Richard Lynn

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.

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".

Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence.

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.

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 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.

"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."

In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations (1996), 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.

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[ing] 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".

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 identified as racist in nature.

Two of his recent books are on dysgenics and eugenics.

In a 2011 interview, Lynn cited the work of Cattell, Francis Galton, Hans Eysenck and Cyril Burt as important influences.

In a 2013 paper, James Flynn offered his comments on this aspect of the effect's naming:

He was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.

He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal.

Lynn 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.

Many scientists criticised Lynn's work 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.

He has 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.

He was on the editorial board of the journal Personality and Individual Differences until 2019.