James Robert Flynn FRSNZ (28 April 1934 – 11 December 2020) was an American-born New Zealand moral philosopher[1] and intelligence researcher.

Flynn described his father as a "keen reader" who took pride in completing the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen rather than pencil.

Flynn renounced his Catholic religion at age 12 after winning a full set of World Book Encyclopedia in a city-wide competition and reading about scientific explanations for the creation of the universe that contradicted his creationist education.

[3][6] Flynn was a lifelong competitive runner who ran for his high school and college and earned six US running medals over the course of his life.

"[3] He met his wife, an attorney whose family was active in the Communist Party USA,[10] at a protest against segregation at Glen Echo Park in Maryland.

His wife said that Flynn "ticked the entire list of qualities I wanted in a husband and which I had written down in my diary at the age of 15": he was tall, smart, funny, held left-wing political views, could stand up to her mother, and had a job with a pension.

[3] In 1961, he left Kentucky to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, followed by Lake Forest College in Chicago,[5] from which he was fired for giving a lecture on social medicine, working as a peace activist, and being a member of the Socialist Party.

[12] Accordingly, in 1963, aged 29, he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and remained active (from afar) in the American civil rights movement.

[8][9][10] In New Zealand Flynn continued to campaign for left-wing causes, and advised Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk on foreign policy.

[2] In 1978, while working on a refutation of classical racism for an upcoming book about "humane ideals", Flynn read University of California, Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen's 1969 article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?

[4][5][10] In response to critics suggesting that the IQ increase could be attributed in increases in education (as opposed to innate intelligence), Flynn examined the results of Raven's Progressive Matrices IQ tests, which use visual patterns rather than words to estimate fluid intelligence or "on-the-spot problem solving", irrespective of educational or cultural differences among test-takers.

For the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, subjects born over a 100-year period were compared in Des Moines, Iowa, and separately in Dumfries, Scotland.

[15] In 1994, Harvard University psychologist Richard Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray published the highly-controversial book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which discussed Flynn's research and dubbed the increase in IQ scores the "Flynn effect".

He advocated for open scientific debate about controversial social science claims, and was critical of the suppression of research into race and intelligence.

[19] Flynn gained international recognition for the Flynn effect,[7][16][17] which has become widely accepted by psychologists and has been documented in large portions of the developed world and several developing countries, at rates too fast and dramatic to be caused by changes in genes, and correlating with environmental changes such as modernisation and improvements in education.

On the alleged genetic inferiority of Blacks on IQ tests, he lays out the argument and evidence for such a belief and then contests each point.

He interprets the direct evidence—when Blacks are raised in settings that are less disadvantageous—as suggesting that environmental factors explain average group differences.

[2][3] In 2006, with Brookings Institution economist William T. Dickens, Flynn published "Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: evidence from standardization samples", which suggested that the difference in IQ scores between blacks and whites narrowed by four to seven points between 1972 and 2002, a conclusion contested by Jensen and controversial University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton.

He referred to hypothetical eugenicists' suggestions for reversing the trend, including some sort of oral contraceptive "in the water supply and … an antidote" to conceive.

[29] Flynn later articulated his own views on the Close Up television programme in an interview with Paul Henry, suggesting that the Sunday Star-Times had grossly misrepresented his opinions.

[30][31] Flynn continued teaching and was a prolific author in his later life, publishing almost a book every year in his last decade on a number of topics.

[32] His books combined political and moral philosophy with psychology to examine problems such as justifying humane ideals and whether it makes sense to rank races and classes by merit.

[3][13] In July 2012, several media outlets reported Flynn as saying that women had, for the first time in a century, surpassed men on IQ tests based on a study he conducted in 2010.

Women, he argued, caught up with men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access.

Therefore, he said, when a total account of the Flynn effect is considered, women's closing the gap had moved them up in IQ slightly faster than men as a result.