Wit & Attitude Quote by J. Philippe Rushton

Rushton’s sentence is less an argument than a rhetorical trap: accept evolution and you’re supposed to accept his downstream claims about ranking humans, or reject evolution and brand yourself a fundamentalist. The move is slick because it borrows the prestige of biology to preempt moral and political objections. By framing dissent as either religious dogma or “foolishness,” he narrows the field of acceptable disagreement before the evidence even arrives.

The intent is clear: to naturalize human difference as something that should be treated like any other taxonomic problem. “Biological classification” sounds innocuous, even responsible, but in Rushton’s career it signals a controversial project: applying evolutionary reasoning to group differences in behavior and intelligence in ways widely criticized as methodologically weak and socially combustible. The subtext is that modern egalitarian instincts are sentimental, anti-scientific luxuries - an evasion of “laws” that supposedly don’t care about our politics.

What makes the line culturally potent is its opportunistic mix of common sense and intimidation. Most readers are primed to nod along with “humans are animals,” a basic evolutionary premise. Rushton then smuggles in a second, much bigger leap: that whatever can be classified ought to be, and that classification will carry explanatory and even normative weight. The quote also performs a kind of moral laundering: if outcomes are evolutionary, then controversy becomes misdirected outrage at nature itself.

Context matters because this isn’t a neutral plea for Darwinian humility. It’s a permission structure. By casting his framework as the only grown-up alternative to religion, Rushton positions critics as irrational - a familiar tactic in debates where science is invoked not to clarify uncertainty, but to foreclose it.