Stefan Molyneux and Linda Gottfredson Promote Scientific Racism

Linda Gottfredson joined Stefan Molyneux for the December 29th broadcast of Freedomain Radio, entitled “Race, Evolution and Intelligence.” Using recycled claims from The Bell Curve — a notorious book by Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994) and Charles Murray — Molyneux asserted that there is a racial hierarchy as far as IQ distribution is concerned.

“You could roughly equate a sort of five part split or divergence among IQs for particular groups with — I think as Charles Murray pointed out — Ashkenazi Jews sort of at the top, 110, 115, and if you just focused on verbal, 120 plus,” Molyneux said, before listing Asians, Caucasians and, lastly, Hispanics and African-Americans — the latter of whom he claimed have an average IQ of 85.

Gottfredson, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware, agreed, noting that Molyneux neglected to mention one final racial category. “I would just add one more group and that’s African blacks. The IQs of different groups of African blacks, you know, range more around 70.” Gottfredson, of course, has accepted $267,000 in research grants by the racist Pioneer Fund since 1988, and was a staunch opponent of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.

Later in the video Gottfredson defends the late eugenicist Jean-Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). Prior to his death Rushton headed the Pioneer Fund, and made outrageous pseudoscientific claims about black men and women having larger secondary sex characteristics — which he said were inversely proportional to brain size.

At a white supremacist conference in 2000, he stated, “Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks… Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.”

For this, Gottfredson believes Rushton was unfairly “maligned” by critics.