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The most effective way to repudiate Frank Ellis's crudely positivistic claims about intelligence and race is relentlessly to expose their Eurocentrically ideological nature.

In adopting any culturally specific, narrowly circumscribed definition of "intelligence", research such as Ellis's will unsurprisingly yield spuriously "scientific", self-fulfilling results. As John White points out in Intelligence, Destiny and Education , the contemporary (Western) curriculum places undue emphasis on the rational and the abstract. What if, even on his own terms, any observed inter-racial differences in "intelligence" ¨¤ la Ellis tell us far more about the West's disreputable imperialist history of exploitation than they do about genetic differences?

To silence Ellis institutionally might simply furnish him with more opportunities to expound his singularly unscientific views.

Richard House Research Centre for Therapeutic Education Roehampton University