I’m not sure why National Review‘s John Derbyshire doesn’t get more attention from the blogosphere. He’s not as prominent as other conservatives but he is a fountain of misinformed cultural commentary. We talked about Derbyshire once before when he released a book and included a chapter about how women’s suffrage should be repealed. Derbyshire has also written about how the breasts of women in their 30s are hideous and women’s attractiveness is all downhill after the age of 19.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, Derbyshire was invited by the Black Law Students’ Association at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to give an address. He shared his “wisdom” with the group:
When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel, I told them that this is my view of the matter. I said that I was flattered to be invited to speak at such a prestigious institution, and that, having two teenage children, I am always glad to get out of the house for a few hours; but that racial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be “eliminated” by social or political action.
How very “Bell Curve” of him. I’m amazed that the students didn’t walk out of the room after that statement. Perhaps they were curious to see how far he’d go with his hypothesis.
He tries to explain it “scientifically:”
First, the rational grounds. If a species is divided into separate populations, and those populations are left in reproductive isolation from each other for many generations, they will diverge. If you return after several hundred generations have passed, you will observe that the various traits that characterize individuals of the species are now distributed at different frequencies in the various populations. After a few ten thousands of generations, the divergence of the populations will be so great they can no longer cross-breed; and that is the origin of species. This is Biology 101.
Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.
I think he might be trying to say that races are different subspecies or something. I’m not sure where Derbyshire is getting his “facts” but there are many scholarly papers and books debunking the racism of books like the “Bell Curve.”
I looked online to see if there were any accounts of his speech, but could only find Derbyshire’s own account. His contention was that the moderator was mean:
My ten-minute address consisted of (a) five minutes of unfiltered race realism, right between the eyes, followed by (b) a plea to turn to good old American individualism and stop obsessing about group outcomes. This was followed by a sort of stunned silence, into which Madame Moderator interjected the remark that “Mr. Derbyshire is here as a private guest of Prof. Wax, not at the invitation of the BLSA.” This was not true. BLSA invited me, and I have the email trail to prove it. To his credit, David Williams, the BLSA officer who’d invited me, came up afterwards and apologized for the immoderate demeanor of our “moderator.”
This was followed by a sort of stunned silence – heh, I’ll bet.