Michael A. Woodley of Menie

Also, @campusreform readers should check out coauthor Michael A Woodley of Menie, a minor Scottish aristocrat alt-right flake who dabbles in Rushton-esque theories of race and intelligence. His Ph.D., by the way, is on the ecology of a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. Nice company!

Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Younger aka Technical Heretic is an ecologist and cryptozoology pseudoscientist who proposed the 'super-otter' theory of sea serpents as literal giant otters. He holds several other pseudoscientific and fringe-science views including the spiteful mutant hypothesis and belief in paranormal such as spiritual mediumship. He is most controversial for his writings on race and intelligence, eugenics and is associated with the far-right Unz Foundation. He attended the London Conference on Intelligence and formerly sat on the Editorial Board of the journal Intelligence. He has reviewed two papers submitted to the OpenPsych pseudojournals.

Despite his wealthy background (YouTube videos seem to show him living in a huge manor house or castle ), Woodley begs for donations from his meagre following.

In June 2022, it was revealed that white supremacist Payton S. Gendron, the perpetrator of the is fond of Menie's racist research and cited him in his 180-page terrorist manifesto. Woodley was subsequently suspended from Vrije Universiteit Brussel pending an investigation.

Woodley has received criticism for being an "Unz Foundation Junior Fellow" meaning some of his studies are "partially funded by a right-wing antisemitic organization."

In 2019, Woodley appeared as a guest named Technical Heretic on Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic YouTube channel.

Background


Michael Anthony Woodley (who often uses the title "of Menie", a Scottish barony in ), Yr., was born in Guilford, England on 16 May 1984. His father, of the same name, is the (28th) Feudal Baron of Menie and his mother is named Caroline, née Cuthbertson. Despite the prestigious title, neither Michael Woodley, Jr. nor his father descends from aristocracy or Scottish landed gentry. Woodley's father, Michael, a Surrey-based film and television aviation consultant acquired the title of a baron ("of Menie") in 1995. He made his wealth through running Aviation Filming which has worked on James Bond movies (in film credits and his company website, he instead uses the name "Mike Woodley").

In 2009, Donald Trump purchased the Menie Estate in Baldmedie, adjacent to where Woodley's father owns several acres of land; the Woodleys supported Trump building a golf course, spa, hotel, and holiday homes despite local opposition to building development.

The "man in the Mao suit"
Woodley was known as the "man in the Mao suit" when studying at Columbia University in 2006-2007 for wearing a Chinese tunic suit.

According to a former student who remembers seeing Woodley on Columbia University's campus, he dressed eccentrically and described himself as a "transhumanist".

Credentials
Woodley received a Bsc in Environmental Biology at Columbia University in 2007; in 2011 he completed a Ph.D. in Ecology at the University of London (Royal Holloway). His thesis looked at the life history ecology of the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2015, he was a recipient of an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star designation for producing the best-supported model of the Flynn Effect. Since 2018 he has sat on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence. He worked at Technische Universität Chemnitz from 2015 to 2016.

Suspension from Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Woodley was a Lifetime Fellow at, a research center at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium from 2013 until June 2022. He was suspended pending an investigation by the Scientific Integrity Commission after it was discovered his 2010 controversial study on race (see below) had been cited by white supremacist Payton S. Gendron in his terrorist manifesto. Specifically, Gendron on page 17 of his manifesto had relied on a table made by Woodley arguing there is enough genetic diversity between human populations to recognise subspecies (races) when compared to jaguars, leopards, chimpanzees pumas and elk. Gendron, however, posted a simplified form of Woodley's table (citing his study underneath). Woodley's controversial views on race are disputed by most population geneticists.

Cryptozoology
Woodley began his career (2008-2012) publishing a book, articles and conference talks at The Centre for Fortean Zoology on cryptozoology:


 * Woodley, M. A. (2008). "Classificational typologies and marine cryptids: A contemporary review of Heuvelmans' model" (Abstract). The Centre for Fortean Zoology 9th Annual Weird Weekend.
 * Woodley, M. A. (2008). In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans: An Introduction to the History and Future of Sea Serpent Classification. Centre for Fortean Zoology Press.
 * Woodley, M. A., Naish, D., and Shanahan, H. P. (2008). "How many extant pinniped species remain to be described?". Historical Biology, 20(4), 225-235.
 * Woodley, M. A. (2008). "Towards a possible caudata identity for the Mongolian death worm: Introducing the 'plausibility method' for identity theory formation amongst lesser known cryptids" in: The Centre for Fortean Zoology 2008 Yearbook, Jonathan Downes (ed.), 39-47. Centre for Fortean Zoology Press.
 * Woodley, M. A. (2009) "A proposed system of taxonomy for cryptozoology" (Abstract). The Centre for Fortean Zoology 10th Annual Weird Weekend.
 * Woodley, M. A. (2009). "Human diversity and hominology" in: The Centre for Fortean Zoology 2009 Yearbook, Jonathan Downes (ed.), 39-59. Centre for Fortean Zoology Press.
 * Woodley, M. A. (2011). "Introducing aequivotaxa: A new classificatory system for cryptozoology". Kraken: Archives of Cryptozoology. 3: 63-85.
 * Woodley, M. A., Naish, D., and McCormick, C. A. (2011). "A baby sea-serpent no more: Reinterpreting Hagelund's juvenile 'Cadborosaur' report". Journal of Scientific Exploration 25(3): 495-512.
 * Woodley, M. A., McCormick, C., and Naish, D. (2012). "Response to Bousfield and LeBlond: Shooting Pipefish in a Barrel; or, 'Sauropterygian Mega-Serpents' and Occam's Razor". Journal of Scientific Exploration, 26(1): 143-147.



Few of Woodley's cryptozoology writings have been taken serious by scientists with exception of a co-authored sceptical paper. In 2011, Woodley, along with Cameron McCormick, and palaeontologist Darren Naish argued against William Hagelund's claim of capturing a baby sea serpent. Hagelund, a fisherman, in his 1987 memoir claimed to have briefly captured a small sea serpent near De Courcy island in 1968. The unsubstantiated claim (no physical evidence or photos exist) was defended by the oceanographer Paul LeBlond in the 1990s who argued Hagelund had captured a baby (often nicknamed "Caddy"). LeBlond thought this cryptid has reptilian traits. Hagelund's claimed discovery was challenged by Woodley and his co-authors via comparison of the physical characteristics recorded by Hagelund with those of 14 known animals. It was concluded that the description of the sea serpent provided by Hagelund in his memoir most closely resembles that of an ordinary pipefish, not a reptile.

'Super-otter' theory
Environmental scientist Robert France has criticised Woodley’s 2008 book on sea serpent classification mainly for its far-fetched 'super-otter' theory:

In 2022, France criticised Woodley's book again describing it as an example of "embarrassing forays into cryptozoological fantasy". Woodley's (2008) super-otter theory is based on interpreting eyewitness accounts of sea serpents with many humps as literal giant otters whose long tail "undulations propagate giving rise to the many humps witnesses describe." Like, Woodley has argued that reports of long-necked sea serpents and merhorses could be explained by long-necked seals. Sharon Hill, author of Doubtful News has negatively reviewed Woodley's book:

In a 2008 interview with Nick Redfern, Woodley described himself as a "neo-Heuvelmansian" and said the purpose of his book was to improve Bernard Heuvelmans' sea serpent classification.

Dr. Naish who co-authored three papers on cryptozoology with Woodley (including the 2011 sceptical paper on a baby sea serpent) has more recently described Woodley as having "indeed promoted some unusual ideas that cannot be correct, these including that the ‘super otter’ and ‘many-humped’ sea monsters of Heuvelmans (1968) might actually be literal super-sized otters."

Mongolian death worm
Woodley published a paper in The Centre for Fortean Zoology 2008 Yearbook arguing the is an unidentified legless salamander species "which breeds in the moister, southerly regions of the Mongolian desert and migrates north." Needless to say, Woodley's speculative idea is not supported by any physical evidence and is not taken serious by scientists.

Distancing himself from cryptozoology
In a 2014 interview with the magazine Maisonneuve, Woodley stated that he had dropped cryptozoological research on the basis that "Essentially cryptozoology is not science". Woodley further noted:

Although the magazine claims "To Woodley, the point [of cryptozoology] was to do good science. He thought that was what cryptozoologists would want, too, but not everyone shared his ambitions", this is disputed by scientists (such as Robert France) who have criticised Woodley's sea serpent classification (including super-otter theory) and idea about the Mongolian death worm as crankery or pseudoscience.

Racialism
In 2010, Woodley published a paper arguing human races are biological as opposed to social constructs - "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications" - in the fringe-medical journal, Medical Hypotheses. This journal is most controversial for publishing papers that support HIV/AIDS denialism.

The paper has been criticized in detail on a blog that points out Woodley just repeats discredited pseudoscientific racialist arguments and cherry-picks sources to support his own argument, while ignoring most of the scientific literature that debunks race. Not surprisingly, the only websites to support the conclusions of this paper are white nationalist ones, including the race realist and white nationalist "The Alternative Hypothesis." The paper on Google Scholar has been cited 17 times, but 6 citations are by OpenPsych e.g. John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard and Heiner Rindermann.

Eugenics and dysgenics


In 2018, Michael A. Woodley with Edward Dutton published At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future that argues human intelligence has gone into rapid decline since the Industrial Revolution. This sort of pseudoscientific work on dysgenics is popular among the alt-right's HBD community; for example, the book is promoted on The Unz Review. Woodley and Dutton partly blame the alleged lowering of IQ onto Third World immigrants and women's rights, e.g. smarter females having no or fewer children to pursue careers when, in their opinion, they should stay at home.

In a 2015 paper, he drew on the ideas of Victorian eugenicist Francis Galton, arguing that "selection favoring lower IQ" was responsible for a fall in g (general intelligence) since the mid 19th century. This was based on an analysis of the use of difficult words in texts from 1850 to 2005 (word difficulty based on the performance of white men in more recent vocabulary tests). He claimed to use a lot of statistical magic to correct for some of the obvious biases, i.e. changing literacy rates (which reached the modern-day peaks of c. 99% around 1900 and therefore won't be significant over much of the period), and wordage and familiarity. But there are many other biases not corrected for, such as the selection of texts (from Google's corpus as used by N-Gram searches) and changes in literary style even within texts intended for the same audience and purpose. Other factors relating to the complexity of texts are not considered (e.g. complexity of ideas, use of abbreviations, allusion, use of foreign languages, references to different domains of knowledge...); performance in vocabulary tests does have a strong correlation with g (general intelligence) so it might be a reasonable measure if you could ensure you were using the same samples across time (which Menie clearly isn't), word difficulty is constant across time (dubious - especially when words are used in vastly different contexts now to the 19th century), and if you had evidence that word use in texts correlates with performance in vocabulary tests (Menie assumes this is obviously true because no writer ever uses a word they're not sure of the meaning of, but he doesn't try to prove it).

Sexism
Woodley co-wrote a paper at the London Conference on Intelligence with Meisenberg that was overtly sexist, arguing: "Neither economic development nor the progress of female emancipation or empowerment have been successful at virilizing female achievement levels"

Paranormal
In 2020, Woodley co-authored a crackpot paper in a pseudoscientific journal claiming spiritualist mediums can "retrieve information about deceased persons through unknown means".

Alt-right connections


In 2016, Woodley appeared on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel as a guest to discuss "Why Civilizations Rise and Fall". It is a popular video with the alt-right. For example, it is found promoted on VDARE and Conservative websites.

Woodley posts on the alt-right website The Unz Review with James Thompson who praises his research on race and intelligence; he is quoted by Thompson as arguing "replacement immigration" to Denmark is reducing the national IQ.

White nationalist Kevin MacDonald is a fan of Woodley's controversial writings on race.

"The truth about the London Conference on Intelligence!"
Woodley posted a video on Dutton's Youtube channel "The truth about the London Conference on Intelligence!" falsely claiming the LCI conferences were neither secretive, eugenics-based, nor attended by white supremacists. A rebuttal:


 * While Woodley is correct that a very low percentage of talks at the LCI were about eugenics, virtually everyone who attended (even Toby Young, who wasn't a speaker) are known proponents of eugenics; at least all individuals who attended the LCI based on the 2015 and 2016 talk abstracts (including its organiser) are pro-eugenics. In other words, there was little to no media misrepresentation: the media knew two dozen or more eugenicists were meeting in a room and so some newspapers decided to describe the LCI gatherings as a "eugenics conference."
 * The LCI was clearly secretive, i.e the university at which it took place was not informed in advance about the speakers and content of the conference(s); this is highly unusual. Had the university been shown in advance a list of talk abstracts and speaker list, they almost certainly wouldn't have given permission. So the organisers of the LCI were very deceptive and breached the universities room bookings process.
 * A large portion of speakers at LCI either have published in Mankind Quarterly and/or are associated with the latter and sit on its editorial board; this was calculated to be 80% by the London Student. So this is where the media got their source to describe the conferences as "white supremacist." This can hardly be criticised since the MQ was founded by segregationists/anti-civil rights activists back in the 1960s and has always been overtly racist, with an ultra-racialist and hereditarianism POV - the latter especially increased under Roger Pearson as editor-in-chief (during The Bell Curve wars), Meisenberg and now Dutton, to the extent mainstream scientists dismiss MQ as a racist pseudojournal.
 * There's also the fact that most, if not all, of the speakers at LCI are known to hold far-right political views.