Chris Brand

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Christopher Richard Brand (born in Preston, England, 1 June 1943) is a British psychological and psychometric researcher who gained media attention for his controversial statements on race and intelligence. He is a graduate of The Queen's College Oxford, and a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, 1968-70.

Brand is a proponent of IQ testing and the general intelligence factor and Brand was "a major influence in the spread of influence of inspection time as a theoretically interesting correlate of psychometric intelligence," according to Ian Deary and Pauline Smith in the International Handbook of Intelligence, edited by Robert Sternberg.^[1] Deary and Smith report the correlation of inspection time with psychometric intelligence is currently considered to be .4.^[2] The 25th anniversy of the original discovery of this relationship was recently celebrated in 2001 by a special issue of Intelligence.^[3]

Brand's discussion of the disparity between races in average cognitive ability test scores has caused controversy, especially because of his support for the hereditarian hypothesis of such differences. Brand refers to himself as a "race realist," and once told inquiring journalist he accepted he was what the London School's opponents had long called a "scientific racist."[1] He elaborated, "I want to help people with problems caused by low IQ. The way in which I would try to explain higher levels of crime and out of wedlock births would not be by referring to blackness or race, but to IQ which does most of the explanatory work."

Brand's most controversial views generated headlines in 1996, when he was quoted in the Independent on Sunday recommending that "low-IQ girls" be "encouraged to have sex with higher-IQ boys" rather than with their more usual low-IQ companions (resulting in genetic deterioration). "There are plenty of intelligent African men for black girls to be having sex with," he said, though adding (like his hero psychologist William McDougall [2]) that blacks probably needed to be allowed polygamy. Brand has also written that "women are inclined to deceitful promiscuity" (because one child in ten is not the biological child of the father in the home) and that Sigmund Freud was therefore right to ascribe weaker superegos to women than to men. (Unusually, Brand is a supporter both of psychometrician-psychologist Hans Eysenck [3] and of Freud.) His 1996 book The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications led to accusations of scientific racism and sexism, and his university lectures were protested and closed by the Anti-Nazi League of Edinburgh. Brand's book was subsequently withdrawn by publisher John Wiley & Sons. It was subsequently published free on the web by Douance [4].

Also in 1996 Brand came to the defense of Nobel laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek who had been charged with paedophilia. Brand wrote that, "Academic studies and my own experience [as a choir boy occasionally importuned by older men] suggest that non-violent paedophilia with a consenting partner over age 12 does no harm so long as the paedophiles and their partners are of above-average IQ and educational level." He was fired after a year of secret trial [5] from his 27-year tenured position at Edinburgh University in 1997 for conduct that had allegedly "brought the university into disrepute."[6] He considered this to be the result of "media-orchestrated outrage at his political incorrectness".[7] The University subsequently paid him a sum equal to the maximum compensation that British law then demanded for unfair dismissal.

From 2000 to 2004, Brand was a research consultant to the Woodhill Foundation and its CRACK program based in Baltimore, Maryland, which pays drug-addicted mothers (50% black) $200 to be sterilized.[8] Reflecting on the end of his contract as he retired he said that he hoped the program "will bring real advances for [the eugenic cause]".[9]. Long best known as an academic book reviewer, his recent thinking can be sampled via his reviews at Amazon Books [10], his articles in American Renaissance and The Occidental Quarterly, his (co-authored) chapter 'Why ignore the g factor?'[11] and his weblog (where a picture of him is posted)[12]

[edit] References

Independent on Sunday (London) 14 April 1996, p. 21.

^ Deary, I., Smith, P. (February 2 2004). “Intelligence Research and Assessment in the United Kingdom”, Robert Sternberg: The International Handbook of Intelligence. Cambridge University Press, 14-15.
^ Deary and Smith 2004 p. 15.
^ Deary and Smith 2004 p. 14. Original discovery was by Nettelbeck and Lally.