Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn is a controversial English psychologist and author. He is a former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, having had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018, and assistant editor of the journal Mankind Quarterly, which has been described as a "white supremacist journal". Lynn studies intelligence and is known for his belief in sex and racial differences in intelligence. Lynn was educated at King's College, Cambridge, in England. He has worked as lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and as professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.
Many scientists have criticised Lynn's work on racial and national differences in intelligence for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda. A number of scholars and intellectuals have said that Lynn is associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism. In the late 1970s, Lynn wrote that he found that East Asians have a higher average intelligence quotient than Europeans and Europeans have a higher average IQ than sub-Saharan Africans. In 1990, he proposed that the Flynn effect – the gradual increase in IQ scores observed around the world since the 1930s – could possibly be explained by improved nutrition. In two books co-written with Tatu Vanhanen, Lynn and Vanhanen argued that differences in developmental indexes among various nations are partially caused by the average IQ of their citizens. Earl Hunt and Werner Wittmann questioned the validity of their research methods and the highly inconsistent quality of the available data points that Lynn and Vanhanen used in their analysis. Lynn has also argued that the high fertility rate among individuals of low IQ constitutes a major threat to Western civilisation, as he believes people with low IQ scores will eventually outnumber high-IQ individuals. He has argued in favour of political measures to prevent this, including anti-immigration and eugenics policies, provoking heavy criticism internationally. Lynn's work was among the main sources cited in the book The Bell Curve, and he was one of 52 scientists who signed an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which endorsed a number of the views presented in the book.
Lynn sits on the editorial boards of the journals Personality and Individual Differences and Mankind Quarterly. Critics have called Mankind Quarterly a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment" and a "white supremacist journal". He is also on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funds Mankind Quarterly and has also been described as racist in nature. Two of his recent books are on dysgenics and eugenics.
Early life and career
Lynn is the son of Sydney Cross Harland, a botanist and Fellow of the Royal Society known for his work on cotton genetics. He was raised in Bristol by his mother and did not meet his father, who lived and worked in Trinidad and Peru, during his childhood and adolescence.Lynn was educated at Bristol Grammar School and University of Cambridge in England. He has worked as lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and as professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at Ulster University.
In 1974, Lynn published a positive review of Raymond Cattell's A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, in which he expressed the opinion that "incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall" and that "the foreign aid which we give to the under-developed world is a mistake, akin to keeping going incompetent species like the dinosaurs which are not fit for the competitive struggle for existence". In recent years, Lynn has cited the work of Cattell and Cyril Burt as important influences on his own thought.
Publication on secular increases in IQ
Lynn's 1983 article in Nature played some part in bringing the phenomenon of massive score gains on standardised intelligence tests over time to widespread attention. This phenomenon was called the "Flynn effect" in Richard Herrstein and Charles Murray's book The Bell Curve published in 1994. The term "Flynn effect" is now standard in the psychological literature to refer to secular increases in IQ. Some authors refer to the phenomenon under the name "Lynn–Flynn effect".Race and national differences in intelligence
In the late 1970s, Lynn wrote that he found the average IQ of the Japanese to be 106.6, and that of Chinese people living in Singapore to be 110.Lynn's psychometric studies were cited in the 1994 book The Bell Curve and were criticised as part of the controversy surrounding that book. In his article, "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans", published in 2002 in Population and Environment, Lynn concluded that lightness of skin color in African Americans is positively correlated with IQ, which he claims derives from the higher proportion of Caucasian admixture. However, Lynn failed to control for childhood environmental factors that are related to intelligence, and his research was criticised by a subsequent article published in the journal by Mark E. Hill. The article concluded that "... bivariate association disappears once childhood environmental factors are considered". In his response to Hill, Lynn wrote that "The conclusion that there is a true association between skin color and IQ is consistent with the hypothesis that genetic factors are partly responsible for the black–white difference in intelligence… the evidence that a statistically significant correlation is present confirms the genetic hypothesis". This statement was described by Marcus Feldman as "nonsensical".
Lynn's work on national IQ differences have been rejected by mainstream academic media. As of 2012, major publishers did not publish or review his work. According to James Thompson, writing for Personality and Individual Differences, "Despite all attempts to ignore his findings, Lynn's dogged accumulation of data made a considerable contribution to understanding human differences." Summarizing Lynn's research in this area along with that of Tatu Vanhanen, Earl B. Hunt writes that he is "highly critical of their empirical work, and even more so of their interpretations," but that they "do deserve credit for raising important questions in a way that has resulted in interesting and important findings."
Lynn proposed the "cold winters theory" of the evolution of human intelligence, which postulates that intelligence evolved to greater degrees as an evolutionary adaptation to colder environments. According to this theory, cold environments produce a selective pressure for higher intelligence because they present cognitive demands not found in warmer environments, such as the need to find ways of keeping warm, and the stockpiling of food for winter. James Flynn has criticized this theory as being inconsistent with the global distribution of IQ scores. If the theory were correct, the people of Singapore, who originated primarily from China's southern Guangdong province, would possess a lower average IQ than the people of mainland China, when in fact the reverse is true. Psychologist Scott A. McGreal, writing for Psychology Today, has described it as a just-so story, saying the theory fails to account for challenges specific to warmer environments, and also does not explain why hominids who evolved for millions of years in colder environments did not also evolve similar intelligence.
In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen argued that differences in nations' per capita gross domestic product are partially caused by IQ differences, meaning that certain nations are wealthier in part, because their citizens are more intelligent. K. Richardson wrote in the journal Heredity that "an association between IQ and national wealth is hardly surprising, though its causal direction is the opposite of that assumed by L&V. But I would not take the 'evidence' presented in this book to serve arguments either way." Other economists who reviewed the book also pointed to numerous flaws throughout the study, from unreliable IQ statistics for 81 of the 185 countries used in the analysis, to insecure estimates of the national IQ in the remaining 101 countries in the sample that did not have published IQ data. This was in addition to the highly unreliable GDP estimates for present-day developing countries and the even more unreliable historical data estimating GDP and national IQ dating back to the early 19th century, well before either concept even existed. Even the data on the 81 countries where direct evidence of IQ scores were actually available were highly problematic. For example, the data sets containing Surinamese, Ethiopian, and Mexican IQ scores were based on unrepresentative samples of children who had emigrated from their nation of birth to the Netherlands, Israel, and Argentina, respectively. In a book review for the Journal of Economic Literature, economist Thomas Nechyba wrote: "Such sweeping conclusions based on relatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions seem misguided at best and quite dangerous if taken seriously. It is therefore difficult to find much to recommend in this book."
Lynn's 2006 Race Differences in Intelligence is the largest review of the global cognitive ability data. The book organises the data by ten population groups and covers over 500 published articles.
Lynn's meta-analysis lists the average IQ scores of East Asians, Europeans, the Inuit, Southeast Asians and indigenous peoples of the Americas each, Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners , East and West Africans, Australian Aborigines and Bushmen and Pygmies.
Lynn has previously argued that nutrition is the best-supported environmental explanation for variation in the lower range, and a number of other environmental explanations have been advanced. Ashkenazi Jews average 107–115 in the US and Britain due to their better performance in verbal and reasoning tests even though they performed lower in visual and spatial ability tests, but those in Israel average lower.
In an article published in 2005 about IQ in Mexico, Lynn reported that Mexicans of European descent had an IQ of 98, Mestizos in Mexico had an IQ of 94, and indigenous peoples of Mexico had an IQ of 83, explaining the lower than expected IQ of Indians on their poor nutrition and other social factors.
In a 2010 article about IQ in Italy, Lynn contends that IQs are highest in the north and lowest in the south and are correlated with average incomes, stature, infant mortality, literacy and education. The lack of any actual IQ test data among other methodological issues and Lynn's consequent conclusions were criticised.
Other large surveys in Italy have found much smaller differences in educational achievement. Moreover, several subsequent studies based on the direct assessment of IQs failed to report significant differences among Italian regions. On the contrary, the results from the Southern half of the country are sometimes higher than those from the North Central regions.
Lynn similarly claims that southern Spaniards have lower IQs than northern Spaniards do and believes that this is because of Middle Eastern and North African genes in the South.
''The Global Bell Curve''
The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ and Inequality Worldwide is a book by Lynn, originally published Washington Summit Publishers in 2008. The book's stated purpose is to determine whether the racial and socioeconomic differences in the United States in average IQ, as originally claimed by the 1994 book The Bell Curve, also exist in other countries. Lynn's book claims that such differences exist in other countries, in addition to in the United States. It was reviewed favorably by researchers J. Philippe Rushton, Donald Templer, and Gerhard Meisenberg.A less favorable review of the book was written by Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh. Writing in Intelligence, which has Lynn on its editorial board, Johnson stated that "...despite many possible statistical and psychometric quibbles, the data Lynn presents in this book are essentially correct. At the same time, despite Lynn's protestations to the contrary, these data do little or nothing to address the questions of why this is the case or whether the situation is inevitable or permanent. Like the other theorists he criticizes, Lynn confuses correlation with causation."
Sex differences in intelligence
Lynn's research correlating brain size and reaction time with measured intelligence led him to the problem that men and women have different-sized brains in proportion to their bodies. In 2004, Lynn and Irwing conducted a meta-analysis and reported that an IQ difference of roughly 5 points does appear from age 15 and onward on the progressive matrices.However, in the following years, researchers such as Timothy Keith, Johannes Rojahn, and Alan S. Kaufman found contradictory results in gender IQ differences, with Keith even finding an adult female latent advantage in general factors, and Kaufman finding no difference in general intelligence. Keith said that the difference in Lynn's findings can be attributed to not using latent factors to measure their meta-analysis of sex differences. Rojahn's study found that the discrepancies between the gender development were smaller than predicted by Lynn and in fact were so small that they have little or no practical importance.
Dysgenics and eugenics
In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Lynn reviewed the history of eugenics, from the early writings of Bénédict Morel and Francis Galton through the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century and its subsequent collapse. He identifies three main concerns of eugenicists such as himself: deterioration in health, intelligence and conscientiousness. Lynn asserts that natural selection in pre-industrial societies favoured traits such as intelligence and character but no longer does so in modern societies. He argues that due to the advance of medicine, selection against those with poor genes for health was relaxed.Lynn examined sibling studies and concluded that the tendency of children with a high number of siblings to be the least intelligent is evidence of dysgenic fertility. He said there has been a genuine increase in phenotypic intelligence, but that this is caused by environmental factors and is masking a decline in genotypic intelligence.
According to Lynn, those with greater educational achievement have fewer children, while children with lower IQs come from larger families, which he viewed as evidence that intelligence and fertility are negatively correlated. Lynn agreed with Lewis Terman's comment in 1922 that "children of successful and cultivated parents test higher than children from wretched and ignorant homes for the simple reason that their heredity is better". Lynn claimed that socio-economic status is positively correlated with indicators of conscientiousness such as work ethic and moral values and negatively with crime. Next the genetic basis of differences in conscientiousness is discussed, and Lynn concludes that twin studies provide evidence of a high heritability for the trait. The less conscientious, such as criminals, have more offspring.
A review of Dysgenics by W. D. Hamilton, Royal Society research professor in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford, was published posthumously in 2000. Hamilton wrote a lengthy review stating that Lynn, "discussing the large bank of evidence that still accumulates on heritability of aptitudes and differentials of fertility, shows in this book that almost all of the worries of the early eugenicists were well-founded, in spite of the relative paucity of their evidence at the time".
Another review of Dysgenics was written in 2002 by Nicholas Mackintosh, emeritus professor of experimental psychology in the University of Cambridge. Mackintosh wrote that "with a cavalier disregard for political correctness, he argues that the ideas of the eugenecists were correct and that we ignore them at our peril". While recognising that the book provides a valuable and accurate source of information, he criticised Lynn for "not fully acknowledg the negative relationship between social class and education on the one hand, and infant mortality and life expectancy on the other". He questioned Lynn's interpretation of data. He also points out that according to Lynn's reading of the theory of natural selection, "if it is true that those with lower IQ and less education are producing more offspring, then they are fitter than those of higher IQ and more education". According to Mackintosh, eugenicist arguments are not based on a "biological imperative, but rather on a particular set of value judgements".
In Eugenics: A Reassessment, Lynn claimed that embryo selection as a form of standard reproductive therapy would raise the average intelligence of the population by 15 IQ points in a single generation. If couples produce a hundred embryos, he argues, the range in potential IQ would be around 15 points above and below the parents' IQ. Lynn argues that this gain could be repeated each generation, eventually stabilising the population's IQ at a theoretical maximum of around 200 after as little as six or seven generations.
Pioneer Fund
Lynn currently serves on the board of directors of the Pioneer Fund and is also on the editorial board of the Pioneer-supported journal Mankind Quarterly, both of which have been the subject of controversy for their dealing with race and intelligence and eugenics and have been accused of racism, e.g., by Avner Falk and William Tucker. Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research received $609,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund between 1971 and 1996.Lynn's 2001 book The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund is a history and defence of the fund, in which he argues that, for the last 60 years, it has been "nearly the only non-profit foundation making grants for study and research into individual and group differences and the hereditary basis of human nature ... Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science."
Reception
Lynn's review work on global racial differences in cognitive ability has been cited for misrepresenting the research of other scientists and has been criticised for unsystematic methodology and distortion.John P. Jackson Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder, disputed Lynn's claim that the Pioneer Fund was dedicated to funding objective scientific research. Jackson wrote that "... although the Pioneer Fund may not have endorsed any policy proposal officially, it has funded a group that is remarkably uniform in its opposition to school integration, immigration, and affirmative action".
David King, the coordinator of the consumer watchdog group Human Genetics Alert, said: "we find Richard Lynn's claims that some human beings are inherently superior to others repugnant". Similarly, Gavin Evans wrote in the Guardian that Lynn was one of a number of "flat-earthers" who have claimed that "Africans, or black Americans, or poor people" are less intelligent than Westerners. He further wrote, with regard to Lynn's claims that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, "What is remarkable in all this is not so much that there are people who believe him – after all, there are still those who insist the Earth is flat – but rather that any creditable institution should take it seriously."
The datum that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was taken from a group of children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain. Corrections were applied to adjust for differences in IQ cohorts on the assumption that the same correction could be applied internationally, without regard to the cultural or economic development level of the country involved. While there appears to be rather little evidence on cohort effect upon IQ across the developing countries, one study in Kenya shows a substantially larger cohort effect than is reported for developed countries.
In a critical review of The Bell Curve, psychologist Leon Kamin faulted Lynn for "disregarding scientific objectivity", "misrepresenting data", and for "racism". Kamin argues that the studies of cognitive ability of Africans in Lynn's meta-analysis cited by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray show strong cultural bias. Kamin also reproached Lynn for concocting IQ values from test scores that have no correlation to IQ. Kamin also notes that Lynn excluded a study that found no difference in white and black performance, and ignored the results of a study which showed black scores were higher than white scores.
Journalist Charles Lane criticised Lynn's methodology in his article in The New York Review of Books, "The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve". Pioneer Fund president Harry Weyher, Jr. published a response accusing the reviewer of errors and misrepresentation; Lane also replied to this with a rebuttal.
In 2002 an academic dispute arose after Lynn claimed that some races are inherently more psychopathic than others, and other psychologists criticised his data and interpretations. Psychologist Leon Kamin has said that "Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with the scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity".
In 2010, on his 80th birthday, Lynn was celebrated with a special issue of Personality and Individual Differences dedicated to his work that was edited by Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg with contributions by Nyborg, J. Philippe Rushton, Satoshi Kanazawa and several others.
In February 2018, the Ulster University students' union issued a motion calling for the university to revoke Lynn's title as emeritus professor. The motion argued that Lynn's title should be revoked because he has made statements that are "racist and sexist in nature". The university agreed to this request in April 2018.
Allegations of racism
Lynn is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in their extremist files as a white nationalist. The SPLC has kept a record of Lynn's controversial statements, for example, in a 2011 interview with neo-Nazi Alex Kurtagic, Lynn stated: "I am deeply pessimistic about the future of the European peoples because mass immigration of third world peoples will lead to these becoming majorities in the United States and westernmost Europe during the present century. I think this will mean the destruction of European civilization in these countries." In 1995, Lynn was quoted by the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting saying: "What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples ... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality."FAIR also quoted Lynn as having stated in an interview with the right-wing British political magazine Right NOW!:
The SPLC stated that "for 50 years, Richard Lynn has been at the forefront of scientific racism", that "he argues that the nations with the highest IQs must subjugate or eliminate the lower-IQ groups within their borders in order to preserve their dominance", and summarizes his career thus:
The centre has also stated that "Lynn uses his authority as professor of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people."
Lynn is a frequent speaker at conferences hosted by the white-nationalist publication American Renaissance.