London Conference on Intelligence

UCL has launched an investigation into how a senior academic was able to secretly host an annual conference on eugenics and intelligence that heard from white supremacists and was attended by Toby Young.

London Conference on Intelligence were a series of controversial pseudoscientific conferences held annually at University College London (UCL) from 2014-2017, attended by far-right speakers, including white supremacists.

The conferences were secretive since Toby Young was invited to attend as an observer, but was told to not to tell anyone, especially not the media. However, Toby Young did not keep quiet and wrote about attending the UCL conference in December 2017. In January 2018,  there was news exposure of the conferences and UCL set up an inquiry and published a statement noting that none of the conferences were approved by the university.

Breach of room bookings
The UCL conferences potentially breached room bookings policy because the university had not been informed of the speakers or content in advance, so there was no background check of any the individuals who attended, with the exception of Dr. James Thompson, an honorary UCL senior lecturer:

UCL is investigating a potential breach of its room bookings process for events after being alerted to conferences on intelligence hosted by an honorary senior lecturer at UCL. Our records indicate the university was not informed in advance about the speakers and content of the conference series, as it should have been for the event to be allowed to go ahead. The conferences were booked and paid for as an external event and without our officials being told of the details. They were therefore not approved or endorsed by UCL.

Dr. Thompson had organised the UCL conferences for two years (2015-2016) and was involved with advertising the first conference in 2014 on the website The Unz Review, but it remains unclear who was the organiser for the 2014 and 2017 conferences, although Thompson attended all of them. Emil Kirkegaard designed the 2015 conference website.

Background


The sequence of events that led newspapers and the media to discover the London Conference on Intelligence:


 * Toby Young at the beginning of January 2018 made news headlines for sending sexist and other inappropriate tweets. On 9 January 2018, he resigned his position on the Office for Students regulator for making the offensive comments and apologized.
 * Immediately after resigning, journalists looked into Young's Twitter history and discovered he had mentioned in December 2017 his attendance to the London Conference on Intelligence, that he was told to keep silent about: "[I was] asked not to share the information with anyone else..."
 * On 10 January 2018, the magazine  published an article that mentions: "What he [Young] kept to himself was why the conference he attended was so secretive" and names a few of the white supremacists, eugenicists, and sexists (including Richard Lynn) who were speakers at the UCL conferences.
 * After the publication of the Private Eye article, London Student the same day published a more detailed exposure of the far-right extremists and racists who had attended the conferences. London Student informed UCL, and the university responded that they were investigating.
 * On 11 January 2018, mainstream newspapers and other news sources reported the story; some of these credit Private Eye and to a lesser extent London Student.

List of conference speakers and papers
Around 20 speakers attended each conference to present talks based on papers they had written or co-written in advance. Based on two of the conference publications 2015-2016 that list paper abstracts, a journalist writing for London Student calculated that over 80% of speakers have published papers in the Mankind Quarterly, a pseudoscholarly racist journal. Its publisher, Ulster Institute for Social Research was founded by Richard Lynn, a white supremacist who has far-right political views and is a eugenicist; UISR has received grants from the — a hate-group set up by Nazi-sympathisers. Papers presented at UCL conferences also included sexism.

London Conference on Intelligence, 2014
No publication with paper abstracts is available for the first conference, although James Thompson lists the following on The Unz Review:


 * Science and Its Discontents by Gerhard Meisenberg
 * The General Factor of Personality (GFP): Its Current Status and its Presumed Relation with Life history Strategy by Dimitri van der Linden
 * Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic intelligence in Scotland and Sweden by Guy Madison
 * Immigration in Denmark and Norway by Emil Kirkegaard
 * Learning Without Questioning – Why Asians do not win Nobel prizes by Kenya Kura

London Conference on Intelligence, 2015

 * Welcome and Introduction by James Thompson
 * By their words ye shall know them by Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Heitor B. F. Fernandes, Aurelio J. Figueredo & Gerhard Meisenberg
 * Evolution versus culture in international intelligence differences by Heiner Rindermann
 * Spearman’s Hypothesis: Hypothesis or Law? by M. van den Hoek and Jan te Nijenhuis
 * Androgen Levels and K theory by Edward Dutton
 * Race and sex differences in occupational achievement by
 * Spearman’s hypothesis tested on group differences in personality by Jan te Nijenhuis
 * Admixture in the Americas by John Fuerst & Emil Kirkegaard
 * Meta-analysis of Roma intelligence by Dalibor Jurášek, Jan te Nijenhuis and J. Cvorovic
 * Darwin’s “Altruistic Words” by Aurelio J. Figueredo, Heitor B. F. Fernandes, Michael A. Woodley of Menie & Guy Madison
 * General and domain-related effects of prenatal methylmercury exposure by Fróði Debes
 * In chimpanzees, more g-loaded cognitive abilities by Heitor B. F. Fernandes, Michael A. Woodley of Menie & William D. Hopkins
 * Intelligence is correlated with higher non-verbal ability by Kenya Kura &
 * Hormones and Nobel Prizes by Dimitri van der Linden, Edward Dutton & T. Wicaksono
 * The efficacy of early childhood interventions in improving cognitive outcomes by Andrew Sabisky
 * Does intelligence explain over-representation of liberals and leftists in US academia? by Noah Carl
 * Well, colour me stupid! Secular declines and a Jensen effect on color acuity by Michael A. Woodley of Menie & Heitor B. F. Fernandes
 * Communicating our work to the public by James Thompson

London Conference on Intelligence, 2016

 * Welcome and Introduction by James Thompson
 * Sex differences in PISA: Some counterintuitive results by Gerhard Meisenberg and Michael A. Woodley of Menie
 * Total fertility rates, Big G and the cognitive metagene: A cross-country moderation analysis by Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Davide Piffer & Mateo A. Peñaherrera
 * Differential Demographic analysis of the destabilisation of Europe by Helmuth Nyborg
 * Evidence of dysgenic fertility in China by Mingrui Wang & John Fuerst
 * Evolutionary indicators for explaining cross-country differences in cognitive ability by Heiner Rindermann
 * Positive effects of intergroup competition upon in-group collectivism by Heitor B. F. Fernandes, Kenya Kura & Aurelio J. Figueredo
 * Sex differences in intelligence by Richard Lynn
 * The Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test by Guy Madison
 * Demographic, economic, and genetic factors related to national differences in ethnocentric attitudes by Edward Dutton, Guy Madison & Richard Lynn
 * ICAR5: a 5-item public domain cognitive test by Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær
 * Biogeographic Ancestry and Socioeconomic Outcomes in the Americas: a Meta-analysis by Emil Kirkegaard & John Fuerst
 * Publication bias: An exploratory meta-analysis by Jan te Nijenhuis & Xavier Macdaniel
 * Functional architecture of visual emotion recognition ability: A latent variable approach by Gary Lewis
 * The Welfare Trait: how state benefits affect personality by Adam Perkins
 * Population genetics in intelligence research: How much can it help to retrace the evolution of intelligence? by David Becker & Heiner Rindermann
 * Structural Equation Modeling by Fróði Debes, Arne Ludvig, Mariann Ellendersen, Katrin Reinert, Anna Sofía Veyhe, Pál Weihe & Philippe Granjean
 * Openness to Experience Predicts Leftism in the Right Tail of Intelligence by Noah Carl
 * Sex differences in brain size do translate into difference in general intelligence by Dimitri van der Linden & Curtis S. Dunkel
 * The Co-Occurrence Nexus Hypothesis by Aurelio J. Figueredo, Michael A. Woodley of Menie,  Heitor B. F. Fernandes, Mateo Peñaherrera Aguirre & Candace Jasmine Black

University College London
On 10 January 2018, UCL "suspended approval for any further conferences of this nature by the honorary lecturer and speakers pending our investigation into the case".

On 18 January 2018, UCL updated their statement concerning the London Conference on Intelligence:

"UCL does not and has not endorsed the London Conference on Intelligence and formally complained to Youtube that the use of UCL’s logo with videos posted by the conference organisers constituted a trademark infringement. There is no record of a request for the conference, and the logo being used is a doctored version which is in breach of UCL brand guidelines, including terms and conditions. The videos are no longer publicly available on the conference’s Youtube channel. After requests from the university, the organiser said he would remove the entire channel from Youtube."

There was an ongoing inquiry that "aims to complete its investigations as soon as possible, hopefully within weeks". However, their report was not published until February 2020 and many were disappointed with it because it did not investigate the London Conference on Intelligence meetings on eugenics.



Protests and petitions
On 15 January 2018, Union UCL BME Students' Network organised a protest: "Decolonise: White Supremacists & Eugenicists out NOW".

A related protest on the same day, "No to neo-Nazi eugenics at UCL" was supported by Unite Against Fascism and 

UCL Student Union have created an online petition to ban future London Conference on Intelligence at UCL.

Toby Young
Young has since published a statement distancing himself from the London Conference on Intelligence he had attended:

He concludes by describing speakers at the conference he met as "right-wing fruitcakes":

Just because I sat at the back in a lecture room at UCL one afternoon, scribbling away in my reporter’s notepad, while some right-wing fruitcakes held forth about ‘dysgenics’ does not make me a Nazi.

Young himself is a hard right-wing conservative and has caused controversy for sending sexist tweets. London School of Economics academic Simon Hix has defended Young: "By all means criticise [Young] for his insulting, misogynist and childish tweeting, and his friendship with Boris and Conservative chums. But the guy is not a neo-Nazi eugenicist."

Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
On 10 January 2018, Emil Kirkegaard appeared on white supremacist Tara McCarthy's YouTube channel to discuss the furore over the London Conference on Intelligence.

McCarthy named the video "SJWs Declare WAR On Science!"

Institute for Creation Research
Creationists such as the Institute for Creation Research have condemned the conferences for promoting eugenics and racism, which they claim is the result of scientific Darwinism. In reality, creationist nutjobs and far-right eugenicists/proponents of social Darwinism (not to be confused with scientific Darwinism), are opposite sides of the same coin.

White nationalists

 * White nationalists from the far-right website VDARE published an article defending the conferences.
 * The Unz Review published an article defending the conferences, written by Anatoly Karlin.
 * Occidental Observer published an anti-Semitic article attacking journalists who have criticized the conferences.

Woodley et al. 2018
15 speakers who had attended the conferences cowrote a response in Intelligence complaining of "sensationalized" and "erroneous" media coverage. They point out only 2.7% of talks were about eugenics. However, a fairly large percentage (38.7%) were on race and intelligence. Furthermore, they fail to rebut the accurate description of the conferences as far-right, racist, sexist, and/or white supremacist since many speakers who attended hold some of these extreme views, e.g. Richard Lynn, Emil Kirkegaard, James Thompson, Adam Perkins, and Edward Dutton; additionally, Paul Irwing, a co-author of Woodley et al., is an infamous sexist who argues that women score on average 5 points lower than men in IQ tests and have higher conscientiousness and reading accuracy. Irwing's studies haven't been replicated, and have been criticized as pseudoscience; any difference between sexes in IQ scores is actually negligible (by <0.5 IQ point).