Welcome to Human Varieties. My name is Jason, and I’ve inhabited the “Sailersphere” for some 12 years, mostly as a drive-by datamonkey and armchair theorist in comment sections. I can fairly be described as a hereditarian, and my Internet presence has loosely been fashioned around that paradigm and its allied disciplines. I used to contribute, however infrequently, to Razib Khan and Godless Capitalist’s Gene Expression group blog between 2003-2008, drawing the most attention with my review of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence, my discussion of cognitive ability and sexual behavior, and my defense of James D. Watson in 2007. The Watson post, in particular, had three interesting consequences. First, I was contacted and interviewed by earnest New York Times reporter, Amy Harmon. This interview was used for her DNA age article, which subsequently (and not unjustly) won the Pulitzer Prize. Second, I was invited to adapt my post into an editorial for the journal Medical Hypotheses by then Editor-in-Chief, Bruce Charlton. Most remarkably, though, I was called and thanked personally by the great man, James Watson himself! (The comical mismatch between my obscurity and Watson’s eminence, unfortunately, underscores the alarming ubiquity of his ill treatment during that whole manufactured scandal.) Watson even invited me to dine with him personally in early 2008; this was all the more flattering (and not a wee bit ironic) given that he had just published a book titled Avoid Boring People!

Since that time—an eternity in Internet years—John Fuerst has emerged as a much more meticulous and energetic hereditarian dilettante than I ever was or could be. However we have different things we can contribute to our overlapping interests and goals, and furthermore, we are not the only people who could use an active forum for exploring these issues in greater depth. So we started this website to assemble and nurture an online community of human diversity sleuths who can collaborate, respond to, and build off each other’s labor. Ideally, this site can serve as both an alternative to and a launching pad for standard published journal research.

If you have any questions or would like to join this blog as a contributor, please send me an email.

[Chuck: Welcome to Human Varieties. My name is John, but I frequently go by Chuck, a family nicknamed derived from my apparent resemblance, in character, to one Huckleberry Hound. I hail from a well-to-do family and am not currently burdened by the necessity of work and, as such, have time and, more importantly, license to explore exotic interests, HBD being one of the most recent. In pervious years, I was interested in crytozoology, but my attraction to the field soon dissipated after a failed quest for the elusive Yěrén of Shennongjia.

Over the years, I have worked as a research assistant in psychology and chemistry, taught secondary biology to history in the US and abroad, managed to acquire a number of undergraduate degrees, from biology to psychology, wasted some time in graduate school, spent years wandering the world, doing very odd things with many very odd people, but I never quite managed to settle down on anything or managed to find whatever it was that I have been looking for. During a 2004 anti-Japanese rally, to which which I was dragged to, amidst the shattering of Sushi restaurant fronts in Shanghai, I became fond of the idea of ethnic nationalism and so have spent some time blogging about and defending that dying worldview. I don’t pretend that my interest in HBD is completely divorced from my others.]