Exercise scientist Mike Israetel has found himself caught in an internet storm after a clip discussing racial differences in intelligence surfaced on Luke Thomas’s subreddit. What followed was an online pile-on that neatly illustrates the hazards of crossing disciplinary boundaries especially when the topic is intelligence race and science in the era of hot takes.
In the video Israetel says:
“I 100 acknowledge because I’m literate that race is truly a biological construct it is deep it pervades almost everything and it has real world differences in ability that are complicated they are overlapping in Spectra but they are nonetheless for sure real.”
He then immediately pulls the emergency brake refusing to elaborate likely because anyone with a passing familiarity with public discourse knows that even whispering the phrase “racial differences” is enough to get you accused of being a eugenics enthusiast.
And accused he was. On Reddit commenters wasted no time. One wrote
“For those who have gotten into him more recently dude loves a bit of eugenics chat. Because; science(!)”
Another compared his scientific confidence in exercise physiology with what they considered naive overreach in psychology and intelligence. Some even brought up “Nobel Disease” the phenomenon where great minds in one field suddenly feel entitled to drop half-baked theories in another.
Others pivoted back to his own field accusing him of inconsistency in fitness content promoting both high and low training volumes sometimes in the same breath. The charge? That Israetel produces content for content’s sake not scientific coherence.
But here’s the rub psychologists themselves don’t even agree on what “intelligence” is. While IQ tests are widely accepted by the general public they’re seen as narrow tools within the field. Modern psychology distinguishes between fluid intelligence (problem-solving adapting to new challenges) and crystallized intelligence (knowledge built from experience and education). Intelligence is a messy multifactorial trait not a neat number printed on a scorecard.
Historically early “research” claiming racial differences in IQ was drenched in bias and bad methodology. Conveniently those studies tended to ignore socioeconomic status parental education nutrition and cultural context all of which massively shape test performance. To even begin proving “racial differences” one would need to compare two individuals raised under nearly identical conditions with equally educated parents similar environments and matched access to resources. Unsurprisingly when you control for these factors those sweeping “racial gaps” often evaporate.
So is Israetel a secret eugenicist? Probably not. What’s more likely is that he made the classic mistake of dabbling outside his domain of expertise in an era where Reddit is eager to sharpen its pitchforks. The debate doesn’t just expose how touchy this subject is it shows how science talk in the wrong hands (or subreddits) quickly mutates into accusations of ideology.
References
Cattell R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment. Journal of Educational Psychology 54(1) 1–22.
Neisser U. et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist 51(2) 77–101.
Nisbett R. E. et al. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist 67(2) 130–159.
Sternberg R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
Gould S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company.
