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.

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