Jared Taylor marks Rushton’s death a few days ago with this eulogy, of which an excerpt below:
Phil’s crucial insight was to realize that different races show consistent patterns that reflect different reproductive strategies. At one extreme are East Asians, who are the most intelligent, have the largest brains, show the most sexual restraint, develop most slowly, live the longest, and are most law-abiding. This is consistent with having few children but taking very good care of them. At the other extreme are black Africans, whose behavior is consistent with less investment in larger numbers of children. On virtually every scale of r-K behavior (that is, on a scale of high-investment versus low-investment child-rearing), whites fall somewhere between Asians and blacks. Phil meticulously documented and argued this theory in his brilliant 1995 book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior.
I have read that book, and I can simply attest to the power, reasonableness and depth of its evidence and argument. Ruston is unacceptable to modern thought, but I do not see how we can ultimately be a tolerant liberal society on the basis of untruth. Race matters. If we have evolved, then humans have engaged in various survival strategies, and races (subsets of the human species) are the result of those differing evolutionary strategies. I am always shocked by the militant defence by lefties of Darwinism in the abstract but the denial of the effectiveness of those same forces acting upon us as a species for the past 20,000 years.
If we are to be tolerant and liberal, we need to be so on the basis of fact, not myth. We have to deal with our species as it is, and not as we would like it to be, in order to try to move it towards political solutions that are tolerant and liberal. If we were not different from each other in vital ways, there would be no need for the tolerance which is so much praised and so little practiced.
Phillippe Rushton 1943-2012