Richard Lynn

Richard Lynn (born 1930) is a British Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Ulster who is known for his views on racial, ethnic and national differences in intelligence.

Lynn was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Cambridge University in England. He has worked as lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter, and as professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He has written or co-written more than 11 books and 200 journal articles spanning five decades. Two of his recent books are on dysgenics and eugenics.

In the late 1970s, Lynn wrote that he found a higher average IQ in East Asians compared to Whites (5 points higher in his meta-analysis). In 1990, he proposed that the Flynn effect – an observed year-on-year rise in IQ scores around the world – could possibly be explained by improved nutrition, especially in early childhood. In two books co-written with Tatu Vanhanen he argues that differences in developmental indexes among the nations of the world correlate with, and are possibly caused by, the average IQ of their citizens.

Like much of the research in race and intelligence, Lynn's research is controversial. He is cited in the book The Bell Curve. He was also one of the 52 scientists who signed "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. He sits on the editorial boards of the journals Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. Lynn sits on the boards of the Pioneer Fund, an organization that has been described as racist in nature, and of the Pioneer-supported journal Mankind Quarterly, which has been called a white supremacist journal.