Prof's Views on Race Lose Explosive Edge
ANDREW DUFFY
The Windsor Star, 10/01/2005
OTTAWA - In January 1989, when University of Western Ontario psychologist Philippe Rushton presented a paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, it triggered a maelstrom.
His paper, which argued evolution has created identifiable IQ gaps among groups of East Asians, whites and blacks, was denounced on the conference floor.
David Peterson, Ontario's premier at the time, demanded he be fired. Police launched a hate-crime investigation. All of which makes the muted reaction to Rushton's latest paper so curious.
In June, Rushton and University of California psychology professor Arthur Jensen published a 60-page study in Psychology, Public Policy and Law, a journal of the American Psychological Association, that presented 10 categories of evidence, including military and academic tests, brain size and adoption studies, to support their contention that East Asians as a group enjoy an evolutionary advantage over whites, and whites over blacks, that has contributed to measurable intelligence gaps between them.
The cause of that difference is contentious. Some blame the tests, arguing they measure a narrow, western notion of intelligence. Others say intelligence is primarily determined not by genetics but by environmental factors: poverty, nutrition, parental education, discrimination, the quality of local schools.
But Rushton and Jensen posit that 50 to 80 per cent of the IQ gaps between racial groups can be explained by genetics, by the gift of inherited intelligence.
"Ultimately," they write, "the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be over-represented and other groups under-represented in various socially valued outcomes."
In other words, those who design social policy should not seek to create equality between racial groups -- an impossible outcome in Rushton's mind -- but learn to live with the statistical differences.
'Fact of life'
"You absolutely have to accept that Chinese people are going to be under-represented on the basketball team, and that black people are going to be under-represented in high-school graduates," Rushton said in a recent interview. "That is just a fact of life."
Although seemingly incendiary, Rushton's latest ideas have generated little response.
Why were his ideas so controversial 15 years ago but not now? Or have advances in genetic science pulled his theories into the mainstream?
In the 1980s, Rushton was viewed as a rogue academic. But today, a small army of scientists is exploring the genetic foundation of intelligence, and the genetic differences between people of African, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and European descent. Their work flows from the landmark Human Genome Project, which found slight differences in the pattern of DNA among ethnic groups.
In June, for instance, the Journal of Biosocial Science published a paper by a team of University of Utah scientists who suggested that Ashkenazi Jews -- Jews of European descent -- have evolved an enhanced intellectual ability through natural selection.
The researchers, led by anthropologist Dr. Henry Harpending, found Ashkenazim score higher on IQ tests than any other ethnic group to which they can be reliably compared. Six times as many Ashkenazim as Europeans score in the "genius range" above 140 on IQ tests.
Harpending and his colleagues theorize a millennium of discrimination in Europe forced Jews into intellectually challenging occupations as bankers and merchants -- jobs then considered distasteful for Christians. Since European Jews married within their own community, a process of natural selection took place whereby genes that enhanced intelligence became more common.
Rushton and Jensen argue their research is important because "we will never make progress in race relations if we operate on the belief that one segment of society is responsible for the plight of another segment and that belief is false."