Wikipedia

Pioneer Fund

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The Pioneer Fund is a foundation that claims to have played a significant role in research on heredity and human personality differences since its 1937 founding, particularly in intelligence.[1]

The Pioneer Fund's most notable contribution is what is also its single largest funding, the funding of the landmark Minnesota Twin Family Study and Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins adopted by different families.

The Pioneer Fund has been one of the main sources of funding for the partly-genetic hypothesis of IQ variation among races. This has generated a large amount of controversy ever since the publication of The Bell Curve (1994) - a book exploring the role of intelligence in American life, including variation among races - which drew from Pioneer-funded research. The fund has also generated controversy for its focus on the controversial areas heredity, intelligence, human differences, and eugenics. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights advocacy and anti-racism organization, has characterized the Pioneer Fund as a "hate group," using the definition "attack[ing] or malign[ing] an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics".[2] The SPLC cites the Pioneer Fund's funding of some organizations and individuals the SPLC considers racist, and the funding of race and intelligence research.[3]

The fund publishes the journal Mankind Quarterly, and is currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton.

Early history

 
Wickliffe Draper, seen here in military uniform.

The Pioneer Fund was incorporated in 1937 by two American scientists: Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1936 in recognition of his contribution to Nazi eugenics, and Frederick Osborn, who Barry Mehler claims wrote in 1937 that the Nazi sterilization law was "the most exciting experiment that had ever been tried".[4]

The fund's main benefactor and de facto final authority was Wickliffe Draper (1891-1972), Mayflower descendent and heir to a large fortune. [5] According to one geneticist he "wished to prove simply that Negroes were inferior" He funded advocates of repatriation of blacks to Africa and anti-Semitic and neo-nazi advocates such as Willis Carto. Draper also made large financial contributions to efforts to oppose the American Civil Rights Movement and the racial desegregation mandated by Brown v. Board of Education, such as $215,000 to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963.[6].

 
"Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution": Logo from the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, depicting it as a tree which unites a variety of different fields.

The 1937 incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund lists two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi breeding program, was aimed at encouraging the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended". Its second purpose was to support academic research and the "dissemination of information, into the 'problem of heredity and eugenics'" and "the problems of race betterment". [7] The Pioneer Fund argues the "race betterment" has always referred to the "human race" referred to earlier in the sentence, and critics argue it referred to racial groups. The document was amended in 1985 and the phrase changed to "human race betterment".

The Pioneer Fund supported the distribution of a eugenics film titled Erbkrank ("Hereditary Defective" or "Hereditary Illness") which was published by the pre-war 1930s Nazi Party. William Draper obtained the film from the predecessor to the Nazi Office of Racial Politics prior to the founding of the Pioneer Fund. [8]

All of the founders capable of doing so participated in the war against the Nazis.[9]

Current funding

Most of the Pioneer Fund's grants go to scientific research, including to researchers at 38 universities, and a smaller amount has gone to political or legal organizations, mostly to immigration reform/reduction organizations. This section's figures are from 1971-1996 and are adjusted to 1997 USD. (Complete listing, 1971-1996)

Scientific research

 
The Pioneer Fund funds research on the basis and correlates of human ability and diversity. Notable topics in this research are the heredity and neuroscience of intelligence.

Many of the researchers supporting the partially-hereditary hypothesis of the racial IQ disparity found in intelligence research have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund.[10]. Large grantees, in order of amount received, are Thomas J. Bouchard at the University of Minnesota, Arthur Jensen at the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, J. Phillipe Rushton at the U of Western Ontario, Roger Pearson at the Institute for the Study of Man, Richard Lynn at Ulster Institute for Social Research, and Linda Gottfredson at the U of Delaware. Lynn is also on the editorial board of Mankind Quarterly. Other notable recipients of funding include: Hans Eysenck, the most-cited living psychologist at the time of his death (1997), Lloyd Humphreys, Joseph M. Horn, Robert Gordon, Garrett Hardin, author of the phrase the "tragedy of the commons, R. Travis Osborne, Audrey M. Shuey, and Philip A. Vernon.

As compiled in 1997, the recipient of the largest amount of funding ($2.3 million USD) was Thomas J. Bouchard's landmark twin study, the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), better known as the Minnesota Twins Project. The Minnesota Twins Project compared identical and fraternal twins who had been brought up in different families. Another notable twin study that was partially funded by the fund is the Texas Adoption Project, which compared adopted children to their birth and adopted families. The studies, along with similar studies, have demonstrated that as much as half of intelligence and personality are inherited (See Intelligence quotient#Genetics vs environment).

File:Rushton headshot.gif
Professor J. Phillipe Rushton, grantee and current director

Rushton is a central advocate of genetic differences between races in race and intelligence research and the current head of the fund since 2002. In 1999, Rushton used some of his grant money from the Pioneer fund to send out tens of thousands of copies of his controversial book Race, Evolution, and Behavior to social scientists in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, causing a great controversy [11]. The book advocates Rushton's controversial differential K theory.

Eugenicist and anthropologist Roger Pearson, founder of the Journal of Indo-European Studies[12], received over a million dollars in grants in the eighties and the nineties.[13][14] Using the pseudonym of Stephan Langton, Pearson was the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966-67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question," which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power," and "Swindlers of the Crematoria." [15]. The Northern League, an organization founded in England in 1958 Pearson supported Nazi ideologies and included former members of the Nazi Party [16].

William Shockley, winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1956, received a series of grants In the 1970s. Shockley became famous in his later career for supporting the controversial genetic hypothesis of race and intelligence research and for being a proponent of eugenics.

The Fund has given significant support to immigration reductionist organizations, primarily to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), but also to the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), and ProjectUSA. During the campaign over California's Proposition 187 critics noted that the Pioneer Fund was channeling money in favor of the initiative through contributions to the FAIR. [17]

A controversial minor grantee is the paleoconservative and white nationalist journalist Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance and a member the advisory board of the white nationalist publication the Occidental Quarterly. [18] Many of the key academic white nationalists in both Right Now! and American Renaissance have been funded by the Pioneer and the Pioneer was directly involved in funding the parent organization of American Renaissance, the New Century Foundation. [19]

Founders and directors

File:John Marshall Harlan II.gif
John Marshall Harlan II, one of the 5 Pioneer Fund founders, was a U.S. Supreme Court justice who, along with his fellow justices, voted to uphold the end of school segregation following the famous Brown v. Board of Education case.

The main benefactor of the Pioneer Fund was Wickliffe Draper. Among the other notable founders were Frederick Henry Osborn and Harry H. Laughlin. Osborn was the secretary of the American Eugenics Society, which was part of an accepted and active field at the time, the Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Selective Service during World War II and later the Deputy U.S. Representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission. Laughlin was the director of the Eugenics Record Office and served as the president of the Pioneer Fund from its inception until 1941.

Another director was John Marshall Harlan II, who was the director of operational analysis for the Eighth Air Force in World War II, and was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Eisenhower.

Other Fund alumni include John M. Woolsey, Jr., a staff attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, Malcolm Donald, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a brigadier general during World War II, Henry E. Garrett, the former president of the American Psychological Association, and Representative Francis E. Walter.

  • Complete list available here.

Controversy

Criticism

There are reported links between various past contributors to its science journal Mankind Quarterly and Nazism. Italian biologist and Mankind Quarterly associate editor Corrado Gini authored an article titled "The Scientific Basis of Fascism" and was once a scientific advisor to Mussolini. The editorial board member Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was Josef Mengele's mentor before and during the Holocaust and is suspected of being his collaborator. [20][21][22]. The already mentioned Roger Pearson was a former editor.

File:Otmar von Verschuer.jpg
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, circa 1920s-1940s, measures two twin girls as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a controversial nonprofit organization, lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with some individuals the SPLC considers racist.[23].

In accord with the tax regulations governing nonprofit corporations, Pioneer does not fund individuals; under the law only other nonprofit organizations are appropriate grantees. As a consequence, many of the fund's awards go not to the researchers themselves but to the universities that employ them, a standard procedure for supporting work by academically based scientists. However, in addition to these awards to the universities where its grantees are based, Pioneer has also made a number of grants to other nonprofit organizations, essentially dummy corporations created solely to channel Pioneer's resources directly to a particular academic recipient—a mechanism apparently designed to circumvent the institution where the researcher is employed [24][25].

Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead an applicant merely submits "a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested." There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer's board of directors—two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker—decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research [26].

Responses to criticisms

The Pioneer Fund's history after its 1937 incorporation focused on improving hereditary characteristics, which at the time was pursued through the scholarly field eugenics. The scientific community had enthusiasm for what they saw as the promise of eugenics, and most developed nations employed some form of it, most commonly compulsory sterilization of those considered to have incurable hereditary diseases. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 40s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Following WWII, however, eugenics became associated with the brutal policies of the Nazis and fell out of favour. Still, a few nations maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including compulsory sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s.

In addition to this historical focus of the Pioneer Fund, some of the fund's previous members and grantees, including its main founder Wickliffe Draper, have supported ideas that are now disapproved of, such as racial segregation. The fund's administrators state that criticism should be directed at these past individuals, not the entire organization, which has funded notable scientific work. Today, the fund officially holds no political positions and denies any inappropriate bias in choosing grantees.

Some of the areas funded by the Pioneer Fund are often controversial areas of research, especially among the lay population. Scientists have noted a substantial difference in public opinion and majority scientific opinion regarding the influence of heredity on personality and cognitive ability (behavioral genetics), which is a main area of research funded by the Pioneer Fund. The study of the disparity between racial groups in average cognitive ability test scores (race and intelligence) is even more controversial. Additionally, some of the fund's grantees are advocates of the belief that such differences are almost entirely genetic, as opposed to being driven mostly by environmental variation.

The Pioneer Fund has stated that it rejects racism, and has claimed that it is the victim of smear campaigns waged by those who consider a discussion of race to be taboo. In addition, it has asserted that the majority of the criticism that has so far been directed at the Fund falls into such categories as to make it more-appropriately directed at individuals than at an organization as a whole.

The Fund writes on their website that one should consider the historical context surrounding such beliefs, as many mainstream scientists of the first half the twentieth century supported racialist policies that would be unacceptable today (though at least as many did not). The Fund denies that Wickliffe Draper's views on race left a serious influence on the Fund's decisions, despite the common thread which has run through the Fund's grant-making throughout its existence.

Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve, addressed the fund's history in response to criticism of it: "[T]he relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today's Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the relationship between Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation."[27] In the 1920s, Henry Ford authored anti-Semitic literature. A response to this comparison is that unlike the Pioneer Fund, the Ford Foundation is not still funding researchers who have a systematic tendency to make claims asserting the genetic basis of a given group's intellectual inferiority.

Psychologist Ulric Neisser, who was the chairman of the APA's 1995 taskforce charged with writing a consensus statement on intelligence research, gave support for Richard Lynn's history and defense of the fund in a review of Lynn's book The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund (2004). Though race and intelligence research "turns [his] stomach," Neisser stated that "Lynn's claim is exaggerated but not entirely without merit: 'Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science.'" Neisser concludes in agreement with Lynn and against William Tucker's critical book[28] on the Pioneer Fund, also reviewed, that the world was actually better off having the Pioneer Fund: "Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research - research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."

See also

End material

Notes

  1. ^ According to critic Ulric Neisser, who was the chairman of the APA's 1995 taskforce on intelligence research. Neisser gave support for Richard Lynn's argument in a review of Lynn's history and defense of the fund, The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund (2004). Though race and intelligence research "turns [his] stomach," Neisser stated that "Lynn's claim is exaggerated but not entirely without merit: 'Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science.'" Neisser concludes in agreement with Lynn and against William Tucker's critical book[1] on the Pioneer Fund, also reviewed, that the world was ultimately better off having had the Pioneer Fund: "Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research - research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."

References

Critical

Opinion pieces
Scholarly studies

Pro

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