Henry Harpending

Henry Cosad Harpending (January 13, 1944 – April 3, 2016) was an American anthropologist, population geneticist, 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.

Harpending studied genetic and morphometric variation within and between human populations with mathematical models, examining hypotheses such as population growth, divergence, and gene flow.

Harpending did extensive fieldwork in Southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia) and spoke the !Kung language fluently. He died at the age of 72 on April 3, 2016.

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 (as well as having a relatively high number of genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs Disease, Canavan, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, Familial Dysautonomia, Bloom Syndrome, Fanconi anemia, Cystic Fibrosis and Mucolipidosis IV) is due to the historically isolated population of Jews in Europe.

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" (African-Americans) 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'"; 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; gave conferences at what the SPLC says are white supremacist groups; and supported eugenics, crediting it in the form of the death penalty for the "genetic pacification" of the western European population.

Books

• Renee Pennington; Henry Harpending (1993). The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community: Demography, History, and Ecology of the Ngamiland Herero. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-852286-7. 
• Jennie Keith; Christine L. Fry; Anthony P. Glascock; Charlotte Ikels; Jeanette Dickerson-Putman; Henry C. Harpending; Patricia Draper (22 September 1994). The Aging Experience: Diversity and Commonality Across Cultures. SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-1-4522-5484-5. 
• Gregory Cochran; Henry Harpending (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books. ISBN 0-4650-0221-8.