Richard Lynn 20 February — July was a controversial English psychologist and self-described " scientific racist " [ 1 ] who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly , a white supremacist journal. Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University , but had the title withdrawn by the university in Many scientists criticised Lynn's work for lacking scientific rigour, misrepresenting data, and for promoting a racialist political agenda.
Earl Hunt and Werner Wittmann 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. He argued in favour of anti-immigration and eugenics policies, provoking heavy criticism internationally. He was also on the board of the Pioneer Fund , which funds Mankind Quarterly and has also been described as racist. Richard Lynn's father was Sydney Cross Harland FRS — , 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 — 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 , [ 28 ] his mother crossed the Atlantic to resettle near to her parents in Hampstead , where Lynn was born on 20 February In , 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 Lynn worked [ when?
In , Lynn published a positive review of Raymond Cattell 's A New Morality from Science: Beyondism , in which he expressed the opinion that "incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall" and that "the foreign aid which we give to the under-developed world is a mistake, akin to keeping going incompetent species like the dinosaurs which are not fit for the competitive struggle for existence".
In , Richard Lynn published a paper about the generational increase in performance on IQ tests, now known as the Flynn effect slightly before James Flynn 's publications documenting the same phenomenon. It is not a verdict a court would have been likely to hand down if it had an eye for the historical record. As a eugenicist himself, Lynn lists three concerns: deterioration in health, intelligence and conscientiousness.
