Race, Evolution, and Behavior

Race, Evolution and Behavior

File:Race evolution and behavior.jpg Cover of the unabridged third edition of Race, Evolution and Behavior
Author	J. Philippe Rushton
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Evolutionary psychology
Publisher	Transaction Books, later The Charles Darwin Research Institute
Publication date	1995, 1997, 2000
Pages	388
ISBN	978-0965683616

Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a controversial book (first unabridged edition 1995, third unabridged edition 2000) written by J. Philippe Rushton, a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, and the current head of the Pioneer Fund.

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 (Orientals, East Asians) at one end of the continuum, Negroids (blacks, Africans) at the opposite extreme, and Caucasoids (whites, Europeans) in the middle.

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 by which much of Rushton's research had been funded. The book has been examined as an example of Pioneer's funding of "scientific racist" research, 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.

Summary

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

Rushton argues that Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids fall consistently into the same one-two-three pattern when compared on a list of 60 different behavioral and anatomical variables. (Rushton's 2000 book, like other population history works, e.g. Cavalli-Sforza 1994, uses the terms Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid to describe these groups broadly conceived, but these terms have since been replaced in the scientific literature—the MeSH terminology as of 2004 is Asian Continental Ancestry Group, African Continental Ancestry Group and European Continental Ancestry Group.) 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 South East Asians or Australian aboriginals.

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.

Citing genetic research by Cavalli-Sforza, the African Eve hypothesis, and the out of Africa theory, Rushton writes that Negroids branched off first (200,000 years ago, Caucasoids second 110,000 years ago, and Mongoloids last 41,000 years ago), arguing that throughout all of evolution, more ancient forms of life (i.e. plants, bacteria, reptiles) are less evolved than more recent forms of life (i.e. mammals, primates, humans) and that the much smaller variation in the races is consistent with this trend. "One theoretical possibility," said Rushton "is that evolution is progressive and that some populations are more advanced than others". Rushton argues that this evolutionary history correlates with, and is responsible for, a consistent global racial pattern which explains many variables such as worldwide crime statistics or the global distribution of AIDS.

r/K selection theory

Claimed Average Differences Among Blacks, Whites, and Orientals from Race, Evolution, and Behavior
	Blacks	Whites	Orientals¹
Brain size
Cranial capacity (cubic centimeters)	1,267	1,347	1,364
Cortical neurons (millions)	13,185	13,665	13,767
Intelligence
IQ test scores	85	100	106
Academic achievements	Lower	High	High
Reproduction
2-egg twinning (per 1000 births)	16	8	4
Hormone levels	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Sex characteristics	Larger	Intermediate	Smaller
Intercourse frequencies	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Permissive attitudes	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Sexually transmitted diseases	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Personality
Aggressiveness	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Cautiousness	Lower	Intermediate	Higher
Impulsivity	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Self-concept	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Sociability	Higher	Intermediate	Lower
Maturation
Gestation time	Shorter	Longer	Longer
Skeletal development	Earlier	Intermediate	Later
Motor development	Earlier	Intermediate	Later
Dental development	Earlier	Intermediate	Later
Age of first intercourse	Earlier	Intermediate	Later
Age of first pregnancy	Earlier	Intermediate	Later
Lifespan	Shorter	Intermediate	Longer
Social organization
Marital stability	Lower	Intermediate	Higher
Law abidingness	Lower	Intermediate	Higher
Mental health	Low	Intermediate	Higher
Source: Unabridged edition, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (p. 5).

Further information: r/K selection theory and Life history theory

Rushton writes that his collection of 60 different variables can be unified by a single evolutionary dimension known as the r and K scale. His theory attempts to apply the inter-species r/K selection theory to the much smaller inter-racial differences within the human species. While all humans display extremely K-selected behavior, Rushton believes the races vary in the degree to which they exhibit that behavior. He argues that Negroids use a strategy more toward an r-selected strategy (produce more offspring, but provide less care for them) while Mongoloids use the K strategy most (produce fewer offspring but provide more care for them), with Caucasoids exhibiting intermediate tendencies in this area.

He further asserts that Caucasoids evolved more toward a K-selected breeding strategy than Negroids because of the harsher and colder weather encountered in Europe, while the same held true to a greater extent for Mongoloids. Rushton argues that the survival challenges of making warm clothes, building durable shelter, preserving food, and strategically hunting large animals all selected genes for greater intelligence and social organization among the populations that migrated to cold climates.

Rushton invokes genetics to explain his data arguing that purely environmental theories fail to elegantly explain what he sees as such a consistent pattern of both behavioral and physiological differences, but instead just provide a long list of ad hoc explanations. Rushton argues that science strives to organize and simplify data, and seeks the simplest explanation possible, and claims that r/K selection theory explains all of his data parsimoniously.

Critical responses

Professional opinions

According to Richard R. Valencia, the response to the first edition of Rushton's book was "overwhelmingly negative". After the publisher of the first two editions of the work did not wish to have its name on the third edition, The Pioneer Fund paid for 100,000 copies to be printed in an abridged third edition, which was then sent out to thousands of scholars who did not solicit the book themselves. Many of them were outraged at receiving such a book, with some calling it "racial pornography" and "vile piece of work" and at least one insisting on returning it to the publisher.

Favorable reviews

Psychologist Arthur Jensen: and Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has said:

This brilliant book is the most impressive theory-based study...of the psychological and behavioral differences between the major racial groups that I have encountered in the world literature on this subject.

Psychologist Hans Eysenck, and Rushton's thesis advisor stated:

Professor Rushton is widely known and respected for the unusual combination of rigour and originality in his work....Few concerned with understanding the problems associated with race can afford to disregard this storehouse of well-integrated information which gives rise to a remarkable synthesis.[2]

In Contemporary Psychology, Glayde Whitney wrote:

Serious scientific considerations of similarities and differences among the living races of humankind have been in eclipse for most of a century. With Race, Evolution and Behavior author Rushton goes a good distance toward reinstating objective scientific rationality to this important and sensitive area of investigation.

Jensen, Eysenck and Whitney have been grantees of the Pioneer Fund, which has also funded some of Rushton's research.

In Evolutionary Anthropology, Henry Harpending wrote:

I believe that this is very important and pioneering work and that Rushton deserves congratulations for bringing it together and, most of all, for trying to understand it within the framework of modern science. Perhaps there will ultimately be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton’s framework is essentially the only game in town.

Unfavorable

Validity of the concept of race

Main articles: Race (classification of human beings) and Race and genetics

In a review of Rushton's book, Richard Lewontin (1996) wrote:

The first problem for his theory is that there need to be major races. That is, the differences between "Oriental," "Black," and "White" need to be more than skin deep. In claiming that these old racial categories correspond to 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.

In a review of Rushton's book, anthropologist C. Loring Brace (1996) wrote:

"Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy of 'racialism'"

Brace argues that Rushton assumes the existence of three biological races with no evidence except Rushton's speculation as to what an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth would think.

Validity of the data and the methodology of aggregating the data

In Race, Evolution and Behavior, Rushton uses a methodology he calls "aggregation" of evidence, in which he averages hundreds of studies, modern and historical, with equal weight regardless of the quality of the data to demonstrate the racial patterns he asserts. He argues that by averaging many studies the results one gets can be accurate. The expectation being that the law of large numbers will make individual flawed results cancel one another out.

Douglas Wahlsten (2001), a biologist, criticized this in a review:

"However, averaging does nothing to reduce bias in sampling and measurement, and such flaws are abundant in the cited literature. For example, among the 38 reports on brain weight, all but two gave figures for only one group, with most cases being people living in the nation of their ancestors, such as an article on Japanese living in Japan and another on Kenyans living in Kenya. The obvious differences in environment make all of these data of dubious worth for testing hypotheses about genetic causes of group differences. The methods of obtaining the brains were also far from contemporary standards for neuroscience. A report of five black Civil War soldiers from 1865 is given the same weight as a 1934 study of over 300 dead Kenyans. One of the two studies with more than one racial group involved the unclaimed bodies of the indigent and executed criminals in the Baltimore area. Those data varied greatly in the time from death to removal of the brain and method of preserving the brains. Numerous factors can affect measures of brain size, and valid inferences about group differences can be drawn only if it is certain that members of different groups were treated the same way. In my opinion, most of the data raked into one big pile by Rushton are worth less for scientific analysis and should be excluded. Unfortunately, Rushton has not done the hard work of separating the potentially valuable data from the trash. He misleads unwary readers by claiming that averaging many studies can overcome poor research methods. Faced with this kind of criticism, Rushton tells us: "My response is that critics have failed to show an opposite predicted ordering in brain size, intelligence, sexual restraint..." (p. 236). For his critics to succeed, they supposedly must prove the null hypothesis that group differences are "randomly distributed around a mean of zero." This is a posture I term "chip-on-the-shoulder science." The author is an earnest believer in genetically determined race differences, and he vows to cling tenaciously to his world view unless his opponents can provide conclusive proof to the contrary. In my opinion, this is the kind of approach to be expected from religious zealots and politicians, not professional scientists. A rigorous evaluation of the evidence cited by Rushton reveals the methods in most studies were seriously flawed and render the data inconclusive. If the evidence is so poor, the proper action for a scientist is to suspend judgment."

Brace in his review claimed that Rushton makes unsupported claims about sub-Saharan African societies."

r/K theory as an explanation for the data

Rushton argued that European and Asian peoples adapted to survival in "predictable cold environments" requiring increased brain size and parenting behavior. Lieberman (2001) argued that many animal species do not follow the predictions of r/K theory. He further argued that tropical rain-forest conditions, being more constant, would favor K-selection, while seasonal Arctic environments would be less predictable and associated with r-selection, exactly the opposite of what Rushton has argued for. Rushton has responded that it is the East African savanna that should be compared to the Arctic. Lieberman argues, even assuming that the savanna vs. the Arctic has such an effect, this means that Rushton selectively chooses only a very few of the wide variety of habitats humans have lived in for a long time, but then makes general clams for much larger areas with many different habitats such as Africa and all blacks. Brace in a comment writes that Northern mice, foxes, and deer are not better endowed intellectually than their tropical relatives, and the same is true for virtually all other animals with Arctic and tropical representatives.

Evolutionary Biologist Joseph L. Graves (2002) criticized Rushton's application of r/K selection and Life History theories arguing that Rushton doesn't understand the concepts:

I ran a search on BIOSIS using r- and K-selection as keywords for the period of 1995 to 2001, and found only one article. This appeared in the Journal of Environmental Biology, rather ironically concerning algal diversity in treated versus untreated sewage. Stearns (1992) and Roff (1992) presented r- and K-theory as a once useful heuristic that no longer serves any purpose in the discussion of life history theory. It should be noted that their conclusions appeared three years before Rushton published his analysis of human 'racial' variation, with r- and K-selection as its cornerstone. It is hard to understand how any serious student of life history evolution could have missed these developments in the theory. In fact, I had the opportunity to present these same observations to J.P. Rushton personally. This occurred at a panel discussion held at the John Jay College of Criminal Law, City University of New York, 20 March 1997. Yet his newly released abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior would still claim that r- and K-life history theory was 'a basic principle of modern evolutionary theory'. This would indicate that either Rushton does not agree with the theoretical and experimental work invalidating r- and K-theory, does not understand the argument, or has consciously chosen to ignore it. If the first possibility were true, then we would expect some theoretical justification to appear in his work that addresses these specific criticisms. Yet absence of such a response only supports my view that Rushton does not understand life history theory. Thus he employs it incorrectly and through this error his work serves racist ideological agendas.

Psychologist and Peace Studies Researcher David P. Barash wrote (1995) in a review:

I don't know which is worse, Rushton's scientific failings or his blatant racism. [...] At least Rushton has a theory, namely, r- and K-selection. In brief, he argues that `Negroids' are relatively r-selected, `Mongoloids' K-selected, and `Caucasoids' in between. All racial distinctions are then seen to derive from this grand pattern, from differences in genital anatomy, to reproductive regimes, to IQ, etc. He even points to the higher frequency of low birth weight babies among black Americans, data that are undeniably consistent with an r-selection regime, but which might also be attributed to poor nutrition and insufficient prenatal care, and which, not coincidentally, have other implications for behaviour, IQ not the least. [...] I suspect that r- and K-selection does in fact have some relevance to variations in human behaviour, notably the so-called demographic transition, whereby economic development characteristically leads to reduced family size, and, moreover, a greater reliance on a variety of `K-type' traits. But this is a pan-human phenomenon, a flexible, adaptive response to changed environmental conditions of lowered mortality and greater pay-off attendant upon concentrating parental investment in a smaller number of offspring [...] Rushton wields r- and K-selection as a Procrustean bed, doing what he can to make the available data fit[...]. Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book"

Scott MacEachern (2006) argued that through the study of archaeology one may test Rushton's assertions that African populations suffer severe cognitive deficits when compared to other modern humans. Rushton wrote that mental deficits are visible in an evolutionary context, advancing environmental explanations for such deficits, and asserting that such cognitive differences existed prehistorically as well. Scott MacEachern writes that examination of the archaeological record does not support the claims. He therefore argued that regional differences in IQ test score results should not be ascribed to variations in human evolutionary development.

Peregrine et al. (2003) argued, even though using "three versions of the ‘race’ variable, each representing one of the apparent definitions that Rushton used", that "Rushton’s predictions do not find much support, regardless of how ‘race’ is operationalized." They used data from the "186-society Standard Cross-Cultural Sample" and found no statistical support for the predicted associations between "race" and behavior.

Francisco Gil-White, writing in regards to Peregrine's work, states:

The authors are not doing justice to their own findings. It is not true that "Rushton’s predictions do not find much support"; what is true is that Rushton’s predictions are completely contradicted.

Reception among criminologists

Some criminologists who study the relationship between Race and crime, regard Rushton's r/K theory as one of several possible explanations for racial disparities in crime rates. According to criminologist Shaun L. Gabbidon, Rushton's theory is one of the more controversial biosocial theories related to race and crime, and has faced criticism both for failing to explain all of the data and for its potential to support racist ideologies. Criminologist Anthony Walsh has defended Rushton, arguing that none of Rushton's critics have supplied data indicating anything other than the racial gradient he identifies, and that it is unscientific to dismiss Rushton's ideas on the basis of their political implications.

Mailing controversy

The 1st 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." 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." 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. After the mass mailing, 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." Francisco Gil-White wrote "Race, Evolution, and Behavior is a tiny, self-published book (a pamphlet, really), that Rushton takes the trouble to mail to people who never requested a copy, such as myself."

Reviews

• What is Intelligence and Who has it?, The New York Times’ review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, The Decline of Intelligence in America, and The Bell Curve.
• The Return of Racial Science, by Glayde Whitney, published in Contemporary Psychology, December 1996, pp. 1189–1191.
• Review of Race, Evolution and Behavior, by Henry Harpending, published in Evolutionary Anthropology, 1995.
• The Race-Research Funder, discussing the links of the Pioneer Fund to the distribution and positive reviews for Race, Evolution and Behavior.
• Review of Race, Evolution and Behavior, by Irving Louis Horowitz in Society, Jan-Feb 1995 v32 n2.

See also

• Behavioural genetics
• Behavioral neuroscience
• Evolutionary developmental psychology
• Evolutionary neuroscience
• Human behavioral ecology
• Race and intelligence
• Life history theory
• Psychiatric genetics
• Neuroculture

Related:

• Gene–environment interaction
• Genetics of aggression
• Human genetic variation
• Human genetic clustering
• Trait theory

External links

• Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective; 2nd Special Abridged Edition