Mankind Quarterly

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Mankind Quarterly (MQ) is a far-right racialist pseudojournal published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research that supports hereditarianism.[1]

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it a "racist… pseudo-scholarly journal".[2] Saul Dubow describes it as "a pugnacious journal conceived by right-wing intellectuals as a reaction against the liberal antiracism of postwar anthropology".[3] It should not be confused with the widely respected anthropological journal Mankind (published since 1931, renamed in 1990 as The Australian Journal of Anthropology), which is published by Wiley.[4]

Several contributors to the Mankind Quarterly (including assistant editor Richard Lynn) have been bankrolled by grants from the Pioneer Fund, a far-right US-based organisation dedicated to promoting white supremacism and eugenics,[5] and whose founding members had Nazi sympathies.[6][7]

Curiously, the MQ has published black supremacists such as Clyde Winters.[8] However, this isn't too surprising when it is realised many of the journal's previous editorial board were white separatists who supported black separatist movements like the Nation of Islam and generally defended apartheid.

The journal under Gayre (1960 - 1978), while racist with a strong right-wing bias like the current editorial, published more diverse articles, some not related to race; Gayre himself had eccentric and unusual interests ranging from folklore of the Yeti,[9] heraldry, to alternative archaeological theories of Great Zimbabwe. Pearson in 1979 would shift MQ's content to focus almost exclusively on race and intelligence, later popularised by The Bell Curve debate in the early 1990s. The journal in January 2015 transferred to be published by Richard Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research; its current editor-in-chief is Gerhard Meisenberg who is known for his links to white supremacists.[10][11]

Since being transferred to Ulster Institute for Social Research the MQ serves little more than a vanity press for Richard Lynn and his mini-me (and probable future successor) Emil Kirkegaard. Since mainstream science journals refuse to publish Kirkegaard's pseudoscience on race, he now regularly gets Lynn to publish his junk in Mankind Quarterly. Most contemporary writers for MQ are associated with Kirkegaard's OpenPsych pseudojournals.

A recent example of the pseudoscientific nature and shoddiness of the journal can be seen in George Francis and Emil Kirkegaard's paper arguing black men have the biggest penis size based on an unreliable survey of 129 American female sex workers.[12] Kirkegaard was (and may still be) the domain owner for Mankind Quarterly.[13][14]

In the most recent issue of Mankind Quarterly (December 2023), Kirkegaard has authored 6 articles, so he is obviously heavily involved with the journal.[15]

History[edit]

MQ was founded in 1960 in Edinburgh, Scotland by its editor Robert Gayre, and the first journal issue was published in July from his townhouse at 1 Darnaway St, Stockbridge, Edinburgh.[16] Figures associated with it in the 1960s included "honorary" associate editors: Reginald Ruggles Gates, Henry Garrett, Corrado GiniWikipedia (who replaced Gates after his death) and Frank C. J. McGurk; in the 1970s other members of its editorial board included Cyril Burt, Hans Eysenck, and Richard Lynn.[17] The journal's launch was funded by a $2500 donation from textile baron Wickliffe Draper, a regular donor to segregationist and anti-Civil Rights Act causes. Mankind Quarterly was closely linked to Draper's International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), at one point being given for free to IAAEE members.[18] The cover page of the first edition had a little vignette showing white and Asian heads looking upwards, and beneath them a black head captioned "H Africanus", suggesting the wholly unscientific viewpoint that black Africans were a different and lower species.[19] Gayre and colleagues in 1962 published an editorial claiming the logo of Mankind Quarterly was in no way "weighted" against the "black race".[20]

Another of the founders was Reginald Gates, but who died two years after the publication of the first issue. Gates, was a controversial botanist who was forced out of a position at Howard University in 1947 for pushing racist theories "long since repudiated by objective scientists but associated with Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau, and even Hitler", according to the petition against him. Opposing miscegenation while working at a historically black university is not a smart career move, but Gates blamed his declining career on an international Jewish conspiracy blocking publication of his articles, although his work was very outdated as he never updated his methodologies to take account of the development of genetics as a research technique. He was friends with the British anthropologist Arthur Keith who wrote to Gates "I am altogether with you about the Cuckoo race and now understand Hitler's attitude." Gates was involved in the foundation of Mankind Quarterly through correspondence with Gayre and Henry Garrett, a retired psychology processor who kept himself busy advocating for segregation and acting as a so-called expert witness on the pro-segregation side in the many court cases fought in the US in the 1950s and 60s.[18]

Mankind Quarterly had some academic respectability in its first year of publication, with an advisory board that included the Slovene anthropologist and concentration camp survivor Božo ŠkerljWikipedia and its July 1960 issue had published an article by the physicist Charles Galton DarwinWikipedia a grandson of Charles Darwin. However, Darwin didn't publish anything after the first issue (probably owing to the controversial far-right political bias of the journal) and Škerlj quit the journal's board in August 1960, condemning the "abuse, for political motives, of the noble and dispassionate aims of anthropology", and saying "should [Gayre's] own condemnations of what he terms 'Aracialist Ultrapolymorphists' not imply that he is a racialist himself, then words have lost their meaning."[21] In response, Gayre sued Škerlj and the journal Man, claiming that Škerlj had implied that Mankind Quarterly had Nazi sympathies; despite the case being something of a stretch (at least for those not as attuned to traces of Nazism as the Mankind Quarterly staff), Škerlj died before it could come to trial and Man settled the action.[22] The anthropologist U. R. Ehrenfels, who had fled his homeland of Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazis, wrote a paper for the first edition, but later became a critic of MQ, launching an attack on the journal after Gayre decided to remove the final section of his article which condemned South African apartheid and far-right regimes.[19]

Once it came into print, any pretence it was other than extremely racist was destroyed and in private Gayre had admitted the main purpose of the MQ was to oppose UNESCO's The Race QuestionWikipedia. Furthermore, several articles of MQ in the 1960s, openly defended racial segregation on the basis of black mental inferiority and argued against a so-called "equalitarian dogma".[23] The first edition in July 1960 included an article by Henry Garrett attacking the 1954 UNESCO pamphlet Race and Psychology: Garrett asserted that "The weak, disease-ridden population of modern Egypt offers dramatic evidence of the evil effects of a hybridisation that has gone on for 5000 years. In Brazil, coastal Bahia with its negroid mixtures is primitive and backward as compared with the relatively advanced civilization of white southern Brazil", and so on round the world. This led to a condemnation in Science by Santiago Genoves, who accused the journal of "a resurgence of racism" and of an attempt to "use science, or rather pseudoscience, to try and establish postulates of racial superiority or inferiority based on biological differences". Vol 2 number 1 added a review by A James Gregor of Juan Comas's Racial myths (published by UNESCO in 1951), a review which according to Genoves was "full of totally unjustified personal attacks and insinuations", and according to Comas himself was based on an bad translation in an unauthorized 1961 edition.[24][19] Gates and Gayre both responded to these criticisms.[25][26] Gayre more or less admitted to being a white separatist, but denied being a white supremacist on the basis he had argued blacks were more talented than whites in performing music; this defence was though commonly used by white supremacists at the time such as Wesley Critz GeorgeWikipedia who argued in his pamphlet The Biology of the Race Problem (1962) that while blacks were mentally inferior to whites they had greater music ability.[27]

Man reviewed the journal's first year, with G. Ainsworth Harrison saying: "Few of the contributions have any merit whatsoever, and many are no more than incompetent attempts to rationalize irrational opinons", suggesting that Gayre had no familiarity with modern genetics, and hoping that the journal would "succumb before it can further discredit anthropology and do more damage to mankind."[28] MQ however attracted some non-racist article writers for its reputation publishing in controversial areas; Robert Gayre for example was himself interested in cryptozoology and he allowed various papers on cryptids e.g. Yeti and Bigfoot to be published.[29][30] Gayre held unorthodox views on Great Zimbabwe and published articles[31] related to his fringe-views about its archaeology. He also published book reviews on subjects as diverse as astronomy to heraldry (Gayre was a specialist in the latter).

The journal by the late 1960s was less antisemitic than some of its founders but did publish two articles on the extent to which Jews controlled the "American elite"; however it was more focused on supporting segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa than anti-Semitism.[18] On the other hand, Otmar Freiherr von VerschuerWikipedia, a Nazi Party member, eugenicist and teacher of Josef Mengele, whose work made use of Mengele's research at Auschwitz; briefly served as an "honorary" associate editor to MQ (1966 - 1969).[32]

A year after Robert Gayre stepped down as editor-in-chief, Mankind Quarterly in 1979 moved to Washington DC, under the control of Roger Pearson's Council for Social and Economics Studies; British-born Pearson who had re-located to the US in 1965, was the founder of the neo-Nazi organisation Northern LeagueWikipedia and was thrown out of the World Anti-Communist League for his Nazi links.[17][18][33] Pearson would later deny allegations of Nazism, claiming he left the Northern League when it became political. However, the organisation from its foundation was overtly racist. Under Pearson, the MQ shifted its focus to race and intelligence, later popularised by the controversy over The Bell Curve.

The editor-in-chief of MQ was described as "appointment pending" in 1979-1980 when Pearson took over, but oddly no editor-in-chief was ever listed between 1981 and 2014. When the MQ transferred to be published by Richard Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research in January 2015, Gerhard Meisenberg was listed as editor-in-chief, but he quit in 2018 and was replaced by Edward Dutton in 2019. It is most probable editor-in-chief of the Mankind Quarterly between 1979 and 2014 was Roger Pearson who published the journal through the Institute for the Study of Man (a publishing-house owned by his Council for Social and Economics Studies).[34] Gerhard Meisenberg later returned to Mankind Quarterly and is the current editor-in-chief.[10]

Some contributors to MQ[edit]

Editor-in-chief[edit]

Assistant Editor[edit]

Current Advisory Board[edit]

Individuals who have published in MQ[edit]

Ulster Institute for Social Research[edit]

Ulster Institute for Social Research, a small British think-tank that publishes reports on racial differences, human evolution, and IQ. The organization is run by Richard Lynn, a controversial scholar popular among those who argue that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people
—Michael Schulson[42]

The Mankind Quarterly is currently published by Ulster Institute for Social Research which was founded by Richard Lynn after he had retired from working at the University of Ulster[43] which would have been around 1995. This pseudoinstitute was formerly a registered company in 2017-2019 with a London address.[44] Six months after Lynn's death, a new company was registered as a correspondence at the same address named Exeter Research Limited. The company was created by Matthew and Sophia Lynn, relatives of Richard.[45] The company is classified under "research and experimental development on social sciences and humanities".[46] The institute has never published a list of its research fellows. However, John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, Edward Dutton and Davide Piffer have described themselves as fellows on their social media profiles. The website for the institute only lists an advisory council: "Edward Miller, Professor Helmuth Nyborg, Professor Donald Templer, Professor Andrei Grigoriev, Dr James Thompson, Professor Gerhard Meisenberg."[47]

Emil Kirkegaard's affiliation[edit]

The Ulster Institute for Social Research and its secretary Huw Gruffydd in February 2024 wrote a letter stating Emil Kirkegaard was falsely claiming to be affiliated to the institute and therefore accused him of lying.[48] In their own words, "he is not, as he claims, affiliated to the Ulster Institute." Despite this, Kirkegaard as of March 2024 was still describing himself as a "research fellow" at the Ulster Institute on his social media profiles (including Facebook), OpenPsych forum, and on his Google Scholar page.[49][50][51] It is possible that Kirkegaard remains affiliated to the Ulster Institute but the institute published a deliberately incorrect statement to hide his connections and prevent service of court papers since (according to the letter) he is being sued and legal documents were sent to the institute's mailbox. The latter would explain why the institute has anonymized their domain registry records to conceal the fact Kirkegaard is the domain registrant (see below).

On 6 March 2024, Kirkegaard replaced his affiliation on all his OpenPsych papers from the Ulster Institute for Social Research to "Arthur Jensen Institute." For example, a co-authored paper in September 2023 with John Fuerst has suddenly been changed.[52][53] No evidence for the Arthur Jensen Institute appears to exist and looks like something he made up.

In response to the controversy, Kirkegaard has posted emails he recieved from Richard Lynn asking him to be a fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research in April and May 2016.[54][55] These emails, however, do not mention when he stopped becoming affiliated meaning he could have lied years later. Adding to the controversy is the fact Kirkegaard has contradicted the date he became a fellow on his LinkedIn profile(s) which state he has been a research fellow since January 2016 (a discrepancy of 3-4 months) and still questionably claims to be a fellow as of March 2024.[56][57] The emails further reveal the fact the Ulster Institute is an 'institute' in name only. Research fellows are usually postdoctorates or at least obtain their doctorates during the early stage of their research fellowship. Kirkegaard, in contrast, merely holds a bachelor's degree. He also appears to have done no actual research, with Lynn writing a fellowship at his institute has no "practical implications."[58]

Domain registrant[edit]

Emil Kirkegaard was the public registrant owner of Mankind Quarterly between 2017 and February 2023, after which point the WhoIs data was anonymised.[13][14] He is likely to still be the registrant since the most recent issue of Mankind Quarterly (December 2023), has 6 articles by Kirkegaard so he seems to be heavily involved with the journal.[15]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Draper’s Millions: The Philanthropic Wellspring of Modern Race Science. race.undark.org.
  2. Richard Lynn: Southern Poverty Law Center.

    [Richard Lynn] also sits on the editorial committee of Mankind Quarterly, a pseudo-scholarly journal dedicated to publishing “articles in controversial areas, including behavioral group differences and the importance of mental ability for individual outcomes and group differences” — a thinly veiled admission that they primarily print racist pseudoscience.

  3. Dubow, Saul. (2015). "Racial Irredentism, Ethnogenesis, and White Supremacy in High-Apartheid South Africa". Kronos. 41: 236-264; Dubow is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth HistoryWikipedia at the University of Cambridge.
  4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1757-6547/issues
  5. Miller, Adam. (1994). "The Pioneer Fund: Bankrolling the Professors of Hate". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. 6: 58-61.
  6. Lombardo, Paul A. (2001). "The American breed: Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund." Alb. L. Rev. 65: 743-830.
  7. Tucker, William H. (2002). "A closer look at the Pioneer Fund: Response to Rushton." Alb. L. Rev. 66: 1145.
  8. Clyde Winters. (1986). "The Migration Routes of the Proto-Mande". The Mankind Quarterly. 27(1), 77-96.
  9. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-the-tip-of-the-white-iceberg-1601577.html
  10. 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Editorial Panel. mankindquarterly.org.
  11. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/eugenics-racism-mainstream-science
  12. Racial Differences in Sexuality: A Sex Worker Survey. researchgate.net.
  13. 13.0 13.1 the.dfx@gmail.com. Website Informer. Archived.
  14. 14.0 14.1 Jason Wilson (January 14, 2024). "Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists". The Guardian. Quote: "Emil OW Kirkegaard is a Danish writer with a degree in linguistics – not a biological or genetic field – and no higher degree. He is a self-described eugenicist, explicitly advocates 'race science', and is a senior fellow at the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), an organization headed by Richard Lynn, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a white nationalist. ... According to WhoIs records, Kirkegaard was the registrant of the website for UISR’s journal Mankind Quarterly between 2017 and February 2023, after which point the WhoIs was anonymised. Mankind Quarterly, which like UISR was funded by the white nationalist Pioneer Fund, is widely held to be a cornerstone in the recent revival of scientific racism."
  15. 15.0 15.1 Current Issue. mankindquarterly.org.
  16. "Racism and the barmy Laird of Nigg", Linklater, Magnus, The Times (London, England), Wednesday, November 23, 1994, Issue 65119, p.18, via Gale/Times Digital Archive
  17. 17.0 17.1 "Mankind Quarterly Again", Roland Littlewood, Comment, Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 17-18 (2 pages), via JSTOR
  18. 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 "'Scientific' Racism Again?": Reginald Gates, the "Mankind Quarterly" and the Question of "Race" in Science after the Second World War, Gavin Schaffer, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Aug., 2007), pp. 253-278 (26 pages), JSTOR
  19. 19.0 19.1 19.2 "Mankind Quarterly Under Heavy Criticism: 3 Comments on Editorial Practices", U. R. Ehrenfels, T. N. Madan and Juan Comas, Current Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Apr., 1962), pp. 154-158 (5 pages), via JSTOR
  20. http://www.unz.com/print/MankindQuarterly-1962apr-00280/
  21. "The Mankind Quarterly", Božo Škerlj, Corresponence, Man, Vol. 60 (Nov., 1960), pp. 172-173 (2 pages), via JSTOR
  22. 104. Settlement of Action for Damages for Libel, Man, Vol. 65 (Jul. - Aug., 1965), p. 118 (1 page)
  23. http://www.unz.com/print/MankindQuarterly-1961apr-00253/
  24. "Racism and The Mankind Quarterly", Santiago Genoves, Science New Series, Vol. 134, No. 3493 (Dec. 8, 1961), pp. 1928-1930+1932 (4 pages), via JSTOR
  25. "Mankind Quarterly: Gates and Gregor Reply to Critics". Current Anthropology. 4(1): 119-121.
  26. http://www.unz.com/print/MankindQuarterly-1961oct-00079/
  27. http://www.ep.tc/biologyoftheraceproblem/
  28. "Review: The Mankind Quarterly. by R. Gayre of Gayre", G. Ainsworth Harrison, Man, Vol. 61 (Sep., 1961), pp. 163-164 (2 pages), via JSTOR
  29. http://www.unz.com/print/MankindQuarterly-1975jan-00163/
  30. "Yeti-Still a Question Mark" Mankind Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1975): 123-26.
  31. "The Lembas and Vendas of Vendaland". (1967). The Mankind Quarterly. Edinburgh. VIII: 3–15.
  32. Far-right may fund `racist' lecturer, The Independent, 21 April 1996
  33. See the Wikipedia article on Roger Pearson (anthropologist).
  34. Winston, A. S. (1996). The context of correctness: A comment on Rushton. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 5(2), 231-250.

    The General Editor was listed as "appointment pending" in 1979-80. After 1980, no Editor-in-Chief was ever listed, only the Editorial Committee of Hans W. Jurgens (who recently provided head size data for Rushton, 1994) and Richard Lynn, later joined by others. It is unusual for an academic journal not to have an Editor-in-Chief. In contrast, Pearson is clearly listed as editor of the Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies. As Tucker (1994) noted, the manuscript submissions, subscriptions and all business of Mankind Quarterly was handled at Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man, of which he was President

    .
  35. Testing the Replicability of High Jewish Scores on the General Factor of Personality. mankindquarterly.org.
  36. Race and intelligence an alternative hypothesis. mankindquarterly.org.
  37. Human skin color: the sexual differentiation of its social perception. mankindquarterly.org.
  38. Early Modern Witches and Demonic Sexual Fantasies: An Evolutionary Perspective. edwarddutton.com.
  39. Does IQ Cause Race Differences in Well-being?. mankindquarterly.org.
  40. Cognitive Sex Differences: Evolution and History. mankindquarterly.org.
  41. [Continental Genetic Ancestry Source Correlates with Global Cognitive Ability Score Continental Genetic Ancestry Source Correlates with Global Cognitive Ability Score]. mankindquarterly.org.
  42. https://undark.org/article/kevin-macdonald-anti-semitism-psychology/
  43. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/08/31/richard-lynn-evolutionary-psychologist-eugenics-obituary/
  44. https://lei.info/213800GMGBFR6HE44A21
  45. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15369383/officers
  46. https://suite.endole.co.uk/insight/company/15369383-exter-research-limited
  47. Ulster Institute for Social Research: Academic Advisory Council
  48. https://www.pinkerite.com/2024/03/so-what-exactly-is-deal-with-emil-o-w.html
  49. https://archive.is/buqOj
  50. https://archive.is/E5JCp
  51. https://archive.is/g45Le
  52. https://web.archive.org/web/20230930123546/https://openpsych.net/paper/74/
  53. https://openpsych.net/paper/74/
  54. https://www.pinkerite.com/2024/03/thanks-for-reading-emil-o-w-kirkegaard.html
  55. https://archive.is/bXG41
  56. https://archive.is/l6RlJ
  57. https://archive.is/ADlmY
  58. https://archive.is/bXG41