Volkmar Weiss

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Volkmar Weiss (born May 23, 1944 in Zwickau ) is a German geneticist , social historian and genealogist .

Weiss advocates the thesis that differences in human intelligence can essentially be explained by the variation of a gene and the Mendelian rules of inheritance . Social and polygenic factors would only have a secondary influence. In Weiss' opinion, social classes and ethnicities differ in their different high IQ mean values. a. assumes the distribution of gene variants within these groups. Weiss' theses only have a marginal position in science.

From the results of his intelligence research he draws concrete conclusions regarding education , minority , migration and ethnopolitics. His remarks on the relationship between genetics and biology and society predominantly arouse rejection in the public, up to and including the accusation that it is a matter of "heredity in the Nazi tradition". Politically, Weiss moves in right-wing extremist contexts.

Life

After graduating from high school in Annaberg-Buchholz in 1962 , Weiss studied German , geography and biology in Leipzig from 1963 . From 1968 he received special training in anthropology at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1969 he began researching the social background of the GDR's highly gifted mathematics , and he was employed in the Sociology Department of the Academy of Sciences. In 1970 he received a diploma in biology from Humboldt University, and in 1972 he was awarded a Dr. rer. nat. PhD . In 1974 he moved to Leipzig to the German University for Physical Culture . From 1977 he worked in the Sociology of Education department of the Central Institute for Youth Research . In 1984 he became an employee of the research center for regional history of the Central Institute for History of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin . Here he wrote a habilitation thesis on the social history of Saxony , which he defended in 1993. In 1990 he became head of the German Central Office for Genealogy in Leipzig, which was subordinated to the Saxon State Archives in Leipzig as a department in 1995 . Weiss has been retired since 2008.

politics

Weiss was one of the founding members of the German Social Union (DSU) in January 1990 and one of the authors of the party program. He was chairman of the DSU Leipzig and gave a speech at the Monday demonstration on February 19, 1990 in Leipzig. His demand: "German unity - immediately" was broadcast on the same evening by ZDF and BBC . In June 1990 he joined the CDU , from which he left in 1993.

Population and Social Policy

Weiss assumes collectively different, biologically fixed degrees of intelligence of ethnic and social groups in different societies. Such a distributed intelligence does not remain without serious social and economic consequences for the state and society as a whole, which is why Weiss makes specific demands for population, migration and educational policy practice. He demands that “only well-trained people” should be naturalized because they are also intelligent. Since the parents' intelligence, as the decisive prerequisite for social, professional and economic success, is propagated to the children, the problems of previous immigration no longer exist: they are not primarily caused by socio-economic and socio-cultural influences, but rather by immigrant groups with low intelligence.

Weiss' dealings with " gypsies " are exemplary . He ignores the extensive recent scholarly literature on Roma . Instead, he refers to Hermann Arnold , doctor, hereditary hygienist and well-known "Gypsy researcher" in the express successor to Nazi race research, for whom z. B. the racial researcher Robert Ritter with his Racial Hygiene Research Center . Ritter assumed that “gypsies” had “innate nonsense”. Weiss shares Arnold and Ritter's basic position of shifting the historical and social into the biological and declaring it invariant. He derives a mean IQ of 85 from a lower level of education and training of the Czechoslovak Roma and extends his conclusion to the assumption that it seems “for social castes, such as for the Negroes in the USA , the Gypsies in Europe and for the Burakumin in Japan typically has a median IQ of around 85 ”. He sees this as a cause of social exclusion and the emergence of social conflict, alongside illiteracy and high crime. This concept of social marginalization coincides both with older, now obsolete scientific constructions as well as still vital popular images of " anti-social " and subproletarischer " Verlumpung ".

In his work Die IQ-Trap , Weiss describes the effects of what he believes to be the low intellect of “Gypsies” on the example of the Roma in the town of Zendersch (Romania). His perspective is determined by the traditional space and timeless images of popular antigypsyism . “Gypsies” therefore form a remnant of a deeply alien, backward, primeval hunter population that remains unchangeable: “The gypsies still place relaxed life before economic and other success today. They still resemble members of primitive societies who, without looking for added value, work just enough to make life ”.

Educational policy

By referring to the limits of “educational ability”, Weiss regrets the greater permeability of the education system since the 1970s. He argues based on population biology, citing racial hygienists like Hans Harmsen and right-wing extremist texts like the Heidelberg Manifesto . The decline in the “quality of the population”, “the shortage of the German elite”, could not be compensated for “with more school hours for the broader middle”. Education policy is to be financed as part of a German population policy, "but for German children - not for language courses and all-day schools".

Weiss' model of a threefolding of talent corresponds to the three-tier school system typical of Germany, which deviates from the European standard . It follows older educational theoretical and political constructs that legitimize this system. It corresponds best to the “natural” distribution of “talents” and the requirements of the labor market. Weiss expressly refers to these ideas when he quotes Heinrich Weinstock with approval : “The machine needs three kinds of people, the one who operates it and keeps it going; the one who repairs and improves them; after all, the one who invents and constructs it. "

Right-Wing Extremist Contexts

In the taz , Weiss was criticized for having been fishing “in murky brown waters” for years and for obtaining approval on the right with scientifically “more than controversial” and “Nazi tradition” views. In a 2004 lecture on the impending “pension disaster”, for example, he praised the Nazis' concern for the “preservation of the German population” as being exemplary for the present and, on the other hand, called for birth control. "Because, according to Weiss, senseless, unlimited reproduction only exists in the animal kingdom - and with the Osama bin Laden family and Jewish fundamentalists ."

Weiss' more recent places of publication and articulation are e.g. B. the German study group , the Leopold Stocker publishing house or the society for free journalism .

Until February 2015, Weiss was co-editor of the political-scientific US journal Mankind Quarterly . In the human biological discussion, this journal is rated as a “racist program publication” and has the aim of “political participation in the discussion about racial segregation under scientific symbols”.

Weiss is also co-editor of Nouvelle École , a Nouvelle Droite magazine founded by Alain de Benoist . It also experiences a certain reception in the national-conservative transition field to the far right.

Weiss gives presentations on his scientific theories and research at lectures at associations and groups that are elite-oriented, bourgeois - conservative , but above all on the political right fringes.

At the suggestion of the parliamentary group of the NPD , the president of the state parliament of Saxony appointed him in March 2005 as an external expert in the study commission demographic development and its effects on the areas of life of the people in the Free State of Saxony as well as its consequences for the political fields of action from which he in January 2006 resigned. He was also an interview partner and guest author of Junge Freiheit and the German Voice of the NPD.

reception

In his work Psychogenetik: Humangenetik in Psychologie und Psychiatrie (1982; defended in 1990 as a habilitation thesis for genetics ) Weiss described deviations in the normal distribution of raw scores from intelligence tests . The three “performance levels” he noted in his sample could be generalized to the total population, with a distribution of expected IQ values of 94 for 68%, 112 for 27% and 130 for 5%. He also presented data in which the IQ of the children of parents from the low and high group again showed a similar value, “while a quarter of the children of all parents with an IQ of 112 went to the higher or lower group Intelligence group achieved. ”He explained both by inheriting a single, as yet unknown gene with two alleles according to Mendel's laws , which has the most important influence.

Although the importance of genetic factors is recognized in today's intelligence research, with this escalation Weiss takes an outsider position. With this he interprets Charles Spearman's hypothesis of a general factor in intelligence g . In addition, he is based on the information processing model of the Erlangen School of Information Psychology, according to which the short storage capacity is decisive for more complex thought processes, which in turn are made up of information processing speed and memory span .

In 1993 a publication by Weiss in the journal for educational psychology met with criticism from the psychologist Helmut Lukesch and the human geneticist Gisela Grupe .

According to Lukesch, Weiss misjudges the difference between intelligence and performance concepts, such as school grades represent. It is a mistake to take the Abitur average as an IQ indicator, as Weiss advocates it, since the results of participants in tests for medical courses as a kind of intelligence test hardly correlated with their Abitur averages. Lukesch cited a few studies that found that occupations and social class indicators correlated only weakly with IQ. Weiss' intelligence model does not adequately capture the complex relationships between occupation or social class and intelligence. It was not a genetic predisposition, but above all exogamous factors such as the organization of the lessons that produced performance effects.

According to Grupe, Weiss treats “social distributions like a biological constant”. In this way he “reified” general intelligence. But there is no empirical basis for this. The occupation could only be taken as an indicator of intelligence if “there was no control of the choice of occupation, neither from the state nor because of the supply and demand of a job market, nor because of the current family situation”. In addition, Weiss lacks an “empirical access” to low intelligence, because creativity indicates a high IQ, but the absence of creativity does not indicate low intelligence.

Occasionally, Weiss' publications in and through journalism attract more attention. Andreas Speit, for example, criticized Weiss's hereditary biological approach and his methodology - based on Stephen Jay Gould's criticism of sociobiology - that he deduces causes from statistical correlations.

Weiss claims to have transferred methods of quantum mechanics to the human brain. There is a quantization of the memory span and the speed of thinking, that is, only a handful of differently sized memory spans or speeds could occur and there is no continuous distribution. He calls these speeds " natural frequencies of the brain", which could only be whole-number multiples of (with the circle number ) or, in more recent publications, of (with the golden section ). He advocated the thesis that differences in intelligence are determined solely by the differences in these values ​​from person to person. Weiss describes this theory as his "most original scientific achievement". As part of this work, he also put forward the physical thesis that the Planck length is exactly .

According to Volker Weiß , Andreas Kemper and Volkmar Weiss himself, Thilo Sarrazin has taken over some of the central theses and formulations of his 2010 book Germany gets rid of itself directly from Volkmar Weiss. Therefore, Weiss claimed part of the book's success in a review.

Literary work

Published 2007 White a dystopian science fiction -novel ( The millennium Artam. The alternative history from 1941 to 2099 ) in the form of alternate history . In 2084, Germany and Europe fell apart in a “great chaos”. Only in the east still exists the somewhat stable Artam empire, which has to defend itself against partisans controlled from East Asia. The capital is the former Kiev, which is now called Reichsburg. This is where Adrian Schwarz lives, the protagonist of the novel, who works as Obersturmbannführer of the Black Corps in the Reichssippenamt. In order to increase the birth rate and combat strength, Islam was introduced. Schwarz is married to the two sisters Gundula and Godela. That is obviously not enough for him, because he begins a relationship with the Russian Ludmila. The association with a Slavic, if discovered, would be described by the Führer as “racial disgrace”. Adrian, Ludmila and their illegitimate son German would be in great danger. Will they be discovered or will a coup of Islam that knows no races save them?

According to Nils M. Franke , the novel makes use of the Artam cult , "takes historical set pieces and mixes them into a crude future narrative in a modification of German history, with the problem of" racial disgrace "and its consequences being the mainspring of the story". The controversial theoretician Vilfredo Pareto , who was also traded as a pioneer of Italian fascism , was offered as basic literature . The extremism researcher Volker Weiß mentions the novel as an example of how an active author from the NPD environment sees the relationship to Islam strategically: “Unlike immigration, Islam can serve the national cause from this point of view in two ways: either through conversion Warrior ethos rooted in Islam can be harnessed to help Europe rebirth, or the confrontation with Islam enables a return to one's own roots. Both cases would be useful in overcoming the main enemy, hedonistic Americanism. "

Fonts

  • Psychogenetics: human genetics in psychology and psychiatry . VEB Gustav Fischer, Jena 1982, ISSN  0435-284X (reprint in: Volkmar Weiss, Siegfried Lehrl , Helmar Frank : Psychogenetics of Intelligence . Verlag Modernes Lern, Dortmund 1986, ISBN 3-8080-0106-2 ).
  • Population and social mobility: Saxony 1550–1880 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-001973-5 ( [1] ).
  • (with Katja Münchow :) Local family books based in Leipzig . 2nd Edition. Degener, Neustadt / Aisch 1998, ISBN 3-7686-2099-9 .
  • The IQ trap: intelligence, social structure and politics . Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz 2000, ISBN 3-7020-0882-9 .
  • The Artam Empire . The alternative story. Engelsdorfer Verlag, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 978-3-86703-226-1 . 2nd, expanded edition: The Millennial Kingdom of Artam. The alternative story 1941–2099. Arnshaugk Verlag, Neustadt an der Orla 2011, ISBN 978-3-926370-45-7 .
  • Intelligence and its enemies: the rise and fall of industrial society . Ares Verlag, Graz 2012, ISBN 978-3-902732-01-9 .
  • Prehistory and consequences of the Aryan ancestral passport: On the history of genealogy in the 20th century . Arnshaugk, Neustadt an der Orla 2013, ISBN 978-3-944064-11-6 .
  • The red plague from a green perspective: Spring herbs - valued by beekeepers, fought by nature conservationists . Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz 2015, ISBN 978-3-7020-1506-0 .
  • The IQ gene - denied since 2015: a groundbreaking discovery and its enemies . Ares Verlag, Graz 2017, ISBN 978-3-902732-87-3 .
  • No welcoming culture for Douglas firs in the German forest? Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk 2017, ISBN 978-3-944064-76-5 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annotated full bibliography of his 220 publications, pp. 13–50, in: Volkmar Weiss: Der extended SächsArchReport. Documentation from the head of the German Central Office for Genealogy 1990 - 2007 . Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk 2019.
  2. ↑ a b c Sarah Mersch: Leipzig inheritance theory in the Nazi tradition. In: taz of August 8, 2005, p. 7.
  3. ↑ Tabular curriculum vitae, pp. 6–8, in: Volkmar Weiss: The extended SächsArchReport. Documentation from the head of the German Central Office for Genealogy 1990 - 2007 . Neustadt an der Orla: Arnshaugk 2019.
  4. ↑ Achim Beier and Uwe Schwabe (eds.): "We only have the street." The speeches at the Leipzig Monday demonstrations in 1989/90. A documentation. Mitteldeutscher Verlag , Halle / Saale 2016, pp. 200–201, speech by Volkmar Weiss; Pp. 234-237.
  5. ↑ Interview with Weiss in: FAZ, December 11, 2001.
  6. ↑ Volkmar Weiss: The IQ trap: intelligence, social structure and politics . Leopold Stocker Verlag, Graz 2000, ISBN 3-7020-0882-9 , sections “ The Gypsies - a new hereditary lower class? ”, Pp. 195–202 and “ The accumulation of social explosive ” , pp. 202–207.
  7. ↑ Volkmar Weiss, population policy as the basis of state and people. Published in: The new axis. Publications of the Society for Free Journalism 20, 2004, pp. 11–29.
  8. ↑ Heinrich Weinstock, Real Humanism. A look out for possibilities of its realization, Heidelberg 1955, p. 121, quoted. according to: Volkmar Weiss, ability levels of talent and a tripartite school system, in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 7 (1993), no. 4, p. 179.
  9. ↑ Google Books inauthor "Volkmar Weiss" .
  10. ↑ Bernhard Irrgang : Human genetics on the way to a new eugenics from below? (PDF; 319 kB), "Gray series" of the European Academy, Volume 31, Ahrweiler 2002, p. 46; Stefan Kühl, The social construction of scientific and unscientific nature in the international eugenic movement, in: Heidrun Kaupen-Haas / Christian Saller (ed.), Scientific racism. Analyzes of a Continuity in Human and Natural Sciences , Frankfurt (Main) 1999, pp. 11–121, here: pp. 119 f.
  11. ↑ Kirsten Knaak: The Aid School in National Socialism , chap. 8. Current scientific racism in the New Right using the example of the magazine “Neue Anthropologie”, also footnote 94.
  12. ^ Volkmar Weiss: Volkmar Weiss (Leipzig): Co-editor of magazines (accessed on March 30, 2007)
  13. ↑ Sven Baier, “Intelligence is not a coincidence”. The human geneticist Volkmar Weiss on innate intelligence, Günther Jauch and immigration, in: Junge Freiheit, May 11, 2001.
  14. ↑ So also in: Volkmar Weiss, Ability Levels of Talent and Tripartite School System, in: Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 7 (1993), p. 177.
  15. ↑ Helmar Frank: Human cybernetic coherence and political explosives. In: Basic studies from cybernetics and humanities / human cybernetics 41, 2000, pp. 143–146 (review of the IQ trap ).
  16. ^ Gregor Brand: The intelligence of society ( Memento from December 3, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Labyrinth 25, No. 74, 2002, pp. 18–22 (review of The IQ Trap )
  17. ↑ Helmut Lukesch, A Monogenetic Intelligence Theory as a Basis for the Design of the School System? Journal for pedagogical psychology 7 (1993), no. 4, pp. 185-189.
  18. ↑ Gisela Grupe (1993): "How complex phenomena find an apparently simple explanation". Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie 7 (1993), no. 4, pp. 191-195.
  19. ↑ Andreas Speit: Nothing learned - population policy by law . In: Der Freitag , May 27, 2005, p. 6.
  20. ↑ See notes on The Relationship between Short-Term Memory Capacity and EEG Power Spectral Density . In: Biological Cybernetics . tape 68 , 1992, pp. 165-172 .
  21. ↑ Volkmar Weiss: From memory span and mental speed toward the quantum mechanics of intelligence . In: Personality and Individual Differences . Vol. 7, No. 5 , 1986, pp. 737-749 ( online ).
  22. ↑ The spiritual dung beetles of science , on the website of Weiss
  23. ↑ Harald Weiss and Volkmar Weiss: The golden mean as clock cycle of brain waves . In: Chaos, Solitons & Fractals . Vol. 18, No. 4 , 2003, p. 643-652 ( The golden mean as clock cycle of brain waves The golden mean as clock cycle of brain waves ).
  24. ↑ Volker Weiß, Germany's New Right: Attack of the Elites - From Spengler to Sarrazin , Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh 2011, p. 121
  25. ^ A b Nils M. Franke, The nature of the right-wing extremist lifestyle. A critical analysis , State Center for Environmental Education Rhineland-Palatinate (Hg), Mainz 2017, p. 21
  26. ↑ a b Volker Weiß, Das Reich und der Islam , In: Claudia Globisch, Agnieszka Pufelska, Volker Weiß, The dynamics of the European rights , VS-Verlag 2011, pp. 235f
  27. ↑ Klaus Gauger, Arnshaugk: a reading book , Edition Arnshaugk 2009, p. 140
personal data
SURNAME Weiss, Volkmar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German genealogist, head of the German Central Office for Genealogy
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Zwickau , Saxony