J. Philippe Rushton facts for kids

John Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 – October 2, 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.

Rushton's work has been heavily criticized by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many academics arguing that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 to promote eugenics, which has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also published articles in and spoke at conferences organized by the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance.

Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2020, the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Ontario released a statement stating that "much of [Rushton's] research was racist", was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint", and "Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity." As of 2021, Rushton has had six research publications retracted for being "unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda".

Early life and education

Rushton was born in Bournemouth, England. During his childhood, he emigrated with his family to South Africa, where he lived from age four to eight (1948–1952). His father was a building contractor and his mother came from France. The family moved to Canada, where Rushton spent most of his teen years. He returned to England for university, receiving a B.Sc. in psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London in 1970, and, in 1973, his Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics for work on altruism in children. He continued his work at the University of Oxford until 1974.

Later life and career

Rushton taught at York University in Canada from 1974 to 1976 and the University of Toronto until 1977. He moved to the University of Western Ontario and was made full professor (with tenure) in 1985. He received a D.Sc. from the University of London in 1992. His controversial research has sparked political debates, and Ontario Premier David Peterson called Rushton a racist. In 2005, The Ottawa Citizen described Rushton as the most famous university professor in Canada.

He published more than 250 articles and six books, including two on altruism, and one on scientific excellence, and co-authored an introductory psychology textbook. He was a signatory of the opinion piece "Mainstream Science on Intelligence."

Rushton died of cancer on October 2, 2012, at the age of 68.

Work and opinions

Genetic similarity theory

Early in his career, Rushton did research on altruism. He theorized a heritable component in altruism and developed Genetic Similarity Theory, which is an extension of W.D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. It holds that individuals tend to be more altruistic to individuals who are genetically similar to themselves even if they are not kin, and less altruistic, and sometimes outwardly hostile, to individuals who are less genetically similar. Rushton describes "ethnic conflict and rivalry" as "one of the great themes of historical and contemporary society", and suggests that this may have its roots in the evolutionary impact on individuals from groups "giving preferential treatment to genetically similar others". According to Rushton: "the makeup of a gene pool [i.e., a human population's total reservoir of alternative genes] causally affects the probability of any particular ideology being adopted".

Articles in a 1989 issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences criticized the theory. Judith Anderson said his work was based on statistically flawed evidence, John Archer and others said that Rushton failed to understand and misapplied the theory of kin selection, Judith Economos said that Rushton's analysis was speculative, that he failed to define the concept of altruistic behavior in a way that it can become manifest, and that he failed to show any plausible mechanism by which members of a species can detect the "altruism gene" in other members of the species. Steven Gangestad criticized Rushton's theory for not being compelling in terms of its attractiveness as an explanatory model. C.R. Hallpike said Rushton's theory failed to take into account that many other traits, ranging from age, sex, social and political group membership, are observably more important in predicting altruistic behavior between non-kin than genetic similarity. John Hartung criticized Rushton for failing to conduct an adequate control group study and for ignoring contradictory evidence.

Littlefield and Rushton (1984) examined degree of bereavement among parents after the death of a child. They found that children perceived as more physically similar to their parents were grieved for more intensely than less similar children.

Russell, Wells, and Rushton (1985) reanalyzed several previous studies on similarities between spouses and concluded there is higher similarity on the more heritable characteristics.

Rushton and Bons (2005) examined personality, attitude, and demographic characteristics for similarity among different groups of people. Monozygotic twins resembled one another (r = 0.53) more than dizygotic twins (r = 0.32), pairs of spouses (r = 0.32), and pairs of best friends (r = 0.20). The monozygotic twins also chose spouses and best friends who were more similar to their co-twins' friends and spouses than did dizygotic twins. The authors said there was a substantial genetic contribution to these effects in the twins. Similarity to social partners was higher on more heritable characteristics than on less.

Race and intelligence

Rushton spent much of his career arguing that average IQ differences between racial groups are due to genetic causes, a view that was controversial at the time and is now broadly rejected by the scientific consensus. His research areas included studying brain size and the effects of racial admixture.

In a 2020 statement, his former department at Western Ontario University stated: "Rushton's works linking race and intelligence are based on an incorrect assumption that fuels systemic racism, the notion that racialized groups are concordant with patterns of human ancestry and genetic population structure." Furthermore, they stated that Rushton's work on the topic is "characterized by a complete misunderstanding of population genetic measures, including fundamental misconceptions about the nature of heritability."

Application of r/K selection theory to race

Rushton's book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) attempted to use r/K selection theory to explain what he described as an evolutionary scale of characteristics indicative of nurturing behavior in which East Asian people consistently averaged high, black people low, and white people in the middle. He first published this theory in 1984. Rushton argued that East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants, whom he argued average higher scores on these measures than Africans and their descendants. He hypothesized that r/K selection theory explains these differences.

Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to explain differences among racial groups has been widely criticized. Differential K theory in particular was described in a 2020 statement by Rushton's former department at Western Ontario University as "thoroughly debunked."

One of his many critics is the evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, who has done extensive testing of the r/K selection theory with species of Drosophila flies. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general. Graves also says that Rushton misrepresented the sources for the biological data he gathered in support of his hypothesis, and that much of his social science data was collected by dubious means. Other scholars have argued against Rushton's hypothesis on the basis that the concept of race is not supported by genetic evidence about the diversity of human populations, and that his research was based on folk taxonomies.

Later studies by Rushton and other researchers have argued that there is empirical support for the theory, though these studies too have been criticized.

Psychologist David P. Barash observed that r- and K-selection may have some validity when considering the so-called demographic transition, whereby economic development characteristically leads to reduced family size and other K traits. "But this is a pan-human phenomenon, a flexible, adaptive response to changed environmental conditions ... 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."

Dimensional structure of personality

Beginning in 2008, Rushton researched the structure of personality. Over about a dozen papers, he argued that variation in personality can be explained by variation in a single underlying "general factor," similar to the g factor of psychometrics.

Opinions

In 2009 Rushton spoke at the Preserving Western Civilization conference in Baltimore. It was organized by Michael H. Hart for the stated purpose of "addressing the need" to defend "America's Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity" from immigrants, Muslims, and African Americans. The Anti-Defamation League described the conference attendees as "racist academics, conservative pundits and anti-immigrant activists".

See also

In Spanish: J. Philippe Rushton para niños

• Race and intelligence
• Scientific racism