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

This book, which first appeared in 1995, is J Philippe Rushton's magnum opus. His introduction is an unusually personal story. Here is his biography in a nutshell.

He was born in England in 1943. He studied in England and Berkeley, coming up in what is called the London school of psychometricians, following in the steps of Francis Galton, Charles Spearman and Karl Pearson, who developed the science of statistics as much to research human intelligence as for any other reason. Working with Hans Eysenck and other scholars of the age, he embraced sociobiology from its inception with EO Wilson and Richard Dawkins in the 1970s.

Rushton's research into human differences brought him into conflict with the academic leftists who had ascended to leadership positions in the major universities. These included Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Steven Rose. The cultural Marxists pursued and persecuted him everywhere, preventing his work from getting published, having him banned from conferences, and physically attacking him. Google "Resolute Ignorance on Race and Rushton" for a well written account of the abuse that he took.

This is a long book, laden with tables and accounts of statistical studies. This is as it must be in order to present a convincing argument. The human being is inherently difficult to measure. It is literally impossible to get a representative sample for any statistical study. The truth must lie in the correlation of many, many studies. In this instance, the correlation of studies of populations in the United States, the Caribbean and Africa. The correlation of people who are black by genetic analysis, self report, and skin color. Factoring in the admixture of other races. Using school samples that knowingly omit, must omit children who are not capable of performing schoolwork and children who have dropped out. Rushton writes extensively about his methodology, and extensively once again on the large numbers of studies that more or less concur in order to support his theses.

I recommend that the reader Google "rushton-the-great-theoetician.pdf" (with the misspelling intact) for a 20-page paper that quite aptly and fully summarizes his work. Turn to this complete book for the thorough analysis necessary to support his conclusions.

All the previous researchers in the London school, in fact all psychometricians, have observed that there are racial differences in average intelligence. Although there are geniuses in every population, such as Thomas Sowell, Paul Robison and Clarence Thomas among modern Blacks, the average measured intelligence of African Blacks, American Blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Caucasian Americans, North Asians and Ashkenazi Jews is spread out over a wide spectrum. At the extremes, less than a 10th of one percent of black Africans would be smarter than the average Ashkenazi Jew. Joseph Conrad's portrayal of the races in "The Heart of Darkness" rings true.

Rushton advocates what he calls the life history approach to racial differences. Succinctly put, there are two broad reproductive strategies among sexually reproducing organisms. Aspens and oysters produce a vast number of fertile seeds which they disseminate into the water in the air. Only a very few grow, but it is enough to perpetuate those species. Avocados and orangutans invest a great deal in protecting their progeny. The avocado fruit and seed are very rich, and the orangutan bears a child only every three or four years, investing a great deal of maternal attention in that child. Baby avocados and orangutans have a good chance of reaching adulthood.

These divergent reproductive strategies are called r/K selection: r for rate of reproduction, K for carrying capacity. Researchers have found a high degree of correlation among many traits associated with r/K selection.
-------- Family characteristics
Large litter size -------- Small litter size
Short birth spacing -------- Long birth spacing
Many offspring -------- Few offspring
High infant mortality -------- Low infant mortality
Little parental care -------- Much parental care
-------- Individual characteristics
Rapid maturation -------- Slow maturation
Early sexual reproduction -------- Delayed sexual reproduction
Short life -------- Long life
High reproductive effort -------- Low reproductive effort
High energy utilization -------- Efficient energy utilization
Low encephalization -------- High encephalization
-------- Population characteristics
Opportunistic exploiters -------- Consistent exploiters
Dispersing colonizers -------- Stable occupiers
Variable population size -------- Stable population size
Lax competition -------- Keen competition
-------- Social system characteristics
Low social organization -------- High social organization
Low altruism -------- High altruism

Rushton found that these apply as well to human populations. Though all humans are highly K specialized, Mongoloids are the most, and Africans the least. This is the source of the controversy.

In summary, I recommend that the curious reader first look at the two articles I cite above, and buy the book if you want more. Also see The Ulster Institute web site for related publications. A group of highly talented academics is continuing his work and making his writings available.

From a perspective of population genetics research, this book contains some useful data and concepts, which I will summarize below. Much of the integrated framework centering around race is misleading in a modern evolutionary context. For example, what is race? Skin pigmentation? Eye shape? These are evolutionary responses to specific environmental stimuli. Skin pigmentation may have evolved separately in the east and west, in response to an agricultural diet deficient in vitamin D, and living at a latitude with reduced UV light. Originally all human skin darkened after protective fur was lost, to prevent skin cancer. If a people move to a new region and change diet their skin color will change. Blue eyes actually evolved first, and are thought to mitigate seasonal affective disorder in northern low-light environments. All life forms now present have a 4 billion year ancestry and none are especially superior or inferior to any other. Confront a crocodile in its own environment if you don't believe me. Even a mosquito can kill you. This point perhaps the author misses.

That people, including their genes and culture, are shaped by their environment is the point he gets, and some of the ideas in this book are unique and you won't find them anywhere else. I would take them more as research hypotheses to be tested than firm conclusions. But they are worth investigating. For example, life in the extreme north, with agriculture and animal husbandry, led to lactose tolerance, blue eyes and lighter skin pigment. What else might have it led to? Did the winter lead to a culture of working to store for the future? Did reliability of partners become more important for the same reason? We now have better tools and methodologies to investigate these questions than in the 1990s when this book was written. For example, the skin pigmentation and blue eyes conclusions result from genome analysis of European remains of many individuals from 5000 to 7000 years ago. This technique was not available at the time of the book.

Now, however, the ideas in the book, separately interesting and testable apart from any preconceptions of "race", are discarded and not present in the literature. It seems as if Rushton in the rush to publicize his ideas over the objections of liberal academics may have evoked a severe counter reaction that suppressed any ideas of merit along with the racial overtones. I am not interested in old debates about political correctness. I am looking for ideas to test wherever they may be. Anyone who cannot think and evaluate for themselves should, I suppose, not read the book. But if you have read this review thus far, you are thinking pretty hard, I'd imagine.

I read this book many years ago. No, I wasn't one of the luminaries on the first mailing. I was on the 2nd mailing. For what reason, I can't imagine. I had not at the time published any papers of note. Most of my publications were 2005 or later, and not in social sciences until about 2009. More recently I began looking into human migration patterns and how they might have effected the evolution of cooperation. This investigation is not finished, though I have written one solid paper on the evolution of cooperation as balancing selection in overdominance. So I went looking for my copy. It is easy to lose such a tiny book. My wife found it. I then went to locate it online and investigate the history of the book and found the [unsurprising] controversy. I thought I would weigh in. If the idea of it is incendiary to you, don't read it. If you are interested in finding a few interesting ideas for thought or research that might make your career as an evolutionary biologist if they can be borne out, by all means comb through it.

The present holds some mysteries. Why does democracy work some places and not others? Why do some regions of the world hold to kin-cooperation while others embrace non-kin cooperation? And is there a downside to large scale non-kin cooperation (hint: patriotism makes it easy to raise large armies)? Consider the map of degrees of kin-cooperation in Ben Enke's NBER paper "Kinship Systems, Cooperation and the Evolution of Culture" which I've loaded to (the NBER is a government agency, and I have access to it, everyone should have access). If there is a genetic component, maybe it won't work to sponsor revolutions and hope the people will organize democratic liberal institutions afterward. Heck, even if it is cultural, maybe that won't work. Maybe that won't even work in Europe. Maybe in some conditions kin-cooperation is more reliable than non-kin cooperation. Maybe kin-cooperation societies are less susceptible to the support of empires. Humans seem to have a tendency to believe that they can wish things to be a certain way, and the universe will comply. But the truth is we have to ask, and test our answers.

A very interesting and essential book on the subject of race., etc. This book should be read by every one who wishes to be knowledgeable on the subject of race. Unfortunately, this is an abridged version of a more thorough study of the subject. I would like to be able to buy a copy of the original from which this volume was taken.