The Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

 academic journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

 dedicated to physical

Physical anthropology

Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...

 and cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...

 and is currently published by the Council for Social and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

 It contains articles on human evolution

Human evolution

Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...

, intelligence, ethnography

Ethnography

Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

, linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, mythology

Mythology

The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

, archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

, etc. The journal aims to unify anthropology with biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

.

It has been called a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment" and a "white supremacist journal", "scientific racism's keepers of the flame", a journal with a "racist orientation" and a "infamous racist journal", and "journal of 'scientific racism'".

Its foundation in 1960 may in part have been a response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...

 which ordered the desegregation of schools in the United States. It was originally published in Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

, Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

, by the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics

International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics

The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics was a prominent group in the promotion of eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.-History:...

.

The founders were Robert Gayre

Robert Gayre

George Robert Gayre of Gayre and Nigg was a Scottish anthropologist who founded Mankind Quarterly. An expert on heraldry, he also founded The Armorial, and produced many books on this subject....

, Henry Garrett

Henry Garrett

Henry Edward Garrett was an American psychologist and segregationist. Garrett was President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955...

, Roger Pearson

Roger Pearson

Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, conservationist, eugenics advocate, founder of the Neo Nazi organization Northern League, and publisher of several journals.-Life and work:...

, Corrado Gini

Corrado Gini

Corrado Gini was an Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist who developed the Gini coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was also a leading fascist theorist and ideologue who wrote The Scientific Basis of Fascism in 1927...

, Ottmar von Verschuer and Reginald Ruggles Gates

Reginald Ruggles Gates

Reginald Ruggles Gates , was a Canadian born anthropologist, botanist, and geneticist. He did most of his work in the United Kingdom and the United States. He received his Bachelor of Science from McGill University with further education in Chicago and London. He did botanical work in Missouri in...

.

Editors

The current editors-in-chief are Peter Boev (Sofia, Bulgaria), Brunetto Chiarelli (Florence, Italy), Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial and ethnic differences. Lynn argues that there are hereditary differences in intelligence based on race and sex....

 (Bristol, England), and Gerhard Meisenberg.

Criticism

Many of those who constitute the publication's contributors, Board of Directors, and publishers are connected to the academic hereditarian tradition

Hereditarianism

Hereditarianism is the doctrine or school of thought that heredity plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetics to explain human character traits and solve human social and political...

. The journal has been criticized by some as being political and strongly right-leaning. The publisher counters that much of Anthropology is 'politicised' in the opposite way and that those who count amongst the most vocal critics of the journal often identify with the Radical tradition

Political radicalism

The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...

 in Anthropology.

During the "Bell Curve

The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray...

 wars" of the 1990s, the journal received attention when opponents of The Bell Curve publicized the fact that some of the works cited by Bell Curve authors Herrnstein

Richard Herrnstein

Richard J. Herrnstein was an American researcher in animal learning in the Skinnerian tradition. He was one of the founders of quantitative analysis of behavior....

 and Murray

Charles Murray

Charles Murray is the name of:*Charles Murray, 1st Earl of Dunmore *Charles Augustus Murray , British author diplomat*Charles Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore *Charles James Murray , British politician...

 had first been published in Mankind Quarterly. In the New York Review of Books, Charles Lane referred to The Bell Curve's "tainted sources," noting that seventeen researchers cited in the book's bibliography had contributed articles to, and ten of these seventeen had also been editors of, Mankind Quarterly, "a notorious journal of 'racial history' founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race." The journal stands by its tradition of publishing hereditarian perspective articles to this day, stating that "...this science has stood the test of time, and MQ is still prepared to publish controversial findings and theories". Pearson received over a million dollars in grants from the Pioneer Fund

Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund states that it focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to...

in the eighties and the nineties.