The Info Web

#Eugenics

17 entries

People (10)

  • Aldous Huxley Aldous Huxley was the novelist of Brave New World who pioneered the literary use of psychedelics in The Doors of Perception, visited Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation parapsychology group, helped seed the Esalen Institute and the Human Potential movement, and lectured on a coming pharmacological dictatorship he called the ultimate revolution.
  • Francis Galton Francis Galton was the Victorian polymath and half-cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the words eugenics and nature versus nurture, founded biometrics and the statistical concepts of correlation and regression to the mean, pioneered fingerprint identification and composite photography, and endowed the chair of eugenics at University College London.
  • Harry Weyher New York tax lawyer who was Wickliffe Draper's personal attorney from 1955, executor of his will, and president of the Pioneer Fund from 1958 until his death in 2002.
  • J. Philippe Rushton J. Philippe Rushton was a British-Canadian psychologist at the University of Western Ontario and president of the Pioneer Fund whose book Race, Evolution, and Behavior applied r/K selection theory to claim a racial hierarchy of intelligence and behavior, work the scientific community condemned as racist and methodologically flawed.
  • John Tanton John Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who built the modern US anti-immigration movement, founding FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and the Social Contract Press, and whose WITAN memos, Pioneer Fund funding, and white-nationalist ties were documented by the New York Times and the SPLC.
  • Julian Huxley Julian Huxley was the evolutionary biologist who coined the modern usage of transhumanism in 1957, served as the first Director-General of UNESCO and wrote a founding document tying the agency to eugenics, and presided over the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962.
  • Nick Bostrom Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who cofounded the transhumanist movement, founded Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, wrote the AI-existential-risk book Superintelligence, is called the father of longtermism, and in 2023 admitted to a 1990s email asserting that black people are less intelligent than white people.
  • Richard Herrnstein Harvard psychologist whose 1971 Atlantic article argued that social standing would come to rest on inherited intelligence, and who co-wrote The Bell Curve with Charles Murray before dying in September 1994.
  • Richard Lynn Richard Lynn was a British psychologist who promoted hereditarian claims about racial and national differences in intelligence and 'dysgenics,' ran the Pioneer Fund and the Ulster Institute for Social Research, and whose national-IQ data was repudiated as fundamentally flawed.
  • Wickliffe Draper Massachusetts textile heir who founded the Pioneer Fund in 1937 and secretly sent nearly 215,000 dollars through Morgan Guaranty to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to fight the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Organizations (2)

  • Mankind Quarterly Mankind Quarterly is a journal founded in 1960-1961 with Pioneer Fund money to publish hereditarian race-and-intelligence research that mainstream journals rejected, widely described as a cornerstone of the scientific-racism establishment.
  • Pioneer Fund New York foundation created in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper to promote eugenics, which became the main financier of race and intelligence research in the United States and of many scholars cited in The Bell Curve.

Events (1)

  • London Conference on Intelligence The London Conference on Intelligence was a secret invitation-only eugenics conference held at University College London from 2014 to 2017, organized by James Thompson and dominated by figures tied to the Pioneer Fund and Mankind Quarterly, exposed in 2018 in a scandal that ended several academic careers.

Concepts (3)

  • Eugenics Eugenics is the project of improving the human species through controlled reproduction, named by Francis Galton in 1883, which drove sterilization and immigration laws and the Holocaust, was repackaged after the war as race-and-intelligence research, and is identified by critics as a root of the transhumanist and longtermist worldview.
  • TESCREAL TESCREAL is an acronym coined by Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru for a bundle of seven overlapping ideologies, transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism, that they argue share roots in twentieth-century eugenics and together drive the race to build artificial general intelligence.
  • The Bell Curve 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray on intelligence and class whose bibliography drew on thirteen Pioneer Fund grantees and seventeen contributors to Mankind Quarterly.

Places (1)

  • Zorro Ranch Zorro Ranch is the New Mexico property near Stanley that Jeffrey Epstein bought in 1993 from Governor Bruce King's family, where victims alleged abuse and which the state reinvestigated in 2026.