Richard Lynn

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Richard Lynn (1930–) is a British white supremacist, psychologist, eugenicist, and self-described "race realist" who formerly taught at the University of Ulster. A former editor-in-chief of the prominent racist pseudojournal Mankind Quarterly and an interviewee of many fascist and neo-Nazi groups, Lynn has been claiming for decades that genetics is responsible for racial inequality and international wealth inequality.

Overview[edit]

Unlike many other researchers with provocative conclusions about race, Lynn is willing to advocate for high-IQ, "genetically superior" societies closing their borders to keep the low-IQ inferior people out.[1] He is probably best known for his work with Tatu Vanhanen,Wikipedia a political scientist, estimating the average IQ scores of different countries.[2] This work has led him to the conclusion that Sub-Saharan African countries have average IQ scores of below 70, an estimate that has been heavily criticized because of his unsystematic methodology.[3] His work on alleged race differences in intelligence gained prominence when it was cited in The Bell Curve.[4] His work on African IQs has been shit on by the scientific community and is itself full of shit. In getting the IQ of natives of Equatorial Guinea, he tested 48 developmentally-disabled 10-year-olds living in Spain. To get the IQ of Ethiopians, he tested the IQ of illiterate Beta Israeli (Jewish Ethiopian) children who had just emigrated from a rural area in Ethiopia to to an urban area in Israel. To get the IQ of Nigerians, he picked the lowest scores in an IQ study of seven Nigerian and Leonese children while ignoring several studies showing Nigerians having an average IQ far above 69 (for reference, chimpanzees have an IQ of around 50). To get the IQ of South Africans, he used a study testing 17 illiterate black South African children. To get the IQ of Somalians, he tested poor Somali refugees living in slums in Kenya and Ethiopia. In addition to these extremely questionable samples, there were many downward errors in translating test scoress to IQs, in countries where no IQ research could be found Lynn would simply base their average IQ on neighboring countries ignoring any social or economic differences (which might as well be tantamout to a violation of any academic integrity), and it seems very possible that he and his partner Vanhanen deliberately ignored tests giving Africans IQs above 75 and even discarded some relevant information from the studies they chose.[5]

Examples of shoddy research[edit]

Shoddy "research" he's published that has been shot down by other researchers includes the following:

  • His work on African IQs, which evidently use horrible samples to validate preconceived biases.
  • A study claiming to show that men are smarter than women — which was slammed by Nature as "simple, utter hogwash"[6]
  • Claiming that psychopathic personality is more common among blacks than whites.[7][8]
  • His work claiming that Irish people had lower IQs than English people was criticised by Ciaran Benson of University College Dublin.[9]
  • A study claiming to validate stereotypes about Asians having shorter dicks than whites and blacks having longer dicks than whites. Seriously. Unsurprisingly, this "study" was based on two highly-questionable sources, including a submission-based website that cited multiple nonexistent sources, and misrepresented other sources that actually exist.[10]

References[edit]

  1. SPLC profile
  2. The estimates are here, FWIW
  3. Controversial study of African IQ levels is 'deeply flawed'
  4. Neo-Nazis!
  5. [1] "Black Intellectual Genocide: An Essay Review of IQ and the Wealth of Nations "
  6. Who has the bigger brain?
  7. Personality, Intelligence And "Race Realism", Psychology Today
  8. Are there racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality? A critique of Lynn's (2002) racial and ethnic differences in psychopathic personality, Marvin Zuckerman, October 2003, Personality and Individual Differences, pp. 1463-9, doi:10.1016/S0191-8869(02)00362-8
  9. Ireland’s Low IQ: A Critique of the Myth, Benson, Ciaran, June 1987Irish Journal of Psychology 8(1):61-70 DOI:10.1080/03033910.1987.10557693
  10. The Pseudoscience of Race Differences in Penis Size