Kevin MacDonald

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach. He testified for David Irving in his libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt. Lipstadt is an American historian and the author of the book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Plume, 1994), in which she called Irving a Holocaust denier.

Activities

MacDonald writes on his website about his decision to testify for Irving. He states:

The decision to testify for David Irving was an agonizing one for me and I want to make clear exactly why I did so. Irving approached me to testify in the trial because I had included the suppression of his book on Goebbels as an example of Jewish tactics for combating anti-Semitism in Separation and Its Discontents. Actually the suppression of Irving goes far beyond what I included in my book. Irving has been prevented from publishing his original archival research, from traveling to several countries, and even from giving lectures. The second defendant in the case, Deborah Lipstadt, has contributed to this effort at censorship. My statement to the court and my entire testimony in court involved this issue, not the Holocaust or the culpability of Hitler.

According to Mr Justice Gray in his summing up of the High Court libel case in 2000:

He [MacDonald] gave evidence on what he termed “Jewish-gentile interactions” from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Biographical information

The following is a biography from his website:

After receiving a Masters degree in evolutionary biology, he received a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences, both at the University of Connecticut. Since assuming his position at California State University–Long Beach, his research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives on culture, developmental psychology and personality theory, the origins and maintenance of monogamous marriage in Western Europe, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers and reviews, and he is the author of Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (1988), A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994), Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). He has also edited three books, Sociobiological Perspectives on Human Development (1988), Parent-Child Play: Descriptions and Implications (1994), and Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development (2004). Cultural Insurrections, a collection of essays, appeared in 2008.

Affiliations

Member of the following organizations (as at December 2009):

• Society for Research in Child Development
• Human Behavior and Evolution Society
• International Society for Human Ethology
• Politics and the Life Sciences

Resources

Kevin MacDonald, My Decision to Testify for Irving, Kevin MacDonald website, accessed 4 Dec 2009

Contact

Address: Department of Psychology, CSU-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901, USA

Phone: (562) 985-8183

Email: kmacd(AT)csulb.edu

Website: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/

Resources

High Court judgment in libel trial available here.