Unexamined research platforms erroneously post debunked theories about race and genetics. A recent analysis reveals that those promoting scientific racism are using mainstream open science archives to disseminate flawed comparisons about human behavior. The study was published in the journal Behavior Genetics.
Over the past decade, the open science movement has dramatically changed the way scholars share information. Researchers frequently upload early drafts of manuscripts, known as preprints, to the Internet Archive. This allows scientists to bypass the traditional peer review process and share data immediately.
Peer review typically involves independent experts who evaluate research for methodological errors before it is accepted by an academic journal. By skipping this step, open science platforms accelerate scientific discovery. It also removes editorial controls that typically prevent improperly conducted or pseudoscientific research from being made available to the public.
Eugenics is a historically debunked movement that claims that human populations can be improved through selective breeding. Concepts associated with scientific racism falsely suggest that there are fundamental biological differences in cognitive abilities and behavior between socially defined racial groups. These ideas have largely been pushed out of the academic mainstream since the mid-twentieth century.
Proponents of these discredited concepts instead relied on obscure fringe publications to share their ideas. Chief among them is a publication called Mankind Quarterly, which was founded by racists and regularly publishes racist pseudoscience. Mainstream scientists quickly learned to ignore these specialized outlets, so authors struggled to reach a wider audience.
In order to appear more trustworthy, some of these individuals have recently changed their tactics. They began uploading papers to popular preprint servers in parallel with legitimate scientific research.
Evan J. Giangrande, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, wanted to quantify the scope of this problem. He sought to understand how often flawed genetic studies of group differences appear on modern preprint platforms. He also aimed to categorize the common tactics used in these papers.
Giangrande began his research by identifying all authors who published articles in Mankind Quarterly from 2014 to the spring of 2024. We then searched for these specific authors across four major open science archives. These online archives include PsyArXiv, bioRxiv, SocArXiv, and OSF preprints.
The search returned 79 different preprints related to these authors. Giangrande narrowed the list to 42 papers that specifically focused on behavioral differences between human groups. He categorized each paper by the characteristics investigated, the groups compared, and the methods employed.
These preprints have attracted thousands of views and document downloads online. The majority of papers categorized humans into socially defined racial, ethnic, or national groups. The authors noted that most group comparisons focused on intelligence, cognitive ability, and educational attainment.
Of the 42 papers focused on population disparities, 31 discussed genetics and 13 conducted new genetic analyses. Giangrande wrote that such analyzes are routinely based on elementary misunderstandings of biology. The paper exploited these misconceptions to falsely claim that social disparities are caused by innate genetic disparities rather than environmental factors.
Many preprints incorrectly assumed that heritability estimates within a given population could explain differences between completely distinct populations. Heritability is a measure of how much genetic variation in a trait accounts for within a particular group of people at a particular time. Mainstream geneticists agree that this metric cannot be used to explain the average differences found between distinct and separate groups.
Other papers in the sample misused polygenic scores to establish underlying genetic differences. A polygenic score is a mathematical estimate of a person’s genetic potential for a particular trait, based on thousands of small DNA variations. Comparing these scores across different ancestral groups is notoriously unreliable because variation does not map evenly across populations.
Some preprints relied on a technique called mixed regression, which assessed individuals with mixed ancestry to separate genetic and environmental influences. Biologists have strongly criticized this method for its inability to accurately account for social disorder. Despite these basic mathematical errors, the preprint presented their findings as conclusive evidence of genetic differences in intelligence.
The authors of these preprints often utilized publicly available data or federally funded databases to perform their analyses. They interpreted this data through the lens of an evolutionary framework that has been thoroughly debunked. One notable example is the cold winter theory, which baselessly claims that humans who migrated to colder climates evolved advanced intelligence to survive harsh environments.
Another common theme identified in the preprints was differential K-theory. This racist biological concept suggests that certain minority groups have evolved to have high birth rates and invest less in their offspring, whereas majority groups have evolved the opposite traits. These papers also promoted abnormal genetics, a false eugenics concept that suggests that a population’s genetic quality is reduced due to the reproductive rate of marginalized groups.
These papers create a false sense of authority by using complex methodologies, statistical software, and academic formats. Giangrande reasoned that unfamiliar readers may have a hard time distinguishing this content from legitimate scientific research. An unsuspecting public audience may cite these preprints as proven fact in online discussions.
This study has some limitations. As a search criterion, authors had to have previous publications in Mankind Quarterly in order to be tracked in the search. This strict rule means that the calculated number of problematic preprints may underestimate the true amount of pseudoscience online.
This study also explicitly focuses on four platforms related to behavioral genetics. No other popular research clearinghouses or catalogs of new artificial intelligence platforms were listed. The issue of weaponized science extends beyond preprints to social media, blogs, and, in some cases, mainstream academic journals.
Giangrande outlined several possible responses for the scientific community to address this recurring problem. He suggested that scientists need to be very precise in their own words to prevent legitimate data from being misinterpreted. Vague terminology regarding race and genetics invites bad actors to exploit the remaining confusion.
Improving public education about human genetics will also help everyday readers spot logical fallacies in pseudoscientific research. Individual scholars can actively format rebuttals to research they find online, labeling flawed research and providing context to the general readership. Finally, the study recommends that open science platforms could provide explicit warnings that unreviewed content may not meet basic scientific standards.
The study, “Preprint Issue: Genetic Information-Based Research on Group Behavioral Differences Housed on Fringe, an Open Science Platform,” was authored by Evan J. Giangrande.
