Henry Cosad Harpending was an American anthropologist and distinguished professor at the University of Utah, best known for his 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, co-authored with Gregory Cochran.
15 Facts About Henry Harpending
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Henry Harpending was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Outside of his scientific publications, Henry Harpending made numerous racist comments concerning innate negative characteristics of black people, the genetic superiority of Europeans and East Asians, and advocated for eugenics.
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Henry Harpending was associated with far-right organisations and the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a white nationalist.
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Henry Harpending was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
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Henry Harpending 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.
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Henry Harpending 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.
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In 1981, while with the University of New Mexico, Henry Harpending studied the group during the South African Border War.
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Henry Harpending's fieldwork was the basis of the 1993 monograph The Structure of an African Pastoralist Community, with Pennington.
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Henry Harpending did extensive fieldwork on the Herero people, a cattle-herding group in the Botswana area.
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Henry Harpending had previous contact with Herero from earlier research trips.
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Henry Harpending once stated that people of Sub-Saharan Black African ancestry do not have the same genetic propensity for "hard work" as Europeans and East Asians do.
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Henry Harpending himself denied being a racist, though he acknowledged that his views would be called "racist" by others.
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Henry Harpending married his second wife, Renee Pennington, around 1995.
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Henry Harpending died on April 3,2016, at the age of 72, following a stroke.