Here is another debate with Rushton against Joseph Graves, an evolutionary biologist:
I've posted information about this
before so there's really no need to repeat it. I didn't get any serious challenges then and don't expect to now. Rushton was basically a quack seeking a genetic basis to racist stereotypes. His research was selective and his evolutionary theories are absurd. People can check that other thread for all of my counter sources. I also uploaded the Rushton vs. Suzuki debate to my channel with more counter sources at the end.
Here is a review of his book that summarizes the general problems with Rushton's work:
Racialism and Racist Agendas
C. LORING BRACE University of Michigan Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. J. Philippe Rushton. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995. 334 pp.
Virtually every kind of anthropologist may be put in the position of being asked to comment on what is contained in this book, so, whatever our individual specialty, we should all be prepared to discuss what it represents. Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy for the promotion of "racialism." Tzvetan Todorov explains "racialism," in contrast to "racism," as belief in the existence of typological essences called "races" whose characteristics can be rated in hierarchical fashion (On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 31). "Racism," then, is the use of racialist assumptions to promote social or political ends, a course that Todorov regards as leading to "particularly catastrophic results." Perpetuating catastrophe is not the stated aim of Rushton's book, but current promoters of racist agendas will almost certainly regard it as a welcome weapon to apply for their noxious purposes.
The author, J. Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, received his doctorate in social psychology at the London School of Economics, focusing on social learning theory. He takes evident pride in claiming to represent the continuity of the "London School" tradition founded by Sir Francis Galton, identified as a "spiritual fascist" by the late Sir Peter Medawar (Times Literary Supplement, January 24, 1975 p. 83).
I mention this here because Rushton has tried to portray those who have criticized his assumptions as being "either unable or unwilling to separate their political agendas from the scholarly pursuit of truth" (p. 256). Whether or not he identifies with Galton in his guise as "spiritual fascist" or as "dilettantish racist" and founder of the "science" of eugenics (Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1968, p. 167), he has acknowledged the continued support of the Pioneer Fund, an organization noted for its promotion of Nazi racist propaganda in the 1930s and credited by Stefan Kuhl with continuing to provide backing for what amounts to a virtual who's who of scientific racism (The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York: Oxford, 1994, p. 9). While he accuses his opponents of having political instead of scientific motives, clearly it is Rushton's position that is based on the politically secured status quo rather than on science it is his own stance, and not that of his critics, that can be characterized as a manifestation of "political correctness" (American Psychologist 50:725-726, 1995).
Rushton starts with an a priori faith in the existence of "the races," of which there are basically three: "Caucasoid," "Mongoloid," and "Negroid." His justification for this is the undocumented assertion that this is how "a team of extraterrestrial scientists" would perceive things if they should arrive on earth "to study human beings" (p. 1). No criteria are ever set up to decide how these groups are established or what traits should be used in determining membership. This means that his acceptance of "race" is ultimately arbitrary and subjective. When "the races" are compared in terms of appearance and performance in the quantities of uncritically collected data assembled in his book, "racial" identity is determined by "self-assess- ment." Rushton's basic units, then, are rooted in folk belief and not in biology. The possibility that the vast majority of the human biological traits that have been shaped by evolution are clinally and independently distributed in association with the relevant selective forces is never once considered, and the word cline is simply missing.
One running concern is how these folk categories compare on such matters as intelligence and reproductive behavior. Sex rears its head again and again in the discussion, with much of the information on comparative sexual performance based on "self-assessment." Rushton is obviously much taken with the "salience of... buttocks and breasts" (pp. 167, 231) as measures of sexuality, although there is a dearth of objectively collected data. More telling is his evident fascination with the "Negroid" penis as an index of "potency" and libido. In his earlier publications on these matters, his information came from "self-assess-ment," but he has bolstered the "conclusions" at which he had previously arrived by reference to the alleged "data" gathered by a 19th-century figure identified only as a "French Army Surgeon."
These were presented in a two-volume exercise in ethnocentric prurience (Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, Paris: Librairie de Medecine, Folklore et Anthropologie, 1898 [reprinted by Krieger, Huntington, NY, 1972]) in which the author discourses at length on the size, angle, and hardness of the erections of males from all over the world. Not a single measurement is recorded, and there is no mention of how the redoubt-able chirugien acquired all that "information." Oddly enough, although Rushton cites this source for his conviction that relative sexual potency is demonstrated by comparative penile size, this was not the opinion of the good surgeon himself. It was his view that "the testicles...are the true index of manly vigour," and that these were of relatively lesser size in "the African Negro" (1898, 2:429).
The main message of Rushton's book is that African ancestry ensures a deficiency of "intelligence, law abidingness, sexual restraint, and social organizational skills" (p. 236), and that these are all genetically fixed. There is no hint at the nature and complexity of the interactions between genetic and environmental factors that influence their course of development. Correlations of 0.16 and 0.18 between head size and IQ are claimed to be "significant" (p. 40) and therefore an indication of cause and effect. The fact that correlation does not necessarily indicate cause is never mentioned, and none of the potentially relevant developmental conditions are ever considered. The focus is entirely on genetic input with no consideration for an environmental contribution. Like so many racialists, Rushton stresses high "heritability" without ever pointing out that the statistic actually is an index of the proportion of genetic and environmental input, and that it is never a fixed quantity. A high figure indicates a highly favorable environment for the development of the trait in question.
The book clearly qualifies as "bad biology," but consider some of what is passed off as anthropology. In addition to a roster of undocumented assertions and elementary errors in fact too extensive to enumerate here, we are told that, in Africa, "biological parents do not expect to be the major providers for their children" (p. 156) and that "it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it" (p. 264). Here Rushton has taken the r/K generalizations applied by evolutionary ecologists for between-species comparisons and applied them to pass judgment on human "races." The slightly shorter African gestation length and slightly higher rate of twinning qualifies "Negroids" as committed to the r-strategy of producing offspring in quantity without much care given to their future survival. Northern "races," in contrast, favor the K-strategy of giving more care to fewer children. None of this is based on any data derived from realized-reproduction figures, and one would never guess from it that there are more than three times as many Chinese as Africans in the world.
The background for Rushton's approach is in his assumption that the African savanna home of human origins provided an easily acquired but unpredictable subsistence (p. 231). This supposed lack of predictability meant that there were fewer rewards for thinking ahead, and, besides, African savanna-dwellers "were largely scavengers" (p. 228). Presumably such conditions led to the mindless rabbit-strategy of child production that he believes is typical of those who have continued to live in Africa. For the real hunters in the north, by contrast, life was harsher but highly predictable-conditions that favored the development of intelligence and attention to child care. Not a single study dealing with the problems of human survival either in the arctic or the tropics is cited, and these claims are nothing more than manifestations of sheer unwarranted prejudice.
Elsewhere Rushton has been quoted as saying, "I really do believe I have made a major breakthrough in understanding human evolution" (The Globe and Mail, February 4, 1989, p. A6). In fact, he has done nothing of the sort. At best, it is a recycling of an old and oft-repeated version of the kind of creation myth exemplified by the Garden of Eden story in the Judeo-Christian Bible. From the perspective of an anthropologist, the kindest thing that can be said about this is that it can be regarded as a classic manifestation of what Wiktor Stoczkowski calls "anthropologie naive," (Anthropologie savante: de 'origine de l'homme, de l'imagination et des idees regues, Paris: CNRS Editions, 1994). A less forgiving reader will recognize this as an attempt to provide a "scientific" justification for the repetition of virtually all major themes of "racial" denigration that have accumulated in the writings of the Western world since the beginning of the Renaissance. Quite evidently, it is a manifestation of blatant bigotry.
