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Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (3rd Edition)

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The scale of recent social problems in South Africa needs another explanation than the glib "nurture" argument with which we have been fed ever since World War II. This makes Rushton's book so relevant to understanding our situation. Despite huge efforts and money spent on black education, not only in separate schools under apartheid, but now, less than 50% of black children obtain the most basic school-leaving qualification.

In fact, Rushton refers to some IQ testing done in conjunction with psychologists at the local liberal University of the Witwatersrand which shows that the mean IQ of first-year black university students is 84, conistent with the mean for the population at large of 75.

All of Rushton's theory can be corroborated by everyday experience in South Africa: extreme violence and aggression displayed by young black males of low intelligence and high sex drives. This country has the highest rate for murder and rape in the world, 50 per 1000 members of the population, as against 8 per 1000 in the US, and about 4 for Britain.

Also differential levels of demographic expansion predicted by his theory fits the SA case perfectly: over the past century blacks multiplied by 20, whereas whites only trebled (with the help of outside immigration of Europeans).

Despite a high degree of initial scepticism (I have also been trained in the liberal, politically correct mode of thought), I found all of Rushton's arguments very convincing, as well as the theory of the evolutionary split 110 000 years ago between Africans and the rest, and 40 000 years ago between Caucasians and Mongoloids. With my current knowledge of evolution, the latter was both fascinating and highly plausible.

Holding views like Rushton's in contemporary South Africa under black rule will probably land one in prison or at least make one liable for a large fine. And yet, given the level of violence experienced by whites who are being killed by the thousands in so-called "criminal" attacks, the tendency of different races towards aggression needs to be held up in broad daylight.

The issues addressed by Rushton - he does not at all come across as a right-wing fanatic, rather more like a cool scientific mind - are of such relevance for South Africa and the rest of the world that it reminds one of Galileo confronting the Catholic Church to say that the earth revolves around the sun and being damned for it. Despite the fundamentalist outrage at this kind of reasoning, courageous people everywhere need to get a serious, scientific debate about race going. Rushton has already made a significant contribution.

By aggregating data on some sixty behavioral and physical traits, Rushton shows that they cluster on a racial continuum comprised of Negroid, Caucasian, and Mongoloid. This is an amazing result, because it shows in the clearest manner that racial differences are robust (a biological reality, not a social construct). Amazing too is the fact that the data used derive from quite varied sources over an extended period of time. One just does not expect such a beautiful result. Seems too tidy to be true. Critics have disputed his results, and to his credit, Rushton usually responds. Rushton explains his results in evolutionary terms, using the life history (r/K theory) approach. The differences between the three races derives from the adaptations each human population made as it encountered new environments on migrating out of Africa. His key point is that the sixty traits associate with a particular ecology AND that the racial variation of these traits correlates with the adaptive demands made on the populations that became Caucasians and Mongoloids. This part of the argument depends on the Out-of-Africa view of human phylogeny (populations that became Caucasian and Mongoloid migrated out of Africa about 110,000 years ago). But Multiregionalists propose a different interpretation. So there is no consensus on human phylogeny, and new evidence is constantly coming to hand that troubles both interpretations. For example, Chinese archaeologists recently reported fossil human remains dating to 200,000 BP. If this and other startling new findings hold up, the phylogenetic tree must be redrawn in its entirety! So it's premature to claim closure on this debate (not that Rushton DOES claim closure).

Since Galton's pioneering work, psychologists have devised many methods for estimating trait heritability in the absence of direct genetic evidence. Such is Rushton's procedure. However, as human genetics becomes ever more refined, direct evidence about the genetics of traits will come to light and thus provide a set of tests for Rushton's theory. He underscores this fact and welcomes the tests.

This is a robust, empirical theory of race that makes many testable predictions. Well done!

What if we've been misled and humans really are unequal from birth, in ways that may not be solved by social policies? In this interesting, but flawed book, Rushton finds, from extensive research, that this is precisely the case. He concludes that there are certain attributes (starting with intelligence, but including sexual activities, extraversion and self-control) that are largely inheritable, and that the three main races in the world (negroid, caucasoid and mongoloid) are not equally blessed: negroids are less intelligent, more impulsive and therefore more promiscuous and criminal than caucasoids, who in turn are also less intelligent and more impulsive than mongoloids. This is not very suprising, we've all seen this sort of data before and it is consistent with stereotypes and everyday experiences. What is interesting is that the author attempts to show that these differences are genetic in origin, and that they correspond with various reproductive strategies which in turn were dictated by various environmental stimuli as mediated by genes. All reproductive strategies may be placed within the r-K continuum. "r"-selected species go for big numbers when they attempt to reproduce. They don't provide much support for their spawn, but this is compensated by the number of these. "K"-selected species go for low numbers of children, but they invest significant effort to make sure these will survive. "r"-selected species compared to the "K"-selected sort will normally achieve reproductive capability at an earlier age, will be more promiscuous, more competitive and less cooperative. They will also die earlier.

Rushton postulates that although humans originated in Africa (thus supporting the "Out-of-Africa" thesis), the divergent strands (those remaining in Africa v. those that move into Eurasia) are really subspecies of humanity that evolved in different ways concerning reproductive strategies. Those that stayed in Africa continued to be more "r" selected, whereas those that moved into Eurasia were subject to "K" selection to a greater degree. This would have been due to divergent climatic situations: in Africa the weather is predictable (there are mostly no seasons), there is much plant food, but there abound all sorts of viruses and parasites and droughts often annihilate large portions of the population. In Eurasia (where until 10.000 years ago there was still the Ice Age) the weather is predictable (there are seasons), there are not so many diseases but it is difficult to survive the winter months, and hunting of large prey is required. Hence, humans became more "K" selected. They developed larger brains (which are essential for higher intelligence) and they opted for stronger coupling and higher investment in a lower number of descendants (less number of sexual partners, but better selection thereof). These factors were even stronger in Asia than in Europe, because most mongoloids developed in the northern part of the continent, where it was even colder. Rushton shows much data that supports his analysis, and some evidence in favor of his r-K reproductive differentiation strategies as the source of the various outcomes.

The contentiousness of this analysis may not be overstated. Rushton believes that the average IQ in Africa is about 2 standard deviations below that in the US, which would mean that more than 3/4 of Africans are less intelligent than the average American, and about half the population of the black continent is feeble-minded. He believes that American blacks are smarter than African ones because they have mixed themselves with Europeans and Asians. If this were true, then many of the greatest issues of our time become suddendly clearer (but not more manageable). The main reason why sub-Saharan Africa is now poorer than it was under European rule would not be racism, or negative terms of trade, or the poisoned inheritance of colonialism but rather a population that is dumber, less self-controled and more risk-taking than others. As access to education and health becomes generalized and the labor markets more transparent, a greater part of social differentiation (at least in developed countries) will be due to differential individual abilities (mostly related to IQ) rather than unfair social systems. If the differential abilities are really not invidual, but racial, then divergence between races will not narrow, but widen, the fairer the system is: only through restrictions on invidual actions will equality be viable. So liberty and fairness really turn out to be incompatible.

The implications of this worldview are extreme, and would affect many fields of legislation, including policies toward less developed countries in matters from free trade to Aids, as well as criminal laws, educational curricula and immigration laws. It is not an exageration to state that if Rushton is right, many changes in policies, such as the elimination of the "separate but equal doctrine" in US education in the famous Brown v. Board of Education ruling, decolonization and even Apartheid would have to be rethought.

This makes it easy to see why proponents of equality of races would disagree with Rushton: if he is right, then there would be no reason for respecting self-determination in countries where the majority of the population are borderline morons, nor would there be any reason for lavishing significant funds for education of a local minority that is really incapable of much improvement. Since social deviance is easy to predict from IQ tests, it probably would make sense to subject those of low intelligence (and large portions of these would come from the negroid race) to repressive police action even in absence of actual crimes. And it wouldn't be desirable to allow continued immigration by peoples who will surely drag down a country's average IQ, commit more crimes than others and generally make a nuisance of themselves by becoming dependent on the state. Rushton doesn't enunciate these conclusions, of course, but they may be easily inferred from his analysis. People have been expelled from universities just for wearing t-shirts that hint that they might hold this type of view.

I agree with the author that one shouldn't fear the truth, and that poorly constructed bromides are no substitutes for real understanding. We need less "feel-good" opinions and more realistic explanations of reality. So I would have expected Rushton to construct his arguments in a more thoughtful fashion than he has. Very clearly there is a genetic element in intelligence measured as IQ (the so-called "Spearman's g"), and it is surely true that IQ is an excellent predictor of success for both workers and executives, and of sexual behavior or law-abidingness for everyone. While it is nonsensical to assume these factors away and just attribute all differential results to environmental circumstances (as many do), it is also incoherent to state, as Rushton does, that in these factors there are both genetic and environmental influences, while at the same time saying virtually nothing about their respective weights, and empahisizing the former much more than the latter. Rushton clearly believes that most of the differential performance of various groups is genetic in origin. One guesses this not just from this book but from many of the reviews he has published on Amazon. This does not seem to be, for him, a scientific argument of theoretic interest, but a personal conviction with some emotional involvement. Normally, that doesn't make for good science. For example, even though he goes as far enough as to estimate that negroids are dumber because they have less brain tissue than caucasoids or mongoloids, he doesn't really give any reason why such comparatively small differences in brain weight generate such enormous variations in intelligence as he finds. The assumption that beyond a certain minimal weight required to run the body's processes, a small percentage of brain tissue has a disproportionate impact on total IQ may be correct, but it demands some factual support. If it doesn't exist, Rushton should have called this a working hypothesis and left it at that.

There are other, interesting, questions that he doesn't answer. While I agree with him that Jared Diamond's explanation of Eurasian success and African and Native American and Australian failure by way of geography is not satisfactory (because it doesn't even consider the possibility that genetics might be involved), I can see that Rushton doesn't attempt to explain the enviromental impact on inferior performances by the various races, or even quantify it. He then leaves himself open to accusations that he is just tidying up, in the language of sociobiology, very traditional racist beliefs. While he concedes that there are some anomalies implicit in his worldview (i.e., as the most "K"-selected race, mongoloids should be bigger than Causasians, who in turn should be bigger than Africans, whereas the reverse is the case), there are many he doesn't even consider, and obvious ones at that. If a harsh but predictable enviroment is a condition for "K"-selection, then Eskimos (or Inuit) should be most "K"-selected and therefore the most intelligent. Is this the case? And surely Mongolians are even more "K"-selected than Han Chinese (because they live further north). Then, why didn't the Chinese empire center in Mongolia, or Manchuria, rather than further south, as was the case? Also, wouldn't it make sense to suppose that North American Natives would be more "K"-selected than Central and South American ones? Yet the great pre-Columbian civilizations were in Central America (Aztecs and Mayas) and South America (Incas) rather than in North America, where the natives never evolved beyond the hunter-gatherer phase. This is not to refer to the obvious point, that the earliest developments of civilization did not take place in Northern European woods, but in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin (not to mention China). By the time the Greeks were arguing about the nature of things and creating epic poetry, theater, classical sculpture and architecture, and the Olympics, German tribesmen were still adoring trees, and even in the Carolingian era the Saxons were gross barbarians that didn't even have proper cities. And let's not even mention the Russians, who in some ways haven't even reached the XX century. So either evolution happened quite recently to propel Northern Europe into the foreground or there were powerful environment elements that haven't been properly considered. I think it must be latter.

While perhaps these questions are well beyond what the author wanted to cover, he surely could have alluded to them and left them for future researchers to answer.

Also, he is sometimes inconsistent. While in parts of his book he implies that Native Americans (as descendants of mongoloids who migrated through the Bering strait) are in some ways smarter than caucasians, in others he concludes that in fact the two populations (mongoloids who remained in Asia and native Americans) diverged far in the past so that they in fact became two different races, one smarter than the other. So what is his real opinion about this?

I think that when a researcher is working in such a politically contentious field as this he should be extra careful in order not to weaken his case by facile arguments that might be misused by interested parties. I don't think Rushton has kept this rule. He (apparently approvingly) quotes Gobineau's dictum that great civilizations decay through mixture with "ethnic taxa that have never initiated a civilization", so that "Degeneration sets it". This is just reckless: quoting Gobineau associates Rushton's arguments with eugenicist perspectives from seventy years algo and thus tarnishes them in a needless way. From here to rassenschande (the Nazi term that criminalized miscegenation) there is not a very long way to go.


While many of Rushton's opponents are tiresomely politically correct (some don't even to appear to think that reality exists, but that it's all about opinions, good or bad ones), Rushton seems to go out of his way to offend. This weakens some pretty powerful arguments in the book and needlessly associates the author with unsavory elements. That's a pity because he is a mostly readable writer, on very important topics.

How amusing we find the seventeenth-century minds which persecuted Galileo for saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun. But we have living in our midst a man who is so brave he has stated a truth even more obvious than Galileo's. Of course the races aren't equal. Everyone knows it but we don't want to admit it.
Even most scientists are so scared that they would rather pretend that natural selection leaves intelligence unaffected. The official story is that it doesn't matter whether your race evolved in a jungle or a desert, the average brain will be totally unchanged by evolution. Everything else will change - height, colour, blood, hair, bones, teeth, eyes - but the brain must by some undiscovered law of nature stay the same.
Read this book for proof of what you, in your heart of hearts, already know.

But certainly not race. You know, J. Philippe Rushton may be the most brave man on the planet for publishing this book on a topic so verboten that it actually got him investigated by the Ontario police. Canada, what a country, everyday I wake up pleased that I don't live there.

Rushton informs the reader in his Preface that his goal is to examine whether or not innate differences between the races exist. He is not interested in proscribing policy or advocating positions, yet, for many in our universities, objectivity is a curse word they may not believe can even exist in any capacity. Rushton unwittingly stepped into a punji trap by daring not to grovel before activists disguised as professors. The classic confusion between politics and science can best be summed up in an exchange I had with an instructor last summer. In reference to a discussion on sex differences she said: "But what good do you do society by studying things like that?" The answer: the goal is to find truth. However, to elucidate the truth not only is the reason we have universities in the first place, but also a great good in itself.

What you have before you with Race, Evolution, and Behavior is the attempt on the part of a learned social scientist to integrate theory with reality. Rushton analyzes 60 separate factors and compares them to see if disparities exist among Asians, Caucasians, and blacks. Some discrepancies, such as skin cancer rate, society will accept without a blush, but others, such as intelligence are more flammable than a depot of kerosene. Rushton doesn't glide, he heroically pushes forth with facts and research. In my humble opinion, this beleaguered scientist is a hero.

The scientific evidence marshaled forth in this book is not only a scathing attack on the pseudo-scientific ramblings of Stephen Gould, Jared Diamond, Leon Kamin and the like, but an implicit denunciation of the political tendencies of the past thirty years that have elevated race-centric policies to a national obsession. Like all great scientific works of unimpeachable integrity, this book is apolitical, but it would be naive and simplistic to presume that this work carries no social or political implications. Rushton makes this point in the introduction of the book when he quotes a famous sociologist who openly admits sociology does not exist as a value-free science, but to push an agenda. Rushton's book is "controversial" and "incendiary" only because it conflicts with the aims of leftist politics. The science itself is solid and indisputable.

Underlying Rushton's explication of empirical race differences is what population geneticists refer to as the r-K continuum. Without going into too much detail, the idea is that in order to cope with different environments species adapt specific reproductive strategies to maximize gene-flow into the next generation. K-selected species devote more energy to nurturing and less to reproduction, while r-selected species tradeoff parental support in favor of reproducing. While humans are at the K end of the spectrum, it is possible to differentiate among separate human populations (races). Rushton provides an overwhelming amount of empirical support -- everything from brain size, maturation rates, dizygotic twinning, age of menarche, gestation periods, frequency of sexual intercourse -- that shows the races consistently lining-up in the following order: Africans, Europeans, and East Asians, with East Asians being the most K-selected and Africans the least. The data ably refutes the two theological premises of egalitarianism: 1) race is not a valid scientific category and 2) races differences are due to environmental factors, not nature.

Let's push the argument some more and think about it this way: either the races are equal or they are not. Now, what evidence can an egalitarian put forth that makes racial equality more plausible than racial inequality? Since the world conforms quite perfectly to the theory of raical inequality -- compare and contrast the history of the European race with the African race -- from what evidence does it make sense to infer that the races are equal? Since the facts directly contradict the theory of race equality the burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of egalitarians. To those who still shutter at the prospect however, I pose a simple question: If race equality is true, then why don't we observe it?

Many critics here and elsewhere seemed upset that Rushton did not provide a stark and clear dividing line between the races. This however confuses the scientific concept of race. Is there a Siberian Husky gene that differentiates it from a Pit Bull gene? Is there a lion gene that differentiates it from a tiger gene? Of course not, yet no one has any intellectual confusion when thinking of dogs in terms of breeds, so why can't they think of human in terms of race? (Politics). Additionally, the critics bring up the fact the many Europeans have some African blood in them, and many Africans have European blood. Entirely true, but this in no way nullifies the concept of race -- in fact it strengthens it. The fact that black-white hybrids have on average higher intelligence than full-blooded Africans proves that race is real, and not a social construction. The critics suffer from the misnomer that race is an essentialist definition and are therefore only successful in shooting down their own strawmen.

Rushton's work is remarkable and the attempt to try to silence him only reflects the fact that academia no longer embraces the unfettered pursuit of science, but wishes to restrict whatever conflicts with their (leftist) political aims. The growth of political liberalism over the last thirty years has been tied in some form or another to racial egalitarianism -- civil-rights law, voting rights, school integration, affirmative action, massive immigration, diversity is a strength, reparations -- and could not exist without it. The false doctrine of egalitarianism is the oxygen that keeps liberalism pushing forward and advancing. While conservatives might make legitimate arguments against affirmative action or uncontrolled immigration, they are conceding too much ground to liberalism. Rushton's work shows definitively that equality is a lie and (hence) liberalism a fraud.

In this astonishing book, Philippe Rushton candidly explores what is probably the single greatest taboo of our times: genetically-based race differences. Rushton reveals the hard facts about the things that most people only talk about in private: the group differences among blacks (negroids), whites (caucasoids) and Asians (mongoloids) in physiological traits, intelligence and crime.

Some of the facts discussed are the following: of the three major races, blacks around the world
- are the fastest to mature physically;
- have the highest rates of bone and tooth development;
- begin to sit, crawl and walk the earliest;
- have the earliest puberty and sexual development;
- have the highest levels of testosterone;
- are the most sexually active whether measured by the age of first intercourse, intercourse frequency or number of sex partners;
- have the highest rates of twinning;
- have the highest levels of AIDS and HIV;
- have the smallest brains, the lowest IQs and educational attainment;
- have the highest rates of crime, including fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, assault, robbery and murder;
- are the most aggressive and mentally unstable;
- have the highest rates of drug and alcohol abuse;
- have the highest rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock children, child abuse and delinquency;
- have the highest rates of unemployment, the highest rates of welfare dependency and the lowest incomes;
- have the most diseases, the highest rates of death at every age and the shortest life expectancy.

Asians fall at the opposite extreme on each of these characteristics, and whites fall in the middle, often close to Asians. Finally, Rushton discusses his "life history" and "out of Africa" theories about the origins of these genetically-based race differences.

This book is easily the best and most comprehensive study of race differences done in our times. I greatly admire Rushton for his empirical research on race. It is likely that he would have received a Nobel prize for his work if he were writing at a different time.

This book is a fearless defiance of the pseudoscience that attempts to brush racial differences under the rug. Leftists like Gould and his ilk are no match for Rushton's intellect and especially they are no match for his data and analysis.

This is a controversial book. It is fair, I think, to say that it was not written for popular consumption, but rather as a treatise aimed at the author's colleagues. The evidence is clear: in order to understand the bulk of the book, one must be conversant with statistical formulae and procedures, and have more than average knowledge of evolutionary anthropology, psychometrics, and psychology. The book is replete with graphs and formulae, and much of the language is technical.

It has been called "incendiary," "racist," and the publisher of the first edition "caved in to [the] pressure" and withdrew from publishing the book and apologized for having distributed it. (See the Preface to this , the third edition.)

"Why this attempt to trash or suppress this book?" asks the author in the Preface, "Because there is no stronger taboo today than talking about race. In many cases, just being accused of 'racism' can get you fired. Some vocal groups in academia and the media simply forbid an open discussion of race."

But, J. Phillipe Rushton is no racist. He is a scholar, and an extremely well-qualified scholar at that. Despite the efforts of left-wing egalitarian social scientists to discredit his work because of the inescapable conclusions it presents, it is clear that his approach to his subject is neutral and clinical. Like Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, he is being attacked because he is the messenger, and the presents he brings are antithetical to their cherished belief that nurture (environmental effects), not nature (genetic evolution) is the reason for the divergence in SAT scores between the races. His worst sin is that he makes an excellent case, and is very persuasive.

This book is about genetic factors and their differential effect on the three main racial branches of the human species; the Mongoloid, Caucasoid and Negroid. It is heavily researched, footnoted, attributed and extremely scholarly.

What the author found, after twenty years of studying the three major races, is that in the brain size, intelligence, sexual behavior, fertility, personality, maturation, life span, and crime and family stability rates, Orientals fall at one end of the spectrum, and Blacks at the other, with Whites in between. Orientals are slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are opposite in those characteristics. And he has much evidence--hundreds of studies--to show that the reason is genetic, and that there are good, solid natural reasons for the variations.

The chicken is an egg's way of producing another egg. The organism is the gene's way of producing more genes. Whether the methodology chosen for the organism's success is production of more offspring, as in a relatively benign climate like Africa, or in a harsher environ like Siberia, to develop better tools, shelter, domestic animals, and depend upon the careful nurture of fewer young, the problem is still successful procreation of the organism's genes. Over time, the human body responds to the demands made on it. When wit is required, it develops.

This is an extraordinary volume. For those interested in such subject matter, I highly recommend it. Ignore the altruistic "all men are created equal" fanatics who would suppress and censor it in the name of Political Correctness.

Joseph H Pierre

For about thirty years now its been taboo to say that persons whose ancestors are from Sub-Saharan Africa are more athletic and less intelligent than those of European and Asian descent. The premise that all racial differences are exclusively environmental has been a fiction with a useful purpose---to lessen tension between the races and provide hope to disadvantaged blacks. The question which some are now asking is whether that useful purpose outweighs the principle that truth and honesty are virtues to be cherished.

If you believe in perpetuating a useful fiction, feel free to berate this book, burn it, suppress all discussion of it, and label all those who accept its basic premise with all sorts of ugly descriptions. However, you should read it first.