Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, Younger aka Technical Heretic (1984–) is a eugenicist, ecologist and paranormalist who first proposed the batshit-crazy spiteful mutant hypothesis. Woodley argues "sociocultural conditions that disincentivize procreation" and "any thought process that leads to a group’s sub-replacement fertility" is a "spiteful mutation".Woodley has a history of promoting other pseudoscientific and fringe-science views, including cryptozoology, eugenics, hereditarianism and racialism; he's co-authored a book with a similar crank named Edward Dutton. He attended the London Conference on Intelligence and controversially sits on the Editorial Board of the journal Intelligence. He also reviews papers submitted to the OpenPsych pseudojournals.
Despite his wealthy aristocratic background (and his YouTube videos which seem to show him living in a huge manor house or castle), Woodley begs for donations from his meagre following.
In May 2019 Woodley posted a video on Edward Dutton's Youtube channel, "The truth about the London Conference on Intelligence!" although the video is anything but the truth; it contains many misleading statements and lies. Dutton deletes any comments merely critical of the video.
Background
Aristocrat Michael Woodley in his manor house.
Michael Anthony Woodley (who often uses the title "of Menie", a Scottish barony), Yr., was born in Guilford, England on 16 May 1984. His father, of the same name, is the (28th) Feudal Baron of Menie and his mother is named Caroline, née Cuthbertson. Woodley's father’s family has its roots in the Scottish landed gentry, and he is related to the twentieth-century Scottish Industrialist William Ritchie who co-founded Grant, Ritchie and CompanyWikipedia.
Woodley received a Bachelor's Degree in Environmental Biology at Columbia University in 2007; in 2011 he completed a Ph.D. in Ecology at the University of London (Royal Holloway). His thesis looked at the life history ecology of the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana. In 2015, he was a recipient of an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star designation for producing the best-supported model of the Flynn Effect. Since 2018 he has sat on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence.
He is a Lifetime Fellow at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and formerly (2015-2016) worked at Technische Universität Chemnitz.
Pseudoscience
Cryptozoology
Woodley began his career publishing on cryptozoology, including articles in Journal of Scientific Exploration and a 2008 book titled In the Wake of Bernard Heuvelmans: An Introduction to the History and Future of Sea Serpent Classification.The book was published with CFZ Press, part of The Centre for Fortean Zoology, which specializes in cryptozoological pseudoskepticism.
Woodley's cryptozoology ideas have not been taken serious by scientists. Environmental scientist Robert France describes Woodley’s writings as “one of the most blatant displays of cryptozoological fancy” and a “ridiculous bit of science fiction”.Palaeontologist Darren Naish co-authored a few papers on cryptozoology with Woodley between 2008 and 2012, but has more recently described Woodley as having "indeed promoted some unusual ideas that cannot be correct, these including that the ‘super otter’ and ‘many-humped’ sea monsters of Heuvelmans (1968) might actually be literal super-sized otters."
Pioneer Fund
Woodley decided as soon as he finished his Ph.D. in 2011 to shift his research from plant ecology to focus on human psychology, something he's not qualified in. He then began to associate himself with the controversial far-right Pioneer Fund, working with Gerhard Meisenberg for 9 months at Ross University and as a research associate of Aurelio J. Figueredo.[citation needed]
Racialism
In 2010, Woodley published a paper arguing human races are biological as opposed to social constructs - "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications" - in the fringe-medical journal, Medical Hypotheses.This journal is most controversial for publishing papers that support HIV/AIDS denialism.
The paper has been criticized in detail on a blog,that points out Woodley just repeats discredited pseudoscientific racialist arguments and cherry-picks sources to support his own argument, while ignoring most of the scientific literature that debunks race. Not surprisingly, the only websites to support the conclusions of this paper are white nationalist ones, including The Alternative Hypothesis.The paper on Google Scholar has been cited 17 times, but 6 citations are by OpenPsych e.g. John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard and Heiner Rindermann.
Eugenics and dysgenics
In 2018, Michael A. Woodley with Edward Dutton published At Our Wits' End: Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future that argues human intelligence has gone into rapid decline since the Industrial Revolution. This sort of pseudoscientific work on dysgenics is popular among the alt-right's HBD community, for example the book is promoted on The Unz Review. Woodley and Dutton partly blame the alleged lowering of IQ onto Third World immigrants and women's rights, e.g. smarter females having no or fewer children to pursue careers when in their opinion they should stay at home.
In a 2015 paper he drew on the ideas of Victorian eugenicist Francis Galton, arguing that "selection favoring lower IQ" was responsible for a fall in g (general intelligence) since the mid 19th century. This was based on an analysis of the use of difficult words in texts from 1850 to 2005 (word difficulty based on the performance of white men in more recent vocabulary tests). He claimed to use a lot of statistical magic to correct for some of the obvious biases, i.e. changing literacy rates (which reached the modern-day peaks of c. 99% around 1900 and therefore won't be significant over much of the period), and word age and familiarity.But there are many other biases not corrected for: such as the selection of texts (from Google's corpus as used by N-Gram searches) and changes in literary style even within texts intended for the same audience and purpose. Other factors relating to the complexity of texts are not considered (e.g. complexity of ideas, use of abbreviations, allusion, use of foreign languages, references to different domains of knowledge...); performance in vocabulary tests does have a strong correlation with g (general intelligence) so it might be a reasonable measure if you could ensure you were using the same samples across time (which Menie clearly isn't), word difficulty is constant across time (dubious - especially when words are used in vastly different contexts now to the 19th century), and if you had evidence that word use in texts correlates with performance in vocabulary tests (Menie assumes this is obviously true because no writer ever uses a word they're not sure of the meaning of, but he doesn't try to prove it).
Sexism
Woodley co-wrote a paper at the London Conference on Intelligence with Meisenberg that was overtly sexist, arguing: "Neither economic development nor the progress of female emancipation or empowerment have been successful at virilizing female achievement levels"
Paranormal
In 2020, Woodley co-authored a crackpot paper in a pseudoscientific journal claiming spiritualist mediums can "retrieve information about deceased persons through unknown means".
Alt-right connections
In 2016 Woodley appeared on Stefan Molyneux's YouTube channel as a guest to discuss "Why Civilizations Rise and Fall".It is a popular video with the alt-right, for example it is found promoted on VDARE and Conservative websites.
Woodley posts on the alt-right website The Unz Review with James Thompson who praises his research on race and intelligence; he is quoted by Thompson as arguing "replacement immigration" to Denmark is reducing the national IQ.
White nationalist Kevin MacDonald is a fan of Woodley's controversial writings on race.
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