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CHOICE Review

Rushton's work is one of three contemporary books that have resurrected, in various guises, the myth of racial differences in intelligence. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (CH, May'95) has received more public notoriety, possibly due to better costuming and greater verbiage, but Rushton's work is at least as inflammatory. The basic thesis that Rushton pursues is that the major groups of humanity evolved under conditions that fostered differing reproductive strategies. Evolution and reproduction can be viewed as a game, the goal of which is to maximize the rate at which one passes genes along to the next generation relative to other members of the species. Different species are known to adopt strategies for playing the game. Some attempt to maximize care for a small number of offspring, thereby ensuring that the few offspring will all survive to reproduce themselves; others minimize parental care and investment while maximizing reproductive rates. These alternatives are referred to as the K-strategy (the former) and r-strategy. It is Rushton's contention that some human "races" are more K-strategists than others, and that this has noticeably affected the intellectual capabilities of members of each group. It is difficult to know where to start in pointing to the errors in concept and fact in the book. For one, the r-K continuum is applicable to different species, but not to groups within a species. The craniometric data is fraught with problems, including poor technique and racial biases. Psychologists are hardly clear as to what intelligence is and how to measure it, but virtually all do agree that within the human species, brain size is a poor indicator. The classification of humans into three major races is anthropologically naive. It is a sad commentary that works such as Rushton's are still referred to as scientific by some. The only positive aspect is that his book proves that freedom of expression is still operating in the US. M. L. Weiss; Wayne State University