J. Philippe Rushton

J. Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 to October 2, 2012) was a British-Canadian psychologist at the University of Western Ontario who became the most prominent academic exponent of a ranked racial hierarchy in intelligence, behavior, and reproduction, and who led the Pioneer Fund from 2002 until his death. His 1995 book Race, Evolution, and Behavior applied r/K selection theory from population biology to human races, claiming that Asians, whites, and blacks fall on a fixed evolutionary continuum. The scientific community rejected the work as racist and methodologically flawed, and the Southern Poverty Law Center classified him as a promoter of scientific racism.¹²

Race, Evolution, and Behavior

Rushton argued that the three groups he labeled "Mongoloid," "Caucasoid," and "Negroid" differ in a suite of traits including brain size, intelligence, sexual behavior, family stability, and reproductive rate, with Asians and blacks at opposite ends and whites in between. He cast blacks as the most "r-selected," presenting them as more fertile, more impulsive, and less intelligent, and Asians as the most "K-selected." To support these claims he ran a paid survey on sexual behavior at Toronto's Eaton Centre shopping mall, paying respondents to answer questions about genital size and sexual habits, work for which the University of Western Ontario censured him for proceeding without ethics-board approval.²³

Transaction Publishers issued the book in 1995 and a condensed "Special Abridged Edition" in 1999, and in 2000 the publisher mass-mailed thousands of free copies of the abridged version to academics, drawing organized protest from sociologists and a public reversal in which Transaction withdrew the book and apologized. Rushton thereafter published the abridged edition through the Pioneer Fund's own Charles Darwin Research Institute and distributed it widely to social scientists and journalists, and he promoted the racial-hierarchy thesis at the white-nationalist American Renaissance conferences run by Jared Taylor.³⁷

The 1989 Controversy

Rushton presented his racial theories at a 1989 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose officials publicly called his research "highly suspect." Ontario premier David Peterson denounced him, the Ontario Provincial Police investigated, the Ontario Human Rights Commission examined his conduct, and the geneticist David Suzuki challenged him to a public debate. The provincial attorney-general Ian Scott declined to prosecute, calling the theories "loony but not criminal." The university kept him on but reprimanded him over the unapproved research.²⁴

The Suzuki debate took place before a packed hall at the University of Western Ontario in 1989, with Suzuki declaring, "There will always be Rushtons in the world. We must be prepared to root them out." Ontario premier Peterson called for Rushton's dismissal, and the police investigated whether his lectures violated Canada's hate-speech provisions under the Criminal Code before Scott's office declined to proceed. The university defended his academic freedom while condemning the content of his work, and for a period after the furor disrupted his classes Rushton delivered his lectures by videotape.⁴⁸

Pioneer Fund Presidency

Rushton received more than a million dollars in Pioneer Fund grants over his career, money he used in part to buy out his teaching duties, and in 2002 he became president of the fund, the Draper-founded foundation that has financed race-and-intelligence research since 1937. He served until shortly before his death, when he nominated the psychologist Richard Lynn as his successor. His r/K framework and his collaborations with Lynn appeared in the journal Mankind Quarterly, and his work supplied citations for Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve and for the human-biodiversity network associated with Steve Sailer.¹⁵

Born in Bournemouth, England in 1943, Rushton took a doctorate from the London School of Economics in 1973, taught at York University and the University of Toronto, and moved to Western Ontario, where he was made full professor in 1985. After Harry Weyher's death he became Pioneer Fund president in 2002 and channeled much of the fund's money to his own Charles Darwin Research Institute in Port Huron, Michigan; tax records show that the institute received $473,835 in 2002, roughly 73 percent of the fund's grants that year. He died of cancer in London, Ontario, on October 2, 2012.¹⁹

Scientific Condemnation

Reviewers across psychology and biology dismissed Race, Evolution, and Behavior. The University of Washington psychologist David Barash wrote that "bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page" of the book. In 2020 the psychology department at the University of Western Ontario issued a statement saying much of Rushton's research "was racist," was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint," and showed how "the impact of flawed science lingers on." By 2021 several of his articles had been retracted as scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable.²⁶

In June 2020 the journal Personality and Individual Differences retracted a 2012 paper Rushton coauthored with Donald Templer that linked skin pigmentation to aggression and sexuality, and in December 2020 the journal Psychological Reports retracted two further Rushton papers from 1990 and 1991 on race and brain size, with the notice citing a misunderstanding of human genetic variation, the inappropriate application of ecological theory to human populations, the misuse of heritability, and the failure to replicate his findings. The wave of retractions reflected a broader reckoning across psychology with hereditarian work funded by the Pioneer Fund.⁶¹⁰