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Former Nuffield fellow denounced for “racist pseudoscience”

Former Nuffield College researcher Noah Carl has been denounced by hundreds of academics for what they describe as his “racist pseudoscience.” Carl is now a Fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

Over 200 academics from across the country expressed concern that Carl’s association with the University of Cambridge would legitimise “discredited ‘race science’”.

In an open letter, the group called on St. Edmund’s College to investigate how the Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship was awarded to Carl.

The letter read: “We are shocked that a body of work that includes vital errors in data analysis and interpretation appears to have been taken seriously for appointment to such a competitive research fellowship.”

The academics noted that his “pseudoscientific” papers have “been used by extremist and far-right outlets with the aim of stoking xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

An article in which Carl argued that public prejudices against immigrants were “largely accurate” was re-posted on far-right outlets including The Daily Caller, InfoWars and Free West Media, despite one external reviewer writing that “it is never OK to publish research this bad.”

Carl has written numerous articles for publications with links to the far-right. He is on the review team of Emil Kirkegaard’s OpenPsych and is the website’s most prolific contributor after Kirkegaard himself. Kirkegaard describes himself as a “self-taught” geneticist who has previously defended child rape, and appeared on the far-right webshow Reality Calls to discuss the “future of eugenics.”

Among Carl’s OpenPsych papers is one arguing that an increased Muslim population leads to more terrorism in the country. The paper was subsequently reviewed by Kirkegaard and self-described “race realist” John Fuerst.

Carl has also written for Mankind Quarterly, described as a white supremacist journal and published by the Pioneer Fund, a pro-eugenics fund which also bankrolls Jared Taylor’s white nationalist American Renaissance.

The former Nuffield postdoctoral researcher attracted controversy earlier this year, when London Student revealed that he had repeatedly attended a secretive conference on eugenics at UCL. The London Conference on Intelligence is closely linked to the Pioneer Fund, and was organised by Emil Kirkegaard.

The conference saw researchers argue that racial ‘admixture’ has a negative effect on population quality and that the number of Nobel Prizes won by different countries can be explained by racial differences in male hormone levels.

The academic left Nuffield College at the end of his contract this summer.

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