#1 The Case Of Philippe Rushton

Is Science Too Eager To Stake Its Claims, Ziegler, Wiesenthal, Wiener, and Wiezmann, (Professors of Psychology) : "Canadian Professor Provokes Uproar With Racial Theories," read the headline on a report about J. Philippe Rushton's presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. The psychologist from the University of Western Ontario had claimed that Orientals are at the top of an evolutionary ladder, with whites in the middle and blacks at the bottom. His views are part of a troubling resurgence of academic theorizing about race. This renewal of scientific racism raises serious questions regarding how science is organized and financed and how scientific claims are disseminated.

Professor Rushton’s public pronouncements have been even more grand and disturbing than the news reports indicated. He begins with the scientifically questionable assumption (based on current scientific evidence) that humanity can be divided into three discrete races: whites, blacks and Orientals. According to Prof. Rushton, these races form a genetically based hierarchy in which blacks rank as the least intelligent, least altruistic, least nurturant as parents, most licentious, most criminal and most given to multiple births ("litters," in his terms). The races also differ physiologically and anatomically; the blacks are said to have the smallest brains and the largest genitalia of the three. In short, Prof. Rushton and his associates see blacks as the most animalistic of the human races, while Orientals represent the most highly evolved. He claims that his theory is based on the findings of evolutionary biology, behavioral genetics, sociobiology and ethology.

The attempt to demonstrate the existence of a racially based hierarchy is not new to science. It was a major theme of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biology and social science. Since Darwin, these racist views have been reformulated repeatedly in terms of whatever evolutionary theory was current at the time. In some cases the superior race was posited to be the oldest, and the inferior races its degenerate offspring. In other cases (as in Prof. Rushton'a version) it was the newest race that was the most advanced and the oldest the most primitive. While Prof. Rushton uses contemporary biological terminology and has altered the traditional hierarchy by placing Orientals rather than Northern European whites at the top, there is little new in his views. They are, in fact, part of a long and dismal tradition in Western biological thought. Although each incarnation of these ideas has been discredited, new versions seem to arise in each generation. Prof. Rushton and his colleagues base their claims primarily on an analysis of research conducted by others, and an examination of this research reveals selective quotation, misconstruction of source materials, discounting of contrary and qualifying evidence and views, and reliance on questionable sources.

A revealing example of the latter is Prof. Rushton's reference to a book that might best be characterized as nineteenth-century "anthroporn." Anonymously authored by a "French army surgeon," it was published in a limited edition of 500 (for subscribers) in Paris in 1896. The text contains anecdotal reports of the sexual habits and customs of "primitive and exotic" peoples. It also contains detailed descriptions of the size, shape, color and texture of the genitalia of the inhabitants of these countries. The reports of their sexual behavior and practices are filled with contradictions and hearsay evidence. As esoteric and even bizarre as this source is, this material is central to his theory, since one of his fundamental evolutionary contentions is that, as the brain grows in size, the genitals shrink. Prof. Rushton attempts to document such a relationship to claim that there is an asoociation between low intelligence, immorality and sexual rapaciousness. Like racial hierarchies, making such an association is not new. It predates evolutionary theory and is a staple of racist literature.

While Prof. Rushton has received fellowship support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Guggenheim Foundation in the United States (he is currently on a Guggenheim fellowship and returns to teaching at Western in September 1990), his major research support has come from the Pioneer Fund, a U.S. tax-exempt foundation that supports research into "racial betterment." His association with this foundation is revealing, since the fund has also opposed school busing for racial integration, supported racial restrictions on immigration and built and maintained strong ties to right-wing organizations. Prof. Rushton's views have been widely disseminated in the scientific and scholarly communities. Over the years, he has presented his findings at major scientific meetings and published them in important scientific journals.

This is disturbing, as is the fact that he has been supported by major grant-giving agencies. Every step in the modern scientific process -- from the application for grants to the way the research is conducted, to its presentation at meetings and eventual publication is presumed to undergo careful scrutiny by outside reviewers. Like other grants, those from the Pioneer Fund are first approved and then administered by the university. The money doesn't go directly to individual faculty researchers. Yet, the wide publicity given to Prof. Rushton's work raises questions about the integrity of this scientific process. The awarding of grants and fellowships, the publication of papers and their presentation at conferences provide legitimacy for scientists and their work. Once sanctioned by the scientific community, the results may find their way into textbooks and academic lectures, and thus influence society at large. All this is taking place at a time when racial tensions in Canada are becoming apparent, and manifestations of racism seem to be on the increase. It is particularly tragic that academe should add fuel to the fire. The Globe & Mail, July 1990

Racial Research Is Not All Wacky, Stephen Strauss (science reporter): As the emotional dust settles in the furor surrounding the racial theories of University of Western Ontario psychologist Philippe Rushton, an overwhelming verdict about the quality of his science seems to have emerged, at least in the media. The words "nonsense" and "discredited" and "anthro-porn" and "rife with errors" abound in critiques given by scientists in various news media. The CBC Radio science program Quirks and Quarks presented a withering examination of Prof. Rushton's positions in which the producers apparently couldn't find a single scientist who would say the professor had correctly interpreted earlier data. The producers concluded by coupling carnival sideshow music with a laugh track, which was played in the background as Prof. Rushton was heard commenting about the relationship of head size to intelligence. But discussions with a number of the scientists whose research is cited in Prof. Rushton's 1988 review paper, in which he concludes that Orlentals are on average the most intelligent, blacks are the least intelligent and whites are in between, reveal a more complex reaction.

Some scientists do indeed angrily say he has both misunderstood and distorted their data. Some say he rightly presents their data but applies illogical interpretations. But others are themselves pursuing lines of research and reasoning that sound remarkably like the most contentious of Prof. Rushton's theses, even if they don't accept everything he has to say. The bulk of the criticism has been focused on Prof. Rushton's personal conclusions.His efforts to explain what he introduces as 60 ordered differences among the races rest on two foundations. One states that molecular genetics has shown the races diverged over the past 110,000 years, with blacks emerging first, then whites and finally Orientals. Prof. Rushton goes on to say that it is a principle of biology that the most recently evolved is the most advanced. By that measure, Orientals are superior to whites, who are in their turn more advanced than blacks, he contends.

The second foundation is to categorize all racial differences under two reproductive strategies. One, called R-strategy, has been applied by ecologists to describe animals that produce many offspring but spend relatively little time and effort in raising them. A classic example of an R-strategy animal is the oyster. The other, called K-strategy, describes animals that have relatively few offspring and subsequently spend the greater part of their lives in childrearing. The great ape is a K strategist par excellence. Prof. Rushton has said that one can explain most of the racial differences he enumerates by assuming that blacks are R-strategy oriented, Orientals are K-strategy oriented and whites are in between. Both notions have been greatly ridiculed. Allan Wilson, a University of California microbiologist quoted by Prof. Rushton, says, "he is plainly misrepresenting what the (genetic) tree shows." After initially refusing to comment on Prof. Rushton's work because she felt it was inappropriate for her to do so, Western's dean of social sciences, Emoke Szathmary, has written two detailed and extensive repudiations of his position in the Western News, the university newspaper. "What evidence is there for a ranked ordering of the human races? None, " she wrote. Similarly, ecologists point out that R and K strategies make sense only when applied to different species. Furthermore, there is so much variance among groups and historical periods that classifying people by strategies has little predictive value.

However, when the Rushton ideological structure is removed, the collateral data on which he built his extravagant claims do not simply fade away, nor do the people who interpret them in the direction his views take. Take, for example, the views of the differences between the IQ scores of Orientals, blacks and whites as put forward in a 3-page article written two years ago by Richard Lynn, a psychologist at the University of Ulster. Prof. Lynn has a high profile. His data portraying national IQ difference have appeared in both Nature and Science. Some of it inspired Time magazine to produce a cover story on racial differences in intelligence. He now interprets his results to suggest that Orientals have evolved to have a higher intelligence than the other races. The same as Prof. Rushton, he suggests this occurred because trying to survive during the ice ages forced people to "construct shelters well insulated from the cold, to build fires, to make warm clothes, to, store food and to plan ahead for winters." Blacks, on the other hand, "evolved in a tropical climate and stayed the same."

What about brain size and intelligence? Harry Jerrison, who teaches biobehavioral science at the University of California at Los Angeles, and who regularly is described by others as the leading expert in terms of relationship of brain size to intelligence and to race, is categorical: "There is no question that there are differences between races in terms of brain size." It would be surprising, he added, if by "something pretty analogous there is not a mechanism that produces performance differences." He has personally avoided saying much about the area because it is unclear to him that any social benefits will come out of exploring the question. "It is a bad question from a social point of view; unfortunately, it is a great question from a scientific point of view,"he said. Even the "anthro-porn" aspect of Prof. Rushton's work is less than clearly rejected by other researchers once it is removed from his all-inclusive theoretical schema. The term was introduced by a group of York University psychologists denigrating Prof. Rushton's claims that genital sizes vary from race to race and are related to "sexual strategies." Prof. Rushton argued that over time Orientals, with stable family lives and less promiscuity, evolved smaller sexual organs, while those of blacks, with more casual sexual lifestyles, came larger. Whites, as in all Prof. Rushton's analyses, were somewhere in between.

In the Feb. 9 issue of Nature, Oxford University zoologists Paul Harvey and Robert May asked a related question: "Why does testes size vary among species?" They review evidence from a variety of animal species in which all the polygamous animals have proportionally bigger testes, more sperm and more active sperm than monogamous ones. Why? In essence, the British scientists argue that having more sperm increases the likelihood that a promiscuous female will become pregnant by that particular male. Thus, evolution produced for larger testes in non-monogamous species. Does the same principle apply in humans? "We think it likely that testes size differences among human races have been adaptive in their own right -- different resposes to different mating behaviou," the two scientists write. They make reference to a study of the testes sizes of some Chinese and some Danes. The Danes' testes, even when body size differences are taken into consideration, are twice the size of the Chinese subjects'.

The evolutionary explanation lor the difference appears to be Rushtonian. "It could be that for generations the Chinese lived in a society that was sexually secure, while over the same time the Danes lived in a rape-and-pillage and violence kind of society," Prof. May suggested in an interview. None of this should suggest that even a preponderance of scientists agree with Prof. Rushton, or that he has not been highly selective, plain wrong and less than critical in interpreting much of his data. On the other hand, "If it were not for the social implications of the work, Rushton would not be portrayed as far out as he has been by others," Jerrison said. The Globe & Mail, September 1990