James R. Flynn - Controversial Remarks

Controversial Remarks

During 2007, new research from the 2006 New Zealand census showed that women without a tertiary (college) education had produced 2.57 babies each, compared to 1.85 babies for those women with a higher education. During July 2007, The Sunday Star-Times quoted Flynn as saying that New Zealand risked having a less intelligent population and that a "persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually". He referred to hypothetical eugenicists' suggestions for reversing the trend, including some sort of oral contraceptive "in the water supply and ... an antidote" in order to conceive.

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. In the article, Flynn argued that he never intended for his suggestion to be taken seriously, as he only said this to illustrate a particular point.

In July of 2012, several media outlets reported Flynn as claiming that women had, for the first time in a century, surpassed men on IQ tests based on a study he conducted in 2010. However, Flynn announced that the media had seriously distorted his results and went beyond his claims, revealing that he had instead discovered that the differences between men and women on one particular test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, had become minimal in five modernized nations (whereas before 1982 women had scored significantly lower). Women, he argued, caught up to men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. Therefore, he claimed, 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, but not that they had surpassed men in IQ. This same trend was also documented among ethnic minorities. According to Flynn, the sexes are "dead equal on cognitive factors . . . in their ability to deal with using logic on the abstract problems of Raven's," but that temperamental differences in the way boys and girls take the tests likely account for the tiny variations in mean scores.