--- alias: - Richard Lynn born: 1930-02-20 category: New Right created: 2026-06-19 died: 2023-07-23 location: Bristol, England summary: Richard Lynn was a British psychologist who promoted hereditarian claims about racial and national differences in intelligence and 'dysgenics,' ran the Pioneer Fund and the Ulster Institute for Social Research, and whose national-IQ data was repudiated as fundamentally flawed. tags: - Person - RaceScience - Eugenics - PioneerFund - HumanBiodiversity - Psychology updated: 2026-06-19 --- Richard Lynn (1930-2023) was a British psychologist who spent the latter part of his career arguing that races and nations differ in average intelligence for genetic reasons and that modern populations are undergoing "dysgenic" decline. He edited the journal [Mankind Quarterly](/organizations/mankind-quarterly/), founded and led the Ulster Institute for Social Research, served as president of the [Pioneer Fund](/organizations/pioneer-fund/) after 2012, and assembled the "national IQ" datasets that other researchers later condemned as methodologically unsound. The Southern Poverty Law Center classified him as a promoter of scientific racism, and he described himself as a "scientific racist."[^1][^2] ### Career Lynn was educated at the University of Cambridge and held posts at the University of Exeter and in Dublin before becoming professor of psychology at the University of Ulster from 1972 to 1995. He founded the Ulster Institute for Social Research and became editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, the Draper-funded race-science journal. In 2018 Ulster University stripped him of his emeritus professor title after concluding that he had advanced views that were "racist and sexist in nature."[^1][^3] Born in 1930 and educated at Bristol Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, Lynn built a four-decade collaboration with the personality psychologist Hans Eysenck on racial and national differences in intelligence. During his Ulster tenure amid the Troubles he attributed Ireland's purportedly low average IQ to "selective emigration of the brightest" and a "dysgenic effect of Roman Catholicism," a claim later contradicted by Catholic pupils outperforming Protestant pupils on Northern Ireland GCSE exams. The 2018 stripping of his title followed a student campaign at Ulster, and he published a self-justifying memoir, *Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist*, through his own Ulster Institute imprint.[^7][^8] ### Race, Dysgenics, and National IQ Lynn's books included *Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations* (1996), *Eugenics: A Reassessment* (2001), *IQ and the Wealth of Nations* (2002, with the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen), and *The Global Bell Curve* (2008). He argued that average IQ differs by race and nation, that sub-Saharan African populations have very low average intelligence, and that welfare and immigration drive a hereditary decline in the gene pool. Mainstream researchers rejected these claims. The psychologist Jelte Wicherts and colleagues showed that Lynn had reached his low African IQ estimates by selectively excluding studies, and that a systematic reading of the data produced substantially higher figures. In 2020 the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association formally warned against using Lynn's national-IQ dataset, concluding that any analysis relying on it was "unsound."[^2][^4] *IQ and the Wealth of Nations* asserted that national average IQ correlated with gross domestic product per capita and assigned numbers as low as the high 60s to several African states, figures that critics traced to a handful of unrepresentative test administrations. Lynn also published *Sex Differences in Intelligence* (2017), claiming that adult men have higher average IQ than women, a thesis that critics rejected as resting on outdated head-size measurements and selective sampling. Psychometricians noted that the Flynn effect, the steady rise in raw IQ scores across the twentieth century documented by the psychologist James Flynn, undercut Lynn's claim that measured group gaps reflected fixed genetic endowments, since environmental change alone moved scores by amounts comparable to the gaps Lynn called innate.[^2][^10] ### Pioneer Fund and the Race-Science Network Lynn received Pioneer Fund money over many years, and on the death of the psychologist [J. Philippe Rushton](/people/j-philippe-rushton/) in 2012 he became the fund's president. His Ulster Institute publishes Mankind Quarterly, and his contributors and associates overlapped with those of the secret [London Conference on Intelligence](/events/london-conference-on-intelligence/) held at University College London from 2014 to 2017, including Emil Kirkegaard, who ran the non-peer-reviewed OpenPsych repository. His hereditarian framework belongs to the literature popularized by [Charles Murray](/people/charles-murray/) and Richard Herrnstein's *The Bell Curve* and circulated through the [human-biodiversity](/concepts/human-biodiversity/) current associated with [Steve Sailer](/people/steve-sailer/), and his "national IQ" figures were widely reproduced in the [neoreactionary](/concepts/neoreaction/) and [Yarvin](/people/curtis-yarvin/)-adjacent online right.[^2][^5] Lynn's stated aims went beyond research into explicit advocacy. Reviewing Raymond Cattell's 1972 tract *A New Morality from Science: Beyondism* in 1974, he wrote that "what is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples." In *Eugenics: A Reassessment* (2001) he argued that the postwar condemnation of eugenics had gone too far and that selective breeding and biotechnology should be used to raise intelligence and reduce genetic disease. The Southern Poverty Law Center quoted these passages in classifying him as among the most unapologetic of self-described scientific racists.[^9] ### Repudiation In June 2024 a group of seven scientists, writing in *STAT*, called on Elsevier, Springer, and other publishers to retract Lynn's national-IQ articles, citing his methodological flaws, his "explicitly racist agenda," and his history of academic malpractice. The campaign followed years of failed replications and the rejection of his work across mainstream psychology and genetics.[^4][^6] The retraction authors, including the evolutionary biologist Kevin Bird and the population geneticist Jedidiah Carlson, catalogued the data underpinning Lynn's national-IQ figures. They reported that his estimate for Angola, a country of some 35 million, rested on a test of 19 people; the Dominican Republic figure came from 34 individuals, Greenland from 40, Uzbekistan from 51, and Botswana from 140 adolescents who may not have been citizens. Lynn published no selection criteria, and he excluded a higher-scoring African sample while keeping several low-scoring studies that lacked basic age data. The authors directed their requests at the Elsevier journals *Intelligence* and *Personality and Individual Differences* and at Springer's *Evolutionary Psychological Science*, reporting that editors had declined to act or had not responded.[^6] [^1]: "UU students call for removal of former professor's title," *The Irish News,* February 14, 2018, on Lynn's Ulster career and the title controversy. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/02/14/news/uu-students-calls-for-removal-of-former-professor-s-title-1255299/ [^2]: "Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles," *STAT,* June 20, 2024, on Lynn's national-IQ work, the Ulster Institute, Mankind Quarterly, and the scientific repudiation. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/ [^3]: "Prof who lost emeritus status for views on race and intelligence has paper flagged," Retraction Watch, August 8, 2019, on the 2018 stripping of his title. https://retractionwatch.com/2019/08/08/prof-who-lost-emeritus-status-for-views-on-race-and-intelligence-has-paper-flagged/ [^4]: "Another failure to replicate Lynn's estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans," Jelte Wicherts et al., *Intelligence,* 2010, on the selective-data critique of Lynn's African IQ figures. https://jeltewicherts.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/wichertsravenafr2010rej.pdf [^5]: "Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed," Southern Poverty Law Center, on Rushton's resignation and Lynn's succession as Pioneer Fund president. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/pioneer-fund-assets-divided-new-leadership-appointed/ [^6]: "Journals that published Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles should retract them," Center for Genetics and Society, June 2024, listing the seven authors (Dan Samorodnitsky, Kevin Bird, Jedidiah Carlson, James Lingford, Jon Phillips, Rebecca Sear, Cathryn Townsend) and the journals targeted; sample-size figures from the accompanying *STAT* article. https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/journals-published-richard-lynns-racist-research-articles-should-retract-them [^7]: "Hans Eysenck," and Lynn, Richard, "Reminiscences of forty years of friendship with Hans Eysenck," on the Cambridge education and the Eysenck collaboration; "Richard Lynn and The Myth of Low Irish IQ," on the Catholicism and GCSE claims. https://medium.com/@leonaburime/the-myth-of-low-irish-iq-how-richard-lynn-built-a-house-of-cards-41ce353a8656 [^8]: "UU students call for removal of former professor's title," *The Irish News,* February 14, 2018, on the Ulster student campaign; Lynn, Richard. *Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist.* Ulster Institute for Social Research. https://www.irishnews.com/news/2018/02/14/news/uu-students-calls-for-removal-of-former-professor-s-title-1255299/ [^9]: "Richard Lynn," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, quoting his 1974 review of Cattell's *Beyondism* with the "phasing out of such peoples" passage and his eugenics advocacy. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/richard-lynn/ [^10]: "Race and gender in methodologically flawed work of Richard Lynn," on *IQ and the Wealth of Nations,* *Sex Differences in Intelligence,* and the critique of his head-size and sampling methods; Flynn, James R., on the secular rise in IQ scores known as the Flynn effect. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338044465_Race_and_gender_in_methodologically_flawed_work_of_Richard_Lynn