Rebecca Sear
LightNews LightNews
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Rebecca Sear
@rebeccasear.bsky.social
11K followers 3.8K following 2.8K posts
Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution, Brunel University London @brunelcce.bsky.social. President of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association @ehbea.bsky.social

https://www.rebeccasear.org/
Posts Replies Media Videos
rebeccasear.bsky.social
This is an excellent piece 👇 its discussion of the “tyranny of the quantifiable” reminded me of the recent article about the tech guys whose miserable vision is for dating to be determined entirely by algorithm
Connecting (and disconnecting) Silicon Valley is full of tyrants of the quantifiable. For decades, its oligarchs have preached that our criteria for what we do and how we do it should be convenience, efficiency, productivity, profitability. They have told us that to go out into the world, to interact with others, is perilous, unpleasant, inefficient, a waste of time, and that time is something we should hoard rather than spend. This ends up meaning that we can minimise our presence in the world and maximise time spent working and online, which also means maximising alienation and isolation. This has involved a reordering of society right down to our retail landscapes.
February 1, 2026 at 4:30 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
If you need any more reason to be anti-eugenics, read this unbearably bleak vision of dating agencies set up by eugenicists (spoiler: they do not result in love)
The application, which can take hours to complete, asks users for their height, ancestral background, SAT score and their feelings about entrepreneurs. They can chose from an exhaustive list of political affiliations (conservative or progressive, Zionist or anti-Zionist, neoliberal or neo-Nazi) and select their partner's "ideal" ethnicity. The system can assess their cheekbone prominence, jaw strength or body-fat percentage from a scanned photo, and analyze their application to estimate an IQ score. Users who fail to make a match, or who bomb on a date, receive constructive feedback. "It wouldn't say, 'Lose 15 pounds," Mr. Myers said. "It would say that we know what type of person you are looking for, and the people you are looking for would be a match for you if you lost 15 pounds. So do with that information what you will." A woman in the crowd raised a hand. She noted that one of Mr. Zervas's slides had featured an image of a modelesque woman. She had been assigned an attractiveness rating of 8.6. "If that was an 8, what's a 10?" she said. "I've never seen a 10 if that's an 8." "That was an example profile," Mr. Zervas said. "Don't base your entire Weltanschauung" - German for "worldview" — "on my slides."
January 7, 2026 at 9:35 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Ron Lee's analysis of economic contributions & consumption across the life cycle suggests that wealth flows are in fact from older to younger generations in lower income populations but switch to going up generations in higher income pops, where older generations have relatively high consumption
Graph showing economic consumption and production by age in three types of society - higher, middle/lower income and hunter-gatherer populations. In hunter-gatherer populations, children are net economic consumers but adults of all ages are net economic producers. But in middle/lower and higher income countries, older adults become net consumers rather than producers
December 13, 2025 at 1:25 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Since claims that Europe is in danger of “civilisational erasure” are in the news, recommend checking out this book on great replacement ideologies. Covers their long history and how they are currently being mainstreamed

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Front cover of THE POLITICS OF REPLACEMENT: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars EDITED BY SARAH BRACKE AND LUIS MANUEL HERNÁNDEZ/AGUILAR
December 10, 2025 at 8:36 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Question: if the main take-away of your book is “It is women’s behaviour and preferences that will need to change”, are you really a “well-meaning man”?

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
These books want to suggest that if more of us understood the bigger picture, and recognised that we have parts of our doomsday scenario back to front, we would be less fearful of the future and keener to have children. They think too many of us have become afraid of our own shadow. But it is also impossible to avoid noticing that these are books written by men – well-meaning men, admittedly, who emphasise over and again that they know how bad that looks. Fertility rates are measured not per person but per woman. Childbirth is done by women. Childrearing still primarily falls on women. It is women’s behaviour and preferences that will need to change, even though the way men behave has a significant effect on falling birth rates (men often display greater reluctance to have children). It can seem like we are drifting into Handmaid’s Tale territory.
December 7, 2025 at 11:02 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Many congratulations to the newly-minted Dr Baafi @josephineabaafi.bsky.social 🎉🥳 who passed her PhD viva yesterday! A very positive experience thanks to examiners Monica Magadi and @joestrong.bsky.social, and Chair @1verofilippi.bsky.social 🙏
Dr Josie looking very happy as she cuts her celebration cake
November 28, 2025 at 4:45 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Historian Quinn Slobodian in the Financial Times today describing how eugenics is now firmly back on the political agenda

www.ft.com/content/23e9...
All told, the picture is one of a consistent, if unacknowledged, libertarian eugenics. The high-tech fertility market privileges those able to pay for genetic advantage. The retreat of public health abandons the social minimum needed to ensure that all children can survive and thrive. And immigration policy redraws the body politic along racial lines, achieving by exclusion what mid-century welfare states once sought through inclusion. What emerges is not a paradox but a 21st-century return of social Darwinism, wrapped in a language of choice, freedom and national greatness.
November 15, 2025 at 3:29 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
When I point out the psychological approach to life history assumes fast & slow LH strategies are largely under genetic, not environmental, control and represent evolved strategies, researchers are sometimes skeptical. Here are the paradigm originators confirming, in 2025, that it's all about genes
The heritability of life history strategy has been well established and documented for some time (e.g., Figueredo et al., Reference Figueredo, Vásquez, Brumbach and Schneider2004; Figueredo & Rushton, Reference Figueredo and Rushton2009), with estimated heritability coefficients ranging from h 2 = .60 to h 2 = .70. Certain environmentally determinist models of life history development, such as the Adaptive Calibration Model (ACM), are seriously confounded by gene-environment correlations, systematically overestimating the magnitude and significance of environmental causal pathways by ignoring and underestimating the genetic ones.
November 14, 2025 at 1:58 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The paper was accepted just a week after submission and claims no data were analysed, despite data clearly being analysed in the paper. The author gives his affiliation as Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research. Wouldn’t be happy if I were on the editorial board of this journal
Data Availability No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study. Received 23 September 2025 Revised 26 September 2025 Accepted 30 September 2025 Authors and Affiliations Ulster Institute for Social Research, London, UK Davide Piffer
November 12, 2025 at 5:29 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The influence of race science is spreading in the evolutionary behavioural sciences. This new paper means members of a race science network have now been published in Evolutionary Psychological Science, Evolutionary Behavioral Science, Evolutionary Psychology & Adaptive Human Behavior & Physiology
Screenshot of a paper published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology Testing the Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology using Ancient and Modern DNA Published: 04 November 2025 Volume 11, article number 18, (2025) Davide Piffer
November 12, 2025 at 5:25 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Really quite striking how blatantly hereditarian research violates scientific norms. One of the papers under critique was accepted the same day it was submitted
Received 15 November 2024; Accepted 15 November 2024 Screenshot of paper being critiqued, published in Intelligence Anti-Mertonian norms undermine the scientific ethos: A critique of Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston's policy proposals and associated justification
November 12, 2025 at 4:22 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Embarrassingly, evolutionary biology is dragged into the debate to justify beliefs about women about their incompetencies. “Scientific sexism” seems to be having a moment alongside scientific racism
And that seemed to me to correspond very closely to the changes that we would describe as wokeness. Her theory is that this originated in the midst of prehistory, that men were organized to have warrior bands, which meant they needed to have hierarchical structures. They needed to know how to take orders and give orders, and not take it personally when their leader made a choice that they didn't agree with. And that they needed to be able to engage in conflict, to fight. And then when that fight was over, you needed to be able to make peace. And that women, being more oriented towards child rearing, were more likely to have protracted conflict with their rivals within the tribe, and less likely to reconcile at the end.
November 8, 2025 at 4:16 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Grokipedia’s entry for r/K selection theory curiously links human behavioural ecology to Rushton’s false claim that r/K explains evolved behavioural differences between races. This - wholly imaginary - link has recently appeared a few times in the ev psych journals which publish hereditarians
Extract from the second paragraph of Grokipedia’s entry on r/K selection theory: “Extensions to human behavioral ecology, including proposals linking racial or cultural differences in mating patterns, impulsivity, and sociality to ancestral environmental pressures, remain contentious, with proponents citing cross-national data on fertility and aggression but critics highlighting methodological flaws and ethical concerns amid institutional resistance to hereditarian explanations.”
November 3, 2025 at 8:43 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
An interesting fact about the 2019 version of Richard Lynn's "national IQ" database is that, for the first time, "Muslim" is considered a race, and an average IQ calculated for Muslims (76.89)
Extract from Lynn and Becker's 2019 book Intelligence of Nations, in a section describing the IQs of human "races": "If the Arabian-Muslim world was defined by all countries with a share of >50% of Muslims on their total populations, a mean Muslim IQ of 76.89 (SD=10.16; N=47)."
November 3, 2025 at 10:01 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
These samples had little weight in the final calculation of US "national IQ", as several countries, including the US, had data "adjusted for ethnic composition".

Note the assumption - built into the database - that different ethnicities had different IQs.
Table 13 from Lynn and Becker's 2019 book Intelligence of Nations "Shares of ethnicities on total populations used for calculation of national means representing ethnic composition. Country Ethnicities (shares) Brazil Whites (47.70%); Mulatto (43.10%); Black (7.60%); Asian (1.10%) Canada Amerindian/Native Americans (4.20%) Kazakhstan Kazakh (63.10%); Russian (23.70%); Uzbek (2.90%) Mexico Mestizo (62.00%); Native Americans (28.00%); Whites (10.00%) Serbia Serbs (83.30%); Roma (2.10%); Bosniaks =2.00% | Christian (90.60%); Muslim (9.40%) United States Whites (72.40%); Hispanics (16.30%); Blacks (12.60%); Asian (4.8%); Amerindian (0.90%) South Africa African (80.20%); White (8.40%); Coloured (8.80%); Indian/Asian (2.50%) Notes: Shares of ethnicities on total populations used for calculation of national means representing ethnic composition. Terms and data from CIA (2017, Index: “Ethnic groups”).
November 3, 2025 at 9:27 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Three samples of Native American children were used to calculate Native American IQ, all of which were very obviously unsuitable for representing the population of interest
Title and abstract of the paper from which one of the three samples was taken: FACTOR STRUCTURE OF THE WECHSLER INTELLIGENCE SCALES FOR CHILDREN–FOURTH EDITION AMONG REFERRED NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS SELENA NAKANO, Arizona State University MARLEY W. WATKINS, Baylor University Abstract: The Native American population is severely underrepresented in empirical test validity research despite being overrepresented in special education programs and at increased risk for psychoeducational evaluation. The structural validity of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children –Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) was investigated with a sample of 176, six-to-sixteen-year-old Native American children referred for a psychoeducational evaluation. Confirmatory factor analysis procedures replicated the normative first-order factor structure and a higher-order general ability factor that accounted for the greatest amount of common (69%) and total (33%) variance. These results support the structural validity of the WISC-IV with a referred Native American sample and suggest that interpretation of the WISC-IV scores should not neglect the strong general ability factor. Title and abstract of the paper from which one of the three samples was taken. In this case only the "non handicapped" sample was used in Lynn and Becker's calculation of IQ: WISC-R VERBAL AND PERFORMANCE ABILITIES OF NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS REFERRED FOR SCHOOL LEARNING PROBLEMS' ANNE TEETER, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee CLAY L. MOORE AND JERRY D. PETERSEN, Northern Arizona University Abstract: This study was designed to determine if three diagnostic groups of Navajo children differed on intellectual dimensions as measured by the WISC-R. Subjects had been previously diagnosed by state certified professionals and were identified as nonhandicapped (NH) (N= 113), educationally disadvantaged.(ED) (N= 189), and learning disabled (LD) (N= 150). NH group means on all WISC-R variables were significantly higher than the LD group means. The ED and the LD group means were similar on &he verbal measures, but the LD group scores were lower than the ED group scores on performance measures. The NH group demonstrated intellectual abilities and deficits similar to those reported for other primary-grade Navajo children who had not been referred for suspected handicapping conditions. Title and abstract of the paper from which one of the three samples was taken: RECATEGORIZED WISC-R SCORE PATTERNS OF OLDER AND YOUNGER REFERRED TLINGIT INDIAN CHILDREN JAMES B. CONNELLY, Southeast Regional Resource Center. Juneau, Alaska Abstract: This study investigated patterns of Bannatyne’s recategorized WISC-R scores of 146 predominantly Tlingit Indian children who were referred for psychoeducational testing. The students were divided into two groups, ages 6 through 10 and I1 through 16, in order to investigate patterns that occurred at each level and to investigate the proportions that exhibited a typically “Indian” pattern: Spatial > Sequential > Conceptual and Acquired Knowledge. As a group, the older children displayed an Indian pattern, but the younger children displayed a different one: Spatial > Conceptual and Sequential > Acquired Knowledge. Both groups, however, displayed a significantly greater proportion of children with an Indian pattern than would be expected by chance. A considerable number of individuals from both groups attained significant differences among scores in the Indian direction
November 3, 2025 at 9:21 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Richard Lynn was criticised for using a sample of children with intellectual impairment to calculate the "national IQ" of Equatorial Guinea in 2002. In 2019, he calculated the IQs of Native Americans from children referred for psychoeducational evaluations, including those with learning difficulties
Extract from page 160 of the 2019 book Intelligence of Nations by Richard Lynn and David Becker, which describes the 2019 version of Lynn's "national IQ" database, which claims to provide national average IQs for nation states worldwide: This extract appears in the section describing the samples used to calculate the US "national IQ": "From a rural area in Southeast Alaska a low-SES sample of Tlingit, mostly with learning difficulties, was reported by Connelly (1983, Table 1). WISC-R FS-IQs for younger participants of 86.89 and older participants of 83.88 were averaged to an uncor. IQ of 85.39, to which 0.68 had to be added for FE-correction but 2.50 had to be subtracted for country correction, which resulted in a cor. IQ of 83.57."
November 3, 2025 at 9:05 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Children as agents (rather than just the outcome variable) rarely appear in low fertility discussions, but they do still contribute to the household in low fertility societies eg by helping care for siblings (help which increased during COVID lockdowns)

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Graph of how much support for childcare changed during the COVID pandemic, from an online survey of US and UK mothers. Mothers reported that help from fathers, partners and siblings tended to increase during the pandemic, but help from older kin, other kin or non-kin was more likely to decrease
November 2, 2025 at 10:53 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
This graph never fails to be shocking: "The US has experienced the earliest and greatest slowdown in life expectancy improvements among higher-income countries, reported Eileen Crimmins. “We have horrible life expectancy—and it’s getting worse and worse”"

www.prb.org/resources/se...
Graph showing life expectancy trends in 23 higher income countries between 1980 and 2024. Life expectancy increased over time in all countries. In 1980, the US is in the middle of the pack, but their life expectancy gains were slower than that of other countries, and by around 2002, the US had the lowest life expectancy of all countries. Over the next 20 years, US life expectancy increasingly tracks away from the trajectories of other countries, as their life expectancy stalls while other countries life expectancy continues to climb
October 31, 2025 at 7:08 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The tendency for psychologists to focus on student samples developed in the post-WWII period, likely as a strategy to appear politically neutral, as the US government targeted communism. This shift in sampling was accompanied by more "neutral" language, and has been described as “context stripping”
These new constraints on funding were intertwined with a fundamental change in the dominant methodology employed in social psychological studies. A clear and rapid postwar shift away from field studies to the use of laboratory experimental approaches in social psychology occurred between 1945 and 1955 (see Rutherford, Unger, & Cherry, 2011). This change was accompanied by a shift to captive groups, such as undergraduates, from community-based samples (Mac-Martin & Winston, 2000). The methodological shift supported and was supported by a more abstract, decontextualized and neutral language for the study of social phenomena. Unger (1986) has usefully described this change as “context strip-ping” in social psychological investigations. On the crucial issue of race and school segregation, context stripping was highly problematic
October 31, 2025 at 12:59 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The is/ought distinction (Hume’s Law,” the position that statements of “ought” cannot be derived from statements of “is”) and the naturalistic fallacy (Moore’s 1903 idea that “goodness” could not be defined in naturalistic terms & so ethics could not be derived from facts) are not the same thing
The problem of “facts” and “values” that SPSSI founders struggled with had along history in philosophy, beginning at least with Greek concepts of “disinterest,” but more directly with “Hume’s Law,” the position that statements of “ought” cannot be derived from statements of “is” (Hume, 1740/2000). Hume’s Law is often confused with the “naturalistic fallacy,” Moore’s (1903) idea that “goodness” could not be defined in naturalistic terms and therefore ethics could not be derived from facts. Although these formulations were originally concerned with ethics, the fact/value dichotomy became a critical theme in positivist definitions of science
October 31, 2025 at 12:49 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Last year they published a race science article that was so bad it caused critics to despair for the future of academic publishing. This year they've published an article claiming women are destroying academia, because men, unlike women, can have reproductive success without their children surviving
"Men and women achieve reproductive success in different ways, and so men and women evolved different psychological proclivities (Geary, 2021).1 To pass on their genes, women needed to prioritize both their own survival and that of their children (Campbell, 1999). Because of the extended helplessness and vulnerability of human offspring, nine months of pregnancy was not enough – women had to survive for many years to nurture and protect their children. Women thus evolved to (i) have higher concern for vulnerable others, and (ii) avoid risks, by preferring kin (those most likely to have their interests at heart), befriending highly trustworthy and equal status others (those who pose no competitive or aggressive threats), and eliminating from their social world anyone who did present risks. For men to pass on their genes, they needed to gain access to women. They did so by (i) competing against peer men to attract women and to gain status and deference from other men and (ii) cooperating with peer men to defeat outgroup men and gain access to their resources and women (e.g., Buss, 1988; Puts, 2010). Men thus evolved to compete in status hierarchies, by displaying competence to their peers, identifying and cooperating with skilled others, and building large coalitions to compete effectively against and defeat enemy groups."
October 27, 2025 at 10:23 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is a cautionary tale of what happens when academic freedom is conflated with free speech. Most journals would be too embarrassed to publish the exceptionally poor scholarship the JCI repeatedly platforms, but at the JCI “controversy” matters, not scientific merit
JOURNAL OF CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS VOLUME V SPECIAL ISSUE CENSORSHIP IN THE SCIENCES OCTOBER 2025
October 27, 2025 at 10:09 PM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Started a talk this week by asking how many in the audience had read Merchants of Doubt. No one had. So here's lead author Naomi Oreskes summarising the book.

One take-away: science and unregulated markets are not compatible because science points out market failures

youtu.be/GXRuxuTyrxo?...
Slide from the talk: Photo of Ashely Montagu with the quote (1950s): "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" Slide from the talk: 1990s Maybe not a liberal bias... ...but reality was increasingly pointing out market failures Slide from the talk Sometimes said that communism failed because prices didn't reflect economic realities Will capitalism fail because prices don't reflect ecological realities?
October 25, 2025 at 9:17 AM
rebeccasear.bsky.social
The second and third most read papers in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences are about pseudoscientific racism and the pseudoscientific sexism of the manosphere. Good to see these critical perspectives about the misuse of science being widely read
Screenshot of the second and third most read papers in EHS: Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience Kevin N. Lala, Gillian Brown, Kalyani Twyman, Marcus W. Feldman Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2025, e24 The use and misuse of evolutionary psychology in online manosphere communities: The case of female mating strategies Louis Bachaud, Sarah E. Johns Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2023, e28
October 23, 2025 at 4:58 PM