The gene delusion

In February this year, the Downing Street adviser Andrew Sabisky was forced to resign when his incendiary comments on race and genetics from six years earlier came to light. Sabisky had been hired by Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, as part of a drive to recruit “weirdos and misfits”. But one of the most alarming aspects of the Sabisky affair is not that he had written that “There are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin”; it is that such views are hardly even controversial today among many right-wing thinkers.

Sabisky was just 21 when he made those comments, though neither he nor his would-have-been bosses Cummings and Johnson has said whether they agree with them today. So while Sabisky had added that “whether the politicians will pay any attention is debatable… [although] it would be nice if they did from the standpoint of immigration control”, we can’t be sure that the British government isn’t, on the contrary, paying very close attention indeed as it tells...