Race, Evolution, and Behavior

Last updated
Race, Evolution and Behavior
Race, Evolution, and Behavior, first edition.jpg
Cover of the first edition
Author J. Philippe Rushton
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Subjects Race
Human evolution
Human intelligence
PublisherTransaction Books, later The Charles Darwin Research Institute
Publication date
1995, 1997, 2000
Media typePrint (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages388
ISBN 978-0-9656836-1-6

Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.

Contents

Rushton argues that race is a valid biological concept and that racial differences frequently arrange in a continuum across 60 different behavioral and anatomical variables, with Mongoloids (East Asians) at one end of the continuum, Negroids (Sub-Saharan Black Africans) at the opposite extreme, and Caucasoids (Europeans) in the middle. [1]

The book was generally received negatively, its methodology and conclusions being criticized by many experts. The aggressive marketing strategy also received a lot of criticism. The book received positive reviews by some researchers, many of whom were personally associated with Rushton and with the Pioneer Fund which funded much of Rushton's research. [2] The book has been examined as an example of Pioneer's funding of scientific racism, [2] [3] while psychologist Michael Howe has identified the book as part of a movement, begun in the 1990s, to promote a racial agenda in social policy. [4]

Summary

The book grew out of Rushton's 1989 paper, "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference)". [5] The 1st unabridged edition was published in 1995, the 2nd unabridged edition in 1997, and the 3rd unabridged edition in 2000.

Rushton argues that Mongoloid, Caucasoid and Negroid populations fall consistently into the same one-two-three way pattern when compared on a list of sixty distinctly different behavioral and anatomical traits and variables. [6]

Rushton uses averages of hundreds of studies, modern and historical, to assert the existence of this pattern. Rushton's book is focused on what he considers the three broadest racial groups, and does not address other populations such as Southeast Asians and Australian Aborigines. The book argues that Mongoloids, on average, are at one end of a continuum, that Negroids, on average, are at the opposite end of that continuum, and that Caucasoids rank in between Mongoloids and Negroids, but closer to Mongoloids. His continuum includes both external physical characteristics and personality traits. [1]

Differential K theory

Differential K theory is a debunked theory proposed by Rushton, [7] which attempts to apply r/K selection theory to human races. According to Rushton, this theory explains race differences in fertility, IQ, criminality, and sexual anatomy and behavior. [8] The theory also hypothesizes that a single factor, the "K factor", affects multiple population statistics Rushton referred to as "life-history traits". [9]

This theory has been widely rejected as unscientific or pseudoscientific. Rushton's work includes logical errors, cites poor-quality sources, ignored contrary sources, and cites sources which Rushton had misinterpreted or misunderstood. [8] [10] [11] [12]

Responses

According to Richard R. Valencia, the response to the first edition of Rushton's book was "overwhelmingly negative", with only a small number of supporters, many being, like Rushton, Pioneer Fund grantees, such as psychologists Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, and Linda Gottfredson. [13]

Valencia identified the main areas of criticism as focusing on Rushton's use of "race" as a biological concept, a failure to appreciate the extent of variation within populations compared with that between populations, a false separation of genetics and environment, poor statistical methodology, a failure to consider alternative hypotheses, and the use of unreliable and inappropriate data to draw conclusions about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. According to Valencia, "experts in life history conclude that Rushton's (1995) work is pseudoscientific and racist."

A more favorable review of the book came from Gottfredson, who wrote in Politics and the Life Sciences that the book "confronts us as few books have with the dilemmas wrought in a democratic society by individual and group differences in key human traits". [14] Another favorable review of the book appeared in the National Review . [15]

Richard Lewontin (1996) argued that in claiming the existence of "major races", and that these categories reflected large biological differences, "Rushton moves in the opposite direction from the entire development of physical anthropology and human genetics for the last thirty years. Anthropologists no longer regard "race" as a useful concept in understanding human evolution and variation." [16] The anthropologist C. Loring Brace (1996) concurred, stating that the book was an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy of 'racialism'". [17] Similarly, anthropologist John Relethford (1995) criticized Rushton's model as "faulty at many points." [18]

Mailing controversy

The first special abridged edition published under the Transaction Press name in 1999 caused considerable controversy when 40,000 copies were "mailed, unsolicited, to psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, many of whom were angered when they discovered that their identities and addresses had been obtained from their respective professional associations' mailing lists." [19] The director of Transaction Press Irving Louis Horowitz, although he had defended the original edition of the book, "condemned the abridged edition as a 'pamphlet' that he had never seen or approved prior to its publication." [19] A subsequent 2nd special abridged edition was published in 2000 with a rejoinder to Horowitz's criticisms under a new entity called The Charles Darwin Research Institute. [19]

According to Tucker, many academics who received the book unsolicited were outraged at its content, calling it "racial pornography" and a "vile piece of work"; at least one insisting on returning it to the publisher. [3] Hermann Helmuth, a professor of anthropology at Trent University, said, "It is in a way personal and political propaganda. There is no basis to his scientific research." [20]

As an example of Pioneer Fund activity

Race, Evolution, and Behavior has been cited as an example of the Pioneer Fund's activities in promoting scientific racism. Valencia notes that many of the supportive comments for the book come from Pioneer grantees like Rushton himself, and that a 100,000 copy print-run of the third edition was financed by Pioneer. [13] The book is cited by psychologist William H. Tucker as an example of the Pioneer Fund's continued role "to subsidize the creation and distribution of literature to support racial superiority and racial purity." The mass distribution of the abridged third edition he described as part of a "public relations effort", and "the latest attempt to convince the nation of 'the completely different nature' of blacks and whites." He notes that bulk rates were offered "for distribution to media figures, especially columnists who write on race issues". [3]

Reviews

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Jensen</span> Professor of educational psychology (1923–2012)

Arthur Robert Jensen was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, the study of how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.

John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carleton S. Coon</span> American anthropologist (1904–1981)

Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist. A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.

Australo-Melanesians is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Melanesia and Australia. Controversially, groups from Southeast Asia and South Asia were also sometimes included.

The Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.

Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species can be subdivided into biologically distinct taxa called "races," and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.

The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Lynn</span> British psychologist noted for his views on race and intelligence (1930–2023)

Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal. Lynn was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

The Mediterranean race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. According to writers of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries it was a sub-race of the Caucasian race. According to various definitions, it was said to be prevalent in the Mediterranean Basin and areas near the Mediterranean, especially in Southern Europe, North Africa, most of Western Asia, the Middle East or Near East; western Central Asia, parts of South Asia, and parts of the Horn of Africa. To a lesser extent, certain populations of people in Ireland, western parts of Great Britain, and Southern Germany, despite living far from the Mediterranean, were thought to have some minority Mediterranean elements in their population, such as Bavaria, Wales, and Cornwall.

Capoid race is a grouping formerly used for the Khoikhoi and San peoples in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races. The term was introduced by Carleton S. Coon in 1962 and named for the Cape of Good Hope. Coon proposed that the term "Negroid" should be abandoned, and the sub-Saharan African populations of West African stock should be termed "Congoid" instead.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Gottfredson</span> American psychologist & scholar

Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mainstream Science on Intelligence</span> 1994 public statement published in the Wall Street Journal

"Mainstream Science on Intelligence" was a public statement issued by a group of researchers led by psychologist Linda Gottfredson. It was published originally in The Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994, as a response to criticism of the book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which appeared earlier the same year. The statement defended Herrnstein and Murray's controversial claims about race and intelligence, including the claim that average intelligence quotient (IQ) differences between racial and ethnic groups may be at least partly genetic in origin. This view is now considered discredited by mainstream science.

<i>The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy</i> 1988 book by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman

The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy is a book published by Smith College professor emeritus Stanley Rothman and Harvard researcher Mark Snyderman in 1988. Claiming to document liberal bias in media coverage of scientific findings regarding intelligence quotient (IQ), the book builds on a survey of the opinions of hundreds of North American psychologists, sociologists and educationalists conducted by the authors in 1984. The book also includes an analysis of the reporting on intelligence testing by the press and television in the US for the period 1969–1983, as well as an opinion poll of 207 journalists and 86 science editors about IQ testing.

Various attempts have been made, under the British Raj and since, to classify the population of India according to a racial typology. After independence, in pursuance of the government's policy to discourage distinctions between communities based on race, the 1951 Census of India did away with racial classifications. Today, the national Census of independent India does not recognise any racial groups in India.

Mongoloid is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms such as "Mongolian race", "yellow", "Asiatic" and "Oriental" have been used as synonyms.

Negroid is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.

The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.

The history of anthropometry includes its use as an early tool of anthropology, use for identification, use for the purposes of understanding human physical variation in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial and psychological traits. At various points in history, certain anthropometrics have been cited by advocates of discrimination and eugenics often as part of novel social movements or based upon pseudoscience.

In psychology and criminology, Differential K theory is a debunked hypothesis first proposed by Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton in 1985, which attempts to apply r/K selection theory to human races. According to Rushton, this theory explains race differences in fertility, IQ, criminality, and sexual anatomy and behavior. The theory also hypothesizes that a single factor, the "K factor", affects multiple population statistics Rushton referred to as "life-history traits". It has been criticized as a key example of scientific racism and devoid of empirical basis.

Aurelio José Figueredo is an American evolutionary psychologist. He is a professor of psychology, Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, cognition, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals, and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates. He is known for his research on personality, such as a 1997 study in which he and James E. King developed the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire to measure the Big Five personality traits in chimpanzees.

References

  1. 1 2 Rushton, J. P. (1995). Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (2nd special abridged ed.). Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute. ISBN   1-56000-320-0.
  2. 1 2 Valencia, Richard R. (2010). Dismantling contemporary deficit thinking: educational thought and practice. Taylor & Francis. p. 53. ISBN   9780415877107.
  3. 1 2 3 William H. Tucker (2002). The funding of scientific racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press. ISBN   978-0-252-02762-8.
  4. ↑ Howe, Michael J. A (1997). IQ in question: the truth about intelligence . Sage. ISBN   9781446264461.
  5. ↑ Presented at the Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics and Political Science, AAAS Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA, January 19, 1989)
  6. ↑ The terms Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid used by Rushton (2000) was in wide use in mainstream literature until the 1990s at least, e.g. by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Since the 2000s, these terms have been deprecated in by some authorities. For example, the recommended Medical Subject Headings as of 2004 was "Oriental Continental Ancestry Group, "African Continental Ancestry Group" and "European Continental Ancestry Group" for "Mongoloid", "Caucasoid" and "Negroid", respectively. The MeSH descriptor Racial Stocks, and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004 along with Blacks and Whites. Race and ethnicity have been used as categories in biomedical research and clinical medicine. Recent genetic research indicates that the degree of genetic heterogeneity within groups and homogeneity across groups make race per se a less compelling predictor.
  7. ↑ Rushton, J. Philippe (January 1985). "Differential K theory: The sociobiology of individual and group differences". Personality and Individual Differences. 6 (4): 441–452. doi:10.1016/0191-8869(85)90137-0.
  8. 1 2 Weizmann, Fredric; Wiener, Neil I.; Wiesenthal, David L.; Ziegler, Michael (1990). "Differential K theory and racial hierarchies". Canadian Psychology. 31 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1037/h0078934.
  9. ↑ Templer, Donald I. (October 2008). "Correlational and factor analytic support for Rushton's differential K life history theory". Personality and Individual Differences. 45 (6): 440–444. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2008.05.010.
  10. ↑ Anderson, Judith L. (1991). "Rushton's racial comparisons: An ecological critique of theory and method". Canadian Psychology. 32 (1): 51–62. doi:10.1037/h0078956.
  11. ↑ "Statement from the Department of Psychology regarding research conducted by Dr. J. Philippe Rushton". Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario.
  12. ↑ Miller, Edward M. (December 1995). "Environmental variability selects for large families only in special circumstances: Another objection to differential K theory". Personality and Individual Differences. 19 (6): 903–918. doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(95)00126-3.
  13. 1 2 Valencia, Richard R. (2010). Dismantling contemporary deficit thinking: educational thought and practice. Taylor & Francis. p. 55. ISBN   9780415877107.
  14. ↑ Gottfredson, Linda (March 1996). "Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective" (PDF). Politics and the Life Sciences.
  15. ↑ Lind, Michael (1994-10-16). "Calling All Crackpots". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2017-11-09.
  16. ↑ "Review: Of Genes and Genitals". Transition (69): 178–193. 1996. JSTOR   2935246.
  17. ↑ "Review: Racialism and Racist Agendas". American Anthropologist. New Series. 98 (1): 176–7. March 1996. doi:10.1525/aa.1996.98.1.02a00250. JSTOR   682972.
  18. ↑ Relethford, John H. (September 1995). "Race, evolution, and behavior: A life history perspective. By J. Philippe Rushton. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 1995. 334 pp" . American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 98 (1): 91–94. doi:10.1002/ajpa.1330980110. ISBN   1-56000-146-1.
  19. 1 2 3 Weizmann, Fredric (November 2001). "Race, Evolution, and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (Review)". Canadian Psychology. doi:10.1037/h0088141.
  20. ↑ UWO Gazette Volume 93, Issue 68 Tuesday, February 1, 2000 Archived May 15, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Psych prof accused of racism
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.