J. Philippe Rushton

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Professor John Philippe (Phil) Rushton Ph.D , D.Sc (born December 3, 1943) is a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, best known for his controversial work on racial differences.

Rushton holds two doctorates from the University of London, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American (APA), British (BPS), and Canadian Psychological Associations, and was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1988. He is the current head of the Pioneer Fund.

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Early life

Born in Bournemouth, England, Rushton's father was a building contractor, while his mother was French and gave him his middle name. Rushton received a B.Sc in psychology from Birbeck College at the University of London in 1970 and in 1973 received his Ph.D from the London School of Economics for his work on altruism in children. He then moved to the University of Oxford where he continued his work until 1974.

Rushton taught at York University in Canada from 1974-1976 and the University of Toronto until 1977. He then moved to the University of Western Ontario, and was made a full professor there in 1985. He received his D.Sc. from London in 1992.

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Works

Rushton began his career with studies on altruism. He found a heritable component in altruism and is the creator of the Genetic Similarity Theory, which states that individuals tend to be more altruistic to individuals who are genetically similar to themselves, and less altruistic, and sometimes outwardly hostile to individuals who are less genetically similar. His work on behavioral genetics and sociobiology later led him to study racial differences. He is the author of five books and 200 articles.

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Rushton's most famous work is his controversial book Race, Evolution And Behavior: A Life History Perspective, in which he draws attention to the existence of many racial differences, including behavioral ones, and shows that they are frequently arranged in a continuum of Mongoloids at one extreme, Negroids at the opposite extreme, and Caucasoids in the middle.[1] The book uses averages of hundreds of studies, modern and historical to demonstrate this pattern. The book grew out his earlier paper, Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental¹-White-Black Difference), which was presented at the Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics and Political Science, AAAS Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA, January 19, 1989).

The book claims that of the three races it is concerned with (Negroids, Caucasoids, and Mongoloids), Mongoloids have the highest average performance in measurements of cognitive ability (See race and intelligence), have the lowest crime rates, work hardest, are the least promiscuous and the least aggressive, and have the largest brain size, lowest ratio of twins to births, the slowest maturation rates, greatest parental investment in child-rearing, the lowest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, the longest life expectancy, the greatest degree of emotional control, and the least amount of body odor (due to their apocrine glands being smallest and least numerous). The book claims that Negroids average at the opposite end on all of these scales, and Caucasoids rank in between Mongoloids and Negroids, but closer to Mongoloids.

Popular science commentator David Suzuki for one protested the book and spoke against Rushton in a live televised debate at the University of Western Ontario.

Rushton's ordering of the human races (excerpt)
Blacks Whites Orientals
IQ¹ 85 100 106
Cranial capacity (cm³) 1267 1347 1364
Lifespan Lower Intermediate Higher
Skeletal development Earlier Intermediate Later
Gestation time Shorter Longer Longer
2-egg twinning² 16 8 4
Intercourse frequency Higher Intermediate Lower
Law abidingness Lower Intermediate Higher
Cultural achievements Low High High
¹ All figures are group averages
² Per 1000 births
Source: [2]

Rushton's theory is based on an attempt to extend the r/K selection theory to humans. He explains the patterns in the table by arguing that while all humans display extremely K-selected behavior, the races vary in the degree to which they exhibit that behavior. He argues that Negroids use a strategy more toward an r-selected strategy (produce more offspring, but provide less care for them) while Mongoloids use the K strategy most (produce fewer offspring but provide more care for them), with Caucasoids exhibiting intermediate tendencies in this area. He argues that Caucasoids evolved more toward a K-selected breeding strategy than Negroids because of the harsher and colder weather encountered in Europe, while the same held true to a greater extent for Mongoloids.

Rushton's work is prominent in race and intelligence research, but his r/K selection theory is the subject of much more criticism and accusations than found even in this controversial field. For example, in a 1996 review of the book, anthropologist C. Loring Brace wrote that "Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy of 'racialism'" (Brace 1996). Brace argues that Rushton assumes the existence of three biological races with no evidence except Rushton's speculation as to what an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth would think. Since Brace's criticism, genetics studies have identified possible genetic differences between the racial groups under question (Tang et al. 2005)². Brace also disagrees with Rushton applying the concept of heritability (normally applied in the context of individuals) to groups. Finally, Brace claims Rushton makes unsupported claims about sub-Saharan African societies.

This theory has difficulty explaining why Native Americans, who appeared even later and emigrated from the northernmost parts of Asia, do not currently have high scores on IQ tests. On the other hand, Rushton (1995) argues that lower scores of Native Americans can be attributed to the evolutionary relaxation of cognitive demands due to the more temperate environment and comparative ease with which North American fauna could be hunted. But it can be argued that life along the fertile river plains in China was not particularly harsh. It is also questionable that conditions in deserts are no less harsh but people living there do not currently score high on IQ tests.

The theory is directly contradicted by the only comparative study on IQ scores in different European nations that showed a statistically insignificant association between the average IQ and latitude of various European nations. Template:Ref In contrast, Beals et al. (1984, p. 309) found a correlation of 0.62 (p=0.00001) between latitude and cranial capacity in samples worldwide and reported that each degree of latitude was associated with an increase of 2.5 cm³ in cranial volume. A more recent study finds this pattern only when including a Siberian population living in extremely cold condition. The explanation may be natural selection for a thermoregulatory capacity in extremely cold environments, resulting in brachycephalization, rather than a selection for intelligence.Template:Ref

Since 2002, Rushton has been the president of the controversial Pioneer Fund, which aims "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Rushton's work has received grants from the fund totalling over $1 million USD since 1981.

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Rushton sources, such as semi-pornographic books and the Penthouse magazine, have been dismissed by other researchers, or have been criticized as extremely biased and inadequate reviews of the literature, or simply false [3]. There have also been many other criticisms of the theory [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Actual recent data show that blacks are not more psychopathic [11], nor do they differ from whites when testing for the big five personality traits [12], differences in sex hormones between whites and East Asians are best explained by environmental differences [13], and the fundamental prediction of the theory that blacks have a higher frequency of twins is incorrect [14].

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Notes

¹ Rushton has sometimes been criticized for using the word "Oriental", when most North Americans use the term "Asian" instead. Since the 1990s, Asian American activists have begun campaigns to stop people from using the word Oriental, claiming the term has offensive connotations. However, the term is used non-pejoratively in Great Britain to denote people of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean ancestry, since the term "Asian" there has historically referred to people from the Indian Subcontinent.

² The methodology of this study required severe classification constraints (e.g. the groups in question are assumed to be mutually exclusive with no multi-racial cases). Also, the study only looked at United States ethnic groups ("white", African-American, and Hispanic) and Taiwanese (East Asian) samples that would potentially obscure continuously distributed gene frequencies. In short, the results of these studies are not at all incompatible with Brace's concept of morphological diversity across geographic clines.

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See also

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References

  • Lynn, Richard. The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund. University Press of America, 2001.
  • {{cite journal 
| author=Brace, C. Loring
| title = Racialism and Racist Agendas
| journal = American Anthropologist
| year = 1996 | volume = 91 | issue = 1 | pages = 96-97
}}
  • {{cite journal 
| author=Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D.
| title = Size matters: a review and new analyses of racial differences in cranial capacity and intelligence that refute Kamin and Omari
| journal = Personality and Individual Differences
| year = 2000 | volume = 29 | pages=591–620
}}
  • {{cite journal 
| author=Tang H, Quertermous T, Rodriguez B, Kardia SL, Zhu X, Brown A, Pankow JS, Province MA, Hunt SC, Boerwinkle E, Schork NJ, Risch NJ
| title=Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies
| journal=Am J Hum Genet
| year=2005 | volume=76 | pages=268–275
| id = PMID 15625622
}}
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External links

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Opinion

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Criticism

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Pro-Rushton

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