Education Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

“Nonetheless” is doing a lot of rhetorical laundering here. It signals that the author knows the ground is morally radioactive, then steps onto it anyway, positioning himself as the brave empiricist pushing past squeamish taboos. That’s the first move: frame dissent as sentiment and his own stance as dispassionate science. “Much has been learned” is the second. It’s a triumphal, passive-voice claim with no specifics, no citations, no mention of what was “learned” or at what human cost. The vagueness functions as a smuggler’s compartment: readers can project onto it whatever “lessons” they already want race science to deliver.

The phrase “statistical differences” is the clincher. It borrows the prestige of quantification to preempt critique, as if the mere existence of measured variation settles the ethical and political stakes. Statistics here aren’t just a tool; they’re a shield. And “various human races” treats race as a stable, biologically coherent set of categories rather than a historically contingent, socially policed taxonomy. That quiet reification is the subtext: race is assumed to be real in the way height is real, making downstream hierarchies feel like neutral description instead of ideological choice.

Rushton’s broader context matters because he was a prominent proponent of racialized IQ and behavior narratives within the long afterlife of scientific racism. Read that way, the line isn’t an invitation to nuanced inquiry; it’s a bid to re-legitimate a controversial project by wrapping it in the language of sober, incremental knowledge. The intent is normalization: to make a politically loaded research agenda sound like ordinary, overdue scholarship.