Jeffrey Epstein attempted to gather the best minds of science around him. His interests were rooted in a perverse, eugenic fantasy
It was not a huge surprise to find myself in the Epstein files. Hundreds of scientists are named, in everything from humdrum admin and trivial marketing blasts where Epstein happened to be on the mailing list, to weird, creepily cryptic exchanges, all the way to explicitly racist, misogynistic and predatory messages. A few of these men will be enduring sleepless nights at the moment, terrified – as they should be – that their careers and reputations are at risk. My name appears once, in an email promoting a talk I gave about genetics and the origin of life at London’s Conway Hall in 2016.
As the files are scoured, and princes and politicians tumble from what scant grace they had left, we have begun talking of the “Epstein Class”: people with a level of wealth and power that places them in positions of apparent impunity. The world of the scientist is usually nerdy and unglamorous. But science is also inherently hierarchical, and dominated by men, some of whom have colossal egos. Jeffrey Epstein loved to hang around scientists, mostly male, whom he considered to be “big idea” thinkers. As science is such a core concern of humanism, some of these men were champions of that movement, too.
Epstein courted scientists, funded their research, entertained them and in some cases apparently lavished them with pleasures unavailable in their normal existence – private jets, a submarine trip for the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, parties and whatever happened on his private island. He threw bags of money at Harvard, MIT and other institutions and, via force of personality and very deep pockets, positioned himself as a visionary patron.
His efforts to gather “great men” around him were centered in part around the intellectual salon Edge.org, founded as an exclusive network of the self-appointed intellectual elite. Physicist Lawrence Krauss, linguist Noam Chomsky, the geneticist George Church and many more were part of this brainy boys’ group.
Epstein used this salon to court scientists deemed to be intellectual superstars. Some appear many times in the files, because of his interest in them – but there’s no actual correspondence. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, is mentioned dozens of times, but there’s no evidence that he ever messaged Epstein. (Pinker is in a short video on Epstein’s private plane in 2002. This was before Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring prostitution from a minor, and Pinker has persistently distanced himself.) Epstein also seemed to want a relationship with Richard Dawkins, but again there’s no evidence in the files of direct correspondence.
On the other hand, Krauss became a friend and confidante: his science-outreach organisation was funded by Epstein to the tune of $250,000, and he organised at least one Edge meeting that Epstein funded and attended. Krauss is no stranger to sex scandal: he departed Arizona State University in 2019 under a cloud of sexual misconduct accusations, a scenario that Epstein advised him on over email. Krauss denied the allegations, despite the findings of a university investigation.
Stuart Pivar, a chemist who became somewhat infamous in the early 2000s for crackpot alternative theories about non-Darwinian evolution, was also a close friend although he claims to have broken off contact after he first became aware of sexual misconduct. Pivar apparently also saw Epstein as an intellectually lazy dilettante, later describing how the financier would interrupt dinner conversations about big ideas in science with attempted bon mots such as “What does that got to do with pussy?”
“Epstein told scientists that he wanted to re-seed humankind with his own DNA”
But Epstein’s scientific interests were not randomly distributed. Aside from big questions of the Cosmos, they clustered around a specific set of obsessions – vaguely defined but headline-grabbing subjects like human enhancement, intelligence and evolutionary psychology. All of these have relevance to the field of eugenics.
The paedophile financier had apparently bought into a eugenic fantasy. He sought improvement of the human species through selective reproduction of a particularly narcissistic kind. According to the New York Times, he told scientists and guests that he wanted to re-seed humankind with his own DNA, impregnating women with his sperm on a sufficient scale to influence the human gene pool. There isn’t really a version of human genetics where this could be achieved, but the desire aligns well with his disregard for women – believing that they exist as vessels for his genes, or for his gratification. He liked to tell friends that a woman is “a life support system for a vagina”.
Perhaps Epstein’s interest in evolutionary psychology was motivated by his sexual proclivities – “What does that got to do with pussy?” It is a field that many don’t take seriously. Its loudest public voices have over the years proposed that women’s breasts are at their most symmetrical when they are most fertile, that strippers earn more in tips at the same time of the month, or that beards act as a softening buffer to being punched in the face. None of these studies stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Examining the evolution of our minds should be a serious area of scholarship, but it’s a field dogged by persistently bad science and research that is underpowered, spurious or just ridiculous, but which always generates headlines.
In the early 2000s, Epstein did succeed in meeting Robert Trivers, who had a profound and positive influence as a young scientist on the emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology. Trivers’ early work included exploration of a gene-centric view of human behaviours such as altruism, parental investment and adultery. He befriended Epstein and publicly supported him long after the 2008 conviction.
Trivers, who died while I was writing this article, was the type of scientist who did truly brilliant work for a time, but was often described in euphemistic terms like “eccentric”, in part due to later choices that were at best odd. He said of a research trip, “I took one look at the women [in Jamaica] and thought, if I have to study lizards to pay for frequent trips to this island, I’ll do it.”
Trivers received funding from Epstein’s foundation to study the relationship in Jamaican people between bodily symmetry, dancing ability and attractiveness. One of Trivers’ co-authors on this work was the evolutionary psychologist Randy Thornhill, author of the absurd breast symmetry study and a book about rape being an evolutionary strategy. To his credit, Trivers detected problems in another co-author’s data, and requested that the paper be retracted; this happened eight years after it was published, in 2013.
Trivers seemed to have found Epstein stimulating. The combination of apparent intellectual curiosity, extraordinary wealth and freedom from the constraints of conventional academic funding – in which we scientists typically have to beg for money in an arduous process with a low success rate – must have been hugely appealing.
Evolutionary psychology is a field fraught with Just So Stories – attempts to explain complex human behaviours, especially about sex and power, with simplistic biological explanations. Epstein’s interest in eugenics, and his desire to propagate his own DNA, reflects another area in which proponents argue that nature trumps nurture. I am generally cautious about the use of this once popular, now toxic term in relation to contemporary practices. But the deliberate manipulation of human reproduction to spread the genes of people deemed superior is pretty much the definition.
“Eugenics, particularly in the US, has always been a pet project of the mega wealthy”
More than anything else, eugenics is a mindset. It is a way of thinking about people and their worth. We all try to foster advantages for our offspring by choosing our partners – no one mates randomly. But to imagine the world would be improved by selective procreation requires a belief in an elite class who are biologically superior. Epstein was in a long line of men who thought like this.
Eugenics was formalised by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton, who dedicated his life to promoting the idea that populations could and should be improved via selective breeding of humans. His view is characterised today as “hereditarian”, meaning that in the conflict of “nature versus nurture” – Galton’s own coinage – the genetic (nature) was dominant over the environmental (nurture).
Today, we reject the notion that these are in conflict: our lives are a manifestation of a complex and malleable relationship between the probabilistic output of our genes and the environment in which they are expressed.
For the hereditarian, and the eugenicist, however, biological inheritance trumps our social and environmental influences, and therefore is a fulcrum on which improvement of a people could be leveraged. In 1909, Galton believed eugenics should be pursued as “a ‘Jehad’, or Holy War against customs and prejudices that impair the physical and moral qualities of our race”. Galton’s eugenics was a new scientific formulation of an older idea, simply that some people are more deserving of reproductive rights than others.
It became a wildly popular ideology, on both the political left and right, and was enacted via involuntary sterilisation in countries from Sweden to Peru, and enthusiastically in the US. In some ways, eugenics was a defining idea of the 20th century. Weimar and then Nazi Germany took the framework of eugenics to genocidal levels, with the murder of hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities or vaguely defined diseases (such as “feeblemindedness”), and of racialised groups, culminating in the Holocaust.
The question that should always follow the expression of eugenic ideas is: “Who gets to decide?” Because eugenics is a manifestation of power. It was conceived of as a radical way to preserve the status quo. The ideas, mostly phantom, that threaten those in power all centre around losing their generational dominance because they are not having enough children, or children of high enough “quality”, and those they deem unworthy are having too many. It’s the basis of persistent conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement, a debunked white nationalist idea that there is a deliberate, planned substitution of white populations taking place through mass migration and orchestrated lower birth rates.
The first state eugenics laws were introduced in 1907 in Indiana, and the last was repealed in 1983, although women in the US have reportedly been sterilised without consent as recently as 2020 while in ICE detention centres. The sentiment is right there in the opening few pages of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s examination of the East Coast aristocrat ghouls of a century ago. “Civilisation is going to pieces,” rants Tom Buchanan, unprompted, at supper one evening. “… If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
It wasn’t proved then, nor is it now. Though initiated by scientists, the philanthropists of the so-called “progressive age” played central roles in the development of eugenics, and it is these mindsets that Fitzgerald was mocking. Some of the richest Americans to have ever lived – John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. H. Kellogg – funded the eugenics movement in the US from its inception until the eve of the Second World War. Eugenics, particularly in the US, has always been a pet project of the mega wealthy. These ideas are at the core of Epstein’s fantasy.
“Rising to such immense levels of wealth is a deeply dehumanising process”
Some scientists may have drawn Epstein’s attention due to his interest in eugenics, without being aware of the fact. The geneticist George Church, who has apologised for his interactions with Epstein, has worked on many gene editing projects, including for gene therapies and longevity. He says he knew nothing about Epstein’s plans for a eugenics programme. But these ideas are also popular today amongst right-wing ideologues and Silicon Valley tech bros.
Elon Musk is the naked emperor in the tech-bro class. He’s in the Epstein files too, including via a tragic attempt to get an invitation to the “wildest party” on the island, which doesn’t seem to have transpired. Science-aligned but never a scientist, Musk has repeatedly expressed views about human reproduction and population that sit in uncomfortable proximity to old-fashioned eugenic thinking. He has persistently opined that fertility is an existential problem for humankind, for example, tweeting in 2022 that “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming. Mark these words.”
This gels with the ethos underlying the popular philosophies that Musk supported, such as Longtermism and Effective Altruism. One of the most influential documents in the foundations of these mindsets was former Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2002 paper “Existential Risk” which cites “the gradual loss of human fertility” as a threat to “advanced civilised society”.
There’s much to unpick in those short sentiments. Fertility rates are falling in many countries, but the overall global population continues to rise, which suggests that their concern is not humanity as a whole, but those they class as “civilisation”. Bostrom was recently exposed for messages in 1996 in which he expressed the view that black people are stupider than white people, and for using the N-word. He apologised for the email in 2023, after it was unearthed, and said it did not represent his views. Musk had funded Bostrom’s Oxford research institute until it was shut down a year later.
Musk, I suppose to his credit, is at least attempting to practise what he preaches when it comes to reproducing his own DNA. It is unknown whether Epstein fulfilled his eugenic fantasy and left any progeny at all, but Musk has 14 known children by four different women, several via IVF, including reportedly using a company that specialises in the selection of embryos for complex traits. This company offers the selection of embryos free of polygenic diseases – those caused by the combined effects of multiple genes – a practice that is heavily restricted in most of the world for scientific and ethical reasons, but not in the US.
The Epstein files contain millions of emails, including correspondence with dozens of scientists, many of whom flirted with or directly engaged with Epstein’s grim, scientifically illiterate narcissism. It isn’t that difficult to figure out why. Wealth brings privilege, and distance from people who work for a living. It buys isolation from the poor, including those who serve the food at dinner parties, and clean up the empty bottles and condoms, the detritus of Epstein’s sex parties.
I guess that rising to such immense levels of wealth is a deeply dehumanising process. It appears to require you to regard other people as being of lesser worth – financially, intellectually and maybe morally. The eugenicist mindset also requires the ranking of people by value, as determined by the hegemonic class, and a belief that those differences of value are not a result of social background, economic history and luck, but of biology: “We are the rulers of the world because it was foretold in our genes.”
The parallels between Epstein and his circle and the Gatsby-era aristocrats are striking: unaccountable wealth; lavish, debauched parties; feudal philanthropy; and more than a passing interest in the science of eugenics. Science at its core is the generation of knowledge for the benefit of all humankind, regardless of power or status. Many of the “great thinkers” that Epstein approached did not engage. For those who chose to link up with a morally bankrupt, abusive ghoul, the temptations of glamour, the lure of money and membership of the Epstein Class were enough for them to forget this simple principle.