Atlanta Constitution

Historian's views on Holocaust put under microscope Book portrays writer as 
'denier'

http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/today/news_6.html

Bert Roughton Jr. - Staff Correspondent Monday, January 24

London -- A controversial historical writer is expected to be assailed in
court today over his assertion that it is a "big lie" that Jews were
slaughtered in gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp.

David Irving dismisses the gas chambers seen by visitors to the infamous
camp in Poland as fakes that were built after the end of World War II by
the Polish government.

Irving, who believes the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews has been greatly
exaggerated, is suing Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt and her
publisher Penguin Books for libel over assertions made about him in her
1994 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."

Lipstadt portrayed Irving as a prominent and dangerous "Holocaust denier,"
who believes the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during
World War II never took place. She also depicts him as an extremist who
manipulates, distorts and falsifies history for his own purposes.

Today, lead defense attorney Richard Rampton is expected to challenge
Irving on the writer's statements about Auschwitz, arguably the most
notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. Rampton intends to call expert
witnesses to validate the accepted account of the mass killings at
Auschwitz --- including at least 1 million deaths in gas chambers.

The trial, which opened nearly two weeks ago, has been divided into two
segments --- the first focusing on Irving's views of the Holocaust and
Adolf Hitler's role in the mass killings. Irving has maintained that Hitler
didn't know about the campaign to exterminate Jews until 1943, at least two
years after the massacres began.

Irving said he doesn't deny the Holocaust but says it has been exaggerated.
He challenges the number and manner of Jewish deaths in concentration camps.

But Irving already has been forced to concede major points.

The 62-year-old author of about 30 historical books has been forced to
admit in court that he based part of his claim about Hitler's attempts to
stop the mass murders on a misreading of a 1941 handwritten note from
Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler. Irving also has acknowledged that he was
wrong in asserting that the Nazis never employed exhaust fumes from trucks
to kill Jews on a large scale.

In both cases, Irving accepted documents presented by the defense that
showed that he was wrong.

However, Irving denies that these mistakes prove that he distorted or
manipulated historical facts to suit his purposes. He maintains that he
believed his positions when he espoused them and was unaware of evidence to 
the contrary.

Lipstadt and Penguin Books deny they libeled Irving, and under British law
are required to prove that the book portrayed him truthfully. Irving, who
is not a lawyer, is representing himself in the trial.


Copyright 2000 Associated Press
AP Worldstream

January 24, 2000; Monday

Writer based denial of gas chambers on untrue report, court hears

DATELINE: LONDON -- British writer David Irving based his denial that Nazi
gas chambers existed at the Auschwitz concentration camp on a report he knew
to be untrue, his opponents in a libel suit said Monday.

Irving is suing American academic Deborah Lipstadt in the High Court over
her 1994 book, ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory,'' which he says maintains he denies the Holocaust and distorted
statistics.

Irving says he doesn't deny the Holocaust, but says it has been exaggerated
and he challenges the number and manner of Jewish deaths in concentration
camps.

Lipstadt, holder of the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies
at Emory University in Atlanta, and the publishers Penguin deny libel.

Richard Rampton, representing Lipstadt and Penguin, said in 1988 a man named
Fred Leuchter visited Auschwitz at the request of the defense in the
Canadian trial of German-born Ernst Zundel, who was charged with denying the
existence of gas chambers at the camp.

Leuchter, ''who seems to have made his living as some kind of consultant in
the design of execution facilities in the United States,'' looked for
evidence of deadly gas chambers, but concluded they hadn't existed, Rampton
said.

The judge trying Zundel declared Leuchter's report was inadmissable as
evidence because he had no relevant expertise. But Irving, who gave evidence
for Zundel, read the report and ''shortly thereafter he declared himself
convinced that Leuchter was right,'' Rampton said.

He said Irving knew the report, by Fred Leuchter, was ''bunk,'' but ignored
the ''stupidities'' of it because he wanted it to be true.

During a visit to Florida in 1995 Irving had made it clear that he relied
heavily on the findings of the Leuchter report, Rampton added.

''I still am,'' retorted Irving, who is representing himself at the trial,
now entering its third week. It is expected to last 12 weeks in all.

One of the main reasons Leuchter advanced for his conclusion was that it was
to be expected that any residual traces of hydrogen cyanide the killing
agent in the Zyklon B gas pellets used by the SS would be much higher in
those parts of the Auschwitz ruins which were identified as gas chambers
than in those parts where the gas had just been used to kill lice.

Rampton said the Leuchter reported finding very small traces of hydrogen
cyanide in the gas chamber ares and relatively large traces in the delousing
areas and concluded that ''the alleged gas chamber remains could obviously
never have been gas chambers at all.''

Rampton said the Leuchter report has been ''comprehensively demolished'',
but Irving maintains that the ''broad trend'' of the report was largely
substantiated by later studies.

###

SLATE @ MSN
Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semite
By: Judith Shulevitz
Posted Monday, Jan. 24, 2000, at 7:35 a.m.
http://slate.msn.com/Code/Culturebox/Culturebox.asp?Show=3D1/24/00&idMessage=
=3D4446

What scares people about the trial going on in London over whether Jewish
historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled Holocaust denier David Irving by calling
him a liar is that British law requires Lipstadt to show that her statement
was true. If she can't prove beyond a doubt that the Holocaust took place,
Irving might win. That would be a devastating blow to historical accuracy if
it happens, but Culturebox thinks it won't. There's a lot of truth on
Lipstadt's side, and very little on Irving's. Plus Lipstadt has one of the
best lawyers in London and is planning to call several heavyweight scholars
to testify. Irving, on the other hand, is acting as his own lawyer and so
far has named very few witnesses and experts, none of whom anyone has ever
heard of.

If Irving doesn't appear to be taking the necessary steps to win, why else
might he have brought the lawsuit? For publicity, is the obvious answer--to
air his own views, as well as those of his witnesses. And that's what scares
Culturebox. Irving's claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz is
bad enough, but since it bears directly on the question of his truthfulness,
it will be refuted on the spot. Irving's experts, on the other hand, are
being called to testify on issues tangential to the case, and their twisted
theories could well go unanswered. One expert, John Fox, the former editor
of a British Holocaust journal, will probably argue that Lipstadt and the
Jews are trying to shut down free discussion of the Holocaust. Irving's
other expert is an American professor named Kevin MacDonald, whose ideas
about Jews have almost no relevance to the case but represent the broadest,
ugliest, and most vicious anti-Semitism passing for scholarship in this
country today.

We know more or less what McDonald will say on the stand, because he
recently put a copy of his written statement to the British court on the
Internet. (Click here to go to the discussion group where he posted it. At
the drop-down dialogue box, select postings for January 2000, then click on
a posting titled "MacDonald's statement in the Irving/Lipstadt trial," dated
Jan. 18.) The bulk of MacDonald's testimony will be a summary of his three
books about Jews: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group
Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger, 1994); Separation and Discontents: Toward an
Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Praeger, 1998); and The Culture of
Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in
Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger, 1998). Here
is what he says in them--in Culturebox's words, not his. (If you want to
read MacDonald's own summary, clink on the link above. To read a fuller
account of his books, go to his Web page.)

MacDonald's central thesis is that Judaism is best understood not as a
religion but as a blueprint for an experiment in eugenics--a "group
evolutionary strategy," he calls it--designed to maximize a single trait:
intelligence. For thousands of years, he says, Jews have separated
themselves from their neighbors, choosing to confine themselves to a closed
society with strict rules against marrying outside the group. They have
lived by policies of extreme group loyalty and obedience to rabbinical
authority, which served to maintain their racial purity; and they practiced
low-birth-rate, high-investment parenting, which is the royal road to a high
group I.Q. They conferred social status (which brings along with it the most
desirable women) on men according to their brilliance--indeed, says
MacDonald, study of the Talmud was nothing more than a casuistic exercise
meant to weed out the dim. Eventually, their highly developed genes for
mental and verbal acuity, as well as their social aggression (also carefully
bred-in), gave the Jews powerful tools that enable them to dominate
neighboring ethnic groups in the endless war of all against all for food and
resources.

In his second book, MacDonald explains why Jews have encountered so much
anti-Semitism for so many years: It was justified. Gentiles reacted to Jews
the way any group of animals on the veldt would when confronted with a group
of superior animals likely to challenge them successfully for control of the
available resources--they tried to destroy the Jews before the Jews
destroyed them. Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such as
Nazism, can be seen not as aberrations but as "a mirror image" of Judaism,
with its emphasis on creating a master race. (MacDonald does not deny that
the Holocaust occurred, but he appears to think it was rooted in an
immutable biological chain reaction that the Jews set off.) Faced with the
hatred of gentiles, Jews have often resorted to a "strategy of
crypsis"--that is, they have pretended not to be Jews. Do the Jews
themselves realize what they're up to? MacDonald goes back and forth on this
point; one moment he'll chastise Jews for believing their own religious
rationalizations, the next he'll explain that they can't help it--they're
genetically "prone to self-deception."

In his third book, MacDonald takes on what he calls the "Jewish"
intellectual movements of the 20th century, from psychoanalysis to Marxism
to "Boasian anthropology" and "the Frankfurt School of social research." His
argument is that the ideas of secular Jewish intellectuals are merely a
device to promote tolerance of the Jewish presence by gentiles--so that the
Jews can more efficiently pursue their nefarious agenda of systematic
breeding and control of resources. A good example of this is cultural
anthropology: Its Jewish founder, Franz Boas, shifted the focus of
anthropology away from Darwinism and eugenicism and toward the study of
culture in order to bring an end to the criticism of Jews as a race. Even if
an intellectual movement (such as liberalism) was founded by non-Jews, the
minute Jews join it, they'll take it over, because their ancestral history
predisposes them to form "highly cohesive groups": "Intellectual activity is
like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist
strategies." Ideas that MacDonald identifies as Jewish, he invariably finds
to be not only subtly self-interested but also repellent by any ordinary
(which is to say gentile) moral or intellectual standard. Freud
"conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture." When
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed doubts about sociobiology
back in the 1970s, their approach exemplified the kind of "skeptical thrust
of Jewish intellectual activity" that results in Jewish "nihilistic
anti-science."

Toward the end of the third book, MacDonald lays out his solution for
restoring what he calls "parity" between the Jews and other ethnic groups:
systematic discrimination against Jews in college admission and employment
and heavy taxation of Jews "to counter the Jewish advantage in the
possession of wealth."

It is not a coincidence that MacDonald spends much of his time in his third
book attacking the enemies of Darwinism and sociobiology--or evolutionary
psychology, as it is usually called today. MacDonald identifies himself as
an evolutionary psychologist, and indeed, most prominent figures in the
field would at least know his name. But, remarkably, to Culturebox's
knowledge, no American evolutionary psychologist has publicly objected to
his work. This is not to say that it has been celebrated. A man in his 50s,
MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate
school, California State University in Long Beach. [Note from Culturebox two
days later: She was wrong about this. He is in fact a full professor. My
apologies for the error.] But much more important to an academic than his
title is his standing among his peers, and there MacDonald is on firmer
ground: He's the secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and executive
board member of the professional organization the Human Behavior and
Evolution Society (HBES), to which the majority of America's leading
evolutionary psychologists belong. He edits a small journal called
Population and Environment. And the three books summarized above appeared in
a series edited by Seymour Iztkoff, a well-known if extremely conservative
scholar of the genetics of intelligence at Smith College.

Are MacDonald's peers aware of what he's writing in the name of a field long
accused of fostering--unfairly, many of them would say; by Jews, MacDonald
would say--sexist and racist stereotypes? Do other evolutionary
psychologists have an opinion on MacDonald? Culturebox called several
well-known members of HBES, specifying in her voice messages that she was
writing an article about MacDonald. Few returned her phone calls, but those
who did said they'd never read his Jewish trilogy. Two leading scholars said
they had read papers of his on other subjects and found them "muddled"; one
academic said she had been forced to reject a paper by MacDonald on child
development for an anthology she was editing. When Culturebox described the
contents of MacDonald's books to them, they expressed extreme shock and said
he contradicted the basic principles of contemporary evolutionary
psychology. "The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn't
make it on the basis of modern population genetics," said John Tooby, the
president of HBES and a professor of anthropology at the University of
California at Santa Barbara. Also, he said, "group-selection theory"--the
idea that natural selection can occur at the level of a group (such as a
bunch of Jews) as opposed to individuals--was debunked in the 1960s, and
though some scholars are working to bring group-selection theory back, it
remains a minority view.

Not everyone in the field is as critical as Tooby, however. A review
praising MacDonald's first book appeared in the journal Ethology and
Sociobiology four years ago (the publication was in the process of being
taken over by HBES at the time); the author, John Hartung, a professor at
the State University of New York and a former secretary of HBES, concluded
that the Holocaust, "the most enormous act of reactive racism ever
perpetrated," had been misrepresented as an unjustified evil so as to cow
non-Jews into looking the other way while Jews "purloin" land in Israel.
According to Lingua Franca, which covered the incident, the only public
reaction to Hartung's review was a "tepid" letter by the journal's editor
saying he didn't realize that it could be offensive, and an outright defense
of Hartung by HBES's then-president, Dick Alexander. As for MacDonald, the
author of the book that inspired these remarks, there was little visible
effort at the time to refute him or to challenge the appropriateness of
having him serve in so many key positions.

On the contrary. MacDonald thanks several prominent evolutionary
psychologists in the acknowledgments to his trilogy. Among them is David
Sloane Wilson, the leading advocate of group-selection theory. What exactly
these scholars did for MacDonald is unclear. (Wilson did not return
Culturebox's phone calls.) But MacDonald appears to have given them an
opportunity to have their names suppressed, because there are other scholars
he says he could have identified but didn't: "Regrettably," he writes, they
"have asked that their names not appear here."

Can we blame the field of evolutionary psychology for Kevin MacDonald?
Intellectually speaking, no. Evolutionary psychology is a fairly new
endeavor trying to overcome an extremely disturbing past, and you can't make
serious scholars accountable for all the discredited notions their peers
cling to. But we can hold specific academics responsible--Itzkoff comes to
mind--and we can ask what on earth the officers of HBES were thinking when
they allowed MacDonald to become such an active member of their
organization. If the response to Hartung's review is any indication, they
would probably say that they don't believe in censoring their members. But
it is the job of a scholarly association not just to foster discussion but
also to police the boundaries of its discipline. When this evolutionary
psychologist and HBES officer testifies in the Irving trial, he is bound to
get his counterparts in a lot of trouble. In many ways, they deserve it.




Date:  Shulevitz' yellow journalism
Kevin MacDonald
http://bbs.slate.com/bbs/slate-culturebox/posts/uu/7300.asp
tide71.microsoft.com
Tue Jan 25 18:00:39

  Judith Shulevitz=92s article, =93Evolutionary Psychology=92s Anti-Semite,=
=94 is so
outrageous a piece of yellow journalism that I am surprised that a prominent
magazine like Slate would run it. It bears about as much resemblance to what
I=92ve written as a creationist tract attacking evolution bears to Darwin=92=
s
Origin of Species. It is so outrageous one almost yearns for British laws on
libel so that I could force her to provide evidence for her false claims
that I am =93evolutionary psychology=92s anti-Semite=94 and that my ideas=
 about
Jews =93represent the broadest, ugliest, and most vicious anti-Semitism
passing for scholarship in this country today.=94 Some of her statements are
simply overly general, others simply false, while others are incomplete or
take my thoughts entirely out of context. In general Shulevitz fails to even
once indicate that I have adduced a great deal of evidence for my claims and
that I have developed a fairly elaborate theory based on evolutionary
biology and evolutionary social psychology. In the following I will
intersperse my responses--[sometimes in brackets]-- with her
mischaracterizations.

  Shulevitz: =93MacDonald's central thesis is that Judaism is best=
 understood
not as a religion but as a blueprint for an experiment in eugenics--a =91gro=
up
evolutionary strategy,=92 he calls it--designed to maximize a single trait:
intelligence.=94

  Based on a great deal of evidence, I argue that Judaism developed a
conscious program of eugenics to improve scholarly ability (but not only
scholarly ability), with the result that Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is at least one
standard deviation above the white mean. This was not the only trait that
was selected for.

  Jewish eugenics was conscious in the sense that they believed that people
should be very careful about the characteristics of one's mate because they
would affect one's children. They were especially keen on the importance of
marrying men who were scholars. The following is from the Talmud: =93a man
should sell all he possesses in order to marry the daughter of a scholar, or
marry his daughter to a scholar or other man of character, because he may
then rest assured that his children will be scholars; but marriage to an
ignoramus will result in ignorant children=94 (b. Pesachim, 49a).

  This is a paragraph from A PEOPLE THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE: =93JUDAISM AS A
GROUP STRATEGY: the authors of the Talmud, like the other ancients, believed
that heredity made an important contribution to individual differences in a
wide variety of traits, including physical traits (e.g., height),
personality (but not moral character), and, as indicated by the above
quotations from the Talmud, scholarly ability. =91Every care was taken to
prevent the birth of undesirables by a process of selective mating=92 (p.=
 32).
Individuals contemplating marriage are enjoined to attend to the family
history of the future spouse: =91a girl with a good pedigree, even if she be
poor and an orphan, is worthy to become wife of a king=92 (Midrash num. R.i,
5). A prospective wife should be scrutinized for the presence in her family
of diseases believed to be inherited (e.g., epilepsy), and also the
character of her brothers should be examined, suggesting an awareness of the
importance of sex-linked factors. Physical appearance was not to be a
critical resource for a woman: =91for =93false is grace and beauty is vain.=
=94 Pay
regard to good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children=92
(Taanith 26b and 31a). There is every evidence that in fact the Jews
followed these rules quite closely, particularly the practice of wealthy men
finding scholars as husbands for their daughters.=94

  Shulevitz: =93For thousands of years, he says [actually, since the=
 beginning
of the Diaspora=97about 2000 years], Jews have separated themselves from=
 their
neighbors, choosing to confine themselves to a closed society with strict
rules against marrying outside the group. They have lived by policies of
extreme group loyalty and obedience to rabbinical authority, which served to
maintain their racial purity; and they practiced low-birth-rate [oftentimes
Jewish birth rate has been quite high), high-investment parenting, which is
the royal road to a high group I.Q. They conferred social status (which
brings along with it the most desirable women) on men according to their
brilliance--indeed, says MacDonald, study of the Talmud was nothing more
than a casuistic exercise meant to weed out the dim. [Nonsense; that was one
effect, but the Talmud also served as a legal code and much more. The less
intelligent were not literally weeded out, but the intelligent were able to
enter into better marriages and have more children;  over time, this raised
the mean Jewish IQ.] Eventually, their highly developed genes for mental and
verbal acuity, as well as their social aggression (also carefully bred-in)
[I never make such a claim], gave the Jews powerful tools that enable them
to dominate neighboring ethnic groups in the endless war of all against all
for food and resources. [At certain times and places they have dominated,
but surely not always; I never talk about food.]

  In his second book, MacDonald explains why Jews have encountered so much
anti-Semitism for so many years: It was justified. [Such a statement has
moral connotations that are completely inappropriate to my analysis.]
Gentiles reacted to Jews the way any group of animals on the veldt would
when confronted with a group of superior animals likely to challenge them
successfully for control of the available resources--they tried to destroy
the Jews before the Jews destroyed them. [This is an extremely crude
rendering. My thesis is based on the mainstream view that part of our
evolved psychology involves mechanisms designed to deal with between-group
competition. However, I take pains to emphasize that human intelligence and
our ability to monitor the behavior of other group members make us quite
unlike other animals in several important ways. See Chapter 1 of A PEOPLE
THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE.] Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such
as Nazism, can be seen not as aberrations but as =91a mirror image=92 of
Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race [I describe several
ways in which Nazism was a mirror image of Judaism, including a powerful
concern with socializing group members into accepting group goals and with
the importance of within-group cooperation in attaining these goals.
However,  I also describe some differences.]

  =93(MacDonald does not deny that the Holocaust occurred, but he appears to
think it was rooted in an immutable biological chain reaction that the Jews
set off. [My theory emphasizes indeterminism and chance events that have
major effects on history. I do not claim to have a theory of the Holocaust,
only a theory of the general outlines of group competition with specific
reference to anti-Semitism. A theory of the Holocaust would require a
detailed understanding of the psychology of the major players (Hitler,
Himmler, Goebbels) and their underlings who carried out their orders, their
opportunities and constraints. I certainly do not have such a theory.) Faced
with the hatred of gentiles, Jews have often resorted to a =91strategy of
crypsis=92--that is, they have pretended not to be Jews. [Anyone with the
slightest knowledge of Jewish history would have to agree that Jewish
crypsis is well attested in several times and places. This practice is very
understandable given the prevalence of anti-Semitism. I describe a great
many examples of crypsis and other strategies by which Jews have attempted
to combat anti-Semitism in Chapter 6 of SEPARATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.] Do
the Jews themselves realize what they're up to? MacDonald goes back and
forth on this point; one moment he'll chastise Jews for believing their own
religious rationalizations, the next he'll explain that they can't help
it--they're genetically =91prone to self-deception.=92 [The importance of
self-deception is well established among evolutionists. However,
distinguishing between deception and self-deception is extremely difficult.
My discussion is based on a lot of examples, and I think some at least are
plausibly examples of self-deception while some may indeed simply involve
deception. I provide examples of deception and self-deception among both
Jews and anti-Semitic gentiles.]

  =93In his third book, MacDonald takes on what he calls the =91Jewish=92
intellectual movements of the 20th century, from psychoanalysis to Marxism
to =91Boasian anthropology=92 and =91the Frankfurt School of social=
 research.=92 His
argument is that the ideas of secular Jewish intellectuals are merely a
device to promote tolerance of the Jewish presence by gentiles--so that the
Jews can more efficiently pursue their nefarious agenda of systematic
breeding and control of resources [I would never use a word like =91nefariou=
s=92
in this context. This is moralizing by Shulevitz]. A good example of this is
cultural anthropology: Its Jewish founder, Franz Boas, shifted the focus of
anthropology away from Darwinism and eugenicism and toward the study of
culture in order to bring an end to the criticism of Jews as a race. [The
Boasians were much more concerned to discredit the racialist ideas of
Madison Grant and others which accorded the Nordic race a superior place in
the evolutionary scheme. I argue that the Boasians were influenced by their
ethnic identities as were Grant and his supporters. It is a commonplace that
social science had WASPish overtones early in the century. Why should one be
surprised that Jewish contributions reflected their ethic identity? In my
view, individuals with strong group identities see the world through a prism
colored by their perception of group interests.] Even if an intellectual
movement (such as liberalism) was founded by non-Jews, the minute Jews join
it, they'll take it over, because their ancestral history predisposes them
to form =91highly cohesive groups=92: =91Intellectual activity is like any=
 other
human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies.=92
[Again, one must deal with the evidence that I have put together that in
fact several important 20th-century intellectual movements were developed by
people with strong Jewish identities pursuing perceived Jewish interests.]
Ideas that MacDonald identifies as Jewish, he invariably finds to be not
only subtly self-interested but also repellent by any ordinary (which is to
say gentile) moral or intellectual standard. [Not true. Many
gentiles=97including me=97became involved in these movements; we obviously=
 found
the ideas attractive.] Freud =91conceptualized himself as a leader in a war=
 on
gentile culture.=92 [There is a great deal of evidence for this. Shulevitz
writes as if I am just pulling this out of a hat.] When Stephen Jay Gould
and Richard Lewontin expressed doubts about sociobiology back in the 1970s,
their approach exemplified the kind of =91skeptical thrust of Jewish
intellectual activity=92 that results in Jewish =91nihilistic anti-science.=
=92

  =93Toward the end of the third book, MacDonald lays out his solution for
restoring what he calls =91parity=92 between the Jews and other ethnic=
 groups:
systematic discrimination against Jews in college admission and employment
and heavy taxation of Jews =91to counter the Jewish advantage in the
possession of wealth.=92 [This is complete nonsense. I never advocate
discrimination of any kind. The context was my discussion of Horace Kallen's
idea of cultural pluralism (where every group maintains its ethnic identity,
but, in Rodney King's words, we somehow =93all just get along=94) versus the
melting pot idea that most of us learned in high school (where each group
sort of melted in, while still retaining some ties to the old ways in diet,
religion, etc.). I argue that: (1) The data show groups differ in all sorts
of performance (for whatever reason or mix of reasons); (2) like it or not,
evolutionary theory says groups will attach particular significance to where
they stand relative to other groups (hence the call for affirmative action
programs, etc.). Then given (1) and (2), I predict (not advocate) that
sooner or later the high levels of Jewish performance in certain areas will
come to attention and there will be calls for the type of things Shulevitz
insinuates I am advocating. I discuss the many Jewish notables (like Sydney
Hook) who moved from the left to the libertarian right (i.e., neo-cons)
because of their concern that affirmative action for minorities would
eventually compromise Jewish interests. Jewish organizations have clearly
seen that affirmative action is a slippery slope towards the old numerus
clausus that kept qualified Jews out of the Ivy League, etc. That's why
these organizations have opposed affirmative action.]

  =93It is not a coincidence that MacDonald spends much of his time in his
third book attacking the enemies of Darwinism and sociobiology--or
evolutionary psychology, as it is usually called today. MacDonald identifies
himself as an evolutionary psychologist, and indeed, most prominent figures
in the field would at least know his name. But, remarkably, to Culturebox's
knowledge, no American evolutionary psychologist has publicly objected to
his work. This is not to say that it has been celebrated. A man in his 50s,
MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate
school, California State University in Long Beach. [Actually I have been a
full professor for about five years now. (I got a late start because of my
involvement in =9160s radicalism.) I like to think of Cal. State Long Beach=
 as
a second rate institution. It=92s not quite UC-Berkeley, but it=92s pretty=
 good.
Whatever Shulevitz may think, there are many fine professors and students
here. Many of the latter, including some of my master=92s degree students,
have gone on to excellent Ph. D. Programs.] But much more important to an
academic than his title is his standing among his peers, and there MacDonald
is on firmer ground: He's the secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and
executive board member of the professional organization the Human Behavior
and Evolution Society (HBES), to which the majority of America's leading
evolutionary psychologists belong. He edits a small journal called
=91Population and Environment.=92 And the three books summarized above=
 appeared
in a series edited by Seymour Iztkoff, a well-known if extremely
conservative scholar of the genetics of intelligence at Smith College.

  =93Are MacDonald's peers aware of what he's writing in the name of a field
long accused of fostering--unfairly, many of them would say; by Jews,
MacDonald would say--sexist and racist stereotypes? Do other evolutionary
psychologists have an opinion on MacDonald? Culturebox called several
well-known members of HBES, specifying in her voice messages that she was
writing an article about MacDonald. Few returned her phone calls, but those
who did said they'd never read his Jewish trilogy. Two leading scholars said
they had read papers of his on other subjects and found them =91muddled=92;=
 one
academic said she had been forced to reject a paper by MacDonald on child
development for an anthology she was editing. [The only thing muddled is
Shulevitz=92s knowledge of the data and theory of evolutionary psychology=
 and
behavior genetics. Unlike many evolutionary psychologists, I believe not
only in the importance of domain-specific mechanisms that evolved to solve
specific adaptive problems. I am far from being alone in arguing that we
have to go beyond an exclusive concern with domain-specificity to study the
evolutionary importance of domain-general mechanisms like IQ. My colleagues
with a background in both behavior genetics and evolutionary psychology
(e.g., David Geary, David Rowe, Nancy Segal) agree with me on this. (I took
my Ph. D. Under Benson Ginsburg, a prominent behavior geneticist, and did my
Ph. D. dissertation on personality differences among wolves.) IQ is a
central component of my analysis of Judaism, though many evolutionary
psychologists avoid the topic. Nonetheless, I have published my views in
highly reputable refereed journals in psychology.] When Culturebox described
the contents of MacDonald's books to them, they expressed extreme shock and
said he contradicted the basic principles of contemporary evolutionary
psychology. =91The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn't
make it on the basis of modern population genetics,=92 said John Tooby, the
president of HBES and a professor of anthropology at the University of
California at Santa Barbara. [Tooby perhaps has not read the relevant
sections of my books. I summarize a great many population genetic studies
showing that in fact there are genetic frequency differences between Jews
and gentiles and that these differences have been maintained by Jewish
marriage practices. I argue that Judaism represents a group strategy which
is fairly (but not completely) closed to penetration from gentile gene
pools. The data indicate that Jews have remained genetically distinct from
the groups they have lived among despite having lived among them for
centuries. In addition, Jewish populations in very diverse areas have
significantly more genetic commonality than is the case between Jews and the
gentile populations they have lived among for centuries. One of the most
amazing recent studies shows that the Kohanim have preserved among
themselves essentially the same Y-chromosome. I also show that Jews have
placed a high premium on marrying within the group and have placed
formidable barriers to prevent significant penetration of gentiles into
their gene pool. I can=92t imagine why an evolutionist would be surprised by
this.] Also, he said, "group-selection theory"--the idea that natural
selection can occur at the level of a group (such as a bunch of Jews) as
opposed to individuals--was debunked in the 1960s, and though some scholars
are working to bring group-selection theory back, it remains a minority
view. [Again, I doubt that Tooby has read my books. I clearly emphasize
*cultural* group selection which has none of the theoretical difficulties
associated with the form of group selection that was =93debunked in the
1960s.=94 My work is highly compatible with the work of theorists like David
Sloan Wilson, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. This perspective emphasizes
the ability of human groups to monitor group members, prevent cheating, and
enforce group goals=97in short to create a group evolutionary strategy.]=94

  Shulevitz concludes her review by stating that =93it is the job of a
scholarly association not just to foster discussion but also to police the
boundaries of its discipline. When this evolutionary psychologist and HBES
officer testifies in the Irving trial, he is bound to get his counterparts
in a lot of trouble. In many ways, they deserve it.=94

  Whatever Shulevitz may think of my work, I hope all HBES members and
academics in general will agree that we are better sticking with peer review
than being *policed* by Shulevitz or anyone else. My conscience is clear
that I am in no way an anti-Semite and that in the long run my analysis of
Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy will be proved right in its
essentials. SLATE, police thyself!

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