
For those who are fascinated by what is sometimes called “Based Science” — science which fearlessly examines the empirical evidence no matter how “controversial” the findings might be — a breakthrough took place recently: “Rushton’s Paradox” was solved at last, using genomic data. To those who are not initiated, this may sound rather abstruse and academic, but it is massively important: It is a breakthrough.
The theory of one of the most “controversial” scientists ever to live has finally been proven correct: At the individual level, intelligence — the ability to solve cognitive problems — is associated with a slow Life History Strategy, i.e., developing more slowly because you are evolved to a more difficult and highly specific environment, in which you need a long “learning period” — a long childhood — to be taught how to navigate. The implications of this are enormous, but, before we explore them, let’s have a look at the broader theory.
Even though he’s been dead for 12 years, there are few social scientists more loathed by the Woke than J. Philippe Rushton (1943-2012). As I have discussed in my biography of him, J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective, the Canadian government tried to prosecute this British-born Canadian when, back in 1989, he presented his Differential-K model of racial differences at a conference. This model placed Blacks at one end of a spectrum and East Asians at the other, with Whites intermediate in terms of intelligence, psychopathic personality, age at puberty, interest in promiscuous sex over investment and nurture, and much else, but closer to East Asians.
In the resulting furore, students invaded Rushton’s department at the University of Western Ontario and scrawled “Racist Pig Lives Here” on his office door, the premier of Ontario declared that Rushton’s views were “morally offensive” to how people of his state think, newspaper cartoons portrayed Rushton in Ku Klux Klan robes, his lectures were invaded by protestors, his faculty dean tried to wreck his career with a politically-motivated “unsatisfactory” rating and he required a security escort while on campus. Even so, there was no legal case against him and, in 1995, he doubled-down, publishing Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective which set out his theory in depth.
According to Rushton, an r-strategy develops in an unstable yet easy environment. In such a situation, you could be wiped out at any moment, so you evolve to “live fast and die young.” You invest all your energy in mating—in order to have as many offspring as possible with as many partners as possible in the hope that some will survive. You invest very little energy in nurture, because such energy could easily go to waste. Any individual child could be killed at any moment.
This r-strategy is reflected in every aspect of your “life history”—you’re born younger (less developed), you reach developmental milestones younger, you go through puberty younger, lose your virginity younger, you age more quickly, you go through the menopause younger and you die younger. You also advertise your genetic quality as conspicuously as you can—as the end is always nigh—leading to large sexual characteristics, strong body odor, and so on. Rushton presented some of these data in Race, Evolution and Behavior and I added to them in my biography of him.
As the environment becomes more stable and also harsher, the carrying capacity for the species is reached. So, its members start competing more against each other to survive, moving towards a K-strategy. In such a harsh but predictable context, if you invest all your energy in mating then you may find that all of your offspring die. Hence, you have fewer offspring and fewer sexual partners but you invest more in them; you “nurture” them. There develops an arms-race where the species becomes increasingly adapted to the (predictable) ecology.
It does this by learning about the ecology and learning how to cooperate (bonding) and thus becoming higher in altruism, empathy and impulse control — and, perhaps most importantly, by becoming more intelligent. The result is that the offspring can learn about the environment and how to cooperate—and “life history speed” begins to slow down. Parents invest more energy in nurture of a (smaller number of) offspring and less energy in mating. They go for “quality over quantity.” With limited bio-energetic resources, secondary sexual characteristics also become smaller.
As they become more K-strategy, in a stable environment where they can trust that tomorrow will come, litters become smaller, offspring are born later, they develop more slowly, they go through puberty later (learning a great deal in their long childhood), they lose their virginity later, they age more slowly and, for genetic reasons, they die older, giving them more time to pass on their genes. Rushton showed that what he called the “three Big Races” occupy different positions on the r-K spectrum. Northeast Asians are the most K-evolved, Caucasians (a combination of Europeans, South Asians, Arabs and North Africans) are intermediate and Blacks are the most r-evolved.
Rushton’s Paradox was always that evidence could not be found that intelligence correlated with Life History Speed at the individual level, even though it did at the group level. This was so puzzling — and such a problem for the cleanness of Rushton’s model, that he may even have falsified data or otherwise manipulated his results to prove that such a relationship did exist, as I explored in J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective.
I also note there that, as appears to be the case with many genius or semi-genius (highly original) scientists, Rushton’s life evidenced a combination of a very high intelligence and fast Life History traits such as sub-clinical psychopathology [see F. Post, Creativity and Psychopathology: A Study of 291 World Famous Men, British Journal of Psychiatry, 1994]. This meant he didn’t care about offending people (which new ideas always do, as they challenge vested interests), and he was low in rule-following (so could think the unthinkable). Consistent with this, he was divorced three times, had extra-marital affairs, knocked his third wife about, had an illegitimate child by a relationship with a Black woman, dropped out of school and got a girl of about 15, and possibly younger, pregnant.
But if Rushton did falsify data, he needn’t have done so. A new study has proved him correct. The preprint “Genome-wide association meta-analysis of age at onset of walking” by Anna Gui and colleagues has presented a meta-analysis of age at onset of walking, using data on 70,560 European infants. It looked at the relationship between age of onset of walking and alleles that are associated, via very high educational attainment, with intelligence. It found that the age at which you start walking is positively correlated with polygenic scores for intelligence: Kids who are eventually more intelligent learn to walk later; their childhood is longer.
And as if Rushton — with his penchant for “controversy” — laughing from beyond the grave, even this has stirred things up. Researcher Emil Kirkegaard has noted that this new study was originally tweeted out by a mainstream academic. He then deleted the tweet stating: “Unfortunately, it has attracted many racist responses that abused the study to make ugly, racist claims.” There were no racist claims, but it did vindicate Rushton’s theory.
It also adds credence to an idea I have been toying with for quite a while. Why is it that, in advanced societies, intelligent people desire fewer children and why are they less religious than the less intelligent?
One possibility is that these are in-built instincts that are induced in our “evolutionary match” of high mortality salience and the desire to have children. As I explored in my book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, we’ve been surrounded by high child mortality for most of our history. This is our “evolutionary match”: We desired many children because it was quite probably that many would die before adulthood. You would expect the more intelligent to be lower in “instinct” because solving problems involves rising above instinctive reactions and calmly and logically reasoning. It would follow that intelligent people would be more environmentally sensitive; they would be K-strategists, needing to be put on the correct road-map of life to adapt to a specific niche. If this didn’t happen — if they were in a mismatch — they’d become maladaptive, such as by not desiring children. So, the new finding is in line with this theory.
There may have been much to dislike about Rushton personally, but this is part of why he was a highly original thinker. With this new research, his grand theory has been vindicated.
Intelligent reluctance to enter the world of good and evil is a clear validation of platonic theory, which holds that the ideal destiny of the immortal psyche is inevitably greater than its finite presence.
Surprisingly, the pure-blood Negrid demonstrates an inchoate understanding of this basic realty of human embodiment, as shown in the following short study that may interest Unz.Com readers:
https://www.academia.edu/49131287/Brief_Exposition_on_the_Depth_of_the_Negrid_Face
Note that to view the article, simply SCROLL DOWN; no sign-in is necessary. Thanks.
Soon enough the only truth that will exist will be what you bothered to save on your own computer before the Great Deletion of the internet. It will be brought back ups in just a week or so, but very little other than the MSM and other propaganda sites will exist on it. Brush up on the dark web….
absolute hogwash, my son was walking by six months and drawing by nine months, he completed grade school math by 7 and algebra by 9, because he was home schooled and not held back by idiots that understand nothing of childhood development.
this article seems like a feel good affirmation, for stemtards that throw a baseball like a girl. yeah, yeah, yeah, i know einstein didn’t talk, until he was four.
My Football, Soccer theory is that black players tend to shine early in their professional careers but rarely reach potential like a white guy who hits prime around 25-27.
Coaches beware of hiring the fast paced black boys. They may not end up doing your squad any good. Don’t let the skillful slighter white teenagers drop away from the sport as they will grow into the job of professionalism later. As God or Nature appears to have ordained it.
math skills tend to peak in the mid 20’s, what did newton do after 27? there is a window for learning and our current western educational systems are either clueless to this or purposefully destroying the potential of future generations.
” had an illegitimate child by a relationship with a Black woman”
I always had a passing interest in Rushton and his work, but now reading the above has made me write him off completely.
“absolute hogwash, my son was walking by six months and drawing by nine months, he completed grade school math by 7 and algebra by 9, because he was home schooled and not held back by idiots that understand nothing of childhood development.”
What is he doing now, has he done well and continued with that high performance curve or has his performance curve flattened out?
he received a full bright futures scholarship to any state school but chose a private school, because his girlfriend wanted to take her nursing degree in a school with minarets (that didn’t have a real math department) after 27, he flatten out into a libratard. i did my best.
Since the even the greatest artists (such as Raphael) started to achieve things only about age eight (which was ten years ahead of most), it would be extraordinary for any child of less than a year old to anything of substance in drawing. If the drawings are posted online anywhere we would like to see them. By the way, it well documented that even geniuses in math tend to flourish only after their teen years.
“he received a full bright futures scholarship to any state school but chose a private school, because his girlfriend wanted to take her nursing degree in a school with minarets (that didn’t have a real math department) after 27, he flatten out into a libratard. i did my best.”
At least you tried, hopefully, he’ll still come around.
I don’t think a statistical correlation implies an Iron Law.
As a very general rule, theoreticians of Negro inferiority or animalism, do have at an abnormal degree extensive love and sex affairs with some black partner, which far from giving up out of a reaction of disappointment by racial reality leading them to sublimate their personal findings into scientific works of some sort, they continue to entertain and repeat all life-long as a personal fantasy while they warn their public against them (in other words they sexually fantasize about bequeathing a more stupid world to the following generations through their own personal action). This kind of pseudo-scientist is even worse than those who thronged around the lefty gurus and hollered for desegregation and racial equality while taking utmost care only White workers would suffer from it, not them.
Moreover Rushton in case you haven’t noticed is a Jewish supremacist in his conclusions not a defender of his own kind. Rushton’s ideas are marked neither by much common sense (otherwise he would have abstained from sex with people he deems to be defective for reproduction with himself and rather indulged in some kind of more benevolent paternalistic racism such as Schweitzer’s) nor by great genius. He just keeps content from deriving conclusions from very gross and not so spectacular mass statistical data. For instance he highlights the superior IQ of many East Asians without considering that those East Asians, as a shame-and honour driven culture or genetic complexion (no matter), will take these tests far more seriously as real indicators of their own value up to the point of committing suicide when they fail them (which means that without such a pressure and driven only by their own interest for the subject of combination mathematics they would be no better than a guilt and pleasure driven culture such as the Mediterranean people maybe), while in Haiti, a fear and pride driven culture to the point of morbidity, supposedly on the lowest mean IQ of the world, people are as a rule conspiracy theorists and fear for being detected by the powers that be as too openly intelligent to be hired for confidence jobs, like poker-players who hide their game, and deliberately play dumb when given a test unless there is a real promise of a good promotion at the end of it, which is generally not the case at all.
Rushton is proud to remark that economic development has an about 100 mean IQ as a prerequisite as it is generally indicative of a more rational mass conduct leading to more competence in the execution of dreary, pleasure deferring technical jobs needed by a developed civilisation as well as to a disgust for corruption when it counteracts merit.
False : nearly all Slavic people despite having very honourable mental test results both in East and West (as immigrants) have been shown to be as utterly lacking of fine motor skills such as manifested by industrial peoples (there never was a tolerably good mass-produced personal car in Slavic countries without mass injection of foreign know-how and middle manpower : they are better at military production because it is a domain where concerns of efficiency per unit of work and resources deployed are not really at play) as are the people of Congo or of Central America, and they are known to be satisfied with an anti-meritocratic corruption-based economic (the only intellectual disciplines they do attain world champion level at are zero-sum games, such as chess) wherever they settle, in Detroit or Gary as well as in their native Poland or Russia.
when i say he was drawing, i’m not saying he was drawing like raphael, i mean he had a pencil in his hand for the majority of the day. it was how he amused himself, there was always plenty of paper available, paints, crayons, markers. he would make drawings of his favorite cartoon characters and cut them out, making elaborate sets for them. he had every toy in the world, but prefered to draw and make his own. i save all of his drawings in fileboxes and still have them buried in the closet. i haven’t look at them in years and i intended them to be an archive of his work and to document the changes in his skills as he grew up. they are really for him to find after i pass on.
i feel that early childhood development is critical and how much we speak and read to our children influences their final level of intelligence. i never spoke down to my son and i spoke to him as i would speak to my adult friends, if he didn’t understand what i was saying, he would ask and as a result he ended up with a large vocabulary at an early age. young children soak up knowledge like a sponge, especially language, we waste this time in our educational systems, that are little more than wearhouses and in the process we make kids hate learning, because they hate school.
my son learned to read playing video games, he didn’t even know he was being schooled. we also waste their early math skills by wasting grades one through six, teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, for six years. my son covered that in two years and we only worked for a couple hours a day. he loved learning and the older he got the more he pursued his studies out of his own interests.
Very interesting. Being an only child my parents I know invested a lot in me – but I also I also think there were a lot of missing links in my personality that made maneuvering through life socially difficult. Many light bulbs did not go off until I well into adulthood. Life has been one long, sometimes tedious, sometimes painful, and sometimes a joy of a learning experience.
Horse hockey! You are basically spewing verbal diarrhea throwing different kinds of info you picked up in your life and basically since now you have lots of info and think you are genius now decided to form it into a coherent theory of everything. Generally people who get in on Unz (including myself) are that type of individual.
No, you are not a genius, what you are doing is just throwing sh.. at a wall and hoping it will stick and not stink but you are so confused by all the info you don’t realize you are doing this.
Basically, its the same process Freud, Velikovsky, L Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith and lottsa others undergone. I kind of regret writing this because I know you will reply with some other weird info and I will reply with other weird info to that and you will reply to that with other weird info and I will reply to your weird info with other weird….in an endless loop (I know if we continue on that route it will eventually include old tank technology as it always does, the funny thing being is that neither of us have ever driven an old time tank but somehow we’re experts)
So to start let’s just address your BIZARRE belief that Slavs lack motor skills (that is indeed a bizarre belief, Holy F…! are you normal?), well here is my weird info:
Industrial manufacturing and design is all interconnected, components of an industry learn from each other. Skoda and Tatra, traditional Czech car brands (there were a lot more Czech car brands- all quite good) were finely made and the German auto industry learned a lot from them (and vice versa because industrial design and manufacturing is interconnected and people learn from each other-I know I said this already but you didn’t get it the first time around)-the VW Beetle was a copy of a Tatra car, in fact eventually VW, due to court decision, had to pay compensation for stealing the design. Skoda is part of the VW concern now but generally a Skoda is a much better assembled car than a VW. Generally over the centuries a Czech made thing was generally much better made than an equivalent German thing (we’ll leave the old tank technology until later).
That Russian goods (including cars) are shoddy is a long term Western propaganda thing. Generally (remember the emphasis is on generally) Russian things like cars, fridges, artificial penises, light bulbs outlast the lifetime of equivalent Western stuff-the shoddiness is actually Western (generally).
Russian shoddiness is the equivalent of Cold War Western propaganda that Slavic women are ugly (addressing Unz old-timers: do you remember that propaganda ploy? Who remembers that-please provide some examples if you have time). When things opened, the real fact was that they were much more beautiful than Western women (generally).
We generally don’t own Russian stuff since their stuff has been under high import taxes for a long time (that policy predates the Ukrainian war) and since we have no experience with owning Russian stuff we believe Western propaganda about it being shoddy just as we believed Western propaganda about Russian women being extremely ugly.
The point to you personally is that basically you think like your overlords want you to think, while you yourself believe you are some sort of an Earth-shaking rebel (your overlords are kind of OK with that). Funny how socialization works.
Oh…just to explain to those who might be interested…
…yeah the Soviets (the old-timey commie Soviets! not the current Russians!) manufactured dildoes with a feedback loop in the fifties including erection functions. I kid you not. Western dildo technology got stuck into the bunch of hard plastic paradigm which it never got out of. That there was a better technology alternative nobody in the West knows about due to Western arrogance (and the fact that the Soviets were pushing the limit the state-of-the-art fifties technology).
Hey, you didn’t know that did ya?…well now you know, add that to your store of information and make an overall theory of everything from it.
Let’s continue (don’t worry I’ll end soon); in order to assemble satellites, manned spacecraft (I think the current PC term is now personned spacecraft) electronic components, nuclear stuff and all that sh..you kindda have to have fine motor skills. Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, proud countries and all, never made a space probe or a man…personned spacecraft and their nuke tech was imported. Why is that? Obviously, Danes, the Swiss, Swedes lack fine motor skills and Russians can make this stuff while still managing to fart and play the balalaika at the same time too because of their fine motor skills (yeah yeah I’m messin’ with ya).
Look this debate has the potential of being endless. If you decide to reply because that is how you get self-esteem and sexual pleasure I have to forewarn you I know how you will reply and I will reply to that and we’ll eventually include a discussion of old tank technology which is a fate worse than getting rammed by a Western dildo.
Just let it go and accept you wrote something silly. C’mon we all do that especially if we have lots of info about non-related subjects that you want to share and that, for some reason, to you and me seems to fit into a coherent whole.
I’d have guessed that myself. A proportionately larger head will make walking harder.
It’s just like sitting up. Black babies can sit up earlier than white or Asian babies. Their heads are smaller.
Look at blacks some time. It’s not a hidden secret or a debatable point. On average, and proportionate to body size, their heads are smaller.
This is a reasonable remark in the context of an article whose focus is declared to be, not Rushton’s character, but confirmation of his theorizing.
Dutton has a lot more to say about Rushton’s failings, however.
What analytical purpose does all this serve? What relevance, if any, to Rushton’s findings can be adduced to justify detraction at this level of detail of a man who has been dead for a dozen years?
Professor Dutton, have you stopped beating your wife?
As we were always told, in life there are exceptions to the rule. Iron laws are for physics and chemistry ( jest intended )
I think Prof Dutton takes the view: you’re going to find out about this anyway, so it is best coming from me, who knew him personally, first. We can then set this to one side and concentrate on the man’s work.
That’s what I thought initially. Then it dawned on me that this is the trailer for a future article on Rushton..As Dutton wrote: “There may have been much to dislike about Rushton personally, but this is part of why he was a highly original thinker.”
It will look at the social iconoclast from the perspective of evolutionary psychology: their scofflaw attitude to laws, rules, sexual mores: their complete indifference to other peoples’ feelings and their habitual risk taking. The iconoclast’s context in formerly high trust societies will be examined. Coming soon:
J Phillipe Rushton, Anatomy of a Social Iconoclast
Nordic countries maintain robust registers . One easy way to refute support or maintain uncertainty is simply to look at the milestones in early childhood including motor developments and age of walking .Then ascertain relationship of walking to scholastic aptitude in school and colleges ,find relationship to success in career , and jobs, and to achievement in arts, politics, music,dance, athletics, medicine, IT,business, tech and finances .
Absolutely true about the women. Wtf was the late cold propaganda about that? Truly upside down.
A comment in this article to the effect that intelligent people desire fewer children would seem to oppose a main point of my favorite natalist (and economist) Bryan Caplan, who tirelessly advocates people have children for “selfish reasons.”
None of Caplan’s pronouncements would seem to have made any reference to the parents’ intelligence, but much about them would seem to assume/advocate that parents perform their parental obligations diligently, if not strenuously.
Look him up. He’s very interesting on a plethora of subjects.
> One possibility is that these are in-built instincts that are induced in our “evolutionary match” of high mortality salience and the desire to have children.
That’s very misleading. There actually is no such thing as “instincts that … desire to have children.” There is a sexual instinct which can result in a female cat going into heat every so often. And there is a maternal instinct which kicks in after the kittens have been born. But there is no instinct which actually coheres into a desire for children before the sexual act itself has been consummated.
Even human males can feel a paternal instinct to care for a child once it has been born. Human females, if not mentally deranged, will quite obviously feel a strong maternal instinct to care for the offspring of their loins. But any desire for children that may be formulated in the mind before the pregnancy itself is simply an intellectual concept. Humans are able to recognize patterns so that we not only are aware that sex leads to pregnancy in a way which animals are not, but we may even come to a conclusion that marriage and family might, at least in certain circumstances, prove beneficial in ways that are not anticipated by simple sexual desire.
If lower IQ individuals reproduce more frequently, this simply reflects the fact that such people are less likely to anticipate a need for birth-control until it is too late. They are more likely to engage in activities which result in unplanned pregnancy. A society which wants the higher IQ members to be reproducing needs to think more about granting respect to such individuals in a way which encourages reproduction. Perhaps some Asiatic societies still do this. Western societies stopped doing such during the economic boom which followed World War II. Even many of the most successful and well-respected people in the West of the last 75 years generally found that they could be a big hit by using birth-control, limiting pregnancy, and possibly banging a load of chicks. In such a context, there’s no reason to think that such people should want to produce a lot of children.
More so than Kirkegaard?