Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been classified as a hate group and has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. From 2002 until his death in October 2012, the Pioneer Fund was headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, who was succeeded by Richard Lynn. Two of the best known studies funded by Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families. Research backed by the fund on race and intelligence has generated controversy and criticism, One prominent example is the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund also has ties to eugenics, and has both current and former links to white supremacist publications such as American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly. History of the race and intelligence controversy Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund list two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program, was aimed at encouraging the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended". Its second purpose was to support academic research and the "dissemination of information, into the 'problem of heredity and eugenics and "the problems of race betterment". The Pioneer Fund argues the "race betterment" has always referred to the "human race" referred to earlier in the sentence, and critics argue it referred to racial groups.