# Human Biodiversity **Human biodiversity (HBD)** is the rebranding of [[Scientific Racism]] that emerged online in the late 1990s: the claim that cognitive and behavioral differences between racial groups are substantially genetic, dressed in the vocabulary of population [[Genetics]] and evolutionary biology. The phrase was popularized by [[Steve Sailer]], who founded the *Human Biodiversity Discussion Group* e-mail list in 1999 and defined the term as covering differences "in race, sex and sexual orientation"; the position is rejected by mainstream genetics and anthropology and amplified by the [[Alt-Right]] media ecosystem that Sailer's writing at [[VDARE]], Taki's Magazine and the Unz Review helped build. ## What the rebrand does HBD's strategic value to the far right is that it reframes white-supremacist claims as *empirical questions* rather than moral positions. A proposition stated as "we are just noticing" is harder to dismiss without engaging on pseudo-academic terrain, and the demand that critics "debate the data" is itself the move — it places race hierarchy inside the Overton window as a live hypothesis. Sailer's 2024 anthology is titled *Noticing* for exactly this reason: the "noticer" is the online right's name for someone who reads social events through a racial-hereditarian lens. The framework draws on [[Charles Murray]]'s [[The Bell Curve]] (1994), the Pioneer-Fund-supported psychometrics of Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton and [[Richard Lynn]] (see [[Pioneer Fund]], [[Mankind Quarterly]]), and the [[American Renaissance]] conference circuit of [[Jared Taylor]], where the older [[Race Realism]] label and the newer HBD label describe the same audience. Its ancestry is the [[Eugenics]] tradition founded by [[Francis Galton]]; its urgency generator is [[Dysgenics]]. ## The politics Sailer's own contribution beyond the term was electoral: the "Sailer Strategy" (2000–01) argued that Republicans should stop courting minority voters and maximize the white working-class vote with protectionism, immigration restriction and national identity — the path the 2016 Trump campaign followed, as Michael Barone and others noted afterward. His slogan "Invade the World, Invite the World" became a paleoconservative staple, and Tyler Cowen called him the most significant neoreactionary thinker of his moment. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classifies him as a white nationalist; he calls himself a "citizenist." Since 2020 HBD has migrated from the blogs into a Silicon Valley subculture — the overlap with [[Intellectual Dark Web]] figures, the natalist and "genetic enhancement" enthusiasms of parts of the tech right, and Sailer's own re-emergence on the speaking circuit after two decades of ostracism. The vault's interest is in that migration: a set of ideas that could not be published under its own name in 2005 is now a shared premise across several of the ecosystems mapped here. ## See Also - [[Scientific Racism]] · [[Race Realism]] · [[Eugenics]] · [[Dysgenics]] · [[Social Darwinism]] - [[Steve Sailer]] · [[Charles Murray]] · [[Richard Lynn]] · [[Jared Taylor]] - [[American Renaissance]] · [[VDARE]] · [[Pioneer Fund]] · [[Mankind Quarterly]] · [[Alt-Right]] · [[Intellectual Dark Web]]