Linda Gottfredson

Linda Gottfredson is a hereditarian professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Delaware. Her legitimate research focuses on and individuals' career decision-making. For instance, she is well known for her theory of "circumscription and compromise" to explain why people choose certain jobs. She is a former president of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

She has been a prominent proponent of the pseudosciences of hereditarianism and racialism, as both relate to IQ tests, for over 30 years. She also likes defending scientific racists like Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton as well as railing against affirmative action. She was interviewed by Stefan Molyneux on the putative link between race, evolution, and intelligence in 2015.

Outside of her academic research, she is mainly known as the author of the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" letter that was published in the Wall Street Journal in 1994, and signed by 52 other researchers. It was subsequently published in Intelligence in 1997. She is also known as a major recipient of grant money from the notorious white-supremacist organization the Pioneer Fund, which got her in quite a bit of trouble with the University of Delaware in the early 1990s. She was temporarily banned from receiving money from them while on the University's faculty, but in 1992 an agreement was reached that lifted the ban.