Statement on Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr.’s racism after Buffalo’s multiple-victim murder

On 14th May 2022, Payton Gendron killed 10 people in a racist multiple murder, in Buffalo, New York State, US. Payton Gendron published a 180-page document in which he predominantly explains his motivation and reasoning behind the decision to undertake such action. In this document, he cites scientific publications to support his openly racist, fascist, and white-supremacist views and statements. These scientific publications are mainly in the fields of population genetics, evolutionary psychology and demography.

From most of the papers he cites, he extracts biased conclusions which do not agree with the authors’ own conclusions, by cherry-picking and decontextualising figures and text fragments with the sole objective of justifying his preconceived racist beliefs. Undoubtedly, a serious debate should be opened within the scientific communities involved on how to address sensitive issues to avoid racist misinterpretations, such as cross-population analyses of polygenic scores of phenotypes highly influenced by social inequalities, which is a recurrent topic throughout the killer’s document.

However, there is a serious issue that needs to be given special attention. Within the articles cited, there are a few that do not need a misinterpretation by the reader because they are unambiguously racist texts that aim to spread hate speech. This is the case of an article cited by Payton Gendron and written by Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr in 2010 (Figure 1). Michael A. Woodley of Menie, Yr was affiliated to the Royal Holloway, University of London at the time, and since 2012 he has been at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The article is titled Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications and it was published in the journal Medical Hypotheses (Elsevier). In this text Woodley of Menie, Yr pseudoscientifically argues that race is a biological reality rather than a social construct and that Homo sapiens should be considered a polytypic species with different races.

Woodley of Menie, Yr has a long list of published texts in which he disseminates eugenist statements and spreads the Great Replacement theory. One of the examples is the article In France, are secular IQ losses biologically caused? A comment on Dutton and Lynn published in Intelligence (Elsevier) –a journal of which he is a board editor– in 2015. In this text he argues that there is a decline on the intelligence of French population due to “Dysgenics” and “Replacement migration”:

Replacement migration in France involving populations exhibiting lower means of IQ and higher rates of total fertility, such as Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Roma (Čvorić, 2014, Lynn and Vanhanen, 2012) may be increasing the rate of secular losses at the level of g.

Another example from tens of similar publications is Biogeographic Ancestry, Cognitive Ability and Socioeconomic Outcomes published in psych (MDPI) in 2018 in which he is the second author:

Our results show that independent of self-identified racial/ethnic groups (SIRE), African, Oceanian, and Amerindian ancestries, relative to Eurasian ones, were associated with lower cognitive ability and parental SES. […] Genetic ancestry was found to be related to both cognitive ability and parental socioeconomic status independent of SIRE, as predicted by evolutionary theory. These findings strongly disconfirm claims made by various researchers that there are no statistical relationships between genomic ancestry and cognitive ability when controlling for socially identified racial groups.

Considering Woodley of Menie, Yr’s articles are directly and intrinsically related to the killing of at least 10 people, we call on the scientific community to step forward. We, as researchers, urge Royal Holloway, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Elsevier and MDPI to act quickly to avoid spreading hate speech against racialized communities that might lead to further killings and start a reparation process to the victims of Buffalo’s multiple murder.

1. We ask Royal Holloway to retract Woodley of Menie,Yr’s article cited by Payton Gendron immediately.

2. We ask Royal Holloway to withdraw Woodley of Menie, Yr’s PhD title.

3. We ask Vrije Universiteit Brussel to cancel Woodley of Menie, Yr’s contract and affiliation.

4. We ask all editorial groups, mainly Elsevier and MDPI, to retract Woodley of Menie, Yr’s eugenist articles.

5. We ask Elsevier to close the journal Intelligence, which includes Woodley of Menie, Yr as a member of its editorial board, and in which eugenist and racist articles either by him or other authors are frequent.