Gerhard Meisenberg



Mankind Quarterly's Editor-in-Chief, Gerhard Meisenberg, told me last month that there were likely to be biological differences in intelligence between racial groups, which he believes will eventually be discovered by genetics. He referred to “low-IQ countries”, including Pakistan. What is worrying, though, is that people such as Meisenberg and Mankind Quarterly’s assistant editor, Richard Lynn, have managed to penetrate more mainstream scientific circles.

Gerhard Meisenberg is a HBD pseudoscientist who has published a bunch of racist pseudoscience papers, co-authored with Richard Lynn arguing the mean IQ of Sub-Saharan Africa is as low as 68 (when the correct figure is at least 80). These papers have been criticized by other psychologists for confirmation bias (such as cherry-picking sources), manipulation and using a unsystematic methodology. Meisenberg attributes the low African IQs mainly to education. About the claim of African IQs in the 80s, he writes: “Because schooling is the most important environmental factor for children’s intelligence, such a high IQ would imply that African schools are already almost as eﬃcient as American schools, and further eﬀorts to improve African school systems are not needed.” Mesigenberg has no background or qualifications in psychology and is a biochemist. He has defended the pseudoscience of intelligence research, concluding that "intelligence diﬀerences provide powerful explanations of many important real-world phenomena, and that denying their causal role requires the promotion of alternative false beliefs. Acting on these false beliefs almost invariably prevents the eﬀective management of societal problems while creating new ones." Ideologically he is anti-everything: against Trump, against Brexit, and against “ideologies that have been oozing out of academic grievance studies departments for some time.” He wonders if all these ideologies show that people in western countries are getting stupider. According to Meisenberg, “What alt right and lunatic left have in common is the rejection of science and reason, of Enlightenment values and universalism in favor of nationalism and identity politics.” He is associated with various far-right organisations and publishers, for example he is a director of the Pioneer Fund, an Editor-in-Chief of the pseudoscholarly journal Mankind Quarterly and reviews submissions to the OpenPsych pseudojournals.

Meisenberg has published in the controversial peer-reviewed journal Intelligence and formerly served on its Editorial Board. Shortly after The Guardian criticized Meisenberg's links to Mankind Quarterly, the International Society for Intelligence Research removed Meisenberg from the Editorial Board. His work is also promoted on places like VDARE. In 2015, Meisenberg attended the London Conference on Intelligence and the following year co-wrote a sexist paper at the same conference, with Michael A. Woodley of Menie in which he claimed higher school achievement of females than males, arguing that "Neither economic development nor the progress of female emancipation or empowerment have been successful at virilizing female achievement levels". Ignoring his pseudoscience on race and intelligence, eugenics and sexism, Meisenberg is a qualified biochemist and author of the popular textbook Principles of Medical Biochemistry, now in its 4th edition.