Eight months after a psychology journal retracted a pair of articles that were “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda,” the publication has pulled three more papers — all at least a quarter century old — for the same reason.
All five papers were written by J. Philippe Rushton, formerly of the University of Western Ontario, who died in 2012. As we wrote in December 2020, Rushton published dubious studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that:
East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants, who average higher scores on these dimensions than Africans and their descendants.
Here’s the new notice, whose language mirrors that of the earlier retraction statement:
The following articles have been retracted from Psychological Reports:
Rushton, J. P. (1987). An Evolutionary Theory of Health, Longevity, and Personality: Sociobiology and r/K Reproductive Strategies. Psychological Reports, 60, 539–549.
Rushton, J. P. (1992). Contributions to the History of Psychology: XC. Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (with Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences): The 1989 AAAS Paper. Psychological Reports, 71, 811–821.
Rushton, J. P. (1995). Race and Crime: International Data 1989–1990. Psychological Reports, 76, 207–312.
This retraction is following a review that found that the research was unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda. Specifically, these publications authored by Philippe Rushton on the subject of intelligence and race has been rejected based on the following findings:
A better understanding of the human genome (Yudell et al., 2016)
An inappropriately applied ecological theory that explain differences between species’ reproductive strategies to humans (Allen et al., 1992; Anderson, 1991)
A misuse of population genetic measures and misconceptions about heritability (Bailey, 1997)
Ignoring alternative explanations or evidence that did not support the racist theories being presented (Cain & Vanderwolf, 1990)
Rushton’s findings have not been able to be replicated (Peregrine, Ember, & Ember, 2003)
Together, the papers have been cited 48 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. At the time of this writing, none of the original abstracts include a link to the retraction notice.
When we wrote about the Rushton case last year, we received a copy of an email from the journal saying that it would be retracting Rushton’s 1992 paper, “Contributions to the History of Psychology: XC. Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits” along with the other two articles. That didn’t happen at the time.
We asked Cory Scherer, the editor of Psychological Reports, about the eight-month gap between retractions. He told us:
I got an email from a researcher who brought these articles to our attention and when I read them I moved fast on the first retraction and the rest were found when that retraction was already written and In press. I didn’t want to add them to the original retraction until I did my due diligence about the second set found.
Our search of the journal’s website turned up eight articles in total by Rushton in the journal, of which three remain unretracted. Scherer said he has created a committee to review the remnant papers to see if they require retraction.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution or a monthly tax-deductible donation to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
From the second article: “preliminary evidence from a longitudinal adoption study by Scarr, Weinberg, and Gargiulo (1987) found that after 17 years Black children adopted into White middle-class fades do not resemble the White siblings with whom they have been raised. When the children were 7 years of age, the results showed that the Black IQ was comparable to White IQ, but a 10-yr. follow-up showed that Black IQ and educational achievement significantly declined while social deviance and psychopathology increased. Thus Black children have regressed to their population mean on these traits.”
How is it that IQ scores regressed so rapidly? Whatever sort of variables, among children raised in a white American suburb in the 1980s, might influence such an unfortunate result? He has an answer for us: black genes never adapted to cold climates. “The Siberian cold experienced by Mongoloid populations was more severe than even that experienced by other pale skinned populations in Northern Europe.”
These three articles are bald-faced pseudoscience and should never have been in an academic journal. Unfortunately the retractions are not displayed prominently on the Sage website.
As an editor I cannot help asking the question to the original editors & also reviewers of these various retracted papers: What exactly do THEY regard as ‘unethical & scientifically flawed’, if these papers are in these ‘peer reviewed’ journals? Seriously… I would like to know.
Just because something has been peer reviewed, doesn’t mean that it isn’t flawed. I’m guessing you’ve heard of the replication crisis?
Also the critique of these papers and their methodologies is found in other peer reviewed literature.
It’s been obvious for 25 years that Rushton was a racist fabulist whose “research methods” were absurd, No points to the journal editors for finally admitting it now.
CBC Radio has a science show, Quirks and Quarks, which deconstructed these papers not long after they were published, flagging how the data were cherry-picked, ignored counterexamples, etc. They were known as works of advocacy and not scholarship ever since Rushton started presenting these ideas at conferences, even before publication. It’s time the academy made it official.
If they expect such retractions to impugn anyone other than the journal (and not just because the author is dead) they should try to not be so obvious in their motives.
What is more, the paper cited under the words ‘Rushton’s findings have not been able to be replicated’ (i.e., Peregrine, Ember, & Ember, 2003) makes no attempt to replicate findings nor do any other work or research.
The findings are sure to not be replicated if nobody makes any attempt to study it. While that may prevent the findings from being replicated, it still will not be enough to make it not so.
The papers of Rushton, who considered himself a “hard-nosed race-realist scientist”, have received a good deal of criticism in published papers, which are available for all to read.
I do not think that – in this case – the road forward is by retracting these peer reviewed papers that have been around for years. If you find Rushton’s work to be incorrect, you are welcome to express your thoughts in a manuscript, which you can submit. Retracting them after so many years is ultimately counter-productive. It merely creates an excuse to dismiss Rushton’s papers without actually reading them or thinking about his arguments or evidence.
PS: Regardless what I think of his hypotheses, I do not consider Rushton to particularly rigorous or good scientist.
Academia has turned into bold-faced political virtue signalling. If Rushton was wrong, then one is welcome to dispute his findings with new research. Retracting peer-reviewed articles due to the change in political climate is not only a disgusting perversion of science, it is a blatantly obvious one to boot.