By Mark Souter

My 150th birthday party was a bit spoilt when my name was taken in vain.

After an understandably quiet period following WWII, scientific racism developed a higher profile from the end of the last centur onward. A vivid example of this comes from the writings of J. Philippe Rushton. He is a significant figure in this field; Herrnstien and Murray repeatedly cite Rushton in support of their own ethnocentric conclusions in ‘The Bell Curve’. What makes Rushton more topical is that he claims he is the heir of Darwin and criticism of him is criticism of evolutionary science. I have come across this author in students’ writings, with some making a good stab at evaluation whilst others have repeated it uncritically.

Whilst part of me does not want to give it further airing, the greater urge is to use it as a vehicle for tackling scientific racism head on. Just as Rushton is candid about his own project fitting his own outlook, I am content to say I read his work in the context of an  existing viewpoint. This includes the view that it is part of my job as a teacher to (a) give all views appropriate consideration (in my Critical Thinking scheme I have a discussion about the merits of the view that the moon landing was a hoax), and (b) to apply scientific and critical analysis to a wide range of material.

My first point is that Rushton is a psychologist who uses concepts from evolutionary biology as a central plank of his assertion that there are ‘races’ within humans. An interdisciplinary approach must have merit, since confirmation of a theory across different intellectual domains should confer greater validity. However, the applications of such concepts still have to be valid in themselves. I will take Rushton’s central concept of ‘r/K selection theory’ and show how he plays fast and loose with both evidence and application of this impressive sounding concept. I will also point out that it is far from being a widely accepted theory within evolutionary biology.

Another plank of Rushton’s approach is that there is an academic conspiracy to discourage research into ‘politically incorrect’ theories, including those of Darwin. To this end he has been head of the Pioneer Fund since 2002; this historically funded eugenics research and more later funded work on intelligence and inheritance such as the ‘Bell Curve theory’. Since 2000 it has given the bulk of its funding to the ‘Charles Darwin Research Institute’, which is Rushton’s own vehicle for promoting his ideas. In this respect another aim for me is to show that this is not an area in which there are ‘neutral’ views. I am not rejecting Rushton here because I find his views unpalatable. I acknowledge that I do, but this is not an evaluative category I am applying.

That said, since Rushton claims the support of Darwin, I’ll do so too. Darwin was celebrated at this year’s ATP conference and quite rightly so. Darwin considered the implications of his work in relation to contemporary issues of ‘race’, such as slavery and imperialism. He has recently been (selectively) presented as the harbinger of Nazism by US creationists. This is clearly false. Darwin’s view was that humans had the capacity of compassion over and above biological imperatives. To the extent that he thought there were variations in human populations,
and that advances in medicine let ‘the weak’ survive, Darwin clearly indicated his reservations about a eugenicist approach: ‘The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.’ (Darwin et al 1882)

This undermines Rushton’s claims for the support of Darwin in applyingb natural selection (as it does Rushton’s predecessors in the eugenics movement). Rushton also applies the work of a more recent, and less revered, evolutionary biologist – Eric Pianka – who came up with r/K selection theory. Pianka’s theory attempts to explain natural selection as working thought a trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring in response to environmental pressure. Rushton applies this to support his claim that ‘blacks’ ‘evolved’ in an environment of plenty, whilst Europeans had to survive in more difficult conditions. Rushton, in a less academic context, explained the evolutionary pressure in response to more or less restricted resources as ‘a trade off, [between] more brains or more penis. You can’t have everything.’ This is a reference to his claim – presented in a more straight-faced way in his book – the ‘blacks’ have bigger genitals. His source references to this are rather modest: the writings of early explorers and an anonymous Victorian treatise, attributed to a French military doctor. Even accepting the dubious data supporting this key claim point a further link in the chain of his theory is that the size of genitalia is an ‘r’ selected characteristic. This is based on another unsupported assumption: large genitalia correspond to sexualpromiscuity and high reproductive rates. Neither has any supporting evidence. A similar point can be made in relation to many of Rushton’s application, of r/K selection theory: he applies it to suit his assumptions about the ranking ‘races’ in an inconsistent manner.

The whole idea of racial hierarchies has the appeal of a simple story that excuses European domination, and in doing so it echoes historic examples of scientific racism. Rushton performs a sleight of hand. He takes sources from a wide range, even giving references for some of them. He then applies such ideas to fit a pre-existing conclusion. For example, r/K selection theory sounds plausible, and readers might assume a citation to a peer review means it is accepted in that discipline. Even if that source is checked a psychologist might not be familiar with the debate in that area. Pianka’s theory has been shown to be very questionable in a number of experiments. Furthermore, Rushton is very ‘flexible’ in his application of this theory. When it comes to characteristics of ‘blacks’ he invariably interprets these as ‘r’ type, whilst ‘whites 2’ and ‘Orientals’ are always ‘K’. It is worth noting that in the paper that Pianka cited for his own evidence, the author concluded that temperate climates produce more stable environments than tropical ones, so ‘r’ (high reproduction) strategies are selected for, whilst ‘K’ (high nurturing) strategies are advantageous – a relationship that Rushton reverses to fit his own ideas!

At the same time Rushton is denying a conclusion which Darwin reached, and which has been supported by biologists ever since:  there are no ‘races’ amongst humans. This is the core assumption of his theory, but he starts from an assertion that there are ‘races’, and then moves on to applying his own version of r/K selection theory.  His evidence for ‘races’ starts from an ‘everyone knows’ basis, citing the performance of top athletes in particular sports. In doing so he conflates small phenotype differences (which can have consistent effects when performance is measured in hundredths of seconds) with genotypic differences. Space precludes me from covering the rich literature on this topic, but a good summary is contained in Fish (2002) p71. For the purposes of this article I have set aside all of this literature: Rushton dismisses it, without talking about it directly. For him it is part of a conspiracy of wishful thinkers who lack his ‘courage’ in investigating his ‘scientific’ analysis. What I hope I’ve shown is that this is just one more flawed assumption in a flawed approach.

Rushton’s work is wide ranging and any full evaluation needs to be too. I am not pretending that I have dealt with all of his evidence and analysis, though I hope I’ve dealt with two core assumptions. If there is one further point to be made it is psychologists should be well prepared if they are going to apply evolutionary concepts in the field of psychology.

Sources and further reading

Cernovsky, Z.Z. (1995). ‘On the similarities of American blacks and whites: A reply to J.P. Rushton’. Journal of Black Studies 25: 672-679. www.euvolution.com/euvolution/blackwhite.html

Darwin, Zimmer, and Waal (abridged, editor Carl Zimmer, 2007) ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex Plume’.

Barkan, E (1993). ‘The retreat of scientific racism: changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars’.

Richards, G (1997). ‘Race, racism, and psychology: towards a reflexive history Routledge, 1997’.

Fish J, (2001) ‘Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth’. Lawrence Erlbaum’.

‘Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities’.

Sullivan, N (2003). ‘A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory.’ Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Smedley and Smedley (2005). ‘Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race’.  www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp60116.pdf

The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 64, No.3, Summer, 1995.

Howe, M (1997). ‘IQ in question: the truth about intelligence’. SAGE.

There has been a backlash again in the progress made in regard to the use of language in the 1970s and 1980s. That progress was made when it was acknowledged that the images and words used in text books (and elsewhere) helped to shape people’s view of their world. Subsequent approaches, including courses of study, designed to take it into account, were criticised in the 1990s as ‘political correctness’, alluding to the use of this term by the political left. Ironically the political left had got there first: Jessica Mitford had mocked politically clichéd language in the 1950s* e.g. President Bush I ‘Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor, May 4, 1991’

* Jessica Mitford (1956) ‘Lifeitselfmanship or How to Become a Precisely-Because Man’.