Richard Lynn (20 February 1930 – July 2023) was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist"[1] who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence.

[7] Many scientists criticised Lynn's work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

After a liaison in New York City between Harland and Freeman in 1929,[28] his mother crossed the Atlantic to resettle near to her parents in Hampstead, where Lynn was born on 20 February 1930.

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.

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

[47] 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".

[48] 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".

[49] In Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001), 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 (p. 300).

[53][54] 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.

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.

[8] 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.

In his 2011 book The Chosen People, Lynn offers largely genetic explanations for Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence (generally estimated at 107–115 IQ).

As a result, a neuroimaging study published by Schmidt et al. (2009) conducted an investigation into this proposal by measuring sex differences on an n-back working memory task.

It was reviewed favorably by researchers J. Philippe Rushton,[90] Donald Templer in white nationalist publication The Occidental Quarterly,[91] and Gerhard Meisenberg.

Lynn's review work on global racial differences in cognitive ability has been cited for misrepresenting the research of other scientists and has been criticised for unsystematic methodology and distortion.

[99] Pioneer Fund president Harry Weyher, Jr. published a response accusing the reviewer of errors and misrepresentation; Lane also replied to this with a rebuttal.

[100] In 1995 psychologist Leon Kamin faulted Lynn in a critical review of The Bell Curve, for "disregarding scientific objectivity", "misrepresenting data", and for "racism".

[101] Kamin argues that the studies of cognitive ability of Africans in Lynn's meta-analysis cited by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray show strong cultural bias.

[104] In 2003, Gavin Evans wrote in The Guardian that 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.

He further wrote, with regard to Lynn's claims that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, "What is remarkable in all this is not so much that there are people who believe him – after all, there are still those who insist the Earth is flat – but rather that any creditable institution should take it seriously.

[107] Kamin said that "Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with the scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity".

Blacks and Hispanics are concentrated in the Southwest, the Southeast and the East, but the Northwest and the far Northeast, Maine, Vermont and upstate New York have a large predominance of whites.

[24]The SPLC stated that "for 50 years, Richard Lynn has been at the forefront of scientific racism",[24] 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",[24] 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.

[24]The centre has also stated that "Lynn uses his authority as [former[7]] professor (emeritus) of psychology at the University of Ulster to argue for the genetic inferiority of non-white people.