Racial theorist J. Philippe Rushton has gained notoriety for what blogger Steve Sailer has dubbed “Rushton’s Rule.” Sailer summarizes Rushton’s Rule in these words: “on a remarkably wide variety of physical, mental, and social measures, you find the African and East Asian averages at opposite ends, with the white average in the mediocre middle.” Rushton himself speculates that the first population to migrate from Africa and make a go of it in East Asia found itself in a much colder climate than had prevailed in Africa, while the first Europeans found average temperatures midway between those in Africa and those which confronted the first East Asians. Rushton appeals to adaptations would have enabled those early settlers to leave descendants outside Africa as an explanation for the statistical pattern he has described.
Be that as it may, references to Rushton’s Rule always leave me thinking about something else. If you keep getting the same answer, it’s probably because you are asking the same question. Granted that there is “a remarkably wide variety” to the measures which Rushton discusses, mightn’t he in fact have shown that there is an equally remarkable, if less obvious, uniformity to the tests that produce these results?
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