I compiled this in 2020 in a format to be used, among other things, as an Amazon review of Ed Dutton’s Philippe Rushton – A Life History Perspective. Amazon didn’t want it.
Philippe Rushton opens his 1995 book "Race, Evolution and Behavior" with the observation that racial differences are more than skin deep. Research by scientists in every discipline – genomics, paleontology, psychology – have confirmed his findings. The last serious books to challenge this thesis (links below) are also a quarter century old.
However, even today discussing Rushton remains beyond the pale. Such discussions are essential. In their absence the nations of the West have made catastrophic policy decisions. Wrongly ascribing social problems to white racism, they have implemented policies prejudicial to white people. The policies have been astronomically expensive and highly unfair. Most significantly, over the course of 60 years they have simply not worked.
The mission of science is not to moralize but to discover the truth. Finding that the truth endangered their agendas, progressive throughout the world in government, media and the universities have demonized both the science and the scientists. However, as John Adams said "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The facts have not changed, and even some who have worked overtime to suppress them have to admit the truth. Angela Merkel, while stating that "Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have 'utterly failed'," continues to support immigrants and suppress information about their high levels of crime welfare dependency and unemployment.
For the benefit of others in Eastern Europe, who have not yet succumbed to the persistent calls for multiculturalism and open doors for immigration, I recently translated the abridged version of his book into six European languages. This article reflects my renewed admiration for his insights.
Rapid Evolution
The human species is the end result of amazingly rapid evolution. Most notably, the size of our brains almost quadrupled in the 7 million years since we parted company with the chimpanzees. Even more impressive is the more than twentyfold acceleration in the rate at which our brains have been growing.
Rushton's thesis goes straight back to Darwin. The evolutionary success of any species depends on its ability to reproduce. Why did humans come to dominate the earth? Collectively we weigh more than any mammal species except for our cattle. More significantly, what is going on with human evolution today? Though they cannot articulate it, every breeding group has a strategy for reproduction. Rushton's sin is to subject the reproductive strategies of the three major races to scientific analysis.
Different breeding populations – gene pools – of any species adapt themselves to the environment in which they find themselves. As we spread out of Africa, human beings encountered a wider variety of environments than any mammal species in history. We adapted to them. Even more significant, we have been masters at changing our own environment. We got our practice inventing stone tools and mastering fire. However, in the 10 millennia since we civilized ourselves we have been changing our environment at an amazing rate. We have been forcing our own evolution.
In the interest of simplicity, Rushton confined his analysis to the three most significant races then present in the United States and Canada: Whites, Blacks, and Northeast Asians, which at the time of his writing were generally called Orientals. He notes the omission in his book, observing that three races are enough to make his point. Subsequent research, discussed below, bears him out.
Rushton's Ordeal
It is Rushton's 50 page abridgment of his 250 page work that made him a pariah. The original scholarly tome, with infinite footnotes and a bibliography of a thousand books, priced at $80, was easily ignored. It was when he mailed thousands of copies of the abridgment to the academic community that he faced a firestorm of criticism. It had been the same when Arthur Jensen published "How much can we boost I.Q?" in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969, and Murray and Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" in 1994.
Although all of these publications represented mainstream thinking in the life sciences, the powers that be did not want to expose the general public to their findings. The publications and their authors were thoroughly demonized, excluded from public discourse, fired when possible and found their books rejected by reputable publishing houses. Steven Pinker's 2002 "The Blank Slate" provides a good account of the abuse that these researchers took. That abuse had its effect – most of the people who still publish in this sphere are well past retirement age. Many younger ones, cited below, coyly avoid discussion of the implications of their research.
Rushton's Thesis
Rushton lays out his thesis simply in the core chapters of the abridgment:
Throughout the world, large statistical differences exist among the races in the age of maturation, the level of crime, and parenting practices. The phenomena are independent of any national history of slavery, colonialism, or racism.
The races differ in their testosterone levels, frequency of sex, prominence of sex-linked attributes such as breast size and body hair, age of puberty, and incidence of sexually-transmitted diseases. The same patterns occur throughout the world. There is always a tripartite split, with Northeast Asians at one end, Africans at the other, and Caucasians in the middle.
Success in any primate society depends on intelligence – the more the better. The more complex the society, the higher the intellectual demands. Rushton found consistent correlation among brain size (skull size, weight at autopsy, MRI measurement), brain complexity (surface area, gray matter) and intelligence. Moreover, the averages of these measurements differed significantly among the races. He observed the same tripartite division, with Oriental brains averaging 1364 cubic centimeters at one end and Blacks with 1267 at the other.
Linda Gottfredson writes the obvious: functioning in a modern society requires intelligence. Those without enough simply cannot function. Her graph of the average intelligences of people by occupation shows that there is little place in modern society for people with IQs in the 70s and 80s.
I mentioned Rushton's thousand-entry bibliography. Rushton cited primary sources, publications by others over the course of more than a century. His response, when he was asked if the studies were representative, was "where are the studies I overlooked?" Searching the bibliographies of Rushton's detractors, cited below, one sees that there are essentially none.
At the heart of the matter is the "nature versus nurture" battle that has been going on for a century. Nature – heredity – held the upper hand for the first half-century after "Origin of the Species." In the 1930s it ran into stiff opposition. Franz Boas, the founder of the field of anthropology, strongly supported cultural explanations of human differences. He found support with B. F. Skinner and John Watson of Harvard.
These scientists were loath to accept what they called the "genetic determinism" and the eugenics programs endorsed by Darwin's followers such as Francis Galton. Politically, the eugenicists were at odds with the cherished American egalitarian notion that any boy could grow up to be President. They were likewise at odds with the Soviets' belief that they could create a "New Soviet Man" out of the human material at hand.
At the end of the day, environmentalists seized the higher ground in public discourse, the media and the leadership of academia. The scientists themselves, however, remained largely unconvinced. There are few serious books by life scientists advocating the notion that human beings are predominantly the product of their environment.
Having made the case for genetics, Rushton went on to provide an evolutionary explanation. He applied an argument from the then new field of sociobiology, founded by Harvard's E.O. Wilson and including such luminaries as Stephen Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Robert Trivers. Wilson introduced the r-K theory of reproductive strategies with regard to plants and animals.
r-strategists succeed by producing large numbers of offspring which they provide with minimal paternal care in the expectation that enough will survive to adulthood to keep the species going. Rushton's poster child for the r strategy is the oyster, which spews 500 million fertilized eggs per year into the ocean. A K strategist has few offspring but provides sufficient care that they mostly survive to adulthood. Gorillas, for instance, don't start to reproduce until they are 10 years old and give birth only every five years.
Within all species, a vast number of traits co-vary along the r-K axis.
· Length of gestation
· Age of puberty
· Brain size
· Prominence of sexual attributes
· Level of sex hormones
· Level of sexual activity
· Level of child care
· Incidence of disease
· Life expectancy
With regard to humans, Rushton makes a few extensions to Wilson's list:
· Social responsibility
· Sexual restraint
· Marital fidelity
Rushton's argument is that while the whole human species is very K-selected, in comparison with others, among humans Orientals are the most K-selected and Africans the most r-selected. Life in Africa is easy and unpredictable. It doesn't take much planning ahead – minimal need for clothing, shelter, or planning for the winter – but tropical diseases and wild animals make it unpredictable. Their strategy? Simply have a lot of kids.
On the other hand, the Orientals evolved hunting mammoths in the frozen north. They needed a higher level of cooperation, more planning ahead, and more ingenuity devising clothing and shelter. They could not afford to expend a lot of effort in sexual competition. But – most of their children survived until adulthood. Europeans' evolutionary history is somewhat less harsh, but closer to Asian than African.
That's the essence of his thesis. He provides an evolutionary explanation for the observable, measurable differences among the races. He is despised because he states the politically incorrect obvious.
The Intellectual Climate of Rushton's Time
Rushton's thesis was in line with that of other evolutionary psychologists of the time including Wilson, Dawkins and Dennett mentioned above. Robert Trivers published a number of papers in the 1970s on the separate genetic interests of mother, father, child and siblings, and how these conflicting interests played out in the family.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's "Mother Nature" investigated the evolution of the mother child bond. It is not as natural as was thought – humans have the ability to reject an infant that is unfit or cannot be cared for. That is how our kids evolved to be fatter than other ape babies, so cuddly and so loud. Her second book, "Mothers and Others" attributes human evolutionary success to human mother's ability to enlist alloparents – other female relatives – to aid in raising children. Hence the evolution of menopause. Older females take care of grandchildren.
As late as the 1990s several authors defended the "nurture" or environmental explanation of human differences. The most prominent was Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould with his book "The Mismeasure of Man." There was intense antipathy between Gould and Wilson, who called Gould an academic fraud. Gould set up straw men, attacking research that was decades old as if it were the latest news.
Most notably, Gould attacked the methods and the motives behind Samuel George Morton's skull measurements from the 1830s. Coming from that distant age, it would not have been remarkable had they been wrong. But they were not! Other researchers remeasured Morton's skulls and confirmed his results, repudiating Gould. Rushton cites them as well.
It is interesting to read Gould's book as well as Richard Lewontin "Not in our Genes" and Ashley Montagu's "Race and IQ." They are available for free from archive.org. These books have a strident, polemic quality that is absolutely missing from Rushton and the others. Just by their tone they identify themselves as political rather than scientific works. Very few books defending the nurture argument have appeared in the last couple of decades. I reviewed the 2013 "Race Decoded" – I think I am the only person that ever read it. They simply have no argument.
Recent Works validate Rushton's Thesis
A large number of recent books describe findings that for Rushton could be no more than hunches. Robert Plomin's 2019 "Blueprint" recaps his career investigating the importance of heredity over environment. His initial work – the Colorado Adoption Project and the Twins Early Adoption Study in the UK – were statistical analyses carried out the 1970s, when minicomputers first made broad statistical studies feasible. Rushton drew on Plomin's early work.
The second half of Plomin's career, and the second half of his book is dedicated to genomic research. Powerful computers and gene sequencing equipment made it possible to do genome wide association (GWA) studies to analyze the correlation between the genotype and the phenotype. Much more is attributable to heritability than had been thought. In his Chapter 3 Plomin writes "most measures of the environment used in psychology show substantial genetic influence. What look like environmental effects... are actually genetic effects." If anything, Rushton was too modest in his claims for genetic influence.
Also in 2019, Richard Haier published "The Neuroscience of Intelligence." Traditional paper and pencil IQ tests had always been subject to criticisms of cultural bias, the subjects' unfamiliarity with the test procedures and so on.
Psychometricians knew this. Arthur Jensen's last major research was dedicated to measuring reflex time – how fast the signal can get to the brain and the brain can react and do something. These measurements are absolutely independent of culture. Moreover, reaction time tests have been being conducted since the nineteenth century. Whereas IQ tests are not comparable across generations because they are re-centered every few years, reaction time measurements are invariant.
Haier chronicles the progress of brain measurement over the last three decades, from x-rays through EEGs, PETs, and MRIs to magneto encephalograms (MEG). We are now able to watch in real time what's going on in the living brain. There are significant differences among individuals. Moreover, there are significant differences in the averages between the genders – men and women use different parts of the brain to solve similar problems – and among races.
This is almost entirely genetic. The brain wires itself in in the womb and then the early years of life. It confirms Rushton's initial claim that "Race is more than skin deep."
Other Books on Evolution
Evolution is a hot topic. Over the past decade I have read "The Journey of Man," "Genes, Peoples and Languages," "The Evolution of Beauty," "A Million Years of Music," "Male – Female – the Evolution of Human Sexual Differences," "The Evolution of Imagination,", The Evolution of Language," "Before the Dawn," and "A Troublesome Inheritance." Most of these authors are academics who don't want to arouse the enmity of their academic peers. Or lose their jobs. Some are cagier than others about disguising the implications of their findings. The author of the last two, Nicholas Wade, lost his job as science editor of the New York Times for veering too close to the truth.
The bottom line for all these books is that humans are more a product of nature than nurture. Sexual selection – how we choose mates – and how we rear our children has been as essential to our success as it is to every other species. The process is largely under genetic control. To go back to Rushton for a minute, the propensity of Japanese to exhibit great loyalty to their families, devote a lot of resource to raising children and not be sexually adventuresome is more genetic than cultural. The converse is true for Africans. In both cases, the culture and the genome have coevolved to make a workable strategy for reproduction.
There have also been a number of books explicitly addressing the differences among the races. Among them are: "Race Differences In Intelligence," "Race Differences In Ethnocentrism," "Race Differences In Psychotic Personality Disorder," and "Race and Sex Differences In Intelligence and Personality." It goes without saying that all of these titles attribute the differences to genetics.
Evolution of Language
The evolution of language, a topic that Rushton did not analyze, has been the subject of many recent books. The essence is that:
· Homo sapiens evolved the ability to speak between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. In evolutionary time that is extraordinarily recent. To put it in context, it is only about half the time since our split with the Neanderthals and a tenth of the time since we first mastered stone tools and fire. It is only about twice as long as the time since the races diverged with our migration out of Africa.
· That notwithstanding, we had been evolving the ability to handle language for quite a while longer. See Philip Lieberman's "Eve Spoke," Robbins Burling's "The Talking Ape," and Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct," One of Burling's major contributions was explaining how we would have evolved the mechanics of language before we were able to speak.
· The roots of most common words shared among most modern languages – simple ones like the number one, mother and father – date back only to the late Stone Age. Proto-Indo-European, for example, was spoken about 12,000 years ago.
Verbal intelligence, skill with words, is one of the three components of intelligence tests – the other two being mathematical and spatial intelligence. Inasmuch as the races of man have been evolving separately for about half the time we have had language, it is not surprising that our verbal reasoning skills should be different. Note that we developed arithmetic just since agriculture – and the differences in that sphere are more significant.
Language is obviously critical in human reproduction. Sexual selection in humans is highly keyed to verbal ability. Women appreciate smooth talkers. Moreover, as Hrdy noted, human ability to coordinate childcare among members of the community has been a decisive advantage. Language is critical in managing childcare. Lastly, languages are the vehicle for communicating culture. As our cultures have become vastly more complex, especially since the dawn of agriculture, language has been increasingly necessary as a vehicle for communicating our mental and material culture to the rising generations. The fact that Rushton's tripartite division of reproductive strategies maps to the length of time peoples have been civilized should come as no surprise.
Other Races of Man
Scientists such as Luigi Cavalli Sforza and Spencer Wells have continually enhanced their maps of how Homo sapiens migrated to cover the earth. Their latest wrinkles include dead ends, reverse migrations, extinctions and other events that only become visible with more powerful tools, especially DNA analysis. It is worth conjecturing about the races that Rushton did not analyze.
There are some minor races on the fringes of the human gene pool. The two most distantly related populations on earth are the African pygmies/Bushman and the Polynesians/Australian aborigines. The former are few in numbers and measurably less intelligent than the average Africans. They have obviously not been under evolutionary pressure to move from an r to a K strategy.
The Polynesians have been in place for a long time, but they did pick up an admixture of genes from the extinct Denisovan people their ancestors met in China on their journey out of Africa. Whatever their history, this tropical people has enjoyed an easy r-strategy life for many millennia.
The South Asians and Semites have also been in warm lands for quite a while. They are solidly r-strategy, with the exception of the Jews whose diaspora among Europeans placed upon them strong selection pressure for intelligence. Moreover, DNA reveals a fair amount of interbreeding… a few percent per generation adds up over a hundred generations.
Lastly, American Indians share common ancestors with the Northeast Asians. However, crossing the Bering Strait and heading south through Canada they entered a land of milk and honey. Or, rather, large, meaty and clueless mammals that they could easily hunt. Even if they once shared the exceptional intelligence of Northeast Asians, they didn't need it in their environment of the past 10,000 years and they didn't retain it.
The State of Evolution Today
Evolution is the process of adaptation to a changing environment. The human species' ability to modify its own environment has accelerated over time. It is worth a fast-forward – what is happening right now to the populations that Rushton described?
The North Asians are in trouble. They are simply not having babies. Their K-strategy reproduction depended on highly complex social structures that have evaporated in their move to the cities. Being strong K-strategists, Orientals are simply undersexed. You read every day in the paper about the extent to which young Japanese men and women simply are not interested. Without family pressure to marry and produce children, they just do not.
White people retained a bit more sex drive. MacDonald writes that we evolved to have looser ties to families than other peoples. With the freedom to choose our own marriage partners, we evolved a sense of romantic love. We developed a culture, and we evolved temperaments compatible with that culture, to encourage monogamy. As Rushton reports, we had more sex than the Orientals, but our culture and temperaments tended to keep it within the family. It worked – a century ago Europeans represented 30% of humanity.
However, the social constraints that pushed us to remain within family units dissolved as we became urbanized. The freedom that has been our legacy has turned into license. Without constraints, our sex drive has been redirected into a hook up culture, homosexuality, and a society that favors material goods over children.
White people evolved altruism, loyalty to the tribe, in place of the strong loyalty to family enjoyed by other peoples of the world. However, our tribes have been dissolved and our altruism has now been redirected to all of humanity. Most of the governments of white countries altruistically support people who are genetically unlike the native populations. They chastise voters who do not go along with the program as retrograde bigots. The fact is that such policies bring benefits to the politicians at the expense of the ordinary voters. No longer a virtue, altruism allows European people to be victimized by immigrants and minorities with the connivance of their own elected representatives.
White culture – popular music, movies and the like – celebrates the sexual freedom that we observe in the black community. We have been persuaded to adopt their casual attitudes about sex and child rearing. However, to replace us in our roles in our advanced civilizations, white children require more education and socialization. Following the black strategy of fobbing this responsibility off on the community has not worked for white families. Our children are fewer in number, and are not growing up to be like us. We are not replacing ourselves.
The black population is growing. Life is easy. There is enough money to live on, and to create more babies. Black culture celebrates sex. Black people enjoy sex. And the whole society supports the result. Blacks are evolutionarily successful.
For all races, the relentless evolutionary increase in intelligence appears to have reversed. As Woodley and Dutton write in "At Our Wits End," life has become so easy that the children of the duller members of society are ensured survival. Meanwhile the more capable members of society have mastered birth control and found more enjoyable uses for their money than raising kids. While intelligence continues to be an asset for any individual, when those individuals stop reproducing it ceases to be an asset for a breeding population.
Progressives have been bemoaning the Earth's overpopulation for decades now. Their prayers are answered – populations are shrinking in all the richer parts of the world. It is a sweet irony that among the more intelligent, it is the progressives themselves who are having the fewest children. The next generation may be led by the offspring of parents with more traditional views – those with a greater belief in family. We can hope that they will be strong enough to stanch the flow of r-strategists from places that never gave thought to whether or not they should have children.
Conclusion
The extent to which the powers that be have striven to keep people from reading Rushton, to keep his findings from the public, are a gauge of how important they are. Had politicians taken Rushton's message to heart in the 1990s, the West could have avoided the catastrophes that have been brought on by multiculturalism and overwhelming immigration from Third World countries.
Rushton is more important now than ever. A few of us live in countries that remain largely untainted by multiculturalism. We have to defend our legacy. For the West, the time to reverse it is now.
Two comments:-
1) My acceptance, when I was as 7-year old in Texas, I accepted that I went to a different school to the 7-year son of our black servant.
2) The fright I felt when, in the West Indies, I went into bar/eatery, and realised that I was the only white person there.
I accept that a sample of two is statistically invalid.
Hopefully in a few generations we will retain enough clever people to a least maintain the prosperity that technology has created. Our very ease in life depends on the exploitation of energy. That requires creativity and use of IQ skills. Can we maintain that in a society that doesn't value the skills?