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What a tangled web he weaves

Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory

Arizona State University West, USA, joseph.graves{at}asu.edu

The last decade of the 20th century experienced a resurgence of genetically based theories of racial hierarchy regarding intelligence and morality. Most notably was Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994), that claimed genetic causality for long-standing racial differences in IQ. In addition, it raised the time worn argument that the over-reproduction of genetically deficient individuals within our population would lead to a serious decline in average American intelligence. These authors provided no specific rationale for why these genetic differences should exist between human `races'. Instead, they relied heavily on the work of Canadian psychologist J. Philipe Rushton (in The Bell Curve, 1994, Appendix 5: 642—3). Rushton has advanced a specific evolutionary genetic rationale for how gene frequencies are differentiated between the `races' relative to intelligence. He claims that human racial differences result from natural selection for particular reproductive strategies in the various racial groups. Rushton's theory is based entirely on the concept of r- and K-selection, first explicitly outlined by MacArthur and Wilson in 1967. This article examines both the flaws in the general theory, and specifically Rushton's application of that same theory to human data. It concludes that neither Rushton's use of the theory nor the data that he has assembled could possibly test any meaningful hypotheses concerning human evolution and/or the distribution of genetic variation relating to reproductive strategies or `intelligence', however defined.

Key Words: human races • IQ • life history theory • pseudoscience • psychometry • r- and K-selection • racism

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2, 131-154 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/1469962002002002627


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