J Philippe Rushton

J. Philippe Rushton (born 1943 in Northern Ireland), a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, is one of the most vocal academic advocates of the notion that Blacks, Whites and Asians (or "Orientals", as he prefers to call them), can be ranked along a single spectrum in terms of reproductive traits, aggression, intelligence and physical ability, with Asians being most intelligent, least aggressive and least physically robust, Blacks being most aggressive, most prone to criminality, most promiscuous and least intelligent, with Whites occupying the golden mean in between the Asian and Black extremes. Rushton has been accused of associating with right-wing extremist and anti-immigrant groups, and he is currently head of the Pioneer Fund, which was founded in the late 1930s by Wickliffe Draper to further the cause of "racial betterment" (with the race to be bettered explicitly defined as the white race); the Pioneer Fund has funded Rushton's work to the tune of over a million dollars since 1981.

Philippe Rushton is the author of a highly controversial paper, Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference). The paper was presented at the Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics and Political Science, AAAS Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA, January 19, 1989) purporting to show that "Orientals" are on average more intelligent than Europeans, who are in turn more intelligent than Africans. See also race and intelligence for a detailed discussion of this notion.

The paper formed the basis for a later book, entitled Race, Evolution And Behavior: A Life History Perspective, in which Rushton posits a panoply of physical and/or mental traits whose incidences supposedly run along an unvarying continuum with East Asians at one extreme, Africans at the opposite extreme, and Europeans in the middle (example: Multiple births - twins, triplets etc. - are allegedly more common among Europeans than among East Asians, and are supposedly still more frequent among Africans). The provenance and quality of the data used by Rushton to buttress his claims have been severely criticized, however, and he has frequently been accused of misrepresenting others' research findings to advance claims that actually contradict those made by his sources.

Rushton's theory is based on an attempt to extend the R/K selection theory to humans. He argues that Africans use the R strategy (produce many offspring, but provide little care for them) most while East Asians use the K strategy most (produce few offspring but lavish them with care), with Europeans exhibiting intermediate tendencies in this area. Many researchers with specialist expertise in ethology consider Rushton's attempt to extend a theory meant to account for inter-specific differences in behavior to intra-specific differences between human beings as fundamentally illegitimate. In addition, it has been pointed out that childbearing rates in much of Europe during the 19th century were actually higher than they currently are in Africa today, while the fact that 1 in 5 of all human beings is Chinese hardly argues in favor of exceptionally high "Oriental" reproductive investment.

External links

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia article. Browse Wikipedia for more information.