Richard Lynn

With Tatu Vanhanen and later other collaborators, Lynn used national IQ estimates to explain economic disparities between countries. Critics highlighted the use of tiny or unrepresentative samples, the imputation of scores to countries without direct data, selective sourcing and problems of cross-cultural validity.

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Directly implicated

After Lynn's death, researchers called on journals to re-examine articles using his data and methodologies. The European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association published a statement indicating that the 'national IQ' datasets developed by Lynn fell far below expected standards of rigour, curation and measurement validity.

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Lynn spent several decades producing IQ rankings by country and population, which he interpreted as partly reflecting biological and hereditary differences. In his 2019 review, he explicitly reaffirmed these rankings and their racial implications.

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Following a student campaign challenging his positions on racial and sex differences in intelligence, Ulster University reviewed his status. Lynn himself wrote in 2019 that the vice-chancellor had informed him in March 2018 that the university was withdrawing his title of emeritus professor.

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Lynn had interpreted reaction times among children from different countries as supporting racial differences in intelligence. A review published in 2011 compared his summaries with the original reports and concluded that he had omitted or misreported some of his own data; after correction, the rankings became unstable.

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Lynn argued that modern societies were experiencing a genetic deterioration in intelligence because people he considered less intelligent were having more children. He advocated eugenic policies and presented immigration from groups with lower average IQ scores as potentially 'dysgenic'.

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Lynn received substantial funding from the Pioneer Fund, served as a trustee and later as its leader after Rushton, and held editorial positions associated with Mankind Quarterly. He also published an explicitly favourable history of the Pioneer Fund.

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Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn concluded from Raven's matrices that adult men had an average advantage of approximately 4.6 IQ points. Steve Blinkhorn and other specialists challenged the sampling, selection biases and implications of the finding.

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Directly implicated