Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective

“(An) incendiary thesis....that separate races of human beings evolved different reproductive strategies to cope with different environments and that these strategies led to physical differences in brain size and hence in intelligence. Human beings who evolved in the warm but highly unpredictable environment of Africa adopted a strategy of high reproduction, while human beings who migrated to the hostile cold of Europe and northern Asia took to producing fewer children but nurturing them more carefully.” —Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times Book Review “Rushton is a serious scholar who has assembled serious data. Consider just one example: brain size. The empirical reality, verified by numerous modem studies, including several based on magnetic resonance imaging, is that a significant and substantial relationship does exist between brain size and measured intelligence after body size is taken into account and that the races do have different distributions of brain size.” —Charles Murray, Afterword to The Bell Curve