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J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON Race, Evolution, and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition) Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000, 108 pages. (ISBN 0-9656838-2-1, US$5.95, Softcover) Reviewed by FREDRIC WEIZMANN
In 1995, Philippe Rushton wrote Race, Evolution and Behavior, which summarized his ideas about race and racial differences. As many readers of this journal are aware, Rushton assumes that the major racial groupings of humankind represent a deep biological and evolutionary reality, and that there are important racial differences caused by evolutionary differences in reproductive strategies. Rushton claims that Blacks ("Negroids" in his terminology) are less intelligent, more sexually precocious and promiscuous, less involved in parenting, and more likely to engage in criminal behaviour than "Mongoloids." "Caucasoids" fall between the two other groups in all those characteristics.
The book caused considerable controversy. The sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, director of the book's publishing house, Transaction Press, felt compelled to defend the fact of its publication on scholarly grounds (although Horowitz himself criticized Rushton's ideas in Society, the social-science journal that he edited). Even more controversy was sparked in 1999, when Rushton published, under the Transaction imprint, a 108-page "special abridged edition" of the book. Some 40,000 copies of the book were mailed, unsolicited, to psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, many of whom were angered when they discovered that their identities and addresses had been obtained from their respective professional associations' mailing lists. The associations for their part maintained that while they had provided mailing lists to the publishers to advertise the 1995 edition of the book, the later use of the list was unauthorized.
Horowitz, who had defended the initial edition of the book, wrote an open letter dissociating Transaction Press from the revised version, stating that the author (aided financially by the Pioneer Fund, the controversial conservative foundation that has for many years supported Rushton's research) paid for the book's publication, and that Transaction's role was limited to printing and distributing it. Horowitz condemned the abridged edition as a "pamphlet" that he had never seen or approved prior to its publication. In...