Confronting the “Weaponization” of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere

On May 14, 2022, a heavily armed gunman stormed a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. He shot thirteen Black people, killing ten, before police captured him. Prior to the rampage, he had released an online “manifesto” decrying the “great replacement” of white people by Black people, orchestrated by Jews. This racist outlook was not mere hate, he claimed, but justified by data. He foregrounded genetics studies and figures to purportedly demonstrate the genetic distinctiveness of Black people and the genetic causation of racial differences in intelligence and crime. These included figures that cluster populations by genetic variants, track the relatedness of populations by the characteristic versions of sex chromosomes among them, purport to link chromosome lengths to intelligence, and list genetic variants associated with educational attainment whose frequencies differ between Black and white people.

The same materials in the shooter’s manifesto often circulate in toxic online cultures of extreme right-wing discourse, where other memes, graphs, data points, and factoids drawn from human genetics are also shared. These materials are often relabeled as part of the “human biodiversity” movement—the racial realist “study of human genetics and how they are responsible for our inclinations, behaviors, preferences, abilities, intelligence, life span, and other attributes.”¹ Beyond influencing these shooters, this movement has extensive reach, high and low. Journalists have linked figures in the Trump administration, the Boris Johnson administration, and right-wing think tanks to human biodiversity websites.² And New York Times journalist Amy Harmon has documented the ideas’ wide spread online.³

A postgenomic conundrum is emerging. Just as human geneticists can claim genetics is a force for good—catalyzing rare-condition therapies, health screening diagnostics, social science partnerships, and efforts to address health disparities—genetic findings and figures are being promulgated as authoritative justifications for racism, antisemitism, eugenic imaginaries, and terroristic violence.

We have been engaged since 2015 in a project about the uses of scientific research by white nationalists and far-right political movements, and we contend that a “citizen science movement” now drives much scientific racism.⁴ Scientific racism is usually pinned on a cadre of hereditarian geneticists, psychologists, and anthropologists within the academy. And citizen science is typically understood as a salutary, democratizing impulse that makes science more responsive to ordinary people’s concerns. Yet the citizen scientific racism (CSR) we’ve analyzed is driven largely by people without certified positions or credentials (some of whom forge partnerships with academics, thus blurring scientific boundaries) and an antidemocratic politics aiming to naturalize social hierarchies and discriminatory policies. CSR is decentralized but not disorganized; it uses recusant and problematic knowledge practices but is not antiscience or scientifically ignorant; it manifests mainly in a variety of online spaces with different reach and affordances (far-right media, blogs, and discussion boards; mainstream and extreme-right social media; and online journals); and it involves actors with various motivations and talents. But this tacit social movement is unified by a fixation on racial biology, inegalitarian and right-wing politics, and a perception of the corruption of a scientific mainstream that refuses racial hereditarian interpretations.

Human genetics can confront its CSR problem, but it must take a new approach to do so. Human geneticists tend to see their field as the victim of random bad guys executing an unrelated ideological program, but this view misunderstands that CSR exploits conceptual and social features of human genetics, as we will explain below. Further, although human genetics is diverse and fragmented, CSR draws from across its domains: the social and behavioral, population, medical, and ancient-DNA subfields are all targets. We make three general recommendations implicating different parts of human genetics (and bioethics) in order to make the field less easily exploited by white nationalists and to mitigate damage.

First, we criticize the “weaponization” or “misappropriation” frames for understanding white nationalist activities. We argue that all human geneticists should change research practices that feed eugenic and racist thinking. Second, we describe the talents that actors within the CSR movement exercise as online propagandists and how different human geneticists must improve their communication game. And third, we show how features of human genetics’ epistemological practices and culture—especially in the behavioral subfield—have facilitated CSR’s exploitation of its science and legitimacy and recommend strategies for institutional reform to restrict access.

Weaponization and Misappropriation, or Chekhov Sighed

When materials from human genetics are attached to far-right political arguments, scientists often complain that their ideas are being “misappropriated” and “weaponized.” This disavowal is certainly necessary. Scientists should call out arguments that involve incorrect or fallacious understandings of genetics. Imagine the consequences of the genetics mainstream endorsing or staying silent about racism, eugenics, and fascist violence. Geneticists’ objections to misappropriation are what sociologists call “boundary work”—seeking to preserve the autonomy and legitimacy of science by defining this racism as non- or antiscientific.

While boundary work acknowledges a problem, it does so by externalizing it and limiting responsibility. The language of “weaponization” implies that genetics’ ideas are inherently benign or neutral but are turned into weapons. Yet genetics is already a weapon, historically and currently. In a society with massive economic, educational, and health inequalities and where racist ideologies run rampant, studies that correlate genes to these outcomes and racial groups have political meaning and social effects.

We cannot forget that, for at least half of their history, from Francis Galton to World War II, the sciences of heredity were enthusiastically racist, as the history of eugenics demonstrates. After World War II, the field tried to reform this history, though perhaps without deeply changing its ideas or ethos: vocal antiracist scientists—for example, Stephen J. Gould, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Lewontin, and Steven Rose—were often dismissed as letting their leftism pollute their science. In the last decade or two, the human genetics mainstream has taken on at least some of their views and tried to criticize more directly ideas about race and eugenics.⁵ Thus, if genetic studies treating race as real and racial differences as biologically determined are considered misappropriations, this is a recent development.

In this vein, it is often said that geneticists know race to be socially constructed and not biological.⁶ But this is only partly true. First, human genetics, which comprises populational, medical, psychiatric, and behavioral subfields, is heterogeneous both across and within subfields. There are leading medical geneticists, statistical geneticists, and ancient-DNA specialists who explicitly say that races are genetically real (or real enough) and that genetics cause racial differences in health and, some add, cognition.⁷ Furthermore, there is a massive archive of research that treats social categories as if they’re genetic categories through research designs comparing genetic differences between people from different socially designated racial groups.

Even human geneticists who reject race as an adequate representation of human diversity sometimes conduct research that makes race appear genetic. For example, going to the centers of continents, selecting individuals whose known ancestors come from populations believed to be genetically “isolated,” and comparing them to geographically distant others boosts signals of genetic difference in ways that make “races” appear continentally defined and clearly distinct. Admixture and genetic distance techniques implicitly assume that “pure” biological types (read “races”) are the norm and “mixed” individuals or groups the aberration.

Consider figure 1 (available online; see the “Supporting Information” section at the end of this essay). Antiracist geneticist Jedidiah Carlson cites this as an example of how white nationalists weaponize scientific figures by making them appear to confirm racial realism.⁸ In this figure, white nationalists added the title “The Genetic Reality of Race,” the label “(Pre-European Diaspora),” and the author credit to Xing. Carlson identifies these alterations as misdirection, but the racialized logic shines through without them. To the racially motivated or just naïve viewer, it appears to show not only that races are real and genetic, but that Black people (rather, “Africans”) are very different from everyone else. Indeed, you need many sophisticated caveats and considerable background knowledge of genetics to unsee its racial implications.

Figure 1. Sample of a “Weaponized” Genetic Figure.

This figure comes from J. Carlson, “Spread This Like Wildfire,” Science for the People (blog), September 26, 2022, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/spread-this-like-wildfire. Permission for its use has been granted by Science for the People.

Arguably more important than geneticists’ racialized data collection and visualization practices are the quasi-determinist practices animating genetics research. Geneticists rarely measure environments, social contexts, or real-world complexities of ethno-racial identification; they focus on genes, basic population labels, and phenotypic outcomes. They acknowledge the importance of contexts and environments but explain that contexts and environments are difficult to operationalize and expensive to study. That’s understandable, but when people interpret the results of such decontextualized, gene-centric studies in bio-determinist ways, can we really say that this is a misappropriation?

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired before the play ends. Human genetics has shopped at the gun store, cleaned and oiled the purchase, loaded and calibrated the weapon, and left it on a low table in the kids’ playroom. None of this excuses what the CSR movement is doing with the field’s research. But pretending that weaponization is a new and troubling misappropriation of genetics ignores human genetics’ historic partnership with eugenic movements and the ongoing fit of its practices and products with racialist and determinist thinking.

We recommend that human geneticists in behavioral as well as less “sensitive” subfields push further than ethical labeling and historical reflections to reform mundane research practices—that is, to “deweaponize” genetics. These mundane research practices may not involve the enthusiastically racist research logics of early eugenic thinking, but they involve a decontextualized research logic that is still continuous with the racialist and genocentric assumptions of eugenic thinking. Some geneticists have begun to take seriously the idea that racial genetic comparisons, especially for socially sensitive traits, demand greater scrutiny and special justification, and perhaps should not be undertaken at all.⁹ Some call for more education and reflection on the legacy of eugenics. We welcome this new trend but would push further so that it does not become the next frontier of defensive boundary work. Until human geneticists learn the lessons of their field’s history and reform their assumptions and research practices, the field is going to be a careless gun owner, and perhaps a tacit arms dealer.

Raising the Propaganda Game

The CSR movement is comprised of masters of propaganda, and this presents substantial challenges to the scientific community and their efforts to communicate nonracist conclusions from the research. Let’s return to the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, which included figures from scientific studies purporting to show the genetic distinctiveness of Black people and Jews, behavioral genetics findings about racial IQ differences, and a large table of alleles associated with educational attainment and their lower frequencies in Black people compared to white people. Was this the work of a misguided philosopher/murderer drawing conclusions after poring through the primary literature? No. These were materials processed, packaged, and distributed by the CSR movement. The result is ambient racist nonsense in easily digestible units in many quarters of the internet, which contributes to the violent radicalization of some young men and the confusion of others.

Our ethnography has revealed a diverse ecosystem of race science promulgated online. This starts with Mankind Quarterly (the archetypal scientific racism journal), race science vanity journals, and various hereditarian psychology journals; continues with far-right magazines like American Renaissance, VDare, and Taki’s Magazine; includes many blogs about “human biological diversity” (a euphemism for racial essentialism); continues with message boards like Stormfront, 4chan, and Reddit; and is gathered and distributed in archives and collections via Google Drive, Pastebin, and Iron March, from which the content is often cut and pasted across sites. It is an extraordinarily diverse set of venues involving a substantial (and unknowable) number of participants with a robust division of labor aiming to preserve and freely distribute scientific racist objects. This media system is well beyond the reach of any strategy of content moderation.

Many kinds of materials are disseminated. These include scientific racism “classics” from Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray; articles from a newer generation of racial hereditarians (discussed below); and ordinary genetics publications (often interpreted, as discussed above, in a hyperracialized way). Elements of scholarly publications like data tables or figures are often excised and circulated. Racial crime and IQ statistics are especially popular. But the most notable items are the racial memes. Some are scientific images reprocessed to racialize them. Others are produced de novo, relying on images, analogical argumentation, decontextualized factoids, appeals to common sense, and humor or irony to make the case for the biological reality of race and racial differences—or, indeed, misogynous or homophobic claims. These rhetorical features, plus their easily circulatable nature, make memes powerful tools of online communication. (For examples, see figure 2, available online, as explained in the “Supporting Information” section below.)

Figure 2.

Sample Scientific Racist Memes

Human geneticists have responded to racist uses and misuses of their science in a variety of ways. Too often, they have disavowed responsibility; this has been especially true of psychological and behavioral geneticists. Recently, some, especially social scientists using genetics, have promulgated FAQs to head off misinterpretations of potentially controversial papers.¹⁰ Groups of geneticists, anthropologists, and sociologists and several professional genetics associations have published explainers targeting the general public.¹¹ There have also been efforts to revitalize science education for high school and college students to foreground nonracist interpretations of biology.¹² And there is a set of younger geneticists who devote considerable effort to battling racist interpretations of genetics on social media.¹³

These efforts are essential and deserve plaudits, but we believe them to be inadequate to the communicative task at hand. There are several complicating asymmetries at play. First, antiracist conversation in the public sphere rarely engages with biology and genetics. Antiracists claim that race is socially constructed on historical, philosophical, and political grounds, noting, for example, the impermanence of ostensibly “natural” racial categories and that science was historically a handmaiden of racism and eugenics. This allows racial hereditarians to portray themselves as hard-nosed and science-oriented in contrast to those who promote humanities-oriented antiracism.

Second, sober FAQs and bioethical deliberations have limited purchase in the online world. Racial hereditarians are aided by the decontextualization of scientific factoids and appeals to “common sense” (itself shaped by hundreds of years of white supremacy). To understand why an image of genetic data clustered into continental groups is not actually evidence for race or why the visual comparison of canids, apes, and humans cannot illuminate species differences, one must have a good deal of background knowledge of concepts, of the gathering and processing of genetic data, and of alternative explanations for observed patterns. Third, the division of labor is unsustainable: young antiracist geneticists invest considerable labor in online combat, while behavioral geneticists and medical geneticists whose work most often appears in CSR venues mostly avoid the fray.

We recommend new strategies of communication and education to confront the skill and flexibility of the CSR movement. First, more human geneticists, especially those whose subfields appear most frequently, need to seize responsibility and spread the load. Second, beyond sober FAQs and new genetics curricula, what’s needed is antiracist material that can compete squarely with the directness and accessibility of curated memes and rehearsed claims of the CSR movement. People encountering pseudoscientific hate online should not struggle to identify specific debunking resources. Human geneticists, bioethics partners, and professional science communicators need to think about a bold strategy to challenge racist enemies and arm antiracist allies with accessible and appealing materials, or otherwise consider the role they play in sustaining an information environment in which it is easier to find repurposed scientific material that dehumanizes rather than respects the dignity of social minorities. Rather than lengthy documentaries, classroom curricula, or sober statements from expert panels, think racism debunking toolkits or memes for good that are easily understood, can be easily disseminated, and that challenge the arch and ironic style mobilized so effectively by the CSR movement. The field should find ways to fund and credit these activities. Professional associations and funders, for example, might start fellowships to support the labor of online debunking and the development of novel materials. And human geneticists might acknowledge these activities for tenure and promotion. Such changes might reward those engaged in this hard work and incentivize more to undertake it.

Confronting Counterscience

Perhaps the most confounding (yet impressive) feature of the CSR movement is its move beyond curating, reinterpreting, and distributing preexisting scientific works to creating a counterscience of alternate scientific institutions with the aim of replicating scientific structures, producing new heterodox “knowledge,” and influencing the scientific mainstream. They have written articles with racial hereditarian analyses of genetic, psychological, and sociological data; established or commandeered online journals to publish this work; and partnered with professional disciplinary scientists.¹⁴ (Counterscience, it should be noted, is not necessarily pseudoscience, which is the fallacious misapplication of scientific methods, though it is at risk of becoming pseudoscientific because of its heterodox stance and outsider status with respect to legitimate scientific institutions, including the ways faulty scientific practices and claims are disciplined.)

To create this counterscience, the CSR movement has exploited several features of the science and institutions of human genetics. One is the nature of human genetics research, which is often statistical or computational and involves data sources frequently shared among researchers. An internet connection and a statistical package make up most of the necessary kit to do research. Publishable findings might consist of correlations triangulating a trait, genetic variants (or simply “controlling” genetic difference via family studies), and groups of people.

But what has also made this counterscience possible is the open evidentiary culture of parts of human genetics—especially social and behavioral genetics. In Harry Collins’s definition, relatively open evidentiary cultures have lower thresholds for establishing the importance of research claims and strength of evidence, and they assign responsibility for validity to the field (with little penalty to individual groups for faulty claims).¹⁵ Relatively closed evidentiary cultures have high standards for establishing the importance of research claims and the strength of evidence, and the individual group takes strong responsibility for the validity of results (to preserve professional honor). To Collins, neither is inherently superior, and in the domains of physics he compared, the stakes were mainly styles of science and professional prestige. But in social and behavioral genetics, the stakes are much higher, and the open evidentiary culture is a welcome mat to counterscience.

Richard Haier, the longtime editor of Intelligence, the leading journal in intelligence research, trumpeted the journal’s openness: “I decided that it’s better to deal with these things with sunlight and by inclusion. . . . The area of the relationship between intelligence and group differences is probably the most incendiary area in the whole of psychology. And some of the people who work in that area have said incendiary things. . . . I prefer to let the papers and the data speak for themselves.”¹⁶ Intelligence has a long history of publishing hereditarian articles on racial intelligence differences. There has been a recent uptick in articles featuring individuals that we would identify as part of the counterscience movement—engaging in hereditarian race research but lacking PhDs, unaffiliated with a university, and publishing in online or vanity journals related to intelligence or hereditarianism. Beyond Intelligence, Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, an American Psychological Association journal, and other less prestigious outlets have also published this sort of work.

Many of these articles were rebutted after publication and revealed to have errors that would have resulted in failure to pass peer review in journals edited by nonbehavioral geneticists. For example, Curtis Dunkel and colleagues used polygenic scores to argue that Jews have a cognitive advantage relative to Christians, but they did not attend to “population stratification” (accidental, noncausal genetic differences among populations that can lead to spurious findings), which produces the religious-polygenic correlation.¹⁷ Davide Piffer created a nine-allele polygenic IQ index to calculate average values for various countries and ethnic groups, engaging in ecological reasoning and other faults from which no genetic conclusions can be drawn.¹⁸ And Bryan Pesta and colleagues, who did a meta-analysis of heritability studies of intelligence of different racial groups to argue that genes cause racial educational deficits, were subsequently charged with a range of flaws and interpretive errors, including not recognizing that their best datum demonstrated the point they tried to falsify.¹⁹

On the one hand, we can celebrate these debates. This is an open scientific culture working as it should. Many claimants have access to the means of research. They publish their ideas with few barriers. Their claims are subject to the scrutiny of other scholars. We have conjectures and refutations; science marches forward. But there are at least two problems. First, what a waste of time! Science is difficult and expensive, and papers like these cost the field substantial resources to process and reject. Human geneticists often discuss the dilemma of engaging this pseudoscience. It takes time; it distracts from a positive research agenda on real topics; and engagement is also a form of legitimation. Even if the counterscience claims are demolished, at least those who make them can be proud to have been taken seriously. Further, as with the online combat above, the burden falls to motivated antiracist scholars. Most behavioral and psychological geneticists do not get involved.

Second, open evidentiary cultures work best only when other scientists are involved. Given the status of race and genetics in society and the propaganda skills of this movement, there is a large potential public audience for counterscientific claims about race. Steve Bannon, Trump’s modern-day Machiavelli, proclaimed “flooding the zone with shit” as his political strategy for winning the public debate. With so many competing claims, nonsense, and misinformation, fact checkers and “well, actually” pundits can’t keep up. By merely existing, occupying professional bandwidth, and muddying the waters of what’s true and legitimate knowledge, this counterscience performs a valuable service to the CSR movement even if every single claim is decisively falsified.

Other parts of the human genetics field, such as population genetics, have a more closed evidentiary culture than psychological and behavioral genetics. Population geneticists with whom we have spoken express extreme caution in attaching their names to any statement they do not think is ironclad. In recent years, at least, many are quite cautious about the rigor of racial differences claims. For example, an article by Fernando Racimo and colleagues developed a method to model selection on polygenic traits.²⁰ When their method produced a signal appearing to indicate that certain Asian populations experienced positive selection for alleles linked to educational attainment—perhaps confirming a social stereotype—the authors included several hundred words of qualification and alternative explanations to caution against face-value “racial” interpretations. The journal also attached a commentary with several more pages of interpretive cautions and nonracial explanations. Note that research was not suppressed and academic freedom was preserved, but the research was coupled with high evidentiary and significance standards, and responsibility for conducting and presenting the research appropriately was on the researchers and the field. Human population genetics highlights the virtues of a closed epistemic culture and rejects the false choice between laissez faire science and suppression of forbidden knowledge.

We contend that all parts of human genetics, and especially the behavioral, sociogenomic, and psychological subdisciplines, need to model this more-closed evidentiary culture, and we offer a few recommendations for the difficult work of making such changes. First, concerned stakeholders should clarify the meaning and purpose of consensus. As an example, we turn to a 2023 Hastings Center project that explored social and behavioral genomics and defined racial comparisons for socially sensitive traits to constitute research of “greatest concern,” demanding “compelling justification” and specific standards of methodological rigor.²¹ This is a salutary development and represents a move toward a less open evidentiary culture. The CSR-aligned papers that continue to appear are far from the thresholds of significance and evidence in the report, but a lot of mainstream human genetics, in particular, behavioral genetics, might not rise above either. Will researchers heed these standards? Further, are these new standards envisioned as criteria for judging research after it’s published or standards that might prevent publication? Though post hoc evaluation is important—and distilled versions of evaluative criteria that are easy to understand and apply would be examples of the positive “propaganda” tools we mentioned above—we think it is key that this exercise in consensus be oriented toward prevention, given CSR dissemination practices.

Second, considering that data availability and reuse have been among the community features that have made human genetics vulnerable to counterscience, restricting access might be part of the strategy for closing the evidentiary culture. Data repositories and consortia are beginning to take these actions.²² Some scientists have argued that restriction is a totalitarian affront to scientific freedom,²³ but restriction need not be direct prohibition. It could involve increasing friction. For example, collaboration with an existing data consortium member could be a prerequisite. Or access (and ultimate publication) could be limited to groups that preregister studies whose evidentiary threshold and significance are vetted in advance—with a set of standards for legitimate causal genetic comparisons among racial groups.

Third, human geneticists should become more well-versed in articulating that science sometimes necessitates restrictions. All scientific fields are rightly concerned with their scientific freedom and autonomy—their capacity to determine valid knowledge without interference—but for human genetics, the connection with racist and fascist politics has created anxieties or awkwardness about how to claim such freedom. For many, the response has been to disavow responsibility and adopt an absolute defense of scientific freedom, tantamount to saying, “If we allow the fear of racist interpretations of our science to curb our activities, then the racists will have won.” But scientific freedom is not the freedom to say anything and call it science. It is dependent on adherence to prevailing (and evolving) epistemic standards. The CSR movement has also weaponized this absolutist framing of scientific freedom. To them, any ethical misgivings about racist misuses of human genetics shows the power of cultural Marxism, and any critique of their scientific bona fides becomes evidence of totalitarian intellectual suppression. When scientific fields react to the pressure of controversy (racial or otherwise) with a reflexive embrace of scientific freedom, they paint themselves into a corner. Closing the epistemic culture—raising the thresholds of significance, evidence, and responsibility—is a route toward scientific autonomy that eschews content or politics-based prohibitions, relying instead on epistemic gatekeeping. To riff on Carl Sagan, extraordinary racial claims require extraordinary evidence.

We recommend building resilience against CSR by closing the evidentiary culture of human genetics in general and social and behavioral genetics in particular. This will be challenging. The field is disciplinarily fragmented, so there are many “authorities” (across subfields, journal editors, professional societies, data repositories, scientists themselves) who would need to be convinced. The problem is less about unknowns in technical barriers to making valid racial genetic comparisons than about cultural change concerning the epistemic values and reputational practices that allow low-quality claims to flourish. Cultural change is difficult, and it will likely involve a combination of committed advocacy by scientists and allies in the bioethics community, conflict, resources and institutionalization, and generational succession.

A Strategy for Fighting Citizen Scientific Racism

The use of genetics research by racist movements is a complicated problem with no simple solution. The human genetics field has done well over the last generation to marginalize and expel explicit racist and eugenic scientists and research agendas. But the forces of racism have regrouped on the borders of legitimate science and transformed themselves into a dynamic and creative citizen science movement capable of exploiting features of human genetics. We have shown how this involves making explicit and dangerous the implicit racial and hereditarian ideas of human genetics, transforming these into effective propaganda, and wedging open the doors of human genetics through counterscience. To avoid the racist misuse of their science, human geneticists need to contend with the evolving practices of this citizen scientific racist movement.

That means several things. First is moving beyond facile complaints about the “weaponization” of human genetics, acknowledging how implicit and explicit weapons have always been part of human genetics, and deweaponizing genetics research by evolving it to better measure environments, contexts, and how ethnoracial identification works in the real world in order to avoid fallacious racialization. Second, efforts to educate the public about human genetics need to be more sophisticated and find ways to engage audiences who are seduced by the memeification of racial hereditarianism. And finally, human genetics, particularly the psychological and behavioral subfields, should tighten the epistemological culture to make it much more difficult for bogus, low-quality racial hereditarian “research” to appear under the mantle of science. These efforts, should they succeed, would be a blow to the forces of racist violence and would also redound to the long-term scientific and social legitimacy of human genetics.