Toward a Theory of Scientific Misappropriation: White Nationalism, Racial Hereditarianism, and beyond

Aaron Panofsky, University of California, Los Angeles
Kushan Dasgupta, University of California, Los Angeles
Nicole Iturriaga, University of California Irvine

Racial hereditarianism has become a hotbed of lay public activity even as mainstream science is (slowly and haltingly) moving away from the idea that genes are likely an important explanation for supposed racial differences in intelligence and behavior. White nationalists and other racial hereditarians have engaged in a wide range of misappropriation practices aimed at challenging mainstream science on race and racial difference. These include 1) public denial of mainstream conclusions, 2) alternative and selective curation of scientific materials to support racial hereditarianism, 3) elevating heterodox, racial hereditarian figures within science, 4) public participation or citizen science including lay theorizing on discussion boards and blogs, 5) the creation of a parallel counterscience with research projects and institutions that aims to compete with and influence the scientific mainstream. This paper aims to explain what has made the domain of race, genetics, and behavior so vulnerable to these multiple forms of misappropriation. My account emphasizes four interrelated factors: 1) reliance on open and statistical data, 2) evidentiary culture (Collins 1998), including thresholds of evidence, significance, and evidential collectivism, 3) “archipelagic” field structure (Panofsky 2014) and strong internal heterodoxy, and 4) the historical trajectory of scientific controversy. To make the argument, I mobilize two sets of nested comparisons. First, I show that within the broad, archipelagic field of scholars engaging the topic of race, genetics, and behavior it is non-experimental differential psychology much more than neighboring fields genetics, anthropology, or sociology that have energized and indulged misappropriations (including white nationalist counterscience). Second, I compare racial hereditarianism to other domains of misappropriation—including anti-vaccine, intelligent design, flat earth, and anti-climate change activism—to show how different configurations of the four factors within relevant scientific fields influence different patterns of misappropriation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 265. Fields of Expertise: Structure and Transformation