Henry Harpending
Henry Cosad Harpending was an American anthropologist and distinguished professor at the University of Utah. Harpending received his A.B. degree from Hamilton College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Education and career
Harpending was born in Dundee, New York in 1944. He graduated from Dundee Central High School in 1961, Hamilton College in 1964, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1972. Harpending studied population genetics.After graduating from Harvard, he worked at Yale, the University of New Mexico, Penn State, and the University of Utah. Over his career, he contributed to over 120 publications.
Harpending's first wife was Patricia Draper, with whom he had two children. He married his second wife, Renee Pennington, around 1995. They had one son. He died on April 3, 2016 at the age of 72, following a stroke.
Work
Population genetics
According to a biography by Alan R. Rogers, in the 1970s Harpending pioneered the study of the relationship between genetics and geography, developing methods that are still in use. He also overturned the prevailing understanding of group selection, by showing that group selection is most likely to operate when there is strong gene flow between groups, rather than when they are isolated from one another. Harpending also developed the approach of analyzing populations using R-matrix methods, and together with Trefor Jonkin, wrote the most highly cited chapter in the 1973 handbook Methods and Theory of Anthropological Genetics.!Kung and Herero
Harpending did fieldwork in Southern Africa and spoke the !Kung language. In 1981, while with the University of New Mexico, Harpending studied the group during the South African Border War. Harpending described the !Kung society as "like Rorschachs" because anthropologists could draw contradictory conclusions. His fieldwork was the basis of the 1993 monograph The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community, with Pennington.Harpending also did extensive fieldwork on the Herero people, a cattle-herding group in the Botswana area. Herero are locally known for "their traditionalism, their wealth in cattle and their dominating older women". Harpending's previous experience with the !Kung people was useful because many Herero are bilingual in !Kung. Harpending had previous contact with Herero from earlier research trips.
In 1973, Harpending helped start the Kalahari People's Fund. The KPF was an outgrowth of the multidisciplinary Harvard Kalahari Research Group led by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore. Newsweek described the KPF as one of the first people's advocacy organizations in the US with professional anthropological expertise behind it.
Ashkenazi intelligence
Harpending's hypothesis about Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence has attracted both praise and criticism, with some scientists regarding the theory as highly implausible, while others regard it as worth considering. According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this theory "meets the standards of a good scientific theory, though it is tentative and could turn out to be mistaken." On the other hand, geneticist David Reich has argued that the hypothesis is contradicted by evidence that the higher rate of genetic diseases among Ashkenazi Jews is in fact due to genetic drift.''The 10,000 Year Explosion''
In The 10,000 Year Explosion, which he co-authored with Gregory Cochran, Harpending suggests a common belief that human genetic adaptation stopped 40,000 years ago is incorrect and that humans evolved increasingly rapidly in response to the new challenges presented by agriculture and civilization. The result was accelerating evolution which has varied according to new niches or environments that particular populations inhabit.The final chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion expands on their paper from the Journal of Biosocial Science on the issue of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence. Harpending and Cochran argue the cause of the claim of Ashkenazim having higher mean verbal and mathematical intelligence than other ethnic groups is due to the historically isolated population of Jews in Europe.
Harpending and Cochran's book The 10,000 Year Explosion was reviewed in many several academic journals, including the American Journal of Human Biology, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolution and Human Behavior, Explorations in Anthropology, and the Journal of Anthropological Research. Reviews by Milford H. Wolpoff, Gregory Gorelik and Todd K. Shackelford, and Edward Hagen all praised the book as creative and insightful, and argue that it presents a valuable contribution to our understanding of human evolution. However, these reviewers criticized some of the book's hypotheses as not adequately supported. A pair of negative reviews by Cadell Last and Keith Hunley criticized the book for its regarding race as a biological category and for presenting an overly simplistic view of the influence of genetics on human behavioral variation.
Views on race
The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented Harpending's works and statements on race, noting his association with white supremacist groups and referring to his work as an attempt to perpetuate scientific racism. The SPLC notes he attributed stereotypes of different human populations to genetic differences, often saying that Africans, Papua New Guineans, and "Baltimore" possess the same genetic temperamental predispositions which he said are characterized by "violence, laziness, and a preference for 'mating instead of parenting'", while Europeans and northern Asians "have evolved higher intelligence and 'tend to be more disciplined than people who take life for granted'"; that he favored mass deportation of illegal immigrants from the United States using FEMA camps as part of the process and did not believe that more money should be spent on education in the United States because he thought the race-based disparities are based on genetics rather than disparities in funding; that he gave conferences at what the SPLC designates as white supremacist groups; and that he supported eugenics, crediting it in the form of the death penalty for the "genetic pacification" of the western European population.Harpending once stated that people of sub-Saharan ancestry do not have the same genetic propensity for "hard work" as Eurasians do. According to geneticist David Reich, "there is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement."
Harpending denied being a racist. During a talk on race and intelligence at the H.L. Mencken Club, a white nationalist conference founded by Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer, he said that "somebody'll call you a racist, but that's the way the world is". In a 2012 blog post, he wrote "if is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World", with the result being that "talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like 'institutional racism' and 'white privilege'".