Jean-Philippe Rushton

In His Own Words:

“Whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks… Blacks have an advantage in sport because they have narrower hips — but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains.”
--J. Philippe Rushton, speaking at the 2000 American Renaissance conference

“Throughout the world, Europeans and East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) average the highest IQs and socio-economic positions. The lowest averages are found among the Aborigines in Australia and in Africans and their descendants. Intermediate positions are occupied by the Amerindians, the South Asians from the Indian sub-continent, the Maori in New Zealand, and by the mixed race peoples in South Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The same pattern is found on many other social and life history indicators, such as educational levels, earnings, health, accidents, crime, marriage, fertility, and mortality.”
--J. Philippe Rushton in a 2008 post to the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com titled, “Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve—The Explanation That Fits The Facts.”

“As early humans migrated out of Africa they encountered the cognitively demanding problem of having to survive cold winters where there were no plant foods and they had to hunt, sometimes big game. They also had to solve the problem of keeping warm. This required greater intelligence than was needed in tropical and semi-tropical equatorial Africa where plant foods are plentiful throughout the year.”
--J. Philippe Rushton in a 2006 post on the anti-immigrant hate site vdare.com titled, “Winters Are Good For Your Genes: Lynn Book Finds World Average IQ 90, Declining From North To South.”

SUMMARY:

Jean-Philippe Rushton is a psychology professor, author of a handful of academic tomes and numerous articles, and a onetime fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation — and probably the most important race scientist at work today. His most infamous research concludes that brain and genital size are inversely related, implying that blacks are less intelligent than whites. Now head of the race science outfit the Pioneer Fund, Rushton’s position puts him in control of substantial funds that he doles out to his fellow academic racists.

BACKGROUND:

Born in Bournemouth, England, Jean-Philippe Rushton received a Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has taught psychology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada since 1977. Rushton began his university career investigating the basis of altruism — why one person sometimes aids another even at personal risk — and concluded “birds of a feather flock together” and that “genes incline people to marry, befriend, associate with, and help others like themselves.”

Although his training is unrelated to biology or genetics, Rushton has not hesitated to spread his controversial opinions far and wide, especially through his major published work, Race, Evolution and Behavior. His findings: black people have larger genitals, breasts and buttocks — characteristics that Rushton alleges have an inverse relationship to brain size and, thus, intelligence. Although the University of Western Ontario has always been careful to defend Rushton’s academic freedom, officials did reprimand him twice for carrying out research on human subjects in 1988 without required prior approval. In the first incident, Rushton surveyed first-year psychology students, asking questions about penis length, distance of ejaculation, and number of sex partners. In the second, he surveyed customers at a Toronto shopping mall, paying 50 white people, 50 black people and 50 Asians five dollars apiece to answer questions about their sexual habits.

Rushton crossed the political Rubicon in 1989, when he went public, presenting his views on race to an outraged meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Association officials called a press conference the same day to attack what the association’s president called Rushton’s “highly suspect” research. That same year, Rushton set up the Charles Darwin Research Institute in Port Huron, Mich., which is just over the border from London, Ontario, where Rushton teaches, perhaps to avoid breaking Canadian laws on hate speech. The “institute” is basically a website and post office box from which Rushton sells copies of his books.

In recent years, Rushton has spoken on the alleged IQ deficiencies of minorities at conferences of the racist American Renaissance magazine and website, and he has published a number of articles in the group’s newsletter. His work is often published on racist websites, including the anti-immigrant hate site, Vdare.com. In 2002, after renting several academic mailing lists, Rushton mailed an abridged version of Race, Evolution and Behavior to 40,000 people — a mailing paid for by the Pioneer Fund, the race science outfit he now heads. Reacting to complaints from scientists who had received the mailing, the book’s original publisher, Transaction, disavowed the smaller booklet and said that the abridged version had been “purged” of any “evidentiary basis.”

Since 2002, Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, which has for decades funded dubious studies linking race to characteristics like criminality, sexuality and intelligence. Pioneer has long promoted eugenics, or the “science” of creating “better” humans through selective breeding. Set up in 1937 and headed by Nazi sympathizers, the group strove to “improve the character of the American people” through eugenics and procreation by people of white colonial stock. Pioneer has financed a number of leading race scientists, lavishing large sums each year on those who work to “prove” inherent racial differences that the vast majority of scientists regard as nonsense.

Rushton, who has been investigated for allegedly violating Canadian hate-speech laws, had been showered with Pioneer money before he assumed the group’s top post in 2002. For example, tax records from 2000 show that his institute received $473,835 — 73% of that year’s grants. By 2009, the fund was giving about $100,000 annually to Rushton through his university. As of 2009, the fund still had some $2 million to disburse, but its donor base had fallen to one man, Walter Kistler, an aged aeronautics pioneer.

After taking over the fund, Rushton stacked the board with other race scientists. As of 2009, tax records showed that Richard Lynn, R. Travis Osborne and Stephen Rushton were on the board. Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research received $45,000 in 2009 from the fund.

Unfortunately, some academics and some in the media still seem to take Rushton seriously. In October 2005, a refereed academic journal, Nations and Nationalism, published a Rushton study that “proved” that co-ethnics are as genetically similar to one another as half-siblings. Rushton’s real point was that members of ethnic groups typically show favoritism for their own group. Or, as Rushton expressed it in a press release, “People have a need to identify and be with others like themselves.”

Four months earlier, in June 2005, he published an article in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, a journal of the American Psychological Association, arguing that Asians are smarter than whites, who are in turn smarter than blacks. In this case, however, the journal’s editors apparently knew of Rushton’s racist background and also published three rebuttals. But there were no rebuttals offered in December 2004, when the British journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Science, published another Rushton article on co-ethnics. The study was reported later on the Fox News Channel’s Web site, again without any background on its author.

On Oct. 11, 2006, CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported on a controversial new study by Rushton purporting to show that men, on average, are smarter than women. Aside from his slightly bemused tone, Gupta introduced Rushton as he might any academic psychologist, failing to mention Rushton’s ties to the Pioneer Fund or the fact that he is considered a race scientist.