36 Facts About Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence.

Richard Lynn was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.

Richard 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.

Richard Lynn was associated with a network of academics and organisations that promote scientific racism.

Richard Lynn 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.

Richard Lynn argued in favour of anti-immigration and eugenics policies, provoking heavy criticism internationally.

Richard 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.

Richard Lynn was on the board of the Pioneer Fund, which funds Mankind Quarterly and has been described as racist.

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

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.

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 Richard Lynn's mother, living together until their deaths in 1964.

Richard 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, Richard 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.

In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Richard Lynn reviewed the history of eugenics and dysgenics, from the early writings of Benedict Morel and Francis Galton through the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century and its subsequent collapse.

Richard Lynn claimed that twin studies provide evidence of a genetic basis for these differences.

Richard Lynn proposes that conscientiousness is heritable, and that criminals tend to have more offspring.

Richard 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".

Psychologist Nicholas Mackintosh, reviewing the book for the Journal of Biosocial Science in 2002, wrote that Richard Lynn "argues that the ideas of the eugenicists were correct and that we ignore them at our peril".

Richard Lynn 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".

Richard 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.

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.

Richard 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.

Richard 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 2012 Richard Lynn similarly claimed 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: Race, IQ and Inequality Worldwide is a book by Richard Lynn, originally published Washington Summit Publishers in 2008.

Kamin reproached Richard Lynn for concocting IQ values from test scores that have no correlation to IQ.

Kamin noted that Richard 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.

In 2003, Gavin Evans wrote in The Guardian that Richard 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.

In 2002 an academic dispute arose after Richard Lynn claimed that some races are inherently more psychopathic than others, and other psychologists criticised his data and interpretations.

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.

Richard Lynn is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in their extremist files as a white nationalist.

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:.

Since the 1970s, Richard Lynn has been working tirelessly to place race, genes, and IQ at the center of discussions surrounding inequality.

Richard Lynn is an ethnic nationalist who believes that countries must "remain racially homogenous" in order to flourish.

Richard Lynn was a frequent speaker at conferences hosted by the white-nationalist publication American Renaissance.