Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn 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 Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.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 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, 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 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:Dysgenics and eugenics
In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Lynn reviewed the history of eugenics and dysgenics, from the early writings of Bénédict Morel and Francis Galton through the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century and its subsequent collapse. As a eugenicist himself, Lynn lists three concerns: deterioration in health, intelligence and conscientiousness. Lynn claims that, unlike modern societies, natural selection in pre-industrial societies favoured traits such as intelligence and "character".According to Lynn, those with greater educational achievement have fewer children, while children with lower IQs come from larger families. Lynn claimed that twin studies provide evidence of a genetic basis for these differences. Lynn proposes that conscientiousness is heritable, and that criminals tend to have more offspring. 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".
A review of Dysgenics by evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton, published posthumously in 2000 in the Annals of Human Genetics, praised the book and its endorsement of eugenics, saying "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".
Psychologist Nicholas Mackintosh, reviewing the book for the Journal of Biosocial Science in 2002, wrote that Lynn "argues that the ideas of the eugenicists were correct and that we ignore them at our peril". Mackintosh 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, and pointed 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 such as Lynn's 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 six or seven generations.
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 2002 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".In 2010 Earl B. Hunt summarized Lynn's research in this area along with that of Tatu Vanhanen, 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. In 2012 Scott A. McGreal, writing for Psychology Today, 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 organises data on intelligence into 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, South Asians and North Africans each, 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. In his 2011 book The Chosen People, Lynn offers largely genetic explanations for Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence.