Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  The arguments in The Bell Curve are not novel, in our time or any other. In fact, earlier that same year, the prestigious journal Intelligence published an article by another controversial scientist, Philippe Rushton, in which he claimed that not only do blacks and whites differ in intelligence but also in maturation rate (age of first intercourse, age of first pregnancy), personality (aggressiveness, cautiousness, impulsivity, sociability), social organization (marital stability, law abidingness, mental health), and reproductive effort (permissiveness, frequency of sexual intercourse, size of male genitalia). In addition to lower IQs, Rushton believes that blacks have earlier maturation rates, higher impulsivity and aggressiveness, less mental health and law abidingness, more permissive attitudes and greater frequency of intercourse, and larger male genitalia (inversely proportional to IQ, the data for which he collected through condom distributors).

  In both The Bell Curve and Rushton's article, the Pioneer Fund is acknowledged. This caught my attention because of its connections to Holocaust denial. The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 by textile millionaire Wycliffe Preston Draper to fund research that promotes "race betterment" and that proves blacks are inferior to whites, the repatriation to Africa of blacks, and educational programs for children "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states . . . and/or from related stocks" (in Tucker 1994, p. 173; the Pioneer Fund denies that these are its current goals). William Shockley, a Nobel laureate in physics, for example, received $179,000 over ten years for his research on the heritability of IQ. Shockley believed that white Europeans are "the most competent population in terms of social management and general capacity for organization" and that "the most brutal selective mechanisms" of colonial life made the white race superior (in Tucker 1994, p. 184). Rushton's work was financed by the Pioneer Fund to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.

  The Pioneer Fund also supports the journal Mankind Quarterly. One of the early editors of the journal, Roger Pearson, when he immigrated to the United States in the 1960s worked with Willis Carto, organizer of the Liberty Lobby and founder of the Journal of Historical Review, the leading publication of Holocaust denial. Over the past twenty-three years, Pearson and his organization have received no less than $787,400 from the Pioneer Fund. According to William Tucker, Pearson and Carto "regularly blamed the 'New York money changers' for causing the 'Second Fratricidal War' and the subsequent 'Allied War Crimes' against the Reich out of a desire to impose financial slavery on Germany and the world" (1994, p. 256). Carto's Noontide Press, publisher of racist and eugenics tracts as well as books denying the Holocaust, also featured Pearson's Race and Civilization, which describes "how the aristocratic Nordic, the 'symbol... of human dignity,' had been forced by 'taxes against landholders ... to intermarry with Jewish and other non-Nordic elements,' thus securing the wealth necessary to retain their family estates but sacrificing their 'biological heritage' and 'thereby renouncing their real claim to nobility'" (in Tucker 1994, p. 256). Race and Civilization, Pearson acknowledges, was based on the work of Hans Gunther, who was a leading German racial theoretician before, during, and after the Third Reich, although Pearson claims he was de-Nazified after the war. Pearson has also been on the advisory committee for Nouvelle Ecole, called by some "a French highbrow neo-Nazi group" but by Pearson merely "right wing" (1995).

  I telephoned Roger Pearson. When I interviewed him, Pearson confirmed that he did work with Willis Carto for three months when he first came to America, editing Carto's journal Western Destiny, but he explicitly denied having used phrases such as "New York money changers." He also repudiated other charges, including the one that he "once reportedly boasted of helping to hide Josef Mengele" (see Tucker 1994, p. 256). This rumor seems to have spread far and wide, and Pearson is especially perturbed by it since at the time of Mengele's escape in March 1945, Pearson was seventeen-and-a-half and undergoing basic infantry training in the British Army. He has never had any contact whatsoever with Mengele and believes that the charge is like an urban legend, recycling itself through books and articles without anyone being able to cite a primary source for it.

  I found Pearson a kind, soft-spoken man who has given considerable thought to the major issues of our time. He presently holds an honorary position as president of the Institute for the Study of Man (he is sixty-eight and semi-retired), and he is the publisher of Mankind Quarterly, which the institute took over in 1979. At that time, Pearson broadened the journal to include sociology, psychology, and mythology, adding appropriate new board members such as psychometrician Raymond Cattell and mythologist Joseph Campbell. During his reign, Pearson claims, neither the institute nor the journal has endorsed the repatriation of blacks or white supremacy.

  Then where did the idea come from that they do endorse such racialist beliefs? Pearson admits that before his time the journal did endorse such ideas, and that he himself believes that societies ideally should be as homogeneous as possible (i.e., WASP), with the elite running the show. The problem, as he explained, is that this "natural" process is being interfered with by modern war and politics, a belief he developed from personal experiences:

  I served in the British Army in World War II. On May 29, 1942, my only sibling, a 21-year-old Battle of Britain fighter pilot, was killed in combat in North Africa against Rommel. This had a great impact on me and until I was about 32—when I got married and started my own family—I had dreams of my brother returning. In that war I also lost four cousins and three close school friends, all young and without children. And lots of people I knew were killed before they had children. What I was seeing was that the more talented individuals were being selected against in modern warfare and it left me with an acute feeling that there is something deeply wrong with the world where you have wholesale over-breeding by people who are not as competent as others, while the more competent are killed off. Today I am very much against war because it disproportionally selects and destroys the more intelligent people. Plus it destroys culture. Look what we did to the great cities of Europe in World War II. A good example of this can be seen in the book War and the Breed, written in 1915 by the chancellor of Stanford University, David Starr Jordon. It is a story of young, childless Englishmen who were killed in World War I, and how warfare was destroying the West. I republished this book to show that the Europeans were a warlike bunch of people who didn't know what was good for them. Through centuries they destroyed themselves by fighting each other and consequently, from an evolutionary perspective, they did not deserve to survive.

  I was a great nationalist who believed, in those days, in the purity of the gene pool. Nations used to be seen as breeding pools. Not any longer. The nation as a kinship unit is a thing of the past. We are moving into multicultural, multiracial units. I question how desirable this is from an evolutionary point of view. I think it is a reversal of the evolutionary process. (1995)

  To help me better understand his views, Pearson sent me copies of some of his books and a selection of back issues of Mankind Quarterly. He was convinced I would see that the racialist tone of decades past has subsided in recent years. There are many interesting articles in this journal that have nothing to do with race, but there are also plenty that do, and these exhibit the same old slant now tricked out in more technical and less provocative jargon. Here are a few of the many instances I could cite. The Fall/Winter 1991 issue contains an article by Richard Lynn, titled "The Evolution of Racial Differences in Intelligence," in which he concludes that Caucasoids and Mongoloids living in temperate and cold climates "encountered the cognitively demanding problems of survival" and thus "a selection pressure favoring enhanced intelligence explains why the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the races which have evolved the highest intelligence" (p. 99). I guess Egyptians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Jews, Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans—a rather mixed group of races all living in "unchallenging" warm environments—were not particularly smart; and the Neanderthals who inhabited cold northern E
urope long ago must have been very intelligent, even though modern humans allegedly outsmarted them. To be fair, the journal did publish critiques of this argument in the same issue.

  The Summer 1995 issue features Glayde Whitney's Presidential Address to the Behavior Genetics Association, delivered on June 2, 1995, complete with graphs and charts demonstrating a dramatic ninefold black-white difference in murder rates, about which Whitney concludes, "Like it or not, it is a reasonable scientific hypothesis that some, perhaps much, of the race difference in murder rate is caused by genetic differences in contributory variables such as low intelligence, lack of empathy, aggressive acting out, and impulsive lack of foresight" (p. 336). What is his evidence for this hypothesis? Nothing whatsoever. Not even a single citation. And this in an address given to a room full of behavior geneticists and printed in a scientific journal read by anthropologists, psychologists, and geneticists. In this same issue, Pearson concludes a twenty-eight-page history titled "The Concept of Heredity in Western Thought" by bewailing the dysgenics of the modern world in which the elite are being selected against and outbred by the hoi polloi: "Heavily dysgenic trends have dominated this century as a result of the selective elimination of air crews and other talented personnel involved in modern warfare in Europe; the genocidal slaughter of the elite in Europe, the Soviet Union and Maoist China; and the general tendency for the more creative members of modernized societies around the world to have fewer children than the less creative" (p. 368).

  I am not quoting selectively here. Pearson's latest book, Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science, elaborates the same theme, ending with this dramatic prediction about what will happen if we do not do something about this so-called problem: "Any species that adopts patterns of behavior that run counter to the forces that govern the universe is doomed to decline until it either undergoes a painful, harshly enforced and totally involuntary eugenic process of evolutionary reselection and readap-tation, or is subjected to an even more severe penalty—extinction" (1996, p. 143). Just what does "total involuntary eugenic reselection" mean? State-enforced segregation, repatriation, sterilization, or perhaps even extermination? I asked him. "No! I simply mean that nature selects and eliminates and that if we continue on our present course the species will go extinct. Evolution itself is an exercise in eugenics. Natural selection in the long run tends to be eugenic" (1995). But following on the heels of lengthy discussions about racial differences in intelligence, criminality, creativity, aggression, and impulsiveness, the implication seems to be that it is non-whites who are the potential cause of the extinction of the species, and therefore something needs to be done about them.

  The End of Race

  Is it possible to prevent interbreeding and preserve genetic integrity? Has any nation ever been or could any nation ever be a "breeding unit," in Pearson's terminology? Perhaps a worldwide Nazi state might be able to legislate such biological walls, but nature certainly has not, as Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, demonstrate in The History and Geography of Human Genes, lauded by Time magazine as the study that "flattens The Bell Curve" (appropriate, since it weighs in at eight pounds and runs 1,032 pages). In this book, the authors present evidence from fifty years of research in population genetics, geography, ecology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics that, "from a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence" (1994, p. 19). In other words, the concept of race is biologically meaningless.

  But don't we all know a black person or a white person when we see one? Sure, agree the authors: "It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals." But, they continue, "the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection" (p. 19). Traditional popular racial categories are literally skin deep.

  But aren't races supposed to blend into one another as fuzzy sets, while retaining their uniqueness and separateness (see Sarich 1995)? Yes, but how these groups are classified depends on whether the classifier is a "lumper" or "splitter"—seeing similarities or differences. Darwin noted that naturalists in his time cited anywhere from two to sixty-three different races of Homo sapiens. Today there are anywhere from three to sixty races, depending on the taxonomist. Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues conclude, "Although there is no doubt that there is only one human species, there are clearly no objective reasons for stopping at any particular level of taxo-nomic splitting" (1994, p. 19). One might think that Australian Aborigines, for example, would be more closely related to African blacks than southeast Asians, since they certainly look more alike (and facial features, hair type, and skin color are what everyone focuses on in identifying race). Genetically, however, Australians are most distant from Africans and closest to Asians. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even if it goes against our perceptual intuitions, since humans first migrated out of Africa, then moved through the Middle and Far East, down Southeast Asia, and into Australia, taking tens of thousands of years to do so. Regardless of what they look like, Australians and Asians should be more closely related evolutionarily, and they are. And who would intuit, for example, that Europeans are an intermediate hybrid population of 65 percent Asian genes and 3 5 percent African genes? But this is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective.

  Part of the problem of race classification is that within-group variability is greater than between-group variability, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues argue: "Statistically, genetic variation within clusters is large compared with that between clusters." In other words, individuals within a group vary more than individuals between groups. Why? The answer is an evolutionary one:

  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones. This individual variation has accumulated over very long periods, because most polymorphisms observed in humans antedate the separation into continents, and perhaps even the origin of the species, less than half a million years ago. The same polymorphisms are found in most populations, but at different frequencies in each, because the geographic differentiation of humans is recent, having taken perhaps one-third or less of the time the species has been in existence. There has therefore been too little time for the accumulation of a substantial divergence. (1944, p. 19)

  And, the authors repeat (it cannot be overstated), "The difference between groups is therefore small when compared with that within the major groups, or even within a single population" (1994, p. 19). Recent research shows, in fact, that if a nuclear war exterminated all humans but a small band of Australian Aborigines, a full 85 percent of the variability of Homo sapiens would be preserved (Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza 1995).

  The End of Racism

  It is always the individual that matters, not the group; and it is always how individuals differ that matters, not how groups differ. This is not liberal hope or conservative hype. It is a fact of evolution, as one entomologist noted in 1948: "Modern taxonomy is the product of an increasing awareness among biologists of the uniqueness of individuals, and of the wide range of variation which may occur in any population of individuals." This entomologist believed that taxonomists' generalizations of species, genera, and even higher categories "are too often descriptions of unique individuals and structures of particular individuals that are not quite like anything that any other investigator will ever find." Psychologists are equally guilty of such hasty generalizations, he adds: "A mouse in a maze, today, is taken as a sample of all individuals, of all species of mice under all sorts of conditions, yesterday, today, and tomorrow." Worse still, these collective conclusions are extrapolated to humans: "A half dozen dogs, pedigrees unknown and breeds unnamed, are reported upon as 'dogs'—mean
ing all kinds of dogs—if, indeed, the conclusions are not explicitly or at least implicitly applied to you, to your cousins, and to all other kinds and descriptions of humans" (p. 17).

  If he had only talked about bugs, this entomologist would be relatively unknown. But midway through his career, he switched from studying an obscure species of wasp to a very well-known species of WASP— the human variety. In fact, he concluded, if wasps showed so much variation, how much more might humans? Accordingly, in the 1940s, he began the most thorough study ever conducted on human sexuality, and in 1948 Alfred Kinsey, entomologist turned sexologist, published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. In this book, Kinsey observed that "the histories which have been available in the present study make it apparent that the heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition" (Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin 1948, p. 638). One can be both simultaneously. Or neither temporarily. One can start as heterosexual and become homosexual, or vice versa. And the percentage of time spent in either state varies considerably amongst individuals in the population. "For instance," Kinsey wrote, "there are some who engage in both heterosexual and homosexual activities in the same year, or in the same month or week, or even in the same day" (p. 639). One might add, "at the same time." Therefore, Kinsey concluded, "One is not warranted in recognizing merely two types of individuals, heterosexual and homosexual, and that the characterization of the homosexual as a third sex fails to describe any actuality" (p. 647). Extrapolating this to taxonomy in general, Kinsey deduced the uniqueness of individuals (in a powerful statement tucked away in the midst countless tables):

  Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeonholes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex. (p. 639)