Pioneer Fund: "subsidizing race science and eugenics research"

[Cerridwen]

I tripped over the pioneer fund a few months ago as I was researching the white supremacist groups in the US. I'm dinking around the SPLC* website today and I came across this article.

There are very good reasons why I note sources and authors and I prefer original sources for information and links to their sources; especially if they're quoting statistics and/or research. This is but one of those reasons.

From the SPLC* web site:

[center]Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed[/center]

In October 2012, Jean-Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychology professor and probably the most important race scientist in North America, died of cancer. At the time of his death, Rushton was running the Pioneer Fund, a grant-making entity founded in the 1930s by Americans with Nazi sympathies. In recent decades, Pioneer has been the only major foundation devoted to subsidizing race science and eugenics research, areas of science that are now fully discredited.

Under Rushton, the Pioneer Fund gave out very few grants, concentrating its disbursements on prominent race scientists such as Jared Taylor of the white nationalist group, American Renaissance. Rushton also headed the Charles Darwin Research Institute, located in Port Huron, Mich., an online outfit that distributed his racist research. Rushton’s most infamous study concluded that brain and genital size were inversely related, suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites and more highly sexualized. Sometime in the last year, the website for the Charles Darwin Research Institute went offline.

<snip>

{richard} Lynn {rushton's successor} is a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Ulster whose personal webpage lists as interests sex and race differences and eugenics (the “science,” much admired by the German Nazis, of selectively breeding human beings to create “better” people). He runs his own outfit, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer grants over the years. The institute appears to be primarily an online effort and is registered to an address near London.

The Pioneer website said that Rushton had left the Charles Darwin Research Institute in the control of his son, Stephen Rushton, an associate professor of education at the University of South Florida. The younger Rushton had served on Pioneer’s board for several years. The Pioneer Fund website further said that Rushton had done so “in the expectation that his son would support research of the kind,” meaning race science, “that had been supported by the Pioneer Fund.” The website said that Stephen Rushton had then “transferred the assets of the Charles Darwin Research Institute to the JSP Education Foundation (JSP stands for John Stephen Philippe).” Lynn and Rushton were listed as contacts for the fund.

<snip; there's a little more at the link in the title.>

{emphasis was added}

*SPLC; Southern Poverty Law Center (here is where I mention how sad it makes me to have to explain what SPLC stands for)