Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Historically, scientific racism received credence throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. Dividing humankind into biologically distinct groups is sometimes called racialism, race realism, or race science by its proponents. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.
Richard Lynn is a controversial English psychologist and author. He is a former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, having had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. He is former assistant editor and current editor-in-chief of the journal Mankind Quarterly, which has been described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism. Lynn studies intelligence and is known for his belief in sexual and racial differences in intelligence. Lynn was educated at King's College, Cambridge, in England. He has worked as lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and as professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Raymond Bernard Cattell was a British-American psychologist, known for his psychometric research into intrapersonal psychological structure. His work also explored the basic dimensions of personality and temperament, the range of cognitive abilities, the dynamic dimensions of motivation and emotion, the clinical dimensions of abnormal personality, patterns of group syntality and social behavior, applications of personality research to psychotherapy and learning theory, predictors of creativity and achievement, and many multivariate research methods including the refinement of factor analytic methods for exploring and measuring these domains. Cattell authored, co-authored, or edited almost 60 scholarly books, more than 500 research articles, and over 30 standardized psychometric tests, questionnaires, and rating scales. According to a widely cited ranking, Cattell was the 16th most eminent, 7th most cited in the scientific journal literature, and among the most productive psychologists of the 20th century. He was, however, a controversial figure, due in part to false accusations of his friendships with and intellectual respect for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Wickliffe Preston Draper was an American political activist. He was an ardent eugenicist and lifelong advocate of strict racial segregation. In 1937, he founded the Pioneer Fund, a registered charitable organisation established to provide scholarships for descendants of original white American settlers and to support research into heredity and eugenics; he later became its principal benefactor.
Charles Benedict Davenport was a prominent biologist and eugenicist. He was influential in the American eugenics movement.
Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame". It covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It is published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which is presided over by Richard Lynn.
Glayde D. Whitney was an American behavioral geneticist and psychologist. He was professor at Florida State University. Beyond his work into the genetics of sensory system function in mice, in his later life he supported David Duke as well as research into race and intelligence and eugenics.
Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, businessman, eugenics advocate, political organiser for the extreme right, and publisher of political and academic journals. He has been on the faculty of the Queens College, Charlotte, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Montana Tech, and is now retired. It has been noted that Pearson has been surprisingly successful in combining a career in academia with political activities on the far right. He served in the British Army after World War II, and was a businessman in South Asia. In the late 1950s he founded the Northern League. In the 1960s he established himself in the United States for a while working together with Willis Carto publishing white supremacist and anti-Semitic literature.
William H. Tucker, also known as Bill Tucker, is an American psychologist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and the author of several books critical of race science. He retired from Rutgers in 2009.
The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE) was a prominent group in the promotion of eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.
The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 racist and pseudoscientific book by American lawyer, self-styled anthropologist, and proponent of eugenics, Madison Grant (1865–1937). Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human "races". The theory and the book were praised by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.
Barry Alan Mehler is an American social researcher. He is a professor of humanities at Ferris State University, who founded the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR). He earned his B.A. from Yeshiva University in 1970, his M.A. from City College of New York in 1972, and his Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. His dissertation was entitled, "A history of the American Eugenics Society, 1921-1940."
The New Century Foundation is a white supremacist organization founded in 1994 by Jared Taylor known primarily for publishing a magazine, American Renaissance, which promotes white supremacy. From 1994 to 1999, its activities received considerable funding by the Pioneer Fund. On June 29, 2020, American Renaissance's YouTube channel and AmRen Podcasts were banned from YouTube for violations of hate speech guidelines.
The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
Neue Anthropologie was a quarterly anthropology journal. It was published in Hamburg, West Germany by the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavioural Science, whose chairman, Jürgen Rieger, was also the journal's editor. It served as a platform for neo-Nazi psychological and anthropological pseudoscience, with a particular focus on scientific racism.
Nouvelle École is an annual French-language political and philosophy magazine which was established by an ethno-nationalist think tank, GRECE. The publication is one of the significant media outlets of the New Right political approach in France. The director of Nouvelle École, Alain de Benoist, stated that the start of the magazine indicates the birth of the New Right.
