Human Biodiversity Institute
The Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI) refers to a far-right group of scientists, academics, and others associated with pseudoscientific race theories and neo-eugenics.
The Human Biodiversity Institute was founded by Steve Sailer, a journalist who has written for VDARE, an American far-right political website.
[7] The framing of human biodiversity discourse is meant to confer upon the movement scientific authority, and present it as empirical and rational.
[1][8] In a study on white nationalism, the authors describe human biodiversity as a movement to "catalog and create hereditarian ideas" about racial differences, and to then distribute them as red pills to transform online discourse.
[13] Sailer took this as a biological imperative that necessitates "ethnocentrism, clannishness, xenophobia, nationalism, and racism", when applied to the scale of an entire society for "ethnic nepotism".
[9] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the members of the Human Biodiversity Institute consisted mainly of journalists, academics, and scientists who discussed "differences in race, sex and sexual orientation".
[27] In 2003, known members of Human Biodiversity Institute included J. Philippe Rushton, Charles Murray, Kevin MacDonald, Gregory Cochran, J. Michael Bailey, and Ray Blanchard.
[28][29] According to a 2021 study on white nationalism by Panofsky et al., political centrists such as Steven Pinker have played a role in legitimizing the ideas of the human biodiversity movement.
[9] The electronic mailing list eventually went defunct, and discourse moved on to right-wing blogs, in which members started writing about subjects such as race, genetics, and intelligence.
The genuineness of this varies between individuals but often their wider politics and previous statements indicate a predisposition to agreeing with racist pseudoscience.In an August 2003 article, the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, Steve Sailer, characterized homosexuality as a "disease" that may be eliminated by parents in the future.
[26] Bailey denied that his 2001 paper, "Parental Selection of Children's Sexual Orientation", advocated for eliminating homosexuality, as he noted "[H]omosexuality, like heterosexuality, is ethically neutral.
[7] The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted that many of the early supporters of J. Michael Bailey's book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, were members of the Human Biodiversity Institute.
[4] The book advances the theory by Blanchard that female-attracted transgender women are men with abnormal paraphilias or sexual orientations (e.g. autogynephilia).
Often these are single-purpose accounts that exclusively edit on topics like race and intelligence, racial classification and bios of related researchers, like Linda Gottfredson or Helmuth Nyborg.
