Henry Harpending

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

He was a distinguished professor at the University of Utah, and formerly taught at Penn State and the University of New Mexico.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is known for the book The 10,000 Year Explosion, which he co-authored with Gregory Cochran.

Some of Harpending's statements about race, biology and racial differences in intelligence were controversial.

He is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a white nationalist, and associated with groups described by the SPLC as such.

Harpending was born in Dundee, New York, in 1944.

He graduated from Dundee Central High School in 1961, received his A.B. degree from Hamilton College in 1964, and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972.

Harpending studied 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.

After graduating from Harvard, he worked at Yale (1972-1973), the University of New Mexico (1973–85), Penn State (1985-1997), and the University of Utah (1997-2016).

Over the course of his academic career, he contributed to over 120 publications.

Harpending's first wife was Patricia Draper, with whom he had two children.

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.

Harpending did fieldwork in Southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia) and spoke the !Kung language.

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.

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.

He married his second wife, Renee Pennington, around 1995.

They had one son.

In the 2005 paper "Natural History Of Ashkenazi Intelligence", Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Harpending suggest that the high average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews may be attributed to natural selection for intelligence during the Middle Ages and a low rate of genetic inflow.

They hypothesize that the occupational profile of the Jewish community in medieval Europe had resulted in selection pressure for mutations that increase intelligence, but can also result in hereditary neurological disorders.

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.

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 disease, Niemann–Pick disease, Gaucher's disease, familial dysautonomia, Bloom syndrome, Fanconi anemia, cystic fibrosis and mucolipidosis IV) is due to the historically isolated population of Jews in Europe.

Harpending and Cochran's book The 10,000 Year Explosion was reviewed in 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 praised the book as creative and insightful, arguing that it makes a valuable contribution to understanding human evolution, but criticized some of the book's hypotheses as not adequately supported.

He died on April 3, 2016, at the age of 72, following a stroke.