Nathan Cofnas’ research highlights how much tunnel vision and dishonesty is required to be racist at his level. His work made it this far not because of his particular skill, but because of the academic system.
Cofnas mentioned on X that his father received a PhD from the University of Chicago. Given that much of academia involves understanding the system, parental knowledge helps set students up. That advantage is measurable, and larger than most people assume. A 2022 study in * Nature Human Behavior* surveyed more than 7,000 tenure-track faculty in the US and found that 22 percent have a parent with a PhD and 4 percent have two. That’s roughly twenty-five times the rate in the general population, nearly double again at prestigious universities, and it hasn’t moved in fifty years. The system of academia is easier when you’ve watched your parent navigate it.
Academia is also not about being correct, but instead about being able to defend your theories. When Philosophical Psychology published Cofnas’ most contentious paper, the editors Cees van Leeuwen and Mitchell Herschbach ran a note alongside it defending the decision. It concluded that while “Cofnas’ paper certainly adopts provocative positions on a host of issues related to race, genetics, and IQ,” none of those positions “are to be excluded from the current scientific and philosophical debates as long as they are backed up with logical argumentation and empirical evidence, and they deserve to be disputed rather than disparaged.” In other words, rather than making fun of his ideas, we should articulate the issues rationally.
It is worth knowing how the dispute went. A petition started by the philosopher Mark Alfano called for a boycott of the journal on the grounds that the paper had not been competently reviewed. Nine academics submitted a formal reply arguing the paper “fails to meet a range of academic quality standards usually expected of academic publications.” And then the editor who wrote that sentence about disputing resigned rather than run it. Van Leeuwen left after twenty-five years, not over publishing Cofnas but over the decision to publish the reply, citing “the imminent publication of a commentary bypassing editor moderation” and warning against “efforts to enforce ill-motivated slogans upon the journal’s pages, in particular when they are dressed in a cloak of social justice.”
Being disputed rather than disparaged resulted in his losing academic standing, but that’s within the establishment. He had bigger plans. As he said in an online conversation, his goal was a revolution that would transform the world order, and then he could be the head of eugenics at Harvard. His degrees are in philosophy, not lab-based biology. He’s hoping for a job for which he is not qualified while disparaging other people’s qualifications.
Where does this delusion come from? Academia is a closed system claiming to be rational.
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer cautioned that people are not, in fact, rational, and having worked for years in the quasi-academia of Museums, I wholly agree. It’s a culture of subtle, restrained discussions to cover for an inability to face the irrational truths of humanity. Add the scarcity of tenure, and the fact that these positions have basically become hereditary, and academia is a hell many people avoid. People believe that winning an academic debate in a closed system confers validity outside that system.
Ideally, publications should help scholars get outside feedback. But even there, publications often have ulterior motives. In terms of Cofnas’ research, the quality of getting published is not validity but instead following the rules. He has 15 published works on his CV. For academics, peer review is the gold standard, followed by how many other publications cite your work. The editorial system, though, is about allowing a variety of content into the world, and it often publishes contentious content to validate its openness. In other words, his publications could be pushed not for their quality but for outside factors. This is particularly rich, as he is against special treatment while profiting from the system.
Getting a publication accepted is also a skill in itself. Having parents who did this in your childhood would certainly help. This jumping through hoops and framing of language is easier if you have someone helping you navigate the unspoken rules. For example, publications often have themes, and smart scholars find ways to frame their existing research within the theme. Many young scholars I’ve known would get trapped in the process of writing for publication, taking them away from their research. Cofnas, for all his talk of equal systems, basically had plenty of special circumstances.
So being published is not a certification of the validity of his work but rather a measure of how ambitious he was, how much the system wanted to validate its liberal nature, and how much help he received from family. He’s not an example of natural brilliance or proof that genetics results in smarter children, but rather of how nurture fosters success.
Before we turn to the articles, his move from peer review to popular media is a tell about his personality. Tenure is based on peer-reviewed articles and academic books. News editorials and Substack posts do not count. Plenty of academics write for the popular world anyway, some because they want to educate, some for money because they’re stuck without a tenured position. But any academic writing for a non-academic audience is doing it for a reason outside their tenure role. Cofnas choosing Substack was likely about control, since he’s the editor and judge on his own publication, and about focusing attention on him. Which is worth sitting with, given how much energy he has spent accusing Arday of seeking attention.
So why did he decide to focus so much attention on Jason Arday? I wrote about this yesterday. Certainly his own failure to keep a position at Cambridge played into it. Emmanuel College terminated his research associate status in July 2024, after he wrote that in a meritocracy “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He sued the college with backing from the Free Speech Union and lost, on the grounds that the post had caused reputational harm.
But I’d also argue Arday represented the central failure of his research. Arday was appointed the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history in 2023. For a man whose entire body of work argues that appointments of non-white academics must be explained by something other than merit, that is not a colleague. Arday was a counterexample walking around the same university. The campaign that followed had the intensity of someone defending a thesis rather than someone reporting a concern.
I’m not a biology specialist, and his research is largely written for a specialist audience. But even with my undergraduate degree in Biology, and thanks to my dream of becoming a medical illustrator, I can see an essential challenge in his work. He needs to prove something his research doesn’t. Underlying Cofnas’ race realism is a counterfactual concept: that if the playing field were level, the current distribution would look entirely different. Since the 1400s, the playing field has never been level. Not for a decade. Not anywhere. There is no period he can point to where all things were equal between the races, which means the thing his framework requires has never once existed to be measured. His essential point cannot be tested.
He also needs to clip research to fit his needs. He’s basically wringing the sources to match what he wants. This is the academic version of “I do my own research,” which means he’s doing his own job badly. I’m not the only one to point this out. The nine academics who signed that letter to Philosophical Psychology were Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, Helen De Cruz, Jonathan Kaplan, Agustín Fuentes, Jonathan Marks, Massimo Pigliucci, Mark Alfano, David Livingstone Smith and Lauren Schroeder. Between them, they cover philosophy of biology, biological anthropology, and the history of race science. They said the paper had “several critical problems” that should have disqualified it on submission. Why did it get through? The editors felt it was important to have a place to critique his work. So his publications were getting special treatment, even if his research was about a world where there would be no special treatment.
Cofnas says “race realism is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position,” and that it is “a standard term used in the philosophy of biology.” He means racial classification is rooted in biological reality, and that race correlates with sociologically significant traits, intelligence above all.
That first half isn’t a suppressed finding. It’s a position his own adjacent field has formally rejected. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists unanimously adopted a statement holding that the distribution of biological variation in our species shows that socially recognized races are not biological categories, and that Western racial groups were socially, politically, and legally constructed over the last five centuries. That statement doesn’t say race is imaginary. It says the opposite: that race as a social reality is very real and lands on real bodies. What it denies is that the categories carve nature at the joints.
So “realist” is him taking sides, while framing the language so people think it’s settled on his side. The only reality is that he is making one up.
His field is philosophy of biology, and there’s no chance he doesn’t know this. Scholars have spent two and a half thousand years on how much of what we perceive is built by the world we live in. Nobody gets a philosophy degree without learning that perception is a moving target. To wear “realist” as a badge is to announce you’ve opted out of the central problem of your own discipline.
Any art historian can demonstrate it in a minute, because color is the cleanest case there is. Red means fertility in one society and death in another, and the wavelength never changes. It goes deeper than symbolism, down to whether a color gets named at all. Gladstone noticed in the nineteenth century that Homer never calls anything blue. The sea is wine dark, the sky is bronze, and kyanós, which later meant blue, is used for the eyebrows of Zeus and almost certainly meant dark. Berlin and Kay later mapped how color vocabularies grow in a consistent order across languages, dark and light first, then red, with blue arriving late. The Himba of Namibia have five color categories where English has eleven. Russian splits lighter blue, goluboy, from darker blue, siniy, as separate words, and Winawer and colleagues showed in * PNAS* that Russian speakers are measurably faster at distinguishing between two blues when the boundary falls between them.
None of which means the Greeks couldn’t see blue. Their eyes were our eyes, and the sky Homer looked at is the sky we look at. Their vocabulary tracked lightness; ours tracks hue. The photons didn’t change. The perception, and the language for it, did.
That’s what social construction actually claims. That nothing is real, but that the categories we sort reality into are made by people, in history, for reasons. Which is what the anthropologists are saying about race, and what a man who calls himself a realist has decided he can skip.
He works in borrowed vocabulary, taking terms with real technical histories and using them in a sense the technical literature doesn’t support, so that a movement position arrives wearing a lab coat.
Start with “race realism.” There’s a genuine debate in philosophy of biology about biological racial realism, argued by people like Quayshawn Spencer and Robin Andreasen, over whether racial categories can pick out real population structure. Cofnas uses the term as an identity. And the most prominent person in the world using it that way is Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates a white nationalist hate group. Taylor rejects the label white nationalist and prefers race realist precisely because it sounds like a finding rather than a preference. He argues it’s natural and healthy for groups to separate along racial lines.
Now put Cofnas’ own sentence beside that. “Those who truly value diversity should favor the preservation of racial distinctions. There must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius.” That’s not a position in the philosophy of biology. That’s Taylor’s position, in Taylor’s vocabulary, defended with Spencer’s credentials.
Analytic philosophy pointed out this old trick in 1938. The concept comes from Charles Stevenson, writing in Mind, who called it a persuasive definition: giving “a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning” in order to change “the direction of people’s interests.” Take a word people already approve of, keep the warm feeling, quietly swap out what it refers to, and now anyone who disagrees with your new referent looks like they’re arguing against the warm thing itself.
“Realism” is a persuasive definition. Nobody wants to be against reality. “Merit” is one. “Free inquiry” is one. And “natural selection requires no teleology” is one, aimed at other philosophers rather than the public but built identically. Stevenson had a phrase for why anyone bothers. “The words are prizes,” he wrote, which each man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice.
Ian Hacking pointed out the power of classification. Five centuries of sorting people by ancestry, then building law, property, schooling, and policing around the sort, produce populations that differ in measurable ways, and those differences get read back as evidence that the sort was tracking something real all along. But that’s a feedback loop about the system, not the substance. What Cofnas presents as a finding is the output of a machine he refuses to look at.
Karen and Barbara Fields call this racecraft: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, rather than the perception of race producing racism. Race realism is that alchemy given a job title.
And the argumentative structure has a name too, from the philosopher Nicholas Shackel. The motte and bailey. The bailey is the valuable, indefensible ground where you actually want to live; in this case, that Black academics would vanish from high-profile positions under merit and that races should be kept separate. The motte is the fortress you retreat to when attacked; in this case, you merely defend open inquiry into an empirical question. They’re presented as the same claim. They aren’t. He publishes from the bailey and litigates from the motte.
Which is why the citation problem in his ordinary papers matters more than it first appears. A man who def…
