Psychologist/researcher Richard Lynn has just died at the advanced age of 93.
Rest in Peace Professor Richard Lynn, who died peacefully on 17th July 2023 aged 93: Discoverer of the Flynn Effect, high Northeast Asian IQ; persecuted by the 'I Love Science'-tists. My life would be very different today if he hadn't regarded me as a protege. pic.twitter.com/eilhkBCYbX
— Edward Dutton (@jollyheretic) July 20, 2023
He was both famous and infamous for his research into race and IQ, because when the answers to scientific questions turned out to be not Politically Correct, he would publish them anyway, rather than trying to explain them away, or bury them for years, as Robert D. Putnam did when he discovered diversity is not strength.
Lynn published four articles with us:
We’ve also written a lot about his career.
See, from 2014, John Derbyshire on Richard Lynn at 80: The Festschrift and Helmuth Nyborg’s “He Kept the Faith”—A Conversation with Richard Lynn (Part Two, Part Three)
In 2009, I wrote Richard Lynn And the People Who Don’t Want To Know, about the impulse to suppress the wrong answers.
In that article I said
The point of Richard Lynn’s Race Differences, Immigration, and the Twilight of the European Peoples is that IQ has consequences. The immigration of low IQ people into high IQ societies changes those societies for the worse. And what Steve Sailer has been writing about the Minority Mortgage Meltdown is that it was caused by assuming that the minority borrowers were smart enough to decide for themselves that they could pay back those mortgages. Certainly no lender could have put out an internal memo saying that perhaps they weren’t.
And the accusation that the only people who study this subject are ”crypto-racists with an axe to grind” … may be caused by the fact that scientists who study this always come up with the same depressing answer.
Lynn was for years a professor at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist, he explained that while he was at the Economic and Social Research institute (ESRI) in the Republic of Ireland, he made the decision to take a position in the North after he’d made some potentially unpopular discoveries about Irish IQ, although moving from Southern to Northern Ireland in 1971 was going from the frying pan into the fire.
In 2018, when Lynn was 88, I wrote Richard Lynn Stripped Of Emeritus Status For Saying The Same Things That Made Him A Professor In The First Place, when the University of Ulster was shocked, shocked to find that that he had “argued that people from east Asia have a higher average IQ than Europeans and that men have a higher average IQ than women.”
He had actually been arguing this since the 1970s, before he was a professor there, so that was presumably the kind of research that made him a professor in the first place.
For more on Lynn’s research, see Lance Welton’s THE INTELLIGENCE OF NATIONS: Lynn and Becker Crush CultMarx Race Deniers—But They’re Too Crazed to Notice and Beyond THE BELL CURVE—Richard Lynn’s RACE DIFFERENCES IN PSYCHOPATHIC PERSONALITY.
The 47 years elapsing between his hiring and being “stripped of Emeritus Status” had changed a lot of things politically, but the facts are still the facts. His work will live on.
