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The Board
 The
late Harry
F. Weyher, Jr. (1921-2002) served as the third president of the
Pioneer Fund for 44 years (1958-2002). He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After serving in World War II,
Weyher entered Harvard Law School, where he was note editor of the
Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude. In addition to his private
practice, Weyher also taught law at New York University. Along with two
books and a number of articles on law, he also wrote two major
articles on the The Pioneer Fund ("Contributions to the history
of psychology: CXII. Intelligence, behavior genetics, and the
Pioneer Fund," Psychological Reports,
1998, 82, 1347-1374;
"The Pioneer Fund, the behavioral sciences, and the media’s false
stories," Intelligence, 1999, 26, 319-335),
as well as contributing a lengthy preface to The Science of Human
Diversity, by Richard Lynn, which gave an inside view of his
over four decades at the helm.
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 J. Philippe Rushton,
B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.B.Ps.S.,
the fourth and current president of the Pioneer Fund, was born in 1943 in Bournemouth, England. He
received all his degrees from the University of London, including a Ph.D. in
social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He
is the author of 5 books and over 200 scholarly articles published in
peer-reviewed journals. Rushton is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavioral Genetics Association and the Society for
Neuroscience. Rushton has summarized his research for journals of opinion such
as Liberty,
the National Review, and the Washington Times’s Insight on the News,
and discussed it on TV talk shows such as Donahue, Geraldo
Live, and Connie Chung. His major published work is Race,
Evolution, and Behavior, which was favorably reviewed in The New York
Times Book Review of October 16, 1994, translated into Japanese, and is now in
its 3rd unabridged edition, as well as in an abridged edition and an audio book.
Professor Rushton began his
career by researching the basis of altruism. The question of why one individual
aids another, thereby exposing himself to risk, has long posed a challenge to
evolutionary theories of human development. Rushton’s early work focused on the
social learning of generosity in 7- to 11-year-old children. After writing a
book, Altruism, Socialization, and Society (1980), which examined the
influence of the family, the educational system, and the mass media, he
broadened his perspective to include sociobiological and behavioral genetic
factors. He then analyzed the University of London Twin Register and found that
individual differences in empathy and nurturance are about 50% heritable, as
were individual differences in aggression and crime, some of which he found to
be mediated by testosterone.
Studying behavioral genetics and sociobiology led Rushton to explore the
dilemma of why, throughout the natural world, “birds of a feather flock
together.” He found that genes incline people to marry, befriend, associate
with, and help others like themselves. Typically, individuals learn to identify
and prefer their own ethnic group, rather than others, for largely genetic
reasons. Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory expanded the kin-selection
theory of altruism (a fundamental theorem of sociobiology) to explain why the
pull of that factor is so powerful across human relationships and how it
provides an explanation for ethnocentrism and ethnic competition. Altruism
follows lines of genetic similarity in order to replicate genes more
effectively; xenophobia emerges as the dark side of human altruism.
It also led Rushton to examine race differences. In new studies and
reviews of the world literature, he has documented that East Asians and their
descendants consistently average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more
sexual restraint, a slower rate of maturation, and greater levels of law
abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants.
Europeans, in turn, average higher on these dimensions than do Africans and
their descendants. To explain this pattern he proposed a gene-based evolutionary
theory in his book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995).
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The Current Board of Directors
When Harry Weyher died on March 27, 2002, J. Philippe Rushton, Professor of Psychology
at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, a long-time Pioneer grant
recipient, was appointed the new president. At the same time, Weyher’s widow,
Mrs. Michelle Weyher, was appointed a Director, as was Richard Lynn, Emeritus
Professor of Psychology at the University of Ulster, also a long-time grantee.
They joined existing
Board members R. Travis Osborne, Emeritus Professor of Psychology
at the University of Georgia, and Karl Schakel, an engineer and
businessman-rancher from Colorado.
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