Tim Haydon
Dr. J Philippe Rushton - RIP
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Written by Tim Heydon
October 2nd 2012 saw the death of one of the most courageous individuals in academia.
J. Philippe Rushton, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario has died at the too-early age of 68. He was responsible for some of the most imaginative and highly original thinking the field of race studies has seen.
Rushton was born in England of English-French parentage, He took his Ph.D. doctoral thesis on altruism at the University of London. The thoroughness of his research work was later praised by Hans Eysenck, one of the leading psychologists of the twentieth century and professor at the institute of Psychiatry, London University. Rushton was later awarded the senior D.Sc. doctorate by the University.
Rushton’s Newtonian Synthesis
Rushton’s work was described by another courageous academic working in this field, Richard Lynn, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster as a ‘Newtonian synthesis‘ worthy of a Nobel Prize. Of course, given the subject matter: racial differences, for a Nobel Prize to have been bestowed on Rushton in the present political climate was as likely as the world being wiped out by a gigantic comet.
Just as Newton’s genius was to have taken several strands of previous thinking and to have brought them into his grand theory of gravitation, so Rushton’s coup was to have brought together several strands of thinking on racial matters under the umbrella of the r-K Life history theory. These strands can be seen in the attached table which might well be familiar to visitors to this site now..
The r-K Life History Theory
But to reiterate, the r-K Life History Theory has it that:
‘[T]he schedule and duration of key events in an organism's lifetime are shaped by natural selection to produce the largest possible number of surviving offspring. These events, notably juvenile development, age of sexual maturity, first reproduction, number of offspring and level of parental investment, senescence and death depend on the physical and ecological environment of the organism.’ (Wikipedia)
Thus, organisms such as the Pacific salmon produce thousands of eggs at one time and then die (‘r’) while human beings produce few offspring over the course of decades but invest much time and effort into raising them (‘K’).
r-K in Human Sub-Species
According to Rushton’s theory, one finds a spread of such characteristics within the sub-species (races) of humanity. Blacks tend to be more ‘r’, having smaller brains and more offspring but investing less emotionally and otherwise in each of them while East Asians are more ‘K. They have larger brains and fewer children but invest more in them. Whites come somewhere in between. Such characteristics, and those associated with them such as intelligence, taken in the mass, have profound effects on the kinds of societies these racial groups produce.
Why did northern peoples become more 'K' ?
Thanks to the challenge of dealing with the colder winters and scarcer food supply of Europe and North East Asia, the Oriental and White races moved away from an r-strategy towards the K-strategy. This means more parenting and social organisation which requires larger brain size and a higher IQ’ (‘Race, Evolution and Behaviour’ p 89). Apart from such major effects, K–strategy has other wide implications for human beings. For example; larger–brained babies require wide hips to be born. So whites are hadicapped compared to blacks with their narrower hips when it comes to running fast. Further, blacks have more testosterone than Whites, so they are more capable of explosive action than are Whites – hence their success in sprint running as well as other activites requiring it such as boxing football etc. And so on.
Cultural Marxist Bias in the Press
Rushton’s passing has gone unnoticed by the British media but was remarked on by the ‘Free Press’[Ontario] which asserted that his ideas were going to ‘die with him’. This is only the latest example of gross bias and wishful thinking in the culturally marxist media. When Rushton’s book came out in 1989 he was grossly traduced by the Toronto Star newspaper, to the extent that Arthur Jensen the prominent professor of Psychology at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was moved to write to the Ontario Press Council:
A ‘Grossly Vicious and Malicious Defamation’
‘I wish to register my strongest possible condemnation of The Toronto Star’s grossly vicious and malicious defamation of Professor J. Philippe Rushton. I refer especially to The Star’s editorials of March 9 and March 26, 1989. I doubt that I have ever before seen such a patently libelous attack on a scientist or scholar, with its charges of “charlatan”, “discredited”, “academic fraud”, and “racism”. This seems especially reprehensible when it is so unwarranted and is combined with flagrant misrepresentation of Professor Rushton’s position. The Star’s articles, editorial, and cartoon on Rushton were obviously calculated to discredit him and to inflame its readers, rather than to accurately inform them.’
BBC Biased reporting (What else?)
Some visitors to this site will also recall a BBC programme (fronted by a black reporter) a year or two ago which purported to investigate the claims of race realist scientists. It gave both Rushton and Richard Lynn (and this is no exaggeration) not more than three minutes each of air time to put their cases before dismissing them.
Vicious Cultural Marxist Hostility in Academia
Rushton faced vicious hostility in his professional life thanks to the chilling effect of the relentless Cultural Marxist assault on him. He well described the “moralistic aggression” of his adversaries in a paper published back in 1990 in Psychologische Beiträge after he had presented the r/K theory of racial group differences at a Symposium on Evolution at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco in 1989. He was denounced by academic staff while
‘Students and activist groups .. daily demanded a public forum to air my iniquities. Newspapers ran cartoons of me with a Ku Klux Klan hood on and having a telephone conversation with a delighted Adolf Hitler. The Premier of the Province, while acknowledging that he did not have the power to do so said that he would fire me if he could..…..It bordered on becoming a witch-hunt and I was the centre of media and political attention for many weeks.’
Rushton’s Critics rebutted
One frequent charge echo-chambered by Rushton’s critics was that his thesis on race differences is uncorroborated by other scientific studies. But this charge was definitively rebutted by Arthur Jensen in his letter to the Ontario Press Council mentioned above:
‘I have read virtually everything that Professor Rushton has written on the issues in question. Rushton’s research papers have appeared in reputable, refereed psychological journals, have been exposed to published critiques by other scholars, and is itself based on an impressive quantity and quality of scholarship, generally of greater thoroughness and accuracy than that of its critics’
‘Professor Rushton operates within (a) well-established scientific tradition. Anyone who is at all familiar with this venerable scientific tradition and with Rushton’s scientific work would, I’m sure, agree that the use of such terms as those used by The Star in reference to Professor Rushton or his research publications as “charlatan” and “fraud” is absolutely outrageous and wholly uncalled for…’
The sheer hate-filled viciousness directed against a man whose only agenda was the pursuit of scientific truth gives the lie to those left-liberals who think of themselves as lovers of scientific truth and as intellectually and morally superior to their race-realist opponents.
When one considers the volume and intensity of the ideologically fuelled spite endured by Rushton, it is surely being merely realistic to think that there must be many, many more researchers in academia who are in reality race realists but who are less courageous than he was and like much of the rest of the population, have been cowed into silence on this issue.
