J. Philippe Rushton

J. Philippe Rushton (born 1943 in Northern Ireland), professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, is the author of a highly controversial paper, Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Difference). The paper was presented at the Symposium on Evolutionary Theory, Economics and Political Science, AAAS Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA, January 19, 1989) purporting to show that East Asians (or, as he characterizes them, "Orientals") are on average more intelligent than Europeans, who are in turn more intelligent than Africans. See also race and intelligence for a detailed discussion of this debate.

Rushton has been accused of associating with right-wing extremist and anti-immigrant groups. The paper formed the basis for a later book, entitled Race, Evolution And Behavior: A Life History Perspective, in which Rushton cites a panoply of physical and/or mental traits whose incidences run along an unvarying continuum with East Asians at one extreme, Africans at the opposite extreme, and Europeans in the middle (example: Multiple births - twins, triplets etc. - are more common among Europeans than among East Asians, and are still more frequent among Africans).

Rushton's theory is based on an attempt to extend the