Epstein's Gifted Scientists

Epstein was a central node in a toxic gift network that included celebrities, politicians, and billionaires. Academic scientists of the Epstein class covered for his crimes, laundered his reputation, and legitimized his pseudo-intellectual pursuit of eugenics, racism and sexism.

Father of French anthropology, Marcel Mauss, wrote in his 1925 essay ‘The Gift / Essai sur le don’ that “the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding”. What he meant by this is that a gift always creates or reinforces a social connection between the giver and the recipient. It creates an obligation to enter a relationship of reciprocity, where gifts and favors are exchanged. That is why it’s universally considered bad form to accept a gift when you have no interest in a relationship with the giver. Gift relationships are not always between just two people. Potlatches, festivals traditional to Indigenous Americans of the Northwest Coast, ritualize gift giving to create enduring contracts between clans. Gift-exchange relationships are normally cooperative; they help to spin the fabric of social reality. But they can also be toxic.

By bestowing toxic gifts and favors, Jeffrey Epstein created a sense of obligation in others. Sometimes these ‘gifts’ amounted to bribes or tools to be used for leveraging emotional or outright blackmail. His inappropriate gifts to his underage and economically vulnerable victims were designed to make them feel complicit in the abuse and therefore reluctant to report him to the police. They subsequently allowed him to paint the abuse as consenting ‘prostitution’ within a broken judicial system. 

The 2024 British television miniseries A Very Royal Scandal dramatizes the events surrounding the jaw-dropping BBC Newsnight interview of former Prince Andrew that precipitated his removal from public roles in 2020. It contains a scene in which a flustered Michael Sheen, playing Andrew, can’t say no when fictional Epstein asks him to stay the weekend because Epstein had just promised him “a gift” of £125,000 to clear his debt. That weekend at Epstein’s occurred in 2010, when Epstein was already a convicted pedophile. Andrew later claimed he’d made the trip to break off his connection with Epstein. 

Prior to the BBC interview in 2019, it was reported that Andrew had been seen inside Epstein’s New York mansion receiving a foot massage, which undermined his version of the supposed break-up trip. The TV drama implies that the “gift” of the promised £125,000 made it impossible for Andrew to end his friendship with Epstein, at a time when it would have been expedient for him to do so. Instead, a chuckling Epstein was able to hold onto the prestigious royal connection which he could later wield for the purpose of reputational damage limitation. In real life, Epstein may have used Andrew to allegedly extract British state secrets. Thanks to the latest release of emails from the U.S. Department of Justice on January 30^th, we know that after the ‘break up’ trip, which included a lavish celebrity dinner, Andrew emailed: “Wish I was still a pet in your family.”

Although Epstein was evidently no intellectual (physicist Sean Caroll described him as “a standard, fast-talking charlatan who trotted out big words with no real understanding”), he had a knack for Machiavellian manipulations tied to gifts and favors.  In a travesty of potlatch ceremonies, the gifts that the academics brought to the parties were not intended just for Epstein but also for his clan of billionaires and celebrities. The ceremonies were held at opulent intellectual ‘salons’ funded by Epstein. A literary agent by the name of John Brockman was responsible for organizing many of these salons under the guise of a club called the Edge, which facilitated the gathering of billionaires and academics at “glittering events.” Some of these events were apparently secretive safe spaces for participants to praise “race science, rape culture and genetic engineering.” It was through Brockman’s bragging about his association with Epstein to a former client (tech writer Evgeny Morozov) that details of former Prince Andrew’s alleged foot massage emerged.

In the 2019 BBC interview of former Prince Andrew, he says “[Epstein] had the most extraordinary ability to bring extraordinary people together. And that’s the bit that I remember,  going to the dinner parties where you would meet academics, politicians, people from the United Nations. I mean it was, it was a cosmopolitan group of what I would describe as U.S. eminents.” Academics clearly played a role in legitimizing the convicted pedophile and others who kept company with him.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, Epstein was allocated an office in the oddly-titled “PED” (Program for Evolutionary Dynamics), which he funded—more on this to follow—he apparently used “PED” between 2010-2018 as a base to meet with academics, in addition to an independent social club that he funded. 

Other Epstein-funded salons were organized by physicist Lawrence Krauss, as part of his ‘Origins Project’ at Arizona State University (ASU). The Origins Project held cruises to Antarctica, the Amazon, and the Galapagos, to which billionaires and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak were invited. It was discontinued and erased by ASU when Krauss retired in 2018 following a sexual misconduct investigation. Epstein reclaimed unspent funds from ASU that had been donated by himself and his close associate Leon Black. 

The billionaires who attended the intellectual salons may have enjoyed the idea that they were able to hold their own in conversations with “eminent” academics, especially scientists. Science has enormous power and glamour in the modern world.

It’s generally considered positive when conversations take place between academics and a broader audience, but heads will shake when the ‘tedious’ details are waved away, and specialized knowledge is replaced with feel-good soundbites. Steven Pinker’s Panglossian worldview of inexorable progress, for example, is likely most appealing to those who have a vested interest in the hierarchical status quo. But it gets murkier. 

‘Improving’ the human race

Eugenics has always been an ideology invented by elites to serve the perceived interest of elites. It’s never the billionaires who are told that they have bad genes and shouldn’t breed. When ‘top’ scientists entertained aspects of eugenics, it was likely gratifying to at least some of the Epstein class elites. Epstein himself is certainly a case in point.

Epstein aspired to seed humanity with his own gene pool and thought climate change might be a convenient way to get rid of the “excess” population (he had a history of dealings in weapons, oil and gas). Eugenicists seek to control evolution with the aim of ‘improving’ humanity in general, or ‘improving’ a particular nation or race, usually by means of artificial selection. While Epstein and some of his close associates were habitually and casually racist, he was also fascinated with scientific racism, which has been intertwined with eugenics since its invention in the late 19^th century. For example, Epstein thought that Black people were intellectually inferior and that they could perhaps be genetically engineered to be “smarter”. Much like the Nazis, he thought that blue eyes are a sign of superiority, and sought out breeding partners who had this trait. He was also enthusiastic about transhumanism, an ideology that is associated with eugenics. Transhumanists are frequently interested in genetic engineering as a means of obtaining so-called ‘human improvement’. Epstein planned to start a designer baby and human cloning company with “bitcoin guy” Bryan Bishop.

Hugh Gusterson, anthropologist of the ‘elites’, notes that the Epstein files have revealed how the world of capitalism’s 0.1 per cent “trade toxic gifts and favors”. A network of “gifts, favors and financial transactions” connect a “disparate sprawl of bankers, developers, tech bros, media personalities and high-profile academics”. Gusterson suggests that Jeffrey Epstein collected academics because he wanted them to legitimize his obsession with eugenics. 

An exploration of Epstein’s connections suggests that eugenics and scientific racism played a role but that there was more to it than that.  Investigations of Epstein’s relationships with academic scientists illustrate Epstein’s extraction of four gift types from them: 1) objectification of women, 2) legitimization of eugenics and scientific racism, 3) intellectual cosplay, and 4) cover for depraved and sometimes illegal behavior. The latter ranged from the reputation laundering service that was performed by all the academics who continued to associate with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for sex crimes, to conspiring to help Epstein avoid the legal repercussions of his crimes against children. Each academic in Epstein’s orbit likely offered a unique set of gifts to him but these four types seem to be recurring. 

What the select group of academics got from the equation was money or expensive gifts, publicity, and the perceived glamour of being part of the Epstein class. Edge salons came with private flights, Michelin-starred meals, mink throws, and “beautiful young assistants”, after all. Who cared if it was, in Evgeny Marazov’s words “an odd intellectual club located on the dubious continuum between the seminar room and a sex-trafficking ring”? 

Importantly, there is no specific evidence or suggestion that any of these academics themselves engaged in sex crimes. That is not the point. 

Steven Pinker

Harvard linguist Steven Pinker has claimed that he unknowingly contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s legal defense back in 2007, when Epstein was fighting charges involving the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors. His claim is contradicted by newly surfaced evidence from the cache of documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

An allegation that Pinker received $10,000 for a three-page letter appears in a 2008 memo titled “wrongdoing by attorneys in the Epstein criminal matter”. The memo was apparently authored by Darren Indyke, Epstein’s longstanding personal attorney. It states that “Alan had us give Steven Pinker $10,000 for a letter”. When questioned, Pinker has previously claimed that he was not paid for his expert opinion letter and that he didn’t know who he was providing the letter for. The “Alan” that the author refers to in the 2008 memo is Alan Dershowitz, a high-profile lawyer and former Harvard academic, who represented Epstein in his fight against charges related to the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minor girls. 

The expert opinion was used by Epstein’s legal team to prevent the charges against Epstein being taken up as a federal case. On July 26, 2006, Epstein had been arrested on suspicion of trafficking dozens of minors for sex but was later charged only with “procuring a minor for prostitution” and “solicitation of a prostitute” in Palm Beach, Florida. 

A legal document from Epstein’s defense counsel (Gerald B. Lefcourt and Alan Dershowitz) dated July 6, 2007, addressed to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sloman (and other feds) argued that a potential prosecution of Epstein under Section 2422(b) of a federal statute should not proceed as it would violate the terms of the statute, which relates to using interstate commerce, such as the phone, to persuade, induce, entice or coerce minors to engage in sexual activity. The legal document includes the letter from Steven Pinker to Alan Dershowitz dated June 28, 2007, in which Pinker provides his expert opinion as a linguist on the interpretation of the section. 

The memo that has come to light in the recent release, apparently authored by Indyke, contains details regarding negotiations that allegedly took place between Epstein’s legal counsel and Florida state prosecutor Barry Krishcher, in addition to the allegation about a $10,000 payment for Pinker’s three-page letter. Indyke was Epstein’s personal lawyer and is a major beneficiary in Epstein’s will. He was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee in January, and testified on March 11th. It is unclear why Indyke created a memo on the ‘wrongdoing’ of attorneys working on Epstein’s criminal case, but it may have been a record of information to be used as potential leverage over featured individuals. 

Pinker’s involvement in Epstein’s legal defense was first reported in 2019 by BuzzFeed. At the time, he told BuzzFeed that “I don’t recall [Dershowitz] telling me that the question pertained to the Epstein defense … I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter—it’s something that Alan and I do regularly, as colleagues.” 

Given that the charges against Epstein, and Dershowitz’s defense of him, were high-profile events reported widely in the media at the time, Pinker’s claim to have unknowingly contributed to the defense strains credulity. The 2006 news that Dershowitz would represent Epstein appeared, alongside the scandalous evidence that Epstein was a Harvard donor, in the Harvard Gazette, the student-led newspaper of the university where Pinker and Dershowitz were both employed in 2006. Epstein held a Visiting Fellow position at Harvard’s Psychology Department for the 2005-2006 academic year (a position  for which he was unqualified) after providing funding for research there. Pinker and Dershowitz are reportedly longtime friends, who co-taught a psychology course at Harvard called ‘Morality and Taboo’ in 2007, the year in which Pinker’s letter was used in Epstein’s defense. Meanwhile, Epstein and Dershowitz were reportedly also longtime friends. According to a Vanity Fair article from 2003, Dershowitz claimed that Epstein was the only person he would ask to review drafts of his books outside of immediate family. 

In addition, correspondence between Epstein and Dershowitz suggests that they collaborated to request specific changes to Pinker’s letter. Pinker’s original letter was forwarded by Dershowitz to Epstein on the same day it is dated, June 28^th. Embedded within Dershowitz’s forwarding email is an email from Pinker: “Dear Alan, I found it was just as easy to put my analysis in a letter as in an email, so I’ve attached it. I hope it helps – I agree that your interpretation is the only natural one. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Best, Steve”. Dershowitz’s note to Epstein in the forwarding email reads: “I’m going to simplify and shorten and make it more directly relevant to our case and then run it by steve. We should all suggest changes before I go back to steve”. 

The version that was finally included in the legal document that was sent to Jeffrey Sloman on July 6^th  is indeed different from the original letter emailed by Pinker to Dershowitz on June 28^th. The main differences are as follows:

1. In the original version Pinker used a hypothetical scenario in which John invites Mary to dinner via a letter and decides at the dinner to persuade her to have sex with him. This scenario is changed to one in which the dinner invitation happens via telephone. 
2. The following was added to the final version as a concluding passage:

“My professional conclusion, in sum, is that an English speaker, reading the statute, would naturally understand it as applying only to persuasion (etc.) that is done while “using the mail” (etc.). To understand it as applying to persuasion (etc.) done subsequent to the use of the mail, phone, etc., would be an unnatural and grammatically inaccurate reading of the language”. 

Epstein used a separate email account, littlestjeff@yahoo.com, for sensitive information including documents his legal counsel was preparing. The forwarding history to this account suggests that Pinker reviewed changes to the document and sent it back to Dershowitz on July 2, 2007.

Pinker effectively helped Dershowitz to obtain a “completely unprecedented” plea bargain with U.S. attorney Alex Acosta in 2008 which granted Epstein and alleged co-conspirators immunity to federal prosecution for trafficking dozens of underage girls. In exchange for pleading guilty to lesser “prostitution” charges, the plea bargain allowed Epstein to serve just 13 months in Palm Beach County Jail, with work release seven days per week. Epstein allegedly continued with his sex crimes at the offices of his Florida Science Foundation during his work release. Without the deal, Epstein could have served a life sentence and might not have been free to continue abusing hundreds of victims for another decade, up until his final arrest in 2019 on separate federal charges for trafficking minors. Regardless of whether he knew whose defense he was writing the letter for, Pinker’s expert opinion helped Dershowitz to create a potential loophole for pedophiles to escape federal charges.

In 2013, Pinker again leapt to the defense when a man was accused of sexual misconduct, this time in an academic context. He reportedly defended the reputation of Colin McGinn, a philosopher at the University of Miami who had been accused of sexually harassing a graduate student. Pinker later backpedaled. The case, which was ultimately settled, allegedly involved sexualized emails with lines from Nabokov’s novel Lolita. 

Following the recent release by the Department of Justice of a video clip featuring Pinker riding alongside Epstein in the ‘Lolita Express’ (Epstein’s private plane), Pinker was once again catapulted into the limelight. A woman’s voice can be heard in the video saying something indiscernible over the aircraft noise. In the video Pinker is wearing the same shirt as in a photo from the Edge website featuring academics on a flight to a TED conference on February 20, 2002. According to another 2019 article from BuzzFeed, an alleged Epstein co-conspirator, Sarah Kellen, and a potential victim of Epstein’s were on this same flight. The initials “S.K” appear in the passenger list for the flight log, next to “J.E”. The name “Kelly Bovino”, a former model allegedly associated with Epstein, and the first name of the alleged victim also appear on the passenger list. 

On October 18, 2016, Epstein wrote about this same flight—in an email to himself. It appears as if the seven-page passage was written by Epstein but intended to be passed off as the writing of biographer Michael Wolff, who is known to have cultivated a working relationship with Epstein. The following extract concerns the author apparently meeting Epstein for the first time en route to a TED conference in Monterey in 2002. Wolff’s name appears on the flight log for the same flight that took Pinker, Brockman and others to Monterey. 

We met several years before he became arguably the world's most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his plane, a meticulously appointed 727, ferried a group of people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, soliciting every guest's story and views, and accompanied by three young women not his daughters, witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men's magazine fantasy of the luxe life.

Wolff himself is quoted back in 2007 as saying the following about the flight that he met Epstein on:

There’s a little food out. Lovely hors d’oeuvre. And then after fifteen to twenty minutes, Jeffrey arrives … And he was followed onto the plane by—how shall I say this?—by three teenage girls not his daughters. Not adolescent girls. These are young, 18, 19, 20, who knows? They were model-like.

Subsequent to recent publicity surrounding the released video clip, Pinker has reiterated to Scientific American that he didn’t know the letter he provided in 2007 was for Epstein’s defense when asked for comment. The article states that “Pinker unwittingly contributed to the financier’s legal defense.”

Pinker claims that he couldn’t stand Epstein, never took funding from him, and tried to keep him at a distance, also describing him as a “kibitzer and a dilettante”. Perhaps, but for all that, he was willing to rub shoulders with him and accept gifts from him, for example traveling on Epstein’s private plane in 2002. Most of Pinker’s meetings with Epstein were through the Epstein-funded boy’s club known as the Edge. After Epstein’s conviction for sexually abusing a 14-year-old, Pinker continued rubbing shoulders with him, but Epstein’s presence within the circle of elite academics was carefully hidden from publicity. In the Epstein files, Pinker’s name appears repeatedly in emails related to Edge events, emails which included Epstein in the list of recipients, or which were forwarded to him, and which often pertained to exclusive salons for the Edge inner circle. 

Pinker was a featured speaker at an Edge salon, billed as a master class on the science of human nature, that was held at a boutique vineyard in St Helena, Napa, CA in July 2011. According to emails between Epstein and Edge director John Brockman the salon was planned to be ‘confidential’ and limited to 20-25 invited guests. Epstein forwarded the email invitation, including the list of recipients, to a redacted email address asking “will you be in la. then”. The list of recipients included Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. 

The following day Brockman, who was also Pinker’s literary agent, emailed Epstein complaining that “the usual billionaire crowd is not showing up” and asking for Epstein’s help promoting the salon. “Martin and Pinker would be very happy if you showed up”, wrote Brockman, also urging Epstein to help encourage David Brooks of the New York Times to attend. In a subsequent email, Brockman asked Epstein to send his private plane to get Brooks to the event, explaining how important it was to cultivate him to become “Edge’s biggest fan and booster”. Brooks had already attended and positively reviewed a 2010 Morality seminar, and he attended a ‘Billionaire’s Dinner’ in March,  2011 alongside Epstein. In response to BuzzFeed’s 2019 article pinpointing Brooks at the event, Brooks claimed that he had not heard of Epstein in 2011 and therefore would have been unaware of his presence. In response to a 2025 Intercept report on Brooks’s attendance at the dinner, an NYT spokesperson claimed that the dinner was “widely attended”. Meanwhile, the Edge website names 22 photographed individuals who attended the dinner including David Brooks, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.  It is unclear if Brooks attended the Napa event in July 2011, at which Pinker spoke on the topic of his then forthcoming book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but the following month, he quoted the phrase "empathy craze" from what he called Pinker’s “mind-altering new book” in the NYT, and in 2018, he wrote a NYT opinion piece devoted to praising Pinker for “the virtue of radical honesty”.

Although Epstein does not feature in any of the Edge website photographs of the 2011 Napa event featuring Pinker as speaker, correspondence in the Epstein files indicates that he did attend. An email with the header ‘dinner sf sunday’ was sent by Epstein to Richard Merkin at the time of the meeting with a list of 34 attendees, including Pinker and a redacted name. A BuzzFeed article points out that Epstein can be seen in an Edge video of the event, sitting next to Nicholas Pritzker and laughing at a joke about sexual reproduction made by Martin Nowak. 

In 2012, Epstein emailed Auckland-based literature professor Brian Boyd, a specialist on Lolita author Nabokov, promising him 75K in funding and bragging that “Pinker is also a friend”. The following month, Steven Pinker responded to an email invitation sent by one of Epstein’s assistants that he would be “delighted” to meet with Epstein in April, 2012. This meeting evidently did not occur as Epstein was away on the proposed date. In September 2012, Pinker and David Brooks both appear to have featured at another celebrity-attended conference organized by TED talk founder Richard Saul Wurman, which Epstein attended and had a hand in organizing.

In 2013, Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein to tell him that Pinker had agreed to organize a panel for an Arizona State University Origins Project gala event to be held in April 2014. The Origins Project was largely funded by Epstein and his billionaire associate Leon Black, via Epstein. A subsequent email shows that Epstein was planning to coordinate a panel about entrepreneurship at the same event, to which Krauss hoped to lure Larry Summers and Elon Musk. In two separate emails to Bill Gates in late 2013, Epstein promoted the event to him, writing in one that “Steve Pinker, Craig Venter and a very select group are going to ASU phoenix for weekend of Apr 4. 5. come.” (sic).

By early 2014, Epstein may have given up on luring Gates to the ASU gala event. He emailed ‘Peter’ at Clarium Capital, the hedge fund founded by Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, specifically inviting them to join his “one on ones with Pinker on violence Krause on string theory or inflation also david gross. venter on personal genomics. etc.’ (sic). Immediately prior to the event, Epstein mentioned his plans for the weekend to Greg Wyler: “island today fri scottsdale with dawkins pinker venter and krause”. That Friday, Epstein may have hoped to inspire fomo in Bill Gates: “Here with Pinker. Great fun!” he emailed. He also emailed Joshua Cooper Ramo with a last-minute invitation, dropping Pinker’s name. That same day, emails from Epstein’s assistant show that Krauss arranged special meetings between Epstein, Pinker, and Richard Dawkins for the following day. 

Being photographed next to convicted sex offender Epstein had been something that high-profile academics and billionaires who attended Edge meetings evidently wished to avoid, as the Edge website retrospectives exclude all mention of Epstein’s attendance. But as it happened, Pinker was snapped sitting next to Epstein at the 2014 ASU event, and the photo was later circulated widely. In 2019, after Epstein’s arrest, Pinker found himself on the defensive against the publicity surrounding his associations with the pedophile, and issued the following statement on Twitter:

The Epstein files show that the photo of Pinker at lunch with Epstein and Krauss was likely taken by an associate of Epstein on his behalf. The name of this individual is redacted in the files. 

In 2015, Pinker thanked Epstein via a redacted intermediary, likely Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff, for sending him the email address of physicist Stephen Hawking, who Pinker apparently had hoped to interview. This would have been about eight years after Pinker’s letter was used in Epstein’s defense.

Pinker’s involvement with scientific racism

We cannot know the precise details of the conversations that took place between Pinker and others at the Epstein-funded salons, but we do know that Pinker was interested in discussing the idea that “groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments”. As science writer Anjana Ahuja noted at the time, for “groups of people”, read “races”. In a 2006 blogpost on the Edge website, Pinker cited a discredited idea which has been embraced in scientific racism (known as Lewontin’s fallacy). He attempted to counter the scientific consensus that race is not a genetically valid taxonomy and to legitimize the hypothesis that there may be innate racial differences in intelligence.

He has also boosted the profiles of ideologues who peddle in scientific racism and eugenics. For example, he has promoted the work of far-right blogger Steve Sailer, who mainly writes about supposed racial differences in intelligence. He re-published a Sailer essay titled ‘Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, originally published in The American Conservative, in an edited 2004 volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. The article by Sailer argued that Arab societies are too inbred for the type of democratic reform that was a stated goal of Western politicians in the 2003 ‘regime change’ war on Iraq.

Pinker’s interest in legitimizing scientific racism doesn’t seem to have died along with Epstein. Recently, he has appeared on a podcast outlet that is infamous for promoting scientific racism and eugenics. The media outlet concerned has produced an interview with Jared Taylor, a white supremacist who was apparently banned from the Schengen Area of Europe, and a blog post arguing that in order to achieve economic growth in Africa, eugenics should be used to engineer more intelligent Africans. An undercover investigation by Hope Not Hate exposed the neo-Nazi connections of the outlet’s holding organization. In the Hope Not Hate investigation, one of the directors of the holding organization explained to the undercover investigator (who was posing as a potential donor) that well-known commentators like Noam Chomsky were being used as part of a deliberate ploy to attract “high-value” subscribers: “We’re using these people to get legitimacy by association,” similar to Epstein’s strategy. Incidentally, Chomsky is another academic Epstein managed to add to his trophy shelf. To be charitable to Chomsky, he did at least reject Epstein’s racist ideas. 

Separately, at a recent festival of cringe that Epstein would have loved, Pinker delivered a speech tritely titled ‘A Positive Vision for Scholarship and Society’ alongside titles such as ‘Parasitic Ideas and Suicidal Empathy Are Killing the West’; ‘Is Islamophobia Real? Finding Empirical Answers to Questions We’re Not Supposed to Ask’; and the showstopping ‘Truth, What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters’. Papers by authors who attended this conference are being prepared for a special issue in a social science journal that has recently had a new editorial leadership imposed by the publisher, Springer. It now includes Pinker on the editorial board alongside an editor from a conservative think tank that has previously sponsored research by The Bell Curve author Charles Murray. 

Pinker is currently listed as a reference on the Curriculum Vitae of Nathan Cofnas, a ‘race realist’ philosopher who promotes the pseudoscientific idea that there are genetically-based intelligence differences between racial groups. Despite repeated refutations in mainstream science, this notion is kept in circulation by a small group of committed ideologues. If you are looking for a recent empirical and theoretical refutation, this peer-reviewed scientific article should cover it. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Cofnas was formerly employed, cut its association with Cofnas after he wrote a particularly offensive blog post in 2024 in which he railed against diversity, equity and inclusion policies and suggested that in a meritocracy Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”. Cofnas has recently been employed at Ghent University. 

To reiterate the point about a toxic network of reciprocal gifting, the Epstein files provide a glimpse into a network of rich and powerful men who routinely provide cover for one another’s abhorrent behavior. Pinker is fond of warning others not to engage in ‘guilt by association’, a logical fallacy otherwise known as the association fallacy, e.g., in his book Rationality. That is all well and good when the warning is against something like assuming that anyone who was in Epstein’s network is a pedophile. However, it is no fallacy to raise an eyebrow at a decision to enable people who traffic minors for sex or dress racism up as science.

Featured image is Little St James Island - the Estate of Jeffrey Epstein, by Navin75