The late psychologist J. Philippe Rushton said: “Arthur Jensen got into this [IQ] business in the first place because teachers were calling him up and saying, ‘I don’t understand. I have two children here — a white child with an IQ of 70 and a black child with an IQ of 70 — and they are completely different. If you go to the playground, the white child with an IQ of 70, he looks a bit funny. He’s not playing with all the other children. He’s not a social animal. He does everything inappropriately. But the black kid with an IQ of 70 might be popular in the peer group. He knows the names of all of his people. He plays on the swings and the roundabouts. He has no trouble.”
Question: “Given the higher IQ of north-east Asians, do you have any theories why their civilizations haven’t given as much to the world, haven’t invented as many things?”
Phil: “The trouble with this whole field being so riddled with taboos is that there are so few scientists investigating fascinating questions such as the one you asked. Here we have a real anomaly. East Asians have a higher IQ but a lower level of cultural creativity.”
A questioner notes that while Orientals have higher IQs on average than whites but that whites IQs are more spread out (more geniuses and more dunces).
Phil: “There are three good reasons for why east Asians have higher IQs than whites but have not been as culturally innovative. The first one is that the bell-shaped distribution is different. Our bell-shaped curve goes out to the extreme. We have more geniuses than they do. A second possibility is that they have a cautious temperament, which inhibits them from being especially creative. The third one, the one that I am inclined to favor slightly, is that for most of history, the East Asians have been ahead of white Europeans, but there have been one or two little blips.. which have put us ahead. The last one was the Black Death through Europe. Like all viruses, it takes the top half more than the bottom half in social distribution. In other words, if you lose 50% of your population (the low IQ population), then the group that’s left, they moved in to towns, the brighter ones married the brighter ones. With assortative mating, you produced a flowering of high IQ people and the Renaissance. That’s what we’re still living on. East Asians are now reverting back up to their natural level of being slightly ahead of whites.”
David Duke: “Do you think the higher testosterone levels of whites over asians, could lead to more aggression… and the Faustian spirit that represents European mankind?”
Phil: “Yes. Creative genius requires a certain amount of psychopathy, a little bit of erratic behavior, a boldness in thinking, to go several steps further, and if it is channeled in the right way, then you get genius.”
Psychologist Linda S. Gottfredson wrote:
I review Rushton’s research on the evolutionary divergence of the three major human lineages. His life history theory predicts, and his multiple analyses document, a consistent three-way patterning of mean differences among blacks, whites, and East Asians on coevolved sets of morphological, physiological, developmental, psychological, and behavioral traits. I then analyze a typical example of how critics evaluate his work, including the rate at which they cast his scientific hypotheses, methods and conclusions in politically charged language. The set of articles in question, although authored by well-known academics and appearing in a major, peer-reviewed journal, illustrate how mob science works to ‘‘discredit’’ valid research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence. Rushton is a scholar and gentleman but it appears that his critics often act like neither.
