# Richard Lynn **Richard Lynn** (1930–2023) was the British psychologist who spent the second half of his career making race science respectable to itself: editor of [[Mankind Quarterly]], president of the [[Pioneer Fund]] (2012–18), author of *Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations* (1996) and, with the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen, of *IQ and the Wealth of Nations* (2002), whose "national IQ" table — a number for every country on earth — is the single most-cited artifact of contemporary [[Scientific Racism]]. A self-described "scientific racist," he held an emeritus professorship at Ulster University until the university withdrew it in April 2018. ## The dataset The national-IQ figures are the reason he matters. Assembled from whatever test results Lynn could find, the table assigned sub-Saharan countries averages in the 60s and 70s on the strength of samples that were tiny, unrepresentative (children, rural clinics, malnourished cohorts) and in some cases interpolated from neighbors with no data at all; a 2010 critique found the collection "unsystematic" and "too unspecific to allow replication," and Rebecca Sear's 2022 analysis concluded the datasets "do not provide accurate, unbiased or comparable measures of cognitive ability worldwide." The numbers nonetheless propagated: Sear has identified 174 published papers that use them, has persuaded two journals to retract (*Proceedings of the Royal Society B*, 2024; *Cross-Cultural Research*, November 2025), and has been ignored by most of the eighteen editors she wrote to. The table lives on in [[Human Biodiversity]] forums, in *The Bell Curve*'s successors and in the "national IQ" maps that circulate on the right as settled fact. ## The line he connects Lynn is the vault's clearest institutional link between mid-century eugenics money and twenty-first-century race science: the [[Pioneer Fund]] that had financed the segregationists of the 1950s financed him, and he ran it; *Mankind Quarterly*, founded in 1960 to resist *Brown*, was his journal. His *Dysgenics* thesis — that the less intelligent outbreed the more — is the premise [[John Tanton]] endorsed in a May 21, 1997 letter and that underlies [[Passive Eugenics]]; the [[Dysgenics]] page carries the evidence against it. See [[Charles Murray]] and [[The Bell Curve]] for the mainstream vehicle that cited him, and [[Robert K. Graham]] for the practical eugenics of the same circle. ## See Also - [[Dysgenics]] · [[Scientific Racism]] · [[Human Biodiversity]] · [[Eugenics]] · [[Passive Eugenics]] - [[Pioneer Fund]] · [[Mankind Quarterly]] · [[John Tanton]] · [[Charles Murray]] · [[The Bell Curve]] · [[Robert K. Graham]]