Gerhard Meisenberg


Gerhard Meisenberg is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. He is a director, with Richard Lynn, of the Pioneer Fund, which has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which the SPLC has described as a "racist journal".
Meisenberg was on the editorial board for the journal Intelligence until late 2018. Geneticist Daniel MacArthur, writing for Wired, described a letter Meisenberg sent to Nature as advocating for the future use of selective breeding or genetic engineering if group genetic differences in intelligence are found. Meisenberg attended and helped organize the London Conference on Intelligence. He was one of fifteen attendees who contributed to a defense of the conference published in Intelligence.

Research

Meisenberg has proposed a model of economic development in nations that attempts to predict future development based on historical trends in intelligence, education and economic growth. Meisenberg has also studied the possible dysgenic effect in intelligence, due to a claimed negative relationship between fertility and intelligence, Meisenberg argues that in Western society, this trend was delayed by religious prohibitions against contraception, allowing positive selection for intelligence to continue up until the industrial revolution.
Science journalist Angela Saini, in an opinion for The Guardian, has said that Meisenberg's views on race and intelligence are "unsupported by evidence" and "generally receive little to no attention from within the everyday scientific community".
Meisenberg wrote and paid to publish the 2007 book In God's Image: The Natural History of Intelligence and Ethics, explaining Meisenberg's claims regarding how genotype determines both physiology and behavior. Evolutionary biologist and historian R. Paul Thompson, for The Quarterly Review of Biology, described the book as well written, but based on unsupported generalizations, saying "the overall program of the book too extreme, too ideologically driven, and too biologically and anthropologically unsophisticated." Anthropologist Jonathan M. Marks, for the International Journal of Primatology, criticized both the underlying premise of the work, and Meisenberg's "uncritical and cavalier approach" to the topic. Marks compared the book with those by J. Philippe Rushton and Immanuel Velikovsky.

Books

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