Reaching out to racists

[madd0ct0r]

I come across openly racist* people quite frequently.

Mostly this is in real life, occasionally on-line.

Online response is easy - argue and debate but don't expect to ever change their minds.

in real life you have to be a little more nuanced, they're typically work colleagues.

Either way, the ensuing debate needs to proceed from their beliefs. You can prove a fundie wrong on evolution by showing there's no God, but you can actually CONVINCE him if you describe it as God's will working daily, shaping creatures to their environment. (as an example)

Given you've got a guy who's convinced black people are stupid, dangerous and is arguing crime stats and 'the Bellcurve' ect ect, how would you approach the debate?

[tim31]

I just hired a Filipino girl for reception. She interviewed well and has good experience. It's something of a change around the place, as normally you see the southeast asians over in the housekeeping department.

I ask my 2IC the morning after the newbie's first shift what she thinks.

'I don't know if she'll make it.'

'Why not?'

'Dunno. Just not sure she'll work out here.'

If she'd said something constructive like 'accent barrier' I might have accepted her position.

[Ultonius]

You could try disproving the 'stupidity' claim by talking about famous black thinkers like George Washington Carver and W.E.B. Du Bois. As for the 'higher crime rate' claim you could point out that white inner city youths and black middle class people have similar crime rates to their respective black and white counterparts. Suggest that this implies that poverty and lack of educational opportunity is a bigger factor in crime than race, and that the black crime rate only seems greater because black people are more likely to be poor than white people. Further suggest that they are more likely to be poor because they were denied opportunities to better themselves by slavery and the 'Jim Crow' laws that followed Emancipation.

Also, just out of interest, was the asterisk following 'racist' meant to refer to a footnote that you forgot to put in?

[Broomstick]

In my experience, the odds of changing the mind of a racist is about the same as changing the mind of a fundie. It can happen, rarely it does happen, but don't expect it. Racism is based in emotions, not logic, and is largely immune to logical arguments. Any examples you can give to counter racist beliefs are deemed exceptions that can be dismissed or ignored. For instance, I've tried using the George Washington Carver example to counter claims black people are stupid only to be told it was the "white blood" in him that made him smart despite being black.

If the racism arises out of genuine ignorance (such as never having met a black person in real life) or a past wrong (say... being mugged by a black person) that can be countered by positive experiences then it can be overcome but all too many racists believe in their bigotry with the same unmovable fanaticism as a born-again Bible-thumper in the midst of an old fashioned revival meeting.

Note that the white vs. black racism is used as an example here, but it's by no means the only form racism takes.

[madd0ct0r]

You could try disproving the 'stupidity' claim by talking about famous black thinkers like George Washington Carver and W.E.B. Du Bois. As for the 'higher crime rate' claim you could point out that white inner city youths and black middle class people have similar crime rates to their respective black and white counterparts. Suggest that this implies that poverty and lack of educational opportunity is a bigger factor in crime than race, and that the black crime rate only seems greater because black people are more likely to be poor than white people. Further suggest that they are more likely to be poor because they were denied opportunities to better themselves by slavery and the 'Jim Crow' laws that followed Emancipation.

Also, just out of interest, was the asterisk following 'racist' meant to refer to a footnote that you forgot to put in?

it was going to be something like #*or homophobic or sexist or overtly religious or all four wrapped up in one package."

Examples of intelligent guys don't work when they're arguing bell curve bullshit and do you have a good source for those crime stats? That'll go into the quiver.

@Broomstick - the single biggest racists I've met in real life have been chinese, but at least when I was working in the UK the major one was blackVwhite, with a minor three way regarding pakistanis.

[AniThyng]

@Broomstick - the single biggest racists I've met in real life have been chinese, but at least when I was working in the UK the major one was blackVwhite, with a minor three way regarding pakistanis.

The Chinese have a casual derogatory term for just about every non-chinese race there is. But double standards are everywhere I suppose. Nothing like listening to a chinese person rant about racist white people then turn around and rant about lazy malay people...

I would concur pointing out individual named examples of brilliant people won't work because you're actually validating the other guy's point for him, that you are so hard pressed for examples you can to resort to singular great people or something, and his precious bell curve already accepts that.

[Ultonius]

Examples of intelligent guys don't work when they're arguing bell curve bullshit and do you have a good source for those crime stats? That'll go into the quiver.

To be honest, it was just a general impression that I had. However, this Wikipedia article on Race and Crime in the United States does mention a sociological theory called Strain Theory that argues that if there are structures within society that lead to segments of the population lacking equality and suffering deprivation, then members of those segments will be indirectly encouraged to engage in criminal behaviour. The article also quotes a US Justice Department report looking at murders between 1974 and 2004, which found that 86% of murders of white people were committed by other white people, which somewhat discredits the fears of white racists about a black threat.

[mr friendly guy]

You could try disproving the 'stupidity' claim by talking about famous black thinkers like George Washington Carver and W.E.B. Du Bois. As for the 'higher crime rate' claim you could point out that white inner city youths and black middle class people have similar crime rates to their respective black and white counterparts. Suggest that this implies that poverty and lack of educational opportunity is a bigger factor in crime than race, and that the black crime rate only seems greater because black people are more likely to be poor than white people. Further suggest that they are more likely to be poor because they were denied opportunities to better themselves by slavery and the 'Jim Crow' laws that followed Emancipation.

Also, just out of interest, was the asterisk following 'racist' meant to refer to a footnote that you forgot to put in?

it was going to be something like #*or homophobic or sexist or overtly religious or all four wrapped up in one package."

Examples of intelligent guys don't work when they're arguing bell curve bullshit and do you have a good source for those crime stats? That'll go into the quiver.

@Broomstick - the single biggest racists I've met in real life have been chinese, but at least when I was working in the UK the major one was blackVwhite, with a minor three way regarding pakistanis.

The bell curve bullshit can be debunked by using The Flynn effect.

[Simon_Jester]

Examples of intelligent guys don't work when they're arguing bell curve bullshit and do you have a good source for those crime stats? That'll go into the quiver.

To be honest, it was just a general impression that I had. However, this Wikipedia article on Race and Crime in the United States does mention a sociological theory called Strain Theory that argues that if there are structures within society that lead to segments of the population lacking equality and suffering deprivation, then members of those segments will be indirectly encouraged to engage in criminal behaviour. The article also quotes a US Justice Department report looking at murders between 1974 and 2004, which found that 86% of murders of white people were committed by other white people, which somewhat discredits the fears of white racists about a black threat.

Yeah, that's so close to one minus the percentage of black people in the US, it's close to what you'd get if murderers were being selected entirely at random.

[Ziggy Stardust]

(Sidebar: Wouldn't this fit better in SLAM than N&P?)

Either way, the ensuing debate needs to proceed from their beliefs. You can prove a fundie wrong on evolution by showing there's no God, but you can actually CONVINCE him if you describe it as God's will working daily, shaping creatures to their environment. (as an example)

The problem is that, typically, when confronted with an opposing viewpoint, the majority of people will mentally reinforce their own view through mental gymnastics than admit they were wrong, no matter how logical the opposing viewpoint may be. This isn't just "stupid" people, mind you, this is everyone, including you. It is part of the way our brain is wired. There's a battery of psychological phenomena that account for this: the "trust" gap, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and the argumentative theory of reasoning.

Quite simply, it is more or less impossible to change someone's mind just by telling them they are wrong, even by showing them that this is the case. It's the same reason that not just anyone can be a doctor or scientist; it is difficult to train your mind to be empirical (or as close to this as is possible). It takes a certain type of person from the right background to be able to logically address their own biases and alter their notions of reality. It usually requires the right parenting/education from an early age.

While it is not out of the question a fundie or a racist might change their mind, in most cases the type of person who is amenable to changing their mind based on facts/evidence/logic is not the type of person who holds these views in the first place. Though, of course, there are exceptions - some even on this board, IIRC.

[madd0ct0r]

The flynn affect is awesome. I knew of it vaguely but didn't know that lower scoring groups were catching up faster.
It also demonstrates that IQ scores aren't fixed, and that better childhood nutrition and less exposure to disease will help things along. There's also a hint of a threshold affect, where higher IQ people seek stimulating environments which might in turn raise their IQ. Hilariously, there's also reference to hesterosis or 'hybrid vigour'. White sepratists will like that almost as much as the chinese IQ results.

The Social Strain theory I don't like so much - it seems a bit contentious/unproven when things like police racial profiling does a better job of skewing the stats. The nice intraracial crime stats are good arguments against 'race war' stuff, but won't defuse the 'why are so many black guys in jail argument'

[mr friendly guy]

The Flynn effect is an obvious way to debunk the bell curve rubbish. Other ways of course is to ask them to provide studies that Blacks with more European genes (ie more mixed) do better than blacks with more African genes (ie less mixed) in tests of intelligence.

Books on the geography and history of human genes like this one helps as well. Ultimately when you find that the variation between a race is greater than the variation between the means of different races, it makes it very hard to define race on a biological level (as opposed to mostly a cultural and social level with some biological components).

If they can't define race on a biological level, then its very hard for them to point out a biological explanation for differing IQ scores between the races. But I suspect such arguments are a bit hard for them to handle and we get the "how can races not exist" strawman.

[madd0ct0r]

yup. got to keep inside their misinformed box to truly bust it open. Annoyingly, the evidence ain't as clear as I'd like.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

Mean levels of three characteristics—verbal IQ, number of sexual partners, and birth weight—were examined in African American, White (European-descent) Americans, and Black/White mixed race American adolescents. The sample came from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The mean age was 16 years. According to their interviewers, the mixed race children had an African American physical appearance. The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.

http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/gF ... view98.pdf is pretty damning, but the website is owned by Rushton, who keeps coming up in my search. He doesn't like black people much.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx also quotes a rushton paper. I've emailed the journal to ask if this issue actually existed, as it's not on the website.

[mr friendly guy]

Rushton seems to be a favourite of racists, not just whites, but I have seen Chinese quote him as well. I started a topic on him in SLAM a while ago. This guy is a nutjob who is obsessed with the size of a black man's penis (which he attributes as a trade off for the higher intelligence in whites and East Asians), and once asked a bunch of people in a shopping mall how far they could ejaculate. Yep, real science at work there.

I am always weary of scientists commenting outside their field of specialty. Rushton is a psychologist (I remember a debate years ago between Darth Wong and CS strowbridge about whether psychology is a real science). Rushton has commented on anthropology, disagreeing with the majority who argue that race is mostly a social construct. He has also made some awesome ignorant posts on evolution.

For example he says that Whites and Asians have wider hip size than blacks, because of bigger brains.

Of course it never occurred to him why human babies are immature (and helpless) even compared to our primate relatives. Its because our brains are too big to come out of such a narrow pelvis, so evolutionary speaking, we come out immature and our brains continue to develop.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ng-to-walk

In other words evolution didn't use wider hips to help with our brain size, it used less mature brains at birth. But this is what happens a lot when a pseudoscientist comments outside his field of specialty.

[D.Turtle]

Moved to SLAM from N&P.

[Lord Relvenous]

yup. got to keep inside their misinformed box to truly bust it open. Annoyingly, the evidence ain't as clear as I'd like.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

Mean levels of three characteristics—verbal IQ, number of sexual partners, and birth weight—were examined in African American, White (European-descent) Americans, and Black/White mixed race American adolescents. The sample came from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The mean age was 16 years. According to their interviewers, the mixed race children had an African American physical appearance. The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.

http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/gF ... view98.pdf is pretty damning, but the website is owned by Rushton, who keeps coming up in my search. He doesn't like black people much.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx also quotes a rushton paper. I've emailed the journal to ask if this issue actually existed, as it's not on the website.

Unless the performers of that study perfectly eliminated all the other variables that would factor into those three characteristics, that study is bullshit. Studies must be conducted with only one variable, otherwise there's no telling what's actually causing any variance. As I do for all studies that supposedly validate a irrational or bigoted view, I assume selection bias and uncontrolled variables led to their convenient result.

[mr friendly guy]

This is Rushton we are talking about. He literally says this is India's IQ, this is China's, around 20 points higher. China is higher therefore we (re : white people) can work with them. He makes no attempt to correct for the gross disparity in GDP, living standards etc between the two countries. He just says in a study of white twins living in the same country, the different environments leads to a difference of 4 IQ points tops. Thus the TOTALLY differing environmental conditions between China and India can only lead to a 4 IQ point difference instead of the 20 observed, so it must be genetic.

The sad thing is, some Chinese people lap this up, because they don't actually understand science and logic. No I am not making that last part up. That person has literally said logic doesn't matter when I confronted him, and fails to realise science has been using logical principles in its methodology for hundreds of years, and refuse to acknowledge all my links to that effect. But I have said this before, there are stupid people everywhere, so Asians are not an exception. And I am Asian myself.

[madd0ct0r]

I remember your rushton thread. at the time I filed it under 'crazy man shouts at clouds.'
I had no idea how pervasive his shit was in this debate.

[EgalitarianJay]

yup. got to keep inside their misinformed box to truly bust it open. Annoyingly, the evidence ain't as clear as I'd like.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/6dydh0fawxuuhg1r/

Mean levels of three characteristics—verbal IQ, number of sexual partners, and birth weight—were examined in African American, White (European-descent) Americans, and Black/White mixed race American adolescents. The sample came from Wave 1 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The mean age was 16 years. According to their interviewers, the mixed race children had an African American physical appearance. The African American adolescents had a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did White adolescents. For each characteristic, the mixed race mean fell between the means of the two parental populations.

http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/gF ... view98.pdf is pretty damning, but the website is owned by Rushton, who keeps coming up in my search. He doesn't like black people much.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx also quotes a rushton paper. I've emailed the journal to ask if this issue actually existed, as it's not on the website.

If you want to see Rushton defend his research in debate check out these videos on my Youtube channel:









At the end of the first video there are several links to counter studies that refute his research.

Among them I highly recommend the research of Joseph L Graves an evolutionary biologist who has studied racial theories about mental differences and critiqued Rushton's evolutionary theory that explains his research in detail. You can watch Graves rebuttal to Rushton's arguments in the second video.


Here is a brief summary of Graves arguments:

1. Rushton's arguments rely on r- and K- life history theory. These designations are general descriptions of investment in reproduction and somatic tissue on opposite ends of a spectrum (r- = more reproduction/less soma and K- = less reproduction/more soma.) The problem with this notion is that it has been shown to be incorrect in a series of experiments with a wide variety of organisms. No one took this theory seriously after about 1990.

2. Even if r- and K- theory were correct, I showed that Rushton applied it backwards. By the theory, Africans should be K- selected (K selection occurs in stable environments, such as the tropics) while r-selection was to be favored in fluctuating environments, such as the temperate zones. So by Rushton's reasoning, Africans should be more genetically capable of intelligence, and Europeans/Asians less.

3. Throughout his work, Rushton selectively uses examples to support his ideas. I have caught him manipulating data in unclear ways, for the purposes of making his points.

4. Rushton requires the existence of biological races, which humans do not have. The existence of geographically based genetic variation is not the same as proving races exist, or that in life history features all Africans are different from all Europeans.

I debated a supporter of Rushton's work who desperately tried to defend him and pointed out that not only is Graves qualified to speak with authority on the topic of evolutionary genetics but he wrote articles that critiqued Rushton which Rushton never responded to. This prompted him to email Rushton himself to get a response to Graves.

This is Rushton's email response:

Several years ago Joseph Graves did write a book chapter critique of my life-history explanation of race differences. I no longer recall it in detail except that he had ducked the main part, that is, the data.

As you know, most race research focuses on Black-White differences in the US in IQ, education, crime, and marital stability. My research went a lot further to cover some 60 variables such as speed of maturation, brain size (three separate indicators), rate of producing twins at birth, longevity, testosterone, sexual behavior, etc. Moreover, I looked at African descended people in the Caribbean, Canada, the UK, and sub-Saharan Africa. and found the same Black-White differences where ever they were studied. Most crucial, I looked at East Asians on all the same 60 characteristics and found they had higher IQ scores, larger brains, less sexual activity, less crime, fewer twins per 1,000 births etc.

In other words, a highly consistent three-way pattern of racial differences exists in brain size, intelligence, sexuality, personality, speed of maturation, life span, crime, and family stability in which East Asian descended people fall at one end of the spectrum, African descended people fall at the other, and European descended people fall intermediate, typically close to East Asians. East Asians are slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, with larger brains and higher IQ scores. They also engage in greater social organization and less crime than Africans who are at the opposite ends in each of these areas. My 1995 book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior summarized these theories and the evidence supporting them.

So, the fundamental question is, how do we explain the consistent three-way pattern? No environmental theory alone can do so. Only evolutionary theory in which genetics are crucial can account for the pattern If Dr. Graves can come up with a better theory or show the data is different than I described, he should do so. But he has not done so.

I forwarded the email to Graves and this was his response:

Rushton's memory of my critique is quite limited. First, it began with an evaluation of the efficacy of r- and K- theory in general. Professional life-history evolutionists (of which I am, and he is not) no longer regard r- and K- theory as a useful research paradigm. This dismantling occurred due to a series of experiments that tested the predictions of r- and K-theory and showed that they did not hold up in a wide variety of species. Second, I demonstrated that Rushton misapplied r- and K- theory; indeed by MacArthur and Wilson (the originators of r- and K-theory) Africans would be K-selected and Europeans and East Asians (r-selected); just the opposite of what Rushton claimed. Third, I demonstrated that much of the data he cited to make his case was flawed either in collection or source; particularly data like "social organization" and "crime". Thus at three levels his r- and K-theory approach to human life history variation fails. So I challenge the notion his 3-way spectrum is real; secondly even if it were real, he has not presented an evolutionary theory that could explain it; and third that environmental differences could easily explain much of what he reports.

I also showed Rushton's email to another scholar who has debated and critiqued Rushton.

Here is his response:

As for that email, the bulk is just filler, a restatement of the abstract for Rushton's book. His thesis here is simply that this conjunction of data (his 'highly consistent three-way pattern of racial differences') is significant and can only be explained genetically.

The problems with this claim are so great that it's sometimes hard to know
where to begin, but in general, here are some of the main problems:

(1) Aggregation of data is only useful if some degree of control and
comparability are exerted over the data being aggregated - otherwise, you
end up with the GIGO Rule (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Many of Rushton's
data sources are exceptionally poor, to the point of being caricatures of scientific research: thus, one of his primary sources on 'sexual behaviour' is a book of 19th-century travel porn, of no serious scientific value, and many of the studies that he cites on IQ and brain size are based on datasets that even people who agree with him accept as unreliable. In the most direct sense, many of his data are the garbage in the GIGO Rule.

You may or may not have read David Barash's review of Rushton's
methodology: "...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.
Review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior. _Animal Behaviour_ 49:1131-1133

(2) Aggregating data on (say) brain size or twinning rates into his three 'racial' groupings conceals the very significant variations in aggregated
characteristics _within_ those racial groups. Essentially, he reduces
very, very, very diverse characteristics down to single numbers, then
generalizes those single numbers to every population within his putative
races. However, averages among diverse populations tell you almost nothing
about the distributions of those diverse characteristics, nor about the
evolutionary pressures that might have brought them into being.

(3) Many of the characteristics that he thinks are evolutionarily
determined have actually changed dramatically over historical time-periods
in different parts of the world (and are extremely variable _within_ his
'racial' populations - see #2 above): besides obvious things like
longevity, fertility and infant mortality rates, these include characteristics like twinning rates, speed of sexual maturation/first menarche and so on. He treats them as immutable evolutionary differences, whereas in fact they seem entirely sensitive to historical contingency
over short time-scales.

Best

Scott

That should give you a good idea of the problems with his work.

[mr friendly guy]

If Rushton thinks East Asians are less fertile, how the hell does he explain China having more population than Africa combined, even though the latter has more land mass. Why the hell did China need to even introduce a one child policy if they were already not that fertile? Sometimes the comedy just writes itself. But when you are desperate to maintain an ideology, you do all sorts of mental gymnastics which in turn are stupid.

Thanks EgalitarianJay. I will peruse the links when time permits, but I have seen the Suzuki vs Rushton debate before.

Edit - I just realise he will most probably argue that Africa has a higher attrition rate than China, hence China doesn't need to be that fertile. Of course the higher child hood mortality etc is due to environment more so than genetics.

[EgalitarianJay]

If you watch the Graves vs. Rushton video (at 1:05:15) Graves actually cited research that shows that the intrinsic rate of increase of the Chinese population has changed dramatically over the centuries which completely invalidates Rushton's claim that human populations evolved different reproductive strategies because a population would not show major differences in birth rates over generations if their genes determined their fertility.

Your point about the Chinese population being greater than the whole continent of Africa was mentioned by C Loring Brace in his review of Rushton's book:

The book clearly qualifies as "bad biology," but consider some of what is passed off as anthropology. In addition to a roster of undocumented assertions and elementary errors in fact too extensive to enumerate here, we are told that, in Africa, "biological parents do not expect to be the major providers for their children" (p. 156) and that "it is almost certain that only evolutionary (and thereby genetic) theories can explain it" (p. 264). Here Rushton has taken the r/K generalizations applied by evolutionary ecologists for between-species comparisons and applied them to pass judgment on human "races." The slightly shorter African gestation length and slightly higher rate of twinning qualifies "Negroids" as committed to the r-strategy of producing offspring in quantity without much care given to their future survival. Northern "races," in contrast, favor the K-strategy of giving more care to fewer children. None of this is based on any data derived from realized-reproduction figures, and one would never guess from it that there are more than three times as many Chinese as Africans in the world.

[madd0ct0r]

...

That should give you a good idea of the problems with his work.

that was fucking beautiful - thanks for putting it together.

[EgalitarianJay]

...

That should give you a good idea of the problems with his work.

that was fucking beautiful - thanks for putting it together.

Thanks. I think the best way to view Rushton's research is to recognize that it is not science.

It's pseudoscience (fake science).

It doesn't follow the Scientific Method.





Abagond on Pseudoscience

Science is what your science teacher at school said it was:

1. Gather facts.
2. Come up with a hypothesis to make sense of them.
3. Test the hypothesis.

The important thing is that the hypothesis can be tested and can fail. That gives science a way to root out its own errors.

Pseudoscience is the opposite:

1. Come up with the desired conclusion.
2. Gather facts that support the conclusion.
3. Find excuses for the facts that do not fit.

This is called confirmation bias. Ideas are never put to a do-or-die test. Errors remain.

Science makes progress though discovery and disproof. It tries to knock down its own ideas because disproof is way easier than proof. It loves facts that do not fit because they point to new ideas and discoveries.

Pseudoscience never makes new discoveries that go against its claims. It makes excuses to discount facts that do not fit. Far from knocking down its own ideas, it sticks to them long after mainstream science has left them behind.


Rory Coker: Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience


Pseudoscience displays an indifference to facts.

Instead of bothering to consult reference works or investigating directly, its advocates simply spout bogus "facts" where needed. These fictions are often central to the pseudoscientist's argument and conclusions. Moreover, pseudoscientists rarely revise. The first edition of a pseudoscience book is almost always the last, even though the book remains in print for decades or even centuries. Even books with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page may be reprinted as is, over and over. Compare this to science textbooks that see a new edition every few years because of the rapid accumulation of new facts and insights.

Pseudoscience is indifferent to criteria of valid evidence.

The emphasis is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific experiments. Instead it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony, stories and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine scientific literature is either ignored or misinterpreted.

In 1994, The Free Press published Richard Herrnstein and Charles R. Murray’s The Bell Curve. This book claimed that the ‘black’ race was genetically deficient in intellect and that this deficiency was responsible for their social stagnation in American society. Few people realized that this claim was heavily influenced by the racial ideas of Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton. Many view Rushton as a respectable scholar who has raised important questions concerning how evolutionary theory allows us to understand the significance of race in modern society. In reality, he is a spider spinning a pseudoscientific web of incorrectly stated hypotheses supported with dubious evidence. His ideas have not graduated beyond those of the anthropologists of the early 20th century. They were convinced that race was a key explanatory variable in the evolution of human society.


Rushton’s technique of misrepresentation of legitimate research is similar to the tactics utilized by creationists when they assault evolution. Typically the creationist will present a large number of distortions of scientific fact, such that if the evolutionary biologist were to address them all, the audience would simply get lost in the details. Thus, it is necessary to first dismantle the core assumptions of Rushton’s work, i.e. r- and K-selection theory. Having accomplished that, it becomes easier to understand how he has misrepresented biological data to fit his bankrupt hypothesis. In addition, much of his social science data has been collected by dubious means. Thus, Rushton argues genetic causality for racial differences utilizing a discredited theory and questionable data.

Concluding Remarks

J.P. Rushton’s view of human evolution suffers from the use of antiquated and simplistic theoretical models concerning life history evolution. In addition, his methods of data analysis, results, and data sources call into question the legitimacy of his research. In the unabridged version of his book, he claims ‘to have reviewed the international literature on race differences, gathered novel data and found a distinct pattern’ (Rushton, 1995: xiii). This is fallacious on many accounts. Although the scope of the literature is international, to an extent, the data are not novel and the pattern he ‘found’ is hardly distinct from common racist stereotypes. He has only spun a tangled web of disingenuous construction speculations, in which:

1. He failed to grasp the history and formulation of density dependent selection theory.

2. He failed to review the critical experiments that falsified the central predictions of r- and K-selection theory.

3. He incorrectly applied r- and K-theory to explain human life history evolution.

4. He has presented data that are woefully inadequate to test any specific hypothesis concerning the evolution of human life histories.

Source: What a tangled web he weaves: Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory Anthropological Theory Vol 2(2): 131–154

[mr friendly guy]

To be fair, people who believe Rushton aren't exactly budding scientists. They may even WORSHIP science, but fail more importantly to UNDERSTAND it. It becomes a struggle using analogies to explain to them something blatantly obvious why that is bad. For example I have debated some people use the following comparisons to illustrate a difference between races, at the same time saying I am not judging which difference is better (but we both know the intelligence difference is the one they hark on).

1. Blacks run faster - see the Olympic games.

2. Chinese do better at academics, eg smaller proportion of the US population yet won Nobel prizes in science for the US etc.

No attempt is made to control any other variables besides the one they are testing (ie race). They just attribute the difference to genetics between races (as opposed to environmental, genetic difference between individuals etc). To me and frankly anyone who did Grade 8 science in Australia, its obvious why their comparison is poorly thought out science.

For point 1 I would turn it around, and point out that not all Blacks run fast, by pointing out Blacks who do better at long distance running and win medals that way, eg Kenyan athletes. Its physiologically difficult to do both, due to the former requiring fast twitch fibres, while the latter requiring slow twitch, and there is only so many fibres you can squeeze in. Thus if we take these traits as a variation between races rather than a variation between individuals, Blacks that are good at long distance (and hence crap at sprints) are not really Blacks.

2. I was tempted to do something like link to the list of US competitors in weight lifting and note the zero athletes with Chinese surnames, and conclude from that, that Chinese as a people aren't built for weight lifting. Then link to wikipedia page on weight lifting gold medals, and point out that weight lifting is a strong sport for China (and has been a "traditional" strength in Olympic games) with Chinese being very dominant in the sport. Then conclude that Chinese in China are a different race from Chinese in America.

These people use the same flawed thinking of Creationists. They don't take their premise to its logical conclusion. They don't realise if I take their methodology to its logical conclusion, I can conclude that Kenyans aren't black or that Chinese in China are a different race to Chinese in America.

[Humphnaegal]

I'm not sure there's much point debunking a racist using evidence, if you couldn't, yourself, inversely become a racist if there was enough evidence.

It's a strong emotional reaction to people who look different. That's all it is, in spite of how much evidence is twisted to bolster it.