Mankind Quarterly

History

Mankind Quarterly was founded in 1961. The founders were Robert Gayre, Henry Garrett, Roger Pearson, Corrado Gini, Luigi Gedda (Honorary Advisory Board), Otmar von Verschuer and Reginald Ruggles Gates. It was originally published in Edinburgh, Scotland, by the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics.

Its foundation may in part have been a response to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education which ordered the desegregation of schools in the United States.

Already in 1961, the journal came under heavy criticism when renowned physical anthropologist Juan Comas published a series of scathing critiques of the journal. He argued that the journal was reproducing discredited racial ideologies, such as Nordicism and anti-Semitism, under the guise of science. The critique prompted a series of responses and rebuttals to Comas' critique from the editors of the journal, published in the journal itself – including a highly critical review of Comas' book Racial Myths by James A. Gregor, among more or less direct attacks on Comas. Comas then argued in Current Anthropology that the journal's review of his book Racial Myths was politically motivated, and misrepresented the field of physical anthropology by adhering to outdated racial ideologies, for example by claiming that Jews were considered a "biological race" by the racial biologists of the time. Other anthropologists complained that paragraphs that did not agree with the racial ideology of the editorial board were deleted from published articles without the authors' agreement.

The strong criticism meant that few academic anthropologists would publish in the journal or serve on its board; when Gates died, Carleton Coon, an anthropologist sympathetic to the hereditarian and racialist view of the journal, was asked to replace him, but he rejected the offer stating that "I fear that for a professional anthropologist to accept membership on your board would be the kiss of death". Nonetheless, the journal continued to be published supported by grant money. Publisher Roger Pearson received over a million dollars in grants from the Pioneer Fund in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1979, publication was transferred to the Council for Social and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C.. In January 2015, the Ulster Institute for Social Research in London took over as publishers.

Editors

The editor-in-chief is Gerhard Meisenberg (Dominica, East Caribbean). The assistant editor is Richard Lynn, psychologist and former board member and grantee of the Pioneer Fund.

Criticism

Many of those involved with the journal are connected to academic hereditarianism. The journal has been criticized as being political and strongly right-leaning, racist or fascist. Pearson has responded that much of anthropology is politicised in the opposite way and claims that the most vocal critics of the journal often identify with the radical tradition in anthropology.

In 1963, after the journal's first issue, contributors U. R. Ehrenfels, T. N. Madan, and Juan Comas said that the journal's editorial practice was biased and misleading. This was denied by editors of the journal.

During the "Bell Curve wars" of the 1990s, the journal received attention when opponents of The Bell Curve publicized the fact that some of the works cited by Bell Curve authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray had first been published in Mankind Quarterly. In The New York Review of Books, Charles Lane referred to The Bell Curve's "tainted sources", that seventeen researchers cited in the book's bibliography had contributed articles to, and ten of these seventeen had also been editors of, Mankind Quarterly, "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race." The journal continues to publish hereditarian perspective articles, stating that "much of this science has stood the test of time", and "the editors still welcome controversy and new ideas".