Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn (1930- ) is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology, known for his work on intelligence and differential psychology. Lynn's major research has been into race differences and sex differences in intelligence, and he currently sits on the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences.

Lynn was educated at Cambridge University, and has published at least 11 books, several book chapters, and over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles spanning five decades. Two of his recent books are written on dysgenics and eugenics, and are prominent works in those areas.

Two of the larger contributions Lynn is known for is his work in the late 1970s that found a higher average IQ in East Asians compared to Whites (5 points higher in his meta-analysis), and his proposal in 1990 that the Flynn effect -- an observed year on year rise in IQ scores around the world -- could possibly be explained by improved nutrition, especially in early childhood. His findings on a higher mean East Asian IQ have since been corroborated by 101 studies in 12 countries with a combined sample of 128,322 individuals, surveyed in his latest book (2006).

Like much of the research in race and intelligence, Lynn's research has been controversial, notably within the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve (1994), a book which cited his work. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which defended the findings on race and intelligence in The Bell Curve. Lynn 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.

The Flynn effect
The Flynn effect is sometimes referred to as the "Lynn-Flynn effect" to give credit to Lynn for his identifying of increasing IQ scores in Japan in a 1982 Nature article which preceded Flynn's 1984 description of increases in the U.S. However, Flynn describes a lesser-known 1982 article of his own describing "the evidence for American IQ gains," and it was Flynn's 1987 article that showed the trend was large, long-term, and observable in more than a dozen other developed countries, which is the key point of the Flynn Effect.

If Lynn's nutrition hypothesis is shown to be correct, this could strengthen the case for adding Lynn's name to the term. General improvements in nutrition and health care have led to large increases in average adult height in industrial nations since cognitive ability testing began, and available data suggests these gains have been accompanied by gains in average brain size. However, it's thus far been difficult to study directly the relationship between nutrition and intelligence, leaving this hypothesis an open question.

Work
Lynn's psychometric studies were cited in the 1994 book The Bell Curve and came under criticism as part of the controversy surrounding that book. One of his recent notable peer-reviewed articles, "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans," published in 2002 in the journal Population and Environment, concludes that lightness of skin color in African-Americans is positively correlated with IQ, which he argues derives from the higher proportion of Caucasian admixture.

In IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002), Lynn and co-author Tatu Vanhanen (University of Helsinki) argue that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) correlate with, and can be at least partially attributed to, differences in average national IQ. One controversial study following up on IQatWoN's hypothesis, "Temperature, skin color, per capita income, and IQ: An international perspective" (Templer and Arikawa 2006) is currently listed as the most downloaded article in Intelligence at ScienceDirect (Jan. - March 2006).

Lynn's 2006 Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis is the largest review of the global cognitive ability data. The book organizes the data by nine global regions, surveying 620 published studies from around the world, with a total of 813,778 tested individuals. Lynn's meta-analysis lists East Asians (105), Europeans (99), Inuit (91), Southeast Asians and Amerindians each (87), Pacific Islanders (85), Middle Easterners (including South Asians and North Africans) (84), sub-Saharan Africans (67), and Australian Aborigines (62). Lynn has previously argued at length that nutrition is the best supported environmental explanation for variation in the lower range, and a number of other environmental explanations have been advanced (see below). Ashkenazi Jews average 107 in the U.S. and Britain, but lower in Israel. Lynn argues the surveyed studies have high reliability in the sense that different studies give similar results, and high validity in the sense that they correlate highly with performance in international studies of achievement in mathematics and science and with national economic development.

Following Race Differences in Intelligence, Lynn co-authored a further paper along the lines of IQ and the Wealth of Nations with Jaan Mikk (Šiauliai University, Lithuania) - in press in Intelligence - and has co-authored a second book on the subject with Vanhanen, IQ and Global Inequality, to be published later in 2006.

Controversy and criticism
Lynn's work on global racial differences in cognitive ability, mostly surveys of other scientists' studies, has been criticized for its associated measurement difficulties, and some critics have accused Lynn of misrepresenting the data or racism.

Leon Kamin accused Lynn in a Scientific American book review (1995) critical of the Bell Curve of disregarding scientific objectivity, misrepresenting data, and racism. Kamin argues the studies of cognitive ability of Africans in Lynn's meta-analysis cited by Herrnstein and Murray show strong cultural bias. Kamin also criticized Lynn for "concocting" IQ values from test scores that have no correlation to IQ. Furthermore, Kamin argues Lynn selectively 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 made similar criticisms in his New York Review of Books article "The Tainted Sources of 'The Bell Curve'" (1994), which was replied to in the same publication by the Pioneer Fund president of the time, Harry F. Weyher..

In contrast to Kamin and Lane's criticism of Lynn's The Bell Curve, W. D. Hamilton, a British evolutionary biologist, wrote a favorable 2000 book review of Lynn's Dysgenics in the scientific journal Annals of Human Genetics.

Immigration
Lynn has spoken against immigration in Britain at a 2000 American Renaissance magazine sponsored conference, citing problems of unemployment, crime, illegitimacy, and low IQ, considering African and African-Caribbean immigants to perform worse in these measures than Indian and Chinese immigrants. Lynn spoke on his book IQ and the Wealth of Nations at a 2002 American Renaissance conference.

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 size brains in proportion to their bodies, but consensus for the last hundred years has been that the two sexes perform equally on cognitive ability tests. In 1994, Lynn controversially concluded in a meta-analysis that an IQ difference of roughly 4 points does appear from age 16 and onwards, but detection of this had been complicated by the faster rate of maturation of girls up to that point, which compensates for the IQ difference. This reassessment of male-female IQ has been bolstered by Paul Irwing's meta-analyses in 2004 and 2005 which conclude a difference of 4.6 to 5 IQ points (see BBC coverage). Irwing finds no evidence that this is due primarily to the male advantage in spatial visualization, and concludes that some research previously presented to show that there are no sex differences actually shows the opposite.

Dysgenics and eugenics
In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations(1996) and Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001) Lynn reviews these areas and argues the condemnation of eugenics in the second half of the 20th century went too far. He argues the eugenic objectives of eliminating genetic diseases, increasing intelligence, and reducing personality disorders, remain desirable and are achievable by the human biosciences. Lynn concludes human biotechnology is likely to progress spontaneously, and that East Asian countries' lesser resistance to eugenics will contribute to their pulling ahead of Western countries in the 21st century.

In Eugenics, Lynn argues 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 (p. 300). 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 this gain could be repeated each generation, eventually stabilizing the population's IQ at a theoretical maximum of around 200 after as little as six or seven generations.

Eugenics received praise in the American Psychological Association Review of Books (Lykken 2004) as "[an] excellent, scholarly book . . .one cannot reasonably disagree with him on any point unless one can find an argument he has not already refuted.", as well as by the journal Nature (Martin 2001) as a "comprehensive histor[y]" and a welcome one, "given the importance of the topic" of dysgenic trends.

critics

The 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. 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 defense of the fund, in which he argues that, for the last sixty 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."

Psychologist Ulric Neisser, who was the chairman of the APA's 1995 taskforce charged with writing a consensus statement on intelligence research, gave support for Lynn's argument in a review of the book (2004). Neisser stated that, though the work on race of Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton "turns [his] stomach . . . Lynn's claim is exaggerated but not entirely without merit: 'Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science.'" Neisser concludes in agreement with Lynn and against William Tucker's critical book on the Pioneer Fund, also reviewed, that the world was actually better off having the Pioneer Fund: "Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research - research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."