On Cofnas and a Few Other ThingsOn Cofnas and a Few Other Things

I am not a geneticist. I am in my fourth month working in genomics, as a research engineer studying the origins of mutations in ancient and modern human genomes. I came to it from physics. I write code, build models, try to date mutations, compare modern humans with archaic humans, think about Denisovans. My model can be off by several thousand generations. Error is a property of the model, not a person’s fault: I answer for the former, not the latter.

Until recently, I had never even asked myself whether I had the moral right to do this kind of research. Working with ancient human remains, populations and genomes has its own ethics, of course, but I had not yet faced the dilemma directly: are there questions it would be better not to ask, even when they are technically well formulated? In my field, meanwhile, genetic differences between present-day populations are a routine subject of research: Denisovan admixture is unevenly distributed among them. I had assumed that a researcher’s right to ask questions was a given. Otherwise, politics gets to decide which answers we are allowed to find, and to decide in advance, before the question has even been asked.

Nathan Cofnas’s lecture at Ghent University on race, intelligence and the so-called Great Awokening was the first thing to make me not so much question this principle as feel that it was insufficient. Cofnas discusses the heritability of intelligence and the gap in average IQ test scores between Black and white Americans. Does science have the right to investigate such differences if we would rather not know one of the possible answers? My first answer is yes. The difficulties begin when I try to explain why.

At first, I thought this was the central question. Gradually, though, something else began to trouble me, and it proved harder than the first: why would we rather not know one of the answers? Why does our defence of equality so often rest on the hope that science will sooner or later confirm that we really are the same? And what will be left of that defence on the day science refuses to confirm it?

I first encountered Cofnas through the story of Jason Arday, a professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge, rather than through a scientific paper. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarism and questioned his academic record. The university that had awarded Arday his doctorate did not substantiate the plagiarism allegations, but questions remained about his publications, qualifications and biographical claims, and Cambridge opened an investigation of its own. After several weeks of media pressure, Arday left the university. Nine days later, he was found dead at home. That was precisely the order in which it all reached me: first the scandal and the death of a man Cofnas had publicly accused, and only then Cofnas’s own writing. It is hard to imagine a worse sequence for an impartial reading.

Later, I read other work by Cofnas. Among it was Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, in which a man of the right takes a certain methodical pleasure in examining data suggesting that his political allies score lower on measures of intelligence, on average, than those on the left. A rare instance of scientific impartiality: the uncomfortable conclusions begin at home. This does not make Cofnas objective or validate his conclusions about race. It does, however, get in the way of the most convenient explanation: that he simply picks the science that flatters his own group.

But the right to ask a question does not mean the question has been framed scientifically. A column labelled race in a table does not turn race into an unambiguous biological entity. Current guidelines for genomic research require researchers not to use race as an automatic proxy for genetic ancestry, and to explain why they have chosen a particular population category at all. Race may be a necessary variable when studying the effects of racism, but that does not make it a precise synonym for genetic ancestry.

Between banning a question and granting a free pass to any answer lies a considerable stretch of ground that both sides prefer to ignore. Science has the right to ask uncomfortable questions. But the presence of a category in a dataset does not make it a property of nature.

Cofnas, incidentally, sets up the dispute in advance as a question of the right to speak. He begins the lecture with Pierre Thiriar, a judge at the Antwerp Court of Appeal, who had recently written that some of Cofnas’s statements might fall under Belgium’s anti-racism law. Cofnas gives a harsher account of the situation, presenting it almost as a threat of criminal prosecution. At the end of the lecture, he returns to the question of who, in the end, ought to be in prison.

We have not yet reached the argument, but its political frame is already in place: here is a man whom others are trying to silence. After an opening like that, any objection can easily be presented as confirmation of his own account: you are simply not allowed to discuss these things. The louder the demands to cancel the lecture or drive this kind of research out of universities, the more comfortable that position becomes. Cofnas also has a more serious point. If people like him are pushed out of academia, he says, only real extremists will be left studying race and intelligence. Prohibition does a poor job of selecting ideas, but an excellent job of selecting people: the first to abandon a controversial subject are those for whom an academic reputation still means something.

It does not follow, though, that a university is obliged to give a home to any and every piece of research. “Otherwise the Nazis will be the ones talking about it” is an argument about the possible consequences of exclusion. It does not establish the quality of a particular work or confer an unconditional right to a university’s prestige. A platform is not neutral either: it lends institutional weight to what is said. There is no comfortable solution here. Banning Cofnas does not refute him; inviting him does not mean accepting that he is right.

Cofnas’s critics also find a certain convenience in this scene. If the man before us is obviously a racist, there is no need to examine the argument itself. I do not know whether Cofnas is a racist in the sense of possessing some inner essence, and I am not even sure that such essences can be reliably diagnosed in another person. The word “racist” can be entirely accurate and still refute nothing. Academic freedom protects the possibility of asking a question. A good answer does not come with it.

Cofnas builds his argument almost as a syllogism, and everything that matters here lies in that “almost”. He calls the first proposition the equality thesis: on this account, races and sexes do not differ, on average, in socially relevant traits. The second sounds much more modest: everyone has the right to realise their potential. Put the two together, add the observed gap in outcomes, and what you get is less a conclusion than an indictment: if the groups are the same but the outcomes differ, the environment is to blame, discrimination is to blame, injustice is to blame, and society is obliged to change the conditions until the gap disappears. Cofnas calls this “wokism” and argues that the defence of equality rests on sameness. Only he draws the conclusion in reverse: if they are not the same, the very basis for demanding equality disappears.

And almost the entire debate revolves around the first proposition. Are the groups actually the same? How heritable is intelligence? What, exactly, can be inferred from the heritability we observe?

Cofnas is not presenting a genetic discovery of his own. He assembles existing scientific findings into an argument that ends far beyond the bounds of genetics. I am therefore not going to try to establish here whether his particular estimates of heritability are right or wrong. I lack the expertise, and in any case my interest in this story lies elsewhere.

One distinction does need to be made, however, between heritability within a group and the cause of a difference between groups, because too much in this debate depends on it. It is precisely where a conclusion seems obvious that we are most likely to miss the fact that it does not follow from the preceding claim at all.

High heritability of a trait within one group tells us nothing, by itself, about the cause of a difference in the averages of two groups. These are different questions. Variation in a trait within each population can be substantially associated with genetic factors, while the observed difference between the two populations’ averages can be caused by the environment. So the statement “intelligence is heritable” does not yet answer the question of why group averages differ. That requires further data and further assumptions. The argument around Cofnas cannot, then, be reduced to a simple choice between “genes” and “environment”.

Cofnas’s argument looks impeccably coherent until you start asking where each successive “therefore” comes from. Its moral component sounds humane: every person has the right to realise their potential. But the right to realise one’s potential is not the same as moral equality. A person is given the opportunity to fulfil whatever capacities they possess, while the extent and social value of those capacities may already have been declared unequal.

What happens to a person whose abilities are modest, have gone unnoticed, or simply turn out to be of no use to anyone? Formally, nothing is forbidden to them. They are allowed to realise the little that has been found in them, and from there a small salary, rented housing, inaccessible healthcare and a shortened life all fall neatly into place as the logical continuation of their modest gifts. First, an expert determines the extent of their potential. Then society determines the corresponding extent of the world available to them.

For me, moral equality means equal dignity, equal political agency, the right not to be humiliated, and equality of opportunity that is genuine enough to mean something in practice. It does not mean that every choice must have the same consequences. I do not believe that effort and a complete refusal to make any should be valued equally. Differences in work, discipline and the decisions we make may well justify differences in outcomes. But a different outcome and the loss of the basic conditions of a human life are not the same thing. To confuse them is to confuse inequality with the denial of dignity.

To demand complete equality of outcomes is sentimental infantilism, as is treating being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth as a personal achievement. Innate advantages are merely a stroke of luck, not a sign of some higher favour. But to cast every class divide as a tragedy is to indulge in dreary moralistic posturing. The point lies elsewhere altogether. The main question for institutions is much more prosaic: do they give a person real means of living a decent life, or do they cynically stop at granting rights to things they know that person cannot access? A system is under no obligation to make human lives identical. But it has no right to turn difference into grounds for humiliation.

I do not know where circumstance ends and choice begins. My argument needs only a narrower position: there is a minimum of basic goods and dignity that should not depend on how highly we rate a particular person’s abilities, discipline or usefulness.

Cofnas speaks of socially relevant traits, of characteristics that matter socially, as though their relevance were contained in the traits themselves. But the social value of intelligence, memory, productivity, physical strength, the capacity to care or to submit to routine is not set by nature. One ability is recognised, another passes unnoticed, and a third does not even have a name in the language that might describe it.

Even if the first link in the chain turns out to be biological, that does not make the rest natural. Between ability and poverty there is always an institution. The very same difference in ability may have negligible social consequences under one institutional arrangement and determine almost the whole course of a person’s life under another. The natural difference may be the same; its social cost will differ. If defending equality first requires us to prove that people are the same by nature, then, for some reason, we already regard difference itself as sufficient grounds for inequality.

Three distinct questions converge in Cofnas’s argument. The first concerns cause: where the observed gap comes from in the first place. The second concerns blame: whether anyone can be held responsible for its emergence. And the third is a different question altogether: what society should do about its consequences now. He does not literally claim that an innate difference releases society from all obligations. His claim is that if a substantial part of the gap has a natural cause, the “moral emergency” disappears: the one that drives an endless search for discrimination and efforts to change the environment until the observed inequality is gone.

But this is precisely where I am interested in how the argument works beyond its literal wording. If a difference has a natural cause, society did not create it; if society did not create it, society is not to blame. From there, it is very easy to take one more step: once the blame disappears, the demand to put anything right loses some of its former force as well. That step no longer belongs to genetics.

Obligation and blame are not the same thing. No one invented old age, illness or congenital disability, but that does not turn assistance into a favour. The state did indeed have nothing to do with the origins of someone’s misfortune, yet it still has no right to watch that person bear the cost alone. We confuse blame with obligation because we expect politics to deliver a verdict: name the culprit, and then we will decide who owes what to whom. If there is no culprit, the obligation seems to vanish.

For Cofnas, the fact that a difference is innate weakens the moral demand to remedy it. From another moral standpoint, the conclusion is almost the reverse: if the limitation itself cannot be removed, some obligations may prove permanent rather than temporary.

Here I am deliberately changing the question. Cofnas is not challenging social obligations as such, but the habit of explaining every persistent difference in terms of discrimination and treating it as sufficient grounds for special policies towards an entire group. My example does not refute this; Cofnas would most likely have no objection to it. Its purpose is different: to separate obligation from blame. Universal assistance, special measures for particular groups, or a combination of the two: that is the next debate, and the genome will not settle it for us.

It was easier for me to think I had been born this way. As a queer person, I never experienced born this way as an entirely abstract argument from the history of emancipation. There was something reassuring about it, and something irritating too. It lifted some of the shame: I had not chosen my desire, so I should not be punished for it.

Gradually, though, it was that very “I did not choose” that began to seem suspect. For some reason, before I could claim the right to my own sexuality, I first had to prove that I deserved neither credit nor blame for it. The very demand to prove the absence of choice already accepted the prosecution’s terms. It seemed I could be granted freedom only after proving my own lack of it. If it were convincingly established tomorrow that sexual orientation involved an element of choice, my view of gay rights would not change. No one should have to prove the biological inevitability of their desire for the state to leave them alone. Equal dignity in this case does not depend on a gene, a hormone, childhood trauma, the family environment or a conscious decision.

I do not know how much of sexuality is innate, and I do not think my argument requires a definitive answer. A large genomic study by Andrea Ganna and his colleagues, published in Science in 2019, found a complex polygenic influence on same-sex sexual behaviour, but no way of making any meaningful prediction about an individual’s sexuality from their genome. Even genetics failed to provide the simple explanation of sexuality that had been expected of it for so long.

The right to live as you wish has to be justified by proving that you could not have lived any other way. Perhaps this is the paradox of born this way: it defends freedom, yet still demands proof that a person did not choose their own desire. Why is it not enough simply to desire? Why must we establish where that desire came from, name it, and turn it into an answer to the question of who you are?

With Cofnas, what changes is not the logic of the argument but whom it absolves. In the case of born this way, biology absolved the individual: I was born this way, so do not judge me for something I did not choose. Cofnas is not saying that “society no longer owes anyone anything”. He is saying that a natural origin for the gap weakens the moral demand to seek out and eliminate its social causes. Politically, though, such an explanation can easily lead to another conclusion: if the cause lies at least partly in nature, schools, the state and social institutions have grounds to consider themselves less responsible for the observed outcome.

I still lean towards letting the research proceed. Perhaps because I am used to treating doubt as the cardinal professional virtue. But “science above all” sounds good only for as long as the consequences of scientific curiosity fall on someone else.

The possibility of enduring innate differences takes that support away from me. I would have to defend people’s equal dignity without claiming that they are the same in every respect. I would have to acknowledge that a just society will not produce identical people, and that some forms of support may be needed permanently, not merely until the next reform. That is not enough for a complete theory of justice.

When it comes to my own sexuality, it is still easier for me to say “I did not choose” than “even if I did, nobody asked you”. As a researcher, it is just as convenient to say “I am only asking questions” and leave the consequences of those questions to somebody else. Both are partly true. But both phrases let us stop at just the right moment and ask no further questions about our own responsibility.

I still believe that science has the right to investigate the origins of human differences, including by asking the most politically dangerous questions. But that “yes” does not absolve a researcher of the need to justify the category, the method and the limits of their conclusion. Nor does it permit an account of a cause to become a ready-made answer to a question of justice.

The genome may explain why we differ. But no explanation of a cause can, by itself, determine our obligations to one another. Biology has not changed. What has changed is who is absolved.