Richard Lynn
Richard Lynn (
1930- ) is a
British emeritus
professor of
psychology at the
University of Ulster,
[Call for re-think on eugenics BBCNews Friday, 26 April, 2002] known for his work on
intelligence and
differential psychology. Lynn's major research has been into
race differences and
sex differences in intelligence, and he currently sits on the editorial board of
Intelligence[Intelligence publisher's page.[1]] and is a member of the
London School of Differential Psychology.
Lynn was educated at
Cambridge University, and has published at least 11 books, several book chapters, and over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles spanning five decades. Two of his recent books are written on
dysgenics and
eugenics, and are prominent works in those areas.
Two of the larger contributions Lynn is known for is his work in the late 1970s that found a
higher average IQ in
East Asians compared to Whites (5 points higher in his meta-analysis), and his proposal in 1990 that the
Flynn effect could possibly be explained by improved nutrition, especially in early childhood. His findings on a higher mean East Asian IQ have since been corroborated by 101 studies in 12 countries with a combined sample of 128,322 individuals, surveyed in his latest book (2006).
[Image from Gene Expression blog]Like much of the research in
race and intelligence, Lynn's research has been controversial, notably within the controversy surrounding
The Bell Curve (1994), a book which cited his work. In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "
Mainstream Science on Intelligence," an editorial written by
Linda Gottfredson and published in the
Wall Street Journal, which defended the findings on
race and intelligence in
The Bell Curve. Lynn has also worked as lecturer in psychology at the
University of Exeter, and as professor of psychology at the
Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin.
The
Flynn effect is sometimes referred to as the "Lynn-Flynn effect"
[E.g. Beaujean and Osterlind 2005] to give credit to Lynn for his identifying of increasing IQ scores in Japan in a 1982
Nature article which preceded
Flynn's 1984 description of increases in the U.S. However, Flynn describes a lesser-known 1982 article of his own describing "the evidence for American IQ gains," and it was Flynn's 1987 article that showed the trend was large, long-term, and observable in more than a dozen other developed countries, which is the key point of the Flynn Effect.
If Lynn's nutrition hypothesis is shown to be correct, this could strengthen the case for adding Lynn's name to the term.
[Gene Expression Blog] General improvements in nutrition and health care have led to large increases in average adult height in industrial nations since cognitive ability testing began, and available data suggests these gains have been accompanied by gains in average brain size.
[Niesser 1997] However, it's thus far been difficult to study directly the relationship between nutrition and intelligence, leaving this hypothesis an open question.
[Niesser 1997. The challenges to this hypothesis also include that if the Flynn effect represents a genuine increase in intelligence, then today's adults average much more intelligent than their grandparents' average (Niesser) --though some studies have found the Flynn effect has largely only occurred in the lower score ranges (see Flynn effect).]Work
[[Image:Discover_Sept_1982.jpg|right|frame|Lynn's early research on Japanese IQ initiated an academic controversy and became part of Western countries' surprise in the early 1980s at the Japanese' unexpected economic and industrial achievements. ({{Discover (magazine)|
Discover}} 1982)[
2] ]] Lynn's psychometric studies were cited in the
1994 book
The Bell Curve and came under criticism as part of the controversy surrounding that book. One of his recent notable peer-reviewed articles, "Skin color and intelligence in African Americans," published in
2002 in the journal
Population and Environment, concludes that lightness of skin color in
African-Americans is positively correlated with
IQ, which he argues derives from the higher proportion of Caucasian admixture.[
3]
In
IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002)
[Praeger; ISBN 027597510X], Lynn and co-author
Tatu Vanhanen (University of Helsinki) argue that differences in national income (in the form of
per capita gross domestic product)
correlate with, and can be at least partially attributed to, differences in average national
IQ. One controversial [
4] study following up on IQatWoN's hypothesis, "Temperature, skin color, per capita income, and IQ: An international perspective" (Templer and Arikawa 2006)[
5] is currently listed as the most downloaded article in
Intelligence at
ScienceDirect (Jan. - March 2006).[
6]
|
Race Differences in Intelligence |
Lynn's 2006
Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis[Washington Summit Books; ISBN 1-59368-020-1] is the largest review of the global cognitive ability data. The book organizes the data by nine global regions,
[Lynn derives these groups from global genetic branches identified in previous genetic cluster analysis (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994, p. 79).] surveying 620 published studies from around the world, with a total of 813,778 tested individuals. Lynn's meta-analysis lists
East Asians (105),
Europeans (99),
Inuit (91),
Southeast Asians and
Amerindians each (87),
Pacific Islanders (85),
Middle Easterners (including
South Asians and
North Africans) (84),
sub-Saharan Africans (67), and
Australian Aborigines (62). Lynn has previously argued at length that nutrition is the best supported environmental explanation for variation in the lower range,
[In RDiI Lynn surveys NGO reports of four different signs of severe malnutrition - underweight, anemia, wasting, and stunting - for five developing regions, ranking Latin America as suffering the least malnutrition, followed by the Middle-east, Asia/Pacific, Africa, and finally South Asia, suffering the worst malnutrition of any region (ch. 14).] and a number of other environmental explanations have been advanced (see
below).
Ashkenazi Jews score significantly higher than other groups (107-115) in the U.S. and Britain, but estimates of the average IQ of Ashkenazim in
Israel may be somewhat closer to the European mean.
[Lynn's data is somewhat weak on Ashkenazi Jews (Malloy 2006), and only allows an indirect, weighted estimate in Israel (103), compared with (similarly indirect) estimates of 91 for Israeli Oriental Jews, and 86 for Israeli Arabs. Israeli Ashkenazi's scores may average lower than U.S. and British Ashkenazi, Lynn suggests, due to selective migration effects in relation to those countries, and to immigrants from the former Soviet Block countries having posed as Ashkenazim. The data isn't necessarily strong enough, however, to rule out identical scores for Ashkenazi across these nations (Malloy 2006).] Lynn argues the surveyed studies have high
reliability in the sense that different studies give similar results, and high
validity in the sense that they correlate highly with performance in international studies of achievement in mathematics and science and with national economic development.
Following
RDiI, Lynn co-authored a further paper[
7] along the lines of IQatWoN with Jaan Mikk (Šiauliai University, Lithuania) - in press in
Intelligence - and has co-authored a second book on the subject with Vanhanen,
IQ and Global Inequality, to be published later in 2006.
[Discussed in Lynn and Mikk 2006. See review by Rushton in Personality and Individual Differences (Oct. 2006).[8]]Controversy and criticism
Lynn's work on global racial differences in cognitive ability, mostly surveys of other scientists' studies, has been criticized for its associated measurement difficulties, and some critics have accused Lynn of misrepresenting the data or
racism.
Leon Kamin accused Lynn in a
Scientific American book review (1995) critical of
the Bell Curve of disregarding scientific objectivity, misrepresenting data, and
racism.[
9] Kamin argues the studies of cognitive ability of Africans in Lynn's meta-analysis cited by
Herrnstein and
Murray show strong cultural bias. Furthermore, Kamin argues Lynn selectively excluded a study that found no difference in White and Black performance.
Journalist
Charles Lane made similar criticisms in his
New York Review of Books article "The Tainted Sources of 'The Bell Curve'" (1994),[
10] which was replied to in the same publication by the
Pioneer Fund president of the time,
Harry F. Weyher.[
11].
In contrast to Kamin and Lane's attacks on Lynn in the popular media,
W. D. Hamilton, considered one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the twentieth century,[
12] wrote in a 2000 book review of Lynn's
Dysgenics in the scientific journal
Annals of Human Genetics, that it was a "brave and fertile book", and stated that Lynn himself was "brave, thick-skinned, and very persistent to swim against. . . popular antirealistic currents." Hamilton states that "Lynn. . . does an excellent job with the facts".[
13]
Immigration
Lynn has spoken against immigration in Britain at a 2000
American Renaissance magazine sponsored conference, citing problems of unemployment, crime, illegitimacy, and low IQ, considering African and African-Caribbean immigants to perform worse in these measures than Indian and Chinese immigrants.[
14] Lynn spoke on his book
IQ and the Wealth of Nations at a 2002
American Renaissance conference.[
15]
Lynn's research correlating brain size and reaction time with measured intelligence led him to the problem that men and women have different size brains in proportion to their bodies, but consensus for the last hundred years has been that the two sexes perform equally on cognitive ability tests. In 1994, Lynn controversially concluded in a meta-analysis that an IQ difference of roughly 4 points does appear from age 16 and onwards, but detection of this had been complicated by the faster rate of maturation of girls up to that point, which compensates for the IQ difference. This reassessment of male-female IQ has been bolstered by Paul Irwing's meta-analyses in 2004 and 2005 which conclude a difference of 4.6 to 5 IQ points (see
BBC coverage). Irwing finds no evidence that this is due primarily to the male advantage in spatial visualization, and concludes that some research previously presented to show that there are no sex differences actually shows the opposite.
In
Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations(1996) and
Eugenics: A Reassessment (2001)
[Both Praeger] Lynn reviews these areas and argues the condemnation of
eugenics in the second half of the 20th century went too far. He argues the eugenic objectives of eliminating
genetic diseases, increasing
intelligence, and reducing
personality disorders, remain desirable and are achievable by the human biosciences. Lynn concludes human biotechnology is likely to progress spontaneously, and that
East Asian countries' lesser resistance to eugenics will contribute to their pulling ahead of Western countries in the 21st century.
In
Eugenics, Lynn argues embryo selection as a form of standard reproductive therapy would raise the average
intelligence of the population by 15
IQ points in a single generation (p. 300). If couples produce a hundred embryos, he argues, the range in potential IQ would be around 15 points above and below the parents' IQ. Lynn argues this gain could be repeated each generation, eventually stabilizing the population's IQ at a theoretical maximum of around 200 after as little as six or seven generations.
Eugenics received praise in the
American Psychological Association Review of Books (Lykken 2004) as "[an] excellent, scholarly book . . .one cannot reasonably disagree with him on any point unless one can find an argument he has not already refuted.", as well as by the journal
Nature (Martin 2001) as a "comprehensive histor[y]" and a welcome one, "given the importance of the topic" of dysgenic trends.
Lynn currently serves on the board of directors of the
Pioneer Fund, and is also on the editorial board of the Pioneer-supported journal
Mankind Quarterly, both of which have been the subject of controversy for their dealing with
race and intelligence and
eugenics, and have been accused of
racism. Lynn's Ulster Institute for Social Research received $609,000 in grants from the Pioneer Fund between 1971 and 1996.[
16]
Lynn's 2001 book
The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund[Rowman & Littlefield; ISBN 0761820418] is a history and defense of the fund, in which he argues that, for the last sixty years, it has been "nearly the only non-profit foundation making grants for study and research into individual and group differences and the hereditary basis of human nature . . . Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science."
Psychologist
Ulric Neisser, who was the chairman of the APA's 1995 taskforce charged with writing a consensus statement on intelligence research, gave support for Lynn's argument in a review of the book (2004). Neisser stated that, though the work on race of Lynn and
J. Philippe Rushton "turns [his] stomach . . . Lynn's claim is exaggerated but not entirely without merit: 'Over those 60 years, the research funded by Pioneer has helped change the face of social science.'" Neisser concludes in agreement with Lynn and against
William Tucker's critical book[
17] on the Pioneer Fund, also reviewed, that the world was actually better off having the Pioneer Fund: "Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research - research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."
Notes
References
*Beaujean, A. A. and Osterlind, S. J (Dec. 2005). Assessing the Lynn-Flynn Effect in College Basic Academic Subjects Examination (
PDF).
International Society for Intelligence Research manuscript.
*
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Menozzi, P., & Piazza, A. (1994).
The history and geography of human genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
*
Flynn, J. (1982).
Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 35, 411.
*Flynn, J. (1984). The mean IQ of Americans: massive gains 1932 to 1978.
Psychological Bulletin, 95, 29-51.
*Flynn, J. (1987). Massive gains in 14 nations: what IQ tests really measure.
Psychological Bulletin, 101, 171-91.
*Lykken, D. (2004). The New Eugenics.
Contemporary Psychology, 49, 670-672.
*
