I'm almost "fine" with points 2 and 3 because researchers hardly admit their mistakes especially if they have strong ideology they want to push. It's very true in economics, in the past I mostly found myself discussing with economists who refuse to admit their errors likely because it's going to shake the foundation of their principles. And we also know egalitarian researchers in psychology who did much worse than this.
However with respect to the first point, it's indeed pretty bad because it's not easy to get funds for this line of research, so wasting the money even a "tiny" amount can be detrimental. I didn't know Rushton wasted money like this (but I did know about him using money for sending copies of his book). I still appreciate his contribution. Not just intriguing but also important.
Rushton was a somewhat sloppy researcher who was wont to draw strong conclusions from less than unequivocal data as long as his biases were affirmed. Of course, this means that he was no different than the average social scientist, but I would expect more from a hereditarian researcher challenging politically powerful dogmas. He was right often enough, but this was mostly just because the opposite side was so mendacious, rather than because of any virtue of his. I don't think his publications have much staying power. And he destroyed the Pioneer Fund, which was one of the only sources of funding for race realist research.
$600 K, yet per the ResearchGate link Cochran didn't even publish as a sole author within biology. And he expected a second round of free money? Ridiculous. At least with Rushton, one could presume his ideas were his own.
Thank you for this post. I became suspicious of Rushton when I found that both Mongoloids and Caucasoids are each phenotypically diverse, each with the full range of IQ variation (Mongoloids include both Australoids and Koreans, and Caucasoids include both Somalis and Ashkenazis), but Rushton used only samples within the USA and Canada. A single global spectrum of races would be more appropriate, not any number of racial categories. The three-race scheme of Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid is appropriate for forensic anthropology, because bone variation follows more from genetic drift, less from adaptation to climate, but all other phenotypic variation rests more on climate.
I thought maybe that was an honest mistake, but I became more suspicious after I looked into his claim that age of menarche (age at first menstruation) follows the expected racial hierarchy, with Blacks reaching age at menarche at a younger age, and this may be true within the USA, but actually the reverse is true globally: Black Africans reach an age at menarche at an older age, not a younger age.
Even at the time that Race, Evolution and Behavior was written, r/K selection theory was being abandoned by life-history theorists, and other models were taking its place, some that were effectively applied to humans by anthropologists. The model I prefer is the offspring quantity-quality trade-off model, which explains most of Rushton's data. This model is even more politically outrageous than r/K selection theory, but it gets right to the point, with much greater explanatory elegance, so it is a shame that Rushton overlooked it, and even more of a shame that Rushton's hypothesis misled evolutionary psychologists and hereditarian intelligence researchers who followed in his footsteps.
Rushton was really tenacious in ferreting out existing research data in an environment when it was politically impossible to get funding to produce new data. His male/female and white/black head and brain size studies over three years included obscure data from places like foreign military studies to determine helmet sizes. The more other researchers criticized his conclusions, year after year, the more supporting data he was able to dig up.
When his 19th century African colonial medical penis size data was criticized as being untrustworthy he uncovered WHO data on condom use promotion during their AIDS crisis, where the WHO frantically advised Western NPOs to manufacture larger condoms to send to Africa because the ones being sent didn’t fit. This shut up some critics for a while.
Lynn is also of the throw-everything-against-the-wall temperament: His world IQ data was of wildly varying quality, but as a first step that’s how you do it: Do the best you can to provoke others to pitch in and improve future iterations.
I wasn't aware that Unz funded research. Has he funded anyone else?
I'm almost "fine" with points 2 and 3 because researchers hardly admit their mistakes especially if they have strong ideology they want to push. It's very true in economics, in the past I mostly found myself discussing with economists who refuse to admit their errors likely because it's going to shake the foundation of their principles. And we also know egalitarian researchers in psychology who did much worse than this.
However with respect to the first point, it's indeed pretty bad because it's not easy to get funds for this line of research, so wasting the money even a "tiny" amount can be detrimental. I didn't know Rushton wasted money like this (but I did know about him using money for sending copies of his book). I still appreciate his contribution. Not just intriguing but also important.
Rushton was a somewhat sloppy researcher who was wont to draw strong conclusions from less than unequivocal data as long as his biases were affirmed. Of course, this means that he was no different than the average social scientist, but I would expect more from a hereditarian researcher challenging politically powerful dogmas. He was right often enough, but this was mostly just because the opposite side was so mendacious, rather than because of any virtue of his. I don't think his publications have much staying power. And he destroyed the Pioneer Fund, which was one of the only sources of funding for race realist research.
His 1989 debate with David Suzuki was wonderful in letting the famous Mr. Suzuki thoroughly self-beclown.
$600 K, yet per the ResearchGate link Cochran didn't even publish as a sole author within biology. And he expected a second round of free money? Ridiculous. At least with Rushton, one could presume his ideas were his own.
Thank you for this post. I became suspicious of Rushton when I found that both Mongoloids and Caucasoids are each phenotypically diverse, each with the full range of IQ variation (Mongoloids include both Australoids and Koreans, and Caucasoids include both Somalis and Ashkenazis), but Rushton used only samples within the USA and Canada. A single global spectrum of races would be more appropriate, not any number of racial categories. The three-race scheme of Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid is appropriate for forensic anthropology, because bone variation follows more from genetic drift, less from adaptation to climate, but all other phenotypic variation rests more on climate.
I thought maybe that was an honest mistake, but I became more suspicious after I looked into his claim that age of menarche (age at first menstruation) follows the expected racial hierarchy, with Blacks reaching age at menarche at a younger age, and this may be true within the USA, but actually the reverse is true globally: Black Africans reach an age at menarche at an older age, not a younger age.
Even at the time that Race, Evolution and Behavior was written, r/K selection theory was being abandoned by life-history theorists, and other models were taking its place, some that were effectively applied to humans by anthropologists. The model I prefer is the offspring quantity-quality trade-off model, which explains most of Rushton's data. This model is even more politically outrageous than r/K selection theory, but it gets right to the point, with much greater explanatory elegance, so it is a shame that Rushton overlooked it, and even more of a shame that Rushton's hypothesis misled evolutionary psychologists and hereditarian intelligence researchers who followed in his footsteps.
Rushton was really tenacious in ferreting out existing research data in an environment when it was politically impossible to get funding to produce new data. His male/female and white/black head and brain size studies over three years included obscure data from places like foreign military studies to determine helmet sizes. The more other researchers criticized his conclusions, year after year, the more supporting data he was able to dig up.
When his 19th century African colonial medical penis size data was criticized as being untrustworthy he uncovered WHO data on condom use promotion during their AIDS crisis, where the WHO frantically advised Western NPOs to manufacture larger condoms to send to Africa because the ones being sent didn’t fit. This shut up some critics for a while.
Lynn is also of the throw-everything-against-the-wall temperament: His world IQ data was of wildly varying quality, but as a first step that’s how you do it: Do the best you can to provoke others to pitch in and improve future iterations.
My takeaway is that Rushton was a Chad. I just cut a check to his son.