist Community, Neoreaction, and the alt-right.¹²

Origins and the HBD Network

Sailer founded an invitation-only Human Biodiversity Discussion Group mailing list around 1998, gathering academics and writers interested in hereditarian accounts of human difference. The framework drew on the race-and-IQ literature popularized by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and on researchers associated with the Pioneer Fund. An online "HBD blogosphere" developed in the 2000s and 2010s around figures including the anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, coauthors of The 10,000 Year Explosion, and the science blogger Razib Khan.¹³

The phrase itself was not Sailer's coinage. The anthropologist Jonathan Marks used "human biodiversity" as the title of his 1995 book Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History, which argued against treating race as a meaningful biological category; Sailer appropriated the term in the mid-1990s and inverted its meaning into a banner for hereditarianism. The roster of his discussion group, dated March 3, 1999, listed dozens of writers and academics including Murray, J. Philippe Rushton, the National Review columnist John Derbyshire, the journalist Jon Entine, and the physical anthropologist Vincent Sarich, assembling in one forum the figures who would later seed the alt-right's "race realism."⁶⁷

The Eugenics Research Network

The hereditarian claims circulate through a small and interlocking institutional network. The Pioneer Fund has financed race-and-intelligence research since 1937, including the Ulster Institute for Social Research run by the psychologist Richard Lynn and the journal Mankind Quarterly. Between 2014 and 2017 a secret invitation-only London Conference on Intelligence met at University College London, organized by the psychologist James Thompson and bringing together figures including Emil Kirkegaard, who runs the non-peer-reviewed OpenPsych paper repository, Lynn, and the writer Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a favored academic of the neo-Nazi movement. An analysis found that 82 percent of those who spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences were associated with the Ulster Institute or Mankind Quarterly. After the conference was exposed in 2018, the journalist Toby Young resigned from the UK Office for Students on the day his attendance was revealed, and the Cambridge researcher Noah Carl lost his fellowship. This network supplies the academic citations that HBD advocates present as suppressed science.⁵

The network's output flows through publications outside ordinary peer review. Kirkegaard's OpenPsych outlets and the Ulster Institute's Mankind Quarterly print hereditarian papers that mainstream journals reject, and Lynn's national-IQ dataset (built on samples as small as 19 people for a country) became the most-cited product of the operation before the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association warned in 2020 that any analysis relying on it was unsound. In June 2024 seven scientists, including the evolutionary biologist Kevin Bird, called on Elsevier and Springer to retract Lynn's articles. The same funding lineage runs from Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund through J. Philippe Rushton and Lynn, who served as the fund's successive presidents, into the citation pool that HBD bloggers and the tech-right treat as legitimate science.¹⁰¹¹

Laundering Into the Mainstream

HBD functioned as a bridge by which race science migrated from the political fringe toward the technology elite. The rationalist blog Slate Star Codex treated HBD as a debatable hypothesis, and a 2014 email by its author, leaked in 2021, described the framework as "probably partially correct." Curtis Yarvin's neoreaction incorporated hereditarian premises into its case against democratic equality, and the alt-right adopted "race realism" as a core tenet. The "forbidden knowledge" framing that valorizes suppressed hereditarian claims is the same posture marketed by the Hereticon "conference for thoughtcrime," and it surfaced in Nick Bostrom's 1996 email and in the Peter Thiel network's broader anti-egalitarian politics.²⁴

The laundering proceeded through mainstream outlets willing to treat the claims as debatable. In 1994 the editor Andrew Sullivan ran a Bell Curve excerpt as the cover package of The New Republic over the threatened resignations of much of the staff, a moment he later called one of his proudest in journalism. In 2014 the former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, arguing that recent natural selection produced racial differences in social behavior; a letter signed by roughly 140 population geneticists, including David Reich and other leading researchers, appeared in the New York Times Book Review in August 2014 stating that there was "no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures." Sailer praised the book, and it became a standard HBD citation despite the disciplinary rejection.⁸⁹