An Englishman in America’s “Weirdest” Town

For some reason, I had long wanted to visit Portland, Oregon. It has gained a reputation internationally—especially since Antifa took over part of Portland State University during the George Floyd disorder—not only of being the most Woke city in the US, but also one that has acted as a magnet for eccentrics and weirdoes from all over the country. So, naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to fly to Portland to speak at a “based” conference, especially as it included other speakers who were friends of mine, such as Jared Taylor. My four days in the city whose motto is “Keep Portland Weird!” opened my eyes to a stimulating, chaotic anarcho-tyranny, and one that was overwhelmingly white.

The first hint of what was going on came when the student who picked me up from the airport asked me what I fancied for dinner. I fancied Chick Fill-A, a chain which fascinated me because it was apparently run by evangelical Christians, to the extent that it was closed on Sundays. We had to drive to the neighbouring town of Beaverton to find one; it was banned from Portland, it seemed, because it was Christian; Portland proudly being the least Christian city in America. The pretty, blonde, polite teens who served me were, apparently, not consistent with keeping Portland weird.

The next day, I wandered from my hotel, which was close to the university, to the centre of the city. As I got closer to “Voodoo Donuts”—which a lesbian couple on my flight from Iceland had advised me to try out—I began to see tents in the street; something that the Woke city authorities were obviously prepared to tolerate. But this was nothing compared to what happened once I walked into “China Town,” having purchased my “Old Dirty Bastard” donut from an East Asian woman who’d shaved all her hair off and wore a black facemask. The aroma of cannabis mixed with urine started to assault my nostrils as I found myself unable to move for vagrants; a surprising number of them being female. The balmy micro-climate of the west coast being as it is, many of them simply lived in the streets of China Town, with the Chinese long since having moved out.

I lost count, on that sunny early afternoon, of the number of unkempt men simply lying on the pavement asleep. Many vagrants had wheelchairs and trolleys of goods and blankets which they wheeled around. I passed a number of tents with multiple occupants, including dogs. A middle-aged woman talked to herself, a young schizophrenic girl—who presumably thought she had psychic powers—asked “Is your wife a redhead?” and appeared disappointed to discover that she wasn’t. As I ventured closer to the famous Powell’s book shop, an old homeless man with a Bible preached loudly about our damnation, and an elderly lady vagrant, complete with trolley, screamed about how she was being persecuted, to the extent the local “security force” moved her on for “disturbing the peace.” Young, black-clad and very unconvincing transvestites, performatively donning black Covid masks as if it was still 2020, made their way to shops that sold nothing but cannabis and related paraphernalia.

I meandered around the university—which an emeritus professor/fan told me has a shockingly high acceptance rate—to see a fluorescent street mural painted by women dressed in black with “they/them” pronouns, and countless female students with tattoos and unnatural hair colours. Talking to some “Christian” students I found that even they were “non-denominational” in order to be “inclusive.”

A Portland-based follower took me up into the hills; the nice area of the city, from which The Simpsons creator Matt Groening hails; there is a graffito of Bart Simpson in cement in front of Groening’s old school. I assume that Portland once had that wholesome-comic Springfield vibe that you predict from fundamentalist Christian English immigrants to the northern states who then emigrated again to the rugged far West: a sense of religious destiny, intelligence, and creativity. With the collapse of harsh conditions, however, and the rise of Leftism the same social conformity, social anxiety and guilt have created super-Woke Portland and it has sucked in the mentally unwell from far and wide.

Even in the leafy suburbs there were Democrat signs attached to houses, albeit for less Woke Democrats. Portland City Council has only Democrat representatives ranging from traditional Leftists to the borderline insane. The nature spot above this area of large houses afforded a beautiful view of the city, though there were, of course, teenagers dressed in black and smoking weed. They were quite friendly, however. My “British accent” seems to elicit that in Americans. I had never been in a city where there were so many mad people. Naturally, as Portland is mainly white but Woke, all of the many murals on the sides of buildings were of non-whites, including one of a black man carrying Portland on his shoulders. Portland seems to be the Vatican City of the White Guilt sect.

However, the anarchy in Portland goes well beyond tolerating vagrancy. I witnessed a huge queue in front of a place that gives food to the homeless before allowing them, seemingly at their own request, to sleep in the streets. My professor friend showed me a sports and social club. Earlier this year, an anarchist had deliberately driven a car into it as he felt it symbolised traditional power in Portland.

As has been reported in the Daily Mail, as our group ate its brunch, at a Portland restaurant run by a gay man which had the gay-trans flag outside it called “Clarklewis,” Antifa turned up and began filming us; initially two tattooed girls and a weedy man in a facemask, all of them in black. One of the women demanded to know why the restaurant was serving “Nazis,” and started screaming “Nazis.” The restaurant set off its alarm and called the police, with the owner telling them he doesn’t discriminate on religious grounds. The Left were turning on their own; attacking a gay man for the sin of unknowingly serving the opponents of their special form of de facto Fascism.

We left via the back door, being watched by a male Antifa member who’d suffered severe burns to his face. It seems that, somehow, one of our meeting’s programmes had gotten into their hands, possibly having been accidentally left at another restaurant. In other words, Portland is riddled with people who are sympathetic to this violent, terrorist organisation.

A few hours later, the restaurant was surrounded by a mob of about twenty Antifa, windows were smashed, it was forced to close for the evening and to cancel a staff member’s wedding celebration, and a “traumatised” waitress resigned. The hyperbolic headline on the local television news a few hours later was that the restaurant had been “destroyed.” Andy Ngo, who has been seriously assaulted by this group of bitter mutants for revealing their activities, reported on what had taken place.

Beneath the beguilingly “weird” eccentricity of Portland, it is, effectively, run by the mob. However, this is not the mafia that ran Chicago; it is mentally and physically sick people who wear black—expressing, outwardly, how they feel about themselves—and who push for everything degenerate in Portland to be even worse.

Without them, it would be a quirky riverside city of eccentric arty, though Leftist, types. But I suppose, as I explore in my book Borderline Genius/Borderline Insane, optimum mental illness predicts artistic ability and, frequently, the insanity is such that, in the failed artist, it overwhelms rather than leads to talent. Antifa are the side effect of what is interesting about this eccentric little part of the old Wild West.

https://counter-currents.com/author/edward-dutton/

Male Genius - Edward Dutton

Commentary by Simon Sheppard

An enlightening talk by Ed Dutton on intelligence, sex differences and the influence of feminism on truth and science

Audio: Newton, Male Genius and Women in Academia

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https://www.heretical.com/sgs-2026/duttonmg.mp3

This excellent talk was extracted from a longer interview Dutton did with a Barbadian (?) gentleman. The latter had an insufferable and sometimes unintelligible voice, but neglecting that, the interview had so much good information that it was deemed worthy of editing and reproducing here.

Among its revelations is that at one point Oxford University decided to admit women, on equal terms, then relented because of its adverse effects. Contrast that with today, when women comprise the majority in our universities. With great precision Dutton describes the origins and consequences of female influence in academia.

An interesting topic raised is hyper-empathy, as should be expected in a super-feminine environment. Often the terms sympathy and empathy are confused, but sympathy involves consideration and caring for others, while being empathetic is the ability to perceive others’ emotional and psychological state. For example, sociopaths* can use their empathic abilities to determine what someone wants to hear, perceiving their unstated motivations and insecurities, then coldly manipulate them using that knowledge. That is empathy without sympathy. Hyper-empathy results in exaggerated or false attribution of motives and intentions to common signals. Just looking at someone can be given all sorts of wild interpretations.

* Confusion also exists, at least in informal use, between sociopath and psychopath. A common-sense distinction can be that even as the sociopath possesses psychopathic traits, he stops short of breaking the law, while the psychopath with his lack of conscience commits crimes to satisfy his ego and secure other benefits.

Dutton’s particular field in psychology seems to be intelligence and he will surely be aware that although average male and female intelligence is similar, male variation is far greater. Also male and female brains are different: the width of the corpus collosum and disparity in the balance of grey and white matter have often been quoted, but I am not up to date on this. In the unedited interview Dutton opined on the weak correlation between homosexuality and intelligence, also religion and black slavery, topics perhaps of special interest to his interviewer. He fell foul of a common failing of academics, that of straying outside their field, in this case making rather too definite pronouncements about schizophrenia which I suspect a psychiatrist would question, or at least seriously qualify.

Another trap into which people can fall is to fit things into the frame of their own particular speciality. Often genius is defined as exceptionally high intelligence. I don’t think this is right: in other words, and to the contrary, there is a less than perfect correlation between exceptional intelligence and genius. A university friend once told me, “The most important thing I’ve learnt at university is how stupid intelligent people can be.” It may be that some aspects of genius can’t be quantified, no matter how hard psychologists try. The best description of a genius I have heard is “Someone who changes our way of looking at the world.”

Of the remainder, I am somewhat doubtful of Dutton’s explanation of the origins of patriarchy, in particular, that males preferentially selecting religious females as mates has been a significant evolutionary influence. For a start, as Darwin said, “It is the female which usually exerts a choice.”

[In modern time, perhaps, but even than, by some coincidence the female usually exerts choice of more powerful man. 😉VB]

 Moreover, incredible as it may seem, people really believe the gumph they see on screen and TV featuring some athletic woman single-handedly fighting off three soldiers or whatever. Reality is very different. For the entirety of our phylogeny, until very recently, a man had absolute authority to strike his wife or children if he felt it necessary. This may not have been resorted to very often, but the implicit threat was always there, in accord, I might add, with the natural order of things.

A significant omission is at the end, in discussing the decline in male testosterone levels. Dutton fails to mention the many potential biological origins of this, such as effluent from the contraceptive pill and constant exposure to plastics, to name but two. However the listener is reminded of the profound nature of this hormonal change, undoubtedly having enormous societal effects.

Such matters aside, Dutton has earned my admiration for his erudition and fortitude in exploring these topics. No doubt if his conclusions were in accord with the prevailing feminist narrative he would be favoured with much greater prominence. Originally with filedate 22 Sept. 2024 and 75 minutes long, the talk has been reduced to 25 minutes in ten sections separated by a very brief pause. The sections are as follows:

Male-female differences in intelligence;

Instinct and intelligence are inversely correlated, 0:18;

Isaac Newton, cognitive deficits, autism, low empathy, 0:55;

Undermining genius, declining intelligence, 3:40;

Oxford University, males and females working together, genius, 10:20;

Autism, extreme male-female brains, empathy, 14:29;

Evolutionary origins of empathy and patriarchy, 15:38;

Male and female hierarchies, 19:55;

Physical attractiveness, "the mind [brain] is 84% of the genome", 21:06;

https://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory

***

A university friend once told me, “The most important thing I’ve learnt at university is how stupid intelligent people can be.” 

Dutton has earned my admiration for ...

***

Mr Dutton, in desire to proof his thesis that fasting lowers intelligence, support himself with experiments which shows that results of hungry children in mathematical tests were below the standard. Alternative interpretation, that hungry children prefer to think about food than mathematics, somehow doesn't occur to him.😉 VB]

Cry Me a River

By now we all know that Jason Arday has died, likely by suicide. His widely-publicized story has become infamous despite hardly being a month old. The upshot is that he was a black academic who was awarded a professorship in sociology by the woke elites at Cambridge University when he did not have credentials for it. What Arday did have was the capacity to lie.

At the very least, he built his academic reputation on plagiarism, a fact which researcher Nathan Cofnas uncovered last month. Others in the media did as well. Over 100 passages in Arday’s doctoral thesis were identified as originating elsewhere. Of course, the Left backed Arday during this time, claiming racism. The veracity of the charges, however, were undeniable. On August 5, Arday resigned from Cambridge, and on August 14 was found dead in his home. Authorities at the time claimed that the death was “unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.” It’s hard to imagine any other cause of death under these circumstances.

See Ed Dutton and Lipton Matthews for more insightful and expansive takes on this affair. I especially liked this analysis by Sargon of Akkad as well.

I would like to offer, on the other hand, rhetorical ammunition for those of us on the Right now facing the wrath of Left-wingers lost in the throes of vindictive grief over Arday’s passing. For example, there are many tweets like this one on X which claim that “Right-wing reactionary media” was responsible for Arday’s death and has blood on its hands.

Others blame Arday’s death on a “racist witch hunt,” or “a lynch mob,” or a “Right-wing pile on.” Here is a taste from an outlet called The Voice:

Let’s not beat around the bush here. This entire rancid saga only occurred because Jason was Black.

This was never anything more than a right-wing pile on to attack Diversity Equity and Inclusion, and to suggest that anyone Black in any position of prominence is not there because of merit alone. And believe me, it won’t end here.

And let me clear about another thing. What we saw in Jason’s treatment was a media lynching. He was hounded to his death.

What was always missing from this debate was the fact that Nathan Cofnas, the man who had a fixation on Jason Arday and who launched this campaign, is a so-called ‘race realist’ with views that belong in the dustbin of history.

If Jason Arday were White this would not have happened.

In response, we should remind the Left of its own double standard with regards to academic cancellation. When they do it to people on the Right, they’re utterly vicious about it—and the question of whether the victim actually deserves it or whether his work is academically or scientifically sound makes no difference at all. And yet they cry foul with hideous shrieks and imprecations whenever anyone—Right, Left, or Center—investigates one of their own for actual, verifiable fraud.

Aptly, we should first bring up Mike Adams, the conservative criminology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He gained notoriety on the Left in the 2010s with his anti-trans, anti-feminist positions, and by saying inflammatory yet defensible things on social media.

Among the professor’s recent statements was his comparing the efforts of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper to curb coronavirus to that of a slave master, tweeting on May 29: “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go!”

Earlier this year, Adams mocked women’s studies as “non essential” and labeled civil rights protesters “thugs.”

Back in 2016, Adams used an ultraconservative opinion site to target a student at his school with an article titled “A Queer Muslim Jihad.”


You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

When Adams was denied a promotion in 2007, he sued for anti-Christian discrimination and won after a seven-year legal struggle. But by 2020 public pressure against him became so intense that he agreed to retire on August 1 with a half-million-dollar payout from the university. He shot himself in the head a week before that could happen.

Prior to this, a Facebook group called “Justice for UNCW” had pressured the university to fire Adams. Should it and its 8,000 members be held responsible for Adams’ death? According to some defenders of Jason Arday, they should.

There is also a sense of inevitability being projected by Arday’s defenders, as if heightened media scrutiny necessarily leads to suicide. If so, then perhaps we can investigate the numerous times academics and scientists ran afoul of political correctness and did not resort to suicide after being subjected to relentless abuse.

Perhaps most famously, psychologist Arthur Jensen received numerous death threats and much professional hostility in the early 1970s after publishing a paper on the heritability of IQ. For a time, he needed a police bodyguard and a bomb squad to x-ray and open his mail. His lectures were often disrupted by protesters, and calls for his firing were common. This was considerably worse than the one-month ordeal Arday underwent, and yet Jensen never did himself in.

Richard Lynn was another race-realist intelligence researcher who carried on in the face of abuse. Despite many years of activist pressure, disinvitations, lecture disruptions, and widespread calls for his firing—as well as loss of credentials and his removal from the editorial board of a journal he had helped found—he died of natural causes in 2023 at the ripe age of 93. Did Jason Arday actually have it worse than Richard Lynn?

Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 work The Bell Curve has faced similar opposition for decades. In 2017, he and a colleague were attacked by deranged Leftist students at Middlebury College in Vermont where he was scheduled to give a speech. Afterwards, College president Laurie Patton refused to expel the perpetrators, despite how Murray’s colleague Allison Stanger received a concussion and a neck injury during the attack. Unlike Arday, the octogenarian Murray persevered and continues to persevere today.


You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.

Nobel Laureate James Watson had gotten in trouble numerous times throughout his career for dropping bon mots which the Left deemed not so bon. Most notoriously, he stated in 2007 that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” This resulted in instant cancellation, mass-condemnation, and professional ostracism. He was reduced to selling his Nobel Prize medal in 2014 for $4.1 million. Then in 2019 he doubled down, stating correctly that “[t]here’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites in IQ tests. . . I would say the difference is genetic.” This caused mass panic at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island, New York. They immediately revoked all honors and titles conferred to Watson, despite how he had served as the lab’s president from 1994 to 2004.

And yet James Watson died of natural causes in 2025, age 97.

And these are just the heavy hitters of race realism. Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, Emil Kirkegaard, Peter Brimelow, and Jason Richwine are examples of less famous individuals who have been canceled in one way or another for violating Leftist orthodoxy. And yet they continue plugging along. Perhaps ironically, Nathan Cofnas is now receiving death threats from grieving supporters of Arday—one of whom recently promised to “Charlie Kirk his ass” if he ever decided to visit the United States.

I’ve had my issues with Cofnas in the past—but he doesn’t deserve this abuse. I dearly hope nothing bad comes of it. In any event, we do owe Cofnas a debt of gratitude for exposing Arday’s lies in the first place.

We must remember also that, unlike the men mentioned above, Arday was credibly accused of academic fraud. He wasn’t merely a mediocre scholar who might have taken liberties with other people’s material four or five times early on in his career. That would have been merely embarrassing. Instead, at the time of his death he was facing charges of over 100 instances of plagiarism, not all of which came from Cofnas. Add this to the long list of improbable and likely apocryphal things he had said about himself (for example, claiming to have run 30 marathons in 35 days) and the fact that he sicced the police on a journalist who was investigating the fraud allegations against him, and Arday comes across not as a victim, but as a consummate conman and pathological liar who couldn’t face the music once his seven-figure check bounced from the big bank of lies. Furthermore, he was anti-white considering how he co-wrote a book complaining about “whiteness” and once accused a student of having “white privilege” simply for complaining about a low grade.

This is why I cannot drum up even generic sadness for Jason Arday’s passing. And if his supporters wish to lash out at the Right while keeping mum as their fellow travelers trash the memory of murder victim Ann Widdecombe, then they can go cry me a river.

Spencer J. Quinn

Beau Albrecht:

If our lefty moral superiors want to blame critics for Jason Arday’s death, then they also should look into “root causes” as they’re fond of doing.  In this case, the cultural Marxist academic establishment promoted this diversity hire every step of the way – someone was both a chronic liar and didn’t have a clue about academic standards like attribution – to a position far beyond his competence level.  Then when the truth came out, his entire world collapsed.  If instead he’d been working in a job suited to his capabilities (mopping floors, perhaps), then he’d be alive and well now.

https://counter-currents.com/

How to Judge People by What They Look Like by Edward Dutton

‘You can’t judge people by what they look like!’ It’s drummed into us as children and, as this book proves, it is utterly false. In this highly readable analysis of the academic research, Dutton shows that we are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like, we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . Dutton shows that these, and much else, are windows into personality, intelligence, or both. Once you read How to Judge People by What They Look Like, you’ll never look at people the same again.

Foreword by Prof. Bruce Charlton

Appearances are not always deceptive. Indeed, quite the opposite. In this highly informative and entertaining mini-book, Dr Dutton surveys the psychological data in support of the neglected idea that we can tell a lot about someone from how they look. The fact that most people believe they can judge a stranger by their face and body makes it plausible that we really can do this, if not with total accuracy, then at least to a useful degree. It is a question of probabilities. So long as we are better than random at predicting traits such as personality, intelligence or aggression; overall this would have a positive impact on reproductive success. As social mammals, this attribute would have been very helpful, and sometimes vital, during our evolutionary history. Dr Dutton’s book is a necessary corrective to misleading modern myths and taboos about ‘judgmentalism’ and stereotyping. As he makes clear; so long as we are prepared to modify our first impressions in the light of further evidence; it is reasonable and sensible to take seriously our innate ability to sum-up a stranger with a glance.

Prof. Bruce Charlton 

Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.  

Chapter One

The Strange Death of Physiognomy

‘People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Everyone’s heard the cliché, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Don’t judge people by their appearance. Judge people, if you have to judge them at all, by what’s in their hearts. It’s a warm, cuddly idea: that nobody can help what they look like and what they look like is nothing to do with what they actually are like. Imploring people not to judge by appearances has many benefits: it makes you seem kind, for one, and it emphasises your profundity. You are somehow able to rise above your instincts, ignore the ‘superficial,’ and plunge into the depths of people’s hearts. 

In the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal, Jack Black plays Hal Larsen, who is obsessed with physical beauty. Hal’s superficiality appals the ‘life success coach’ Tony Robbins (who plays himself). Robbins ends up sharing an elevator with Hal. Robbins hypnotises Hal such that he can only see people’s inner beauty. If they’re a good person then they’ll be attractive; if they’re a nasty person then they’ll look hideous. Accordingly, Hal ends-up dating an extremely kind but morbidly obese young woman, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Unaccountably, from Hal’s perspective, chairs collapse under this slender goddess, she creates an enormous splash at the local swimming pool, and she has a bizarrely negative opinion of her own appearance. Most of us would like to think that we are like the hypnotized Hal and that we ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’  

1. The Wisdom of the Ancients

Except, we generally do. Despite gaining all the social benefits of claiming we don’t judge by appearances we almost certainly do so, even if only unconsciously. And we do so because we are evolved to do so, and because doing so has worked up until now. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) quipped, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘Only shallow people do not judge by appearances’ (Wilde, 2012). In Medieval and Early Modern England, it went without saying that you judged by appearances. Although the hypotheses which underpinned their thought-systems – such as astrology – were hopeless, our ancestors had it partly right when it came to what is called ‘physiognomy.’ This is the attempt to judge a person’s character from what they look like. 

The Ancient Greeks were firm believers in physiognomy. Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in Prior Analytics that, ‘It is possible to infer character from features’ (Aristotle, 1989) and many other Greek scholars took the same view. Michael Scot (1175-1232), a Scottish mathematician and a scholar at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote a learned thesis on the subject (Porter, 2005, p.122). In the late 14th century work Canterbury Tales, the author, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400), gives the Wife of Bath a gap in her front teeth to imply that she is highly sexual. The Reeve is of slim build, to suggest he is ‘choleric’ (bad-tempered and irritable), while the Summoner is ugly, because he’s an unpleasant person (see Hallissy, 1995). Physiognomy was taught as an academic subject at English universities, until it was outlawed by Henry VIII (r.1509-1547) for having become associated with fortune-telling (Porter, 2005, p.134).

Even so, it continued to be widely accepted in academic and literary circles. Shakespeare made frequent use of it (see Baumbach, 2008). This is most obvious in Julius Caesar’s description of Cassius: 

‘Let me have men about me that are fat 

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights 

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look 

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’ 

(Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II). 

The medic Thomas Browne (1605-1682) published his Religio Medici in 1643, in which he observed, ‘there is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe . . . For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures’ (Browne, 1844, p.102). 

Physiognomy fell into disrepute precisely because of its association with ‘Master Mendicants,’ but it was then re-popularised by the Swiss scholar Johan Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) (see Lavater, 1826). Up until Lavater, people had believed that there were a number of ‘general types’ of people, with physiognomy allowing you to discern which type a person was: choleric (temperamental), phlegmatic (calm), mercurial (changeable and unpredictable) or sanguine (optimistic). Lavater developed this, arguing that physiognomy could be used to be far more specific – to discern the character traits of individuals. Physiognomy was duly revived and by the nineteenth century it was implicit in many novels, and most obviously in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was written in 1890. Dorian wants to maintain his beauty but live an amoral and hedonistic life. Accordingly, he sells his soul in return for his amoral life being reflected in a portrait of him, rather than on his own face and body. He remains beautiful, while the portrait becomes increasingly unattractive. In many other Victorian novels, besides, the good characters were physically attractive while the bad characters were ugly and deformed. Appearance was, once again, a short-hand for character (see essays in Percival & Tytler, 2005). Famously, the captain of The Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, wanted an ‘energetic young man’ as a gentleman companion on his voyage. The nature of Charles Darwin’s nose told Fitzroy that Darwin could not possibly be that man. Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta, later stated that Fitzroy had ‘made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy.’ Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s face compensated for this: ‘His brow saved him’ (quoted in Highfield et al., 2009). 

And this is where the English gentleman scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) makes an appearance. Statistician, polymath, social scientist, proto-geneticist, inventor, meteorologist, geographer and even tropical explorer, Galton was Renaissance man. If there was a belief that remained yet to be scientifically proved or disproved, Galton was drawn to proving or disproving it (see Bulmer, 2004). Physiognomy, therefore, fascinated him. In 1878, Galton published an article in the journal Nature in which he presented his findings. He developed a system of composite photographs in which he superimposed a variety of faces onto each other using multiple exposures. This allowed him to create photographic representations of those with certain qualities, such as being beautiful, criminal or ill. These led to distinct photographs, implying, for example, that there is a degree to which criminals have distinct faces from the rest of the population. 

Unfortunately, physiognomy became associated – and, perhaps, remains associated – with phrenology. Pioneered by German scientist Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828), this was the belief that the nature of a person’s character can be discerned by small differences in the shape of their skull. As the brain is an organ, and different parts of the brain have different functions, it seemed to follow that bumps or indentations in the skull would reflect similar properties in the brain. As such, people could ‘have their lumps felt’ and it would reveal a great deal about the nature of their personality; albeit based on the very limited nineteenth century knowledge of brain modules. Phrenology became hugely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of learned phrenology societies, including a significant one in Edinburgh (see de Giustino, 2016). The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by the Scottish solicitor George Combe (1788-1858) who asserted, ‘that the brain is the organ of mind; that the brain is an aggregate of several parts, each subserving a distinct mental faculty; and that the size of the cerebral organ is, caeteris paribus, an index of power or energy of function’ (quoted in Fodor, 1983, p.131). Unsurprisingly, phrenology was debunked. Physiognomy found itself (intellectually) guilty by association.

2. ‘Not by the colour of their skin . . .’ 

The other problem physiognomy has to deal with is the obvious unpleasant consequences judging people by their appearance has when it comes to the issue of ‘race.’ This is most obvious in the case of a bunch of nasty, anti-intellectuals who took power in Germany and attempted to wipe out the race which they regarded as their own race’s chief competitor. The Nazis measured facial features in order to determine the archetypal ‘Jew’ and the archetypal ‘Aryan,’ giving the measurement of facial features for any broader purpose a bad name. But the actions of the Nazis are entirely irrelevant. As we will see shortly, physiognomy works, in most cases, within races. We will look more at ‘race,’ and its relationship with physiognomy, shortly.

But most importantly, if we accept Darwinian Theory, we really must ask ourselves, ‘Why wouldn’t physiognomy work?’ Humans are an advanced form of ape, very closely related to all mammals, such as the lion. Female lions are more attracted to males with darker manes. This is because these males have higher levels of testosterone, as reflected in the colour of their manes, and are thus more aggressive and more likely to win fights. Physiognomy works with lions (West & Packer, 2002). It would be extraordinary if it didn’t work with humans.     

But before proving that it does work, we should be clear on our key terms. I have already defined these terms in detail in my book The Genius Famine (Dutton & Charlton, 2015). So those who have read that book may wish to skip this section as much of it is exactly the same as in The Genius Famine.