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Henry Cosad Harpending (January 13, 1944 – April 3, 2016) 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. Educated at Hamilton College and Harvard University, his career included faculty positions at Penn State and the University of New Mexico. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Harpending worked primarily in biological anthropology and population genetics, but also conducted Ethnography fieldwork with the !Kung and of Southern Africa. His work in population genetics pioneered the study of the relationship between genetics and geography. In The 10,000 Year Explosion, Harpending and Cochrane argued that human evolution has accelerated since the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago and drove much of human history, including their controversial theory that Ashkenazi Jews became more intelligent than other people due to natural selection in the Middle Ages. This and other aspects of the book were criticised for its reliance on discredited theories of biological race and a lack of evidence for many of their claims.
Outside of his scientific publications, Harpending made numerous Racism comments concerning innate negative characteristics of black people, the White supremacy and East Asians, and advocated for eugenics. He was associated with far-right organisations and the Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a white nationalist.
Harpending was married twice and had three children. He died in 2016.
Over the course of his academic career, Harpending contributed to over 120 publications. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
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.
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.
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. "Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes". The New York Times, June 3, 2005. 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."Pinker, S. "Groups and Genes". The New Republic, June 26, 2006. 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.Reich. D. Who We are and How We Got Here. Pantheon books, 2018, p. 261.
The final chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion expands on their paper from the Journal of Biosocial ScienceG. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending. "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" , Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659–693 (2006). 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."Henry Harpending." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Biography In Context. Web. 1 Sept. 2013.
Harpending once stated that people of Sub-Saharan Black African ancestry do not have the same genetic propensity for "diligence" as Europeans and East Asians do. According to geneticist David Reich, "there is simply no scientific evidence to support this statement."
Harpending himself denied being a racist, though he acknowledged that his views would be called "racist" by others. In 2011, he delivered a lecture on race and intelligence at the H. L. Mencken Club, a white nationalist conference founded by Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer, described by the Anti-Defamation League as a "racist gathering". In a 2012 blog post, he claimed that institutional racism and white privilege do not exist, describing them as a continuation of traditional African beliefs about witchcraft – a belief in "vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people."
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