Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – 23 July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. He was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. Many scientists criticised Lynn's work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda. Lynn was associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism. He had also advocated fringe positions regarding sexual differences in intelligence. 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 (2008) 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 also argued that a high fertility rate among individuals of low IQ constitutes a major threat to Western civilisation, as he believed people with low IQ scores will eventually outnumber high-IQ individuals. He argued in favour of 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. He was also on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funds Mankind Quarterly and has also been described as racist. He was on the editorial board of the journal Personality and Individual Differences until 2019.
Early life and education Richard Lynn's father was Sydney Cross Harland FRS (1891–1982), an agricultural botanist and geneticist, who had lived and worked in Trinidad and later Peru extensively, establishing himself as an expert in cotton genetics. Lynn's mother Ann Freeman (1905–1964) was originally brought up in Trinidad and then educated at Bournemouth Girls' High School and Harrogate Ladies' College, and had moved back to the Caribbean to act as housekeeper for Harland. Harland was a close colleague of Ann Freeman's father — the director of agriculture in the West Indies — but was still married to his first wife Emily. After a liaison in New York City between Harland and Freeman in 1929, his mother crossed the Atlantic to resettle near to her parents in Hampstead, where Lynn was born on 20 February 1930. In London and then Bristol, his mother raised him as a single parent during his childhood and adolescence. In 1949, after his father returned to Britain as professor of genetics at the University of Manchester, he met up with him roughly every year; Harland's younger brother Bernard became a companion of Lynn's mother, living together until their deaths in 1964. Lynn was educated at Bristol Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, where he received a Ph.D. in 1956.
Career Lynn 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 a 2011 interview, Lynn cited the work of Cattell, Francis Galton, Hans Eysenck and Cyril Burt as important influences.
Work
Publication on secular increases in IQ In 1982, Richard Lynn published a paper about the generational increase in performance on IQ tests, now known as the Flynn effect slightly before James Flynn's publications documenting the same phenomenon. A few researchers have called the phenomenon the "Lynn–Flynn effect" as a way of recognizing both their contributions. In a 2013 paper, James Flynn offered his comments on this aspect of the effect's naming:
Calling massive IQ gains over time the "Flynn Effect" was an accident of history, a label Charles Murray coined in The Bell Curve in 1994. It is not a verdict a court would have been likely to hand down if it had an eye for the historical record. [...] Therefore, I give my thanks to Charles Murray and my apologies to Richard Lynn.
Dysgenics and eugenics
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