A conversation with Richard Lynn, for American Renaissance

 Richard Lynn is an English psychologist and author. A former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University and assistant editor of the journal Mankind Quarterly, Prof. Lynn is perhaps the world’s foremost proponent of eugenics. He is also well known for his studies of racial differences in intelligence. Many of his books have been reviewed at American Renaissance.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: When assessing both your personal and intellectual lifetime retrospectively, what may have been your equivalent of Isaac Newton’s Annus Mirabilis—namely the year 1666 when he theorized the law of universal gravitation after he allegedly saw an apple falling—; or Albert Einstein’s one… namely the year 1905 when he published his four papers in Annalen der Physik shaking the notions of space, time, mass, and energy?

  Richard Lynn: It was in 1977 when I discovered that the intelligence of the Japanese was 3 IQ points higher than that of white Americans. Hitherto, virtually all discussions of race differences in intelligence had been concerned with the problem of why white Americans and British had higher IQs than other peoples, and this was generally attributed to the tests being biased in their favor. My discovery about the Japanese set me thinking about whether other Northeast Asian peoples (Chinese and Koreans) have higher IQs that Europeans. I began collecting studies on this and found that they did.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: The 2005 review by Rushton and Jensen on race and cognitive ability had a huge impact and has now over 500 citations. What are more recent discoveries—in life history theory, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, or evolutionary anthropology—that you feel should be documented?

  Richard Lynn: I regard the most important to be what I have called “the cold winters theory” to explain the evolution of race differences in intelligence. The theory explains the relation between the IQs of the races and the coldness of the winters. Thus, the Northeast Asians had to survive the coldest winters and evolved the highest IQs (105) followed by the Europeans (100), North Africans and South Asians (84) and sub-Saharan Africans (70). I first proposed this theory in 1991 and it has become widely accepted.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: You make no secret that you worry about “dysgenic immigration” and the great replacement with which both the white race and national IQs are threatened in the West. What is the current extent of the danger?

  Richard Lynn: In 2016 Rindermann & Thompson have calculated that the intelligence of immigrants in all European countries is lower by an average 6 IQ points than that of indigenous populations. Further data confirming this conclusion for a number of economically developed countries have been reported by Woodley of Menie, Peñnaherrera-Aguire, Fernandes & Figueredo in 2017.

  It can be anticipated that in the decades that lie ahead migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will continue to try to get into Europe. There has been a huge increase of the population in sub-Saharan Africa from approximately 230 million in 1960 to approximately one billion in 2018 and it will likely continue to grow. There are high rates of unemployment and poverty throughout sub-Saharan Africa that are likely to continue and inevitably large numbers will seek a better life in Europe and many will succeed.

  Stephen Smith has predicted in his 2018 book The Rush to Europe that in 35 years there are likely to be between 150 to 200 million sub-Saharan Africans in Europe, around a third of the population. There may be increasing Spanish opposition to this immigration but even if Spain closed its borders to migrants they will find other ways to enter Europe. Many of these will be accepted as asylum seekers and most of those whose asylum claims are rejected will remain because it will be impossible to deport them. In Britain, only 40 percent of those whose asylum claims have been rejected since 2004 have been deported.

  It is inevitable that throughout Western Europe the numbers of non-Europeans will increase as a result of immigration and their greater fertility, the continued arrival of asylum seekers, illegal entrants and marriages with Europeans. In Britain, the growth of the proportion of non-Europeans in the population has been calculated in 2010 by the demographer David Coleman who estimates that the indigenous peoples will decline from 87 per cent of the population in 2006 to 56 per cent in 2056, and will become a minority by about 2066. Similar projections of the growth in the numbers of non-Europeans in Austria, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy and Spain leading to their becoming majorities of the populations in the second half of the twenty-first century have been made by Ediev, Coleman and Sherbokov in 2013. In Western Germany, 42% of children under the age of six came from a migrant background in 2018. In Britain Kauffman has calculated in 2018 that the indigenous people will fall to 32 per cent of the population in 2020.

  Immigration will also have a dysgenic effect in the United States where most immigrants are Hispanics and approximately two-thirds of these are from Mexico, where approximately 9 percent of the population are white, approximately 60 percent are Mestizo, and approximately 30 percent Native American. A meta-analysis of 39 studies of adult Hispanics in the United States by Roth, Bevier, Bobko, Switzer & Tyler in 2001 concluded that they have an average IQ of 89. The low average of IQ of Hispanics is to some degree compensated for by the high IQ of Northeast Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) but Rindermann in 2018 has calculated that the average intelligence of immigrants in the United States is approximately 7 IQ points lower than that of the population and is therefore reducing the national intelligence. This will likely continue as the Hispanic population is estimated to become approximately 60 million in 2018 and is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050.

  There has also been dysgenic immigration in Canada. In 2006 Bélanger has shown in an analysis of the 2001 Census that the total fertility rate has been around 1.5 children per woman for a number of years and women who immigrated in the previous 10 years were 19% more likely than other women to have borne a child during the year. The Blacks, Filipinos and Arabs had the highest fertility with 60%, 28% and 22%, respectively, more likely than Whites to have a child under the age of one year. Chinese, Korean, Japanese and West Asian women were the least fertile. In a further paper in 2007, Bélanger gives the numbers of immigrants as 1.1 million in 1981, 1.6 million in 1986, 2.5 million in 1991, 3.2 million in 1996, and 4.1 million (13.4 per cent of the population) in 2001. Taking into account likely future immigration and fertility, he estimates that in 2031 the number will be 10,600 million (27.4 per cent of the population). He estimates that during the years to 2031 the immigrants would increase at an average rate of 32 per thousand a year while the rest of the population would grow at a rate of about 2 per thousand a year.

  Dysgenic immigration has been less of a problem in Australia and New Zealand. Australia has prohibited ships bringing migrants from landing and diverted them to camps in Papua New Guinea. Non-European immigrants have been mainly Chinese and Indians who in the 2006 census had become 6 percent of the population. These immigrants have mostly done well in Australia so they are not a dysgenic problem. The dysgenic problem in Australia is the high fertility of the Aborigines resulting in an increase of their numbers from 106,000 in the 1961 census to 517,000 in the 2006. The average IQs of these is 62.

  In New Zealand there was a decline in the proportion of Europeans from 1956 to 2001 from 94 percent to 74 percent and an increase in the proportion of Asians from zero to 6 percent, as reported in 2010 by the New Zealand Statistical Office. In 2001, 56 percent of the Asians were Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, 26 percent were from the Indian sub-continent, and the remaining 18 percent were from the rest of Asia. These are not a serious dysgenic problem. The main dysgenic problem is the increase in the proportion of the Maori from 6 percent in 1956 to 16 percent in 2001, resulting from their high fertility, and of Pacific Islanders from zero in 1956 to 10 percent in 2001, resulting from immigration. The average IQ of these groups is 90.

Richard Lynn (on the left) in the company of Grégoire Canlorbe
– London, May 2019

  Grégoire Canlorbe: When it comes to Donald Trump’s migration policy, do you think that he is seriously in a position to reverse the current dysgenic migratory trends in America—formerly known as the “new Europe”?

  Richard Lynn: Many Americans have been unsympathetic to the influx of Hispanics and this was one of the reasons that Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 with his promise to prevent it by building a wall along the border with Mexico. It is doubtful whether such a wall, if it is ever built, would be effective because Hispanics could continue to enter the United States by tunneling under it, by boat or by air, including flying to Canada and crossing into the US. Further dysgenic immigration into the United States is unstoppable. Europeans are already a minority of the school-age population and will become a minority of the adult population about the year 2044. In the second half of the twenty-first century, Europeans will become a dwindling minority through the continued immigration of Hispanics and their greater fertility.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: In the near future, do you see a revival of eugenics, which could save the white man from genetic and cognitive deterioration?

  Richard Lynn: The intelligence of white nations could be increased genetically by programs of positive and negative eugenics. This was proposed by Francis Galton in the mid-nineteenth century. Galton read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species when it appeared in 1859, and he concluded that the process of natural selection, by which the genetic quality of the population is maintained and sometimes enhanced, had begun to weaken in England and other economically developed nations. He first discussed this problem in 1865, when he contended that natural selection had weakened against those with low intelligence and poor health and lacking what he called “character,” by which he meant a well-developed moral sense, self-discipline and strong work motivation.

  Galton discussed genetic deterioration at greater length in 1869 in his Hereditary Genius. He wrote that in the early stages of civilization “the more able and enterprising men” were the most likely to have children, but in older civilizations, like that of Britain, various factors operated to reduce the number of children of these and to increase the number of children of the less able and the less enterprising. Galton’s view that people with high intelligence were having fewer children than those with low intelligence has been confirmed in numerous subsequent studies that have shown that this is true of women but generally not of men… which I reviewed in 2011 and which were confirmed by Woodley & Figueredo in 2013 for a number of economically developed countries and several economically developing countries including Dominica, Libya and Sudan.

  The effect of this has been a decline in the genotypic intelligence (the genetic components of intelligence) in many countries from the late nineteenth century. In 2013 this decline has been shown in a meta-analysis (by Woodley, te Nijenhuis & Murphy) of the slowing of simple reaction time from 1889 to 2004 that has brought about a decline of genotypic intelligence of 1.16 IQ points a decade or 13.35 IQ points over the 115 years. During much of the twentieth century, this genetic deterioration was masked by increases in phenotypic (measured) intelligence brought about by improvements in nutrition, health and education. However, from the closing decades of the twentieth century, declines in phenotypic intelligence have been reported (by Dutton, van der Linden & Lynn in 2016) in Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Norway.

  Galton discussed the problem of genetic deterioration further in 1883 in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. In this he coined the word eugenics for policies to increase intelligence and other desirable qualities. Galton’s eugenic proposals fell into the two categories of positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics consists of policies designed to increase the numbers of those with high intelligence and other desirable qualities. Galton’s proposals for positive eugenics consisted of providing financial incentives designed to encourage those with the desirable qualities of high intelligence and strong moral character to have more children. In 1908 he wrote: “I look forward to local eugenic action in numerous directions, of which I will now specify one. It is the accumulation of considerable funds to start young couples of “worthy” qualities in the married life, and to assist them and their families at critical times.”

  Galton’s proposals for positive eugenics by providing financial incentives designed to encourage those with the desirable qualities of high intelligence and strong moral character to have more children were repeated by several eugenicists like Ronald Fisher later in the twentieth century. Eugenic programs of this kind were introduced in Germany in 1934 and 1935 consisting of the government providing loans to couples assessed as psychologically and biologically sound, and 25 percent of these loans was written off for each baby they produced. Financial grants were given for third and fourth children born to families assessed as genetically desirable. In 1936 Heinrich Himmler set up special maternity hospitals for the wives and mistresses of members of the SS to provide the best medical care during their confinement. A eugenics measure was introduced in Britain in the 1930s in which university lecturers and professors—supposedly the nation’s elite—were paid £50 per annum for every child. This incentive was ended in the 1960s as eugenics fell into disrepute.

  The proposal to provide incentives for those with high intelligence to have more children has recently been revived by Rindermann. He follows Fisher and others by proposing that this could be achieved by reducing the taxation of couples with several children. This would provide those who pay taxes and generally have higher cognitive ability with an incentive to have more children, while avoiding giving an incentive for the poor, who pay little tax and generally have lower cognitive ability. He concludes that “successful value-orientated demographic policies are difficult to implement but are vital to support a positive long-term development of society.” Meanwhile the only country where positive eugenics was explicitly pursued in the second half of the twentieth century was Singapore.

  Galton’s negative eugenics consists of policies designed to reduce the number of those with low intelligence and other undesirable qualities. This would be achieved by measures to discourage and prevent those with undesirable qualities from having children. In 1907 the first law providing for the sterilization of the mentally retarded and habitual criminals was enacted in the American state of Indiana. This was followed in other American states and by 1925 the sterilization laws had been introduced in twenty five of these. In the 1920s and 1930s, similar sterilization laws were introduced in Canada, Japan and a number of European countries including Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The countries where most sterilizations were carried out were Sweden, where they numbered about 60,000, and Germany, where they numbered about 300,00. Sterilization became less frequent from the 1960s and virtually ceased by 1980 as the tide of liberal opinion turned increasingly hostile to eugenic measures.

  Galton proposed that negative eugenics could also be promoted by immigration through “the policy of attracting eminently desirable refugees, but no others.” Presently this policy has been disregarded in many Western countries that have admitted large numbers of migrants claiming to be refugees with lower intelligence than that of their indigenous peoples. For instance, in Britain a study of a representative sample on the CAT (Cognitive Abilities Test) in 2009 reported these non-verbal reasoning IQs: White British 101.4; Indians 100.2; Pakistani 94.5; Bangladeshi 97.3; Black-African 94.1; Black Caribbean 94.6. In Denmark, Nyborg in 2013 has calculated that immigrants will become 67 percent of the population by 2072 and that the low intelligence of these will reduce the average intelligence of the country to 93. The lower average IQs of immigrants has also been shown in Sweden by Heller-Sahlgren in 2015.

  In Cognitive Capitalism (2018) Rindermann discusses this problem and follows Galton in contending that refugees with low intelligence should not be admitted and concludes: “In Western countries, reforms are urgent and indispensable!” This proposal would require withdrawal from the undertaking given by Western nations in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention to admit as refugees those who have a well-founded fear of persecution. This undertaking has been widely honored by Western nations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, notably by Greece that accepted many thousands of migrants who made the crossing from Turkey; by Italy that accepted approximately 650,000 migrants who made the crossing from Libya in the years 2014-2018; and by Germany where Angela Merkel accepted approximately 1.2 million migrants in 2015. These migrants claimed to be refugees but many of them are economic migrants. Their claims to be refugees are assessed and if they are recognized as genuine they are accepted for asylum while if they are rejected they are meant to be deported, but this is frequently impossible and most of them remain in Europe.

  This influx has generated widespread opposition in many European countries and these have responded by attempting to reduce it. From 2015, Europe has paid Turkey to keep migrants in camps to prevent them crossing into Greece, and Austria and Hungary have built fences to stop migrants entering from the south. In June 2018, Italy and Malta refused to accept a boat of 629 African migrants from Libya who had been picked up in the Mediterranean by the charity ship Aquarius and Italy declared she would not longer allow charity ships to land migrants in Italy. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized Italy but refused to allow the ship to dock at French ports but the Aquarius was accepted by Spain which has continued to accept African migrants from Morocco and from west Africa landing in the Canary islands.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to think of the Chinese as “the Jews of the East,” a phrase which notably occurred in the writings of Thailand’s King Vajiravudh—who was quite unhappy with the Chinese diaspora in his kingdom. What do you think of this expression?

  Richard Lynn: “The Jews of the East” is a good description of the Chinese in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries including Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. In all these countries the Chinese have been minorities that have been more successful than the majority indigenous populations, just as the Jews have been in Europe and the United States, and for the same reason: they have higher IQs. I have documented this in my book The Global Bell Curve: Race IQ and Inequality Worldwide (2008).

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Notwithstanding his early death following cerebral edema, martial artist and actor Bruce Lee may be seen as a successful case of Chinese-European crossbreeding. To what extent does the miscegenation between a white man (or woman) and a Chinese woman (or man) prove to be—generally speaking—more eugenic and healthy than the one between a white and an Arab or a Black?

  Richard Lynn: Children inherit genes equally from both parents and in large samples their children have the average of their fathers and mothers. Thus, if one parent has an IQ of 120 and the other has an IQ of 100, the average of their children will be 110. But these are only averages and there is a wide range of the IQs of siblings who typically differ by about 10 IQ points. With regard mixed race children, in my latest calculations, the Chinese have an average IQ of 105 and Whites have an average IQ of 100, so the average White-Chinese child will have an IQ 102.5. Arabs have an average IQ of 84 so Arab-White children will have an average IQ of 92, while Black in sub-Saharan Africa have an average IQ of 70, so Black-White children will have an average IQ 85, which is what they have in the United States. Of course, these are averages and there is a wide range of IQs in the parents and the children all of these groups.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. von Hayek—the two leading Austrian economists of the 20^th century—endeavored to show that central planning was an ineluctable collapse… by reason of the alleged impossibility of economic calculation in the absence of free-market prices for capital goods. Does the success of communist China’s semi-planning show that in the presence of a high average IQ, a moderate planning regime is indeed viable—and not a “logical impossibility” as the Misesian or Hayekian argument professes?

  Richard Lynn: Yes, the rapid economic growth of China since it adopted a moderate free-market economy shows that a country with a high average IQ can prosper economically with what you call “a moderate planning regime”. This was also apparent when Germany was divided between the communist East and the free-market West. Naturally, the free-market West was more prosperous but the communist East did quite well economically because the Germans have a high IQ.

  Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Is there anything else you would like to add concerning how you view the world—and the future of the world?

  Richard Lynn: In my most recent book, co-authored with my young collaborator David Becker and entitled “The Intelligence of Nations,” we envision five scenarios on the probable future of national IQs. First, in the economically developed countries the declines in national IQs that have been reported in a number of these will continue as a result of dysgenic fertility and immigration. The principal problem is the large number of highly educated high IQ career women who remain childless. It is probably impossible to introduce policies to increase the fertility of these women who have been educated out of their reproductive function. It is also probably impossible to introduce policies to reduce the fertility of those with low intelligence.

  In Western Europe, the United States and Canada intelligence will also decline as a result of dysgenic immigration consisting of the continued settlement of immigrants with lower intelligence and greater fertility than that of the host populations. Measures designed to prevent this, such as building a wall along the American-Mexican border or attempting to restrict immigration into Western Europe, will be ineffective. The decline of intelligence will reduce the economic, technological, scientific and military power of these countries.

  Second, national IQs will continue to decline in Eastern Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand as a result of the low fertility of high IQ career women but the decline will not be so great as in Western Europe, the United States and Canada because in these countries there is little dysgenic immigration. Third, while Australia and New Zealand have had little dysgenic immigration, their indigenous peoples with their low IQs will continue to grow because of their high fertility. It will not be possible to reduce this and it will have some adverse effect on their national IQs.

  Fourth, national IQs will continue to increase in economically developing nations. There may be some dysgenic fertility resulting in a decline in genotypic intelligence but this will be more than compensated for as a result of improvements in nutrition, health and education as it was in economically developed nations during most of the twentieth century. The differences in intelligence between economically developed and economically developing nations will therefore be reduced, although it will not be eliminated because the populations of the economically developed nations will retain a genetic advantage as shown by their larger average brain size.

  Fifth, there has been dysgenic fertility in China during the last half century. Despite this, there was a large increase of 15 IQ points in the intelligence of Chinese children from 1988 to 2006 as a result of improvements in nutrition, health and education and the British IQ of Chinese children in 2006 is estimated as 109.8. By 2016, the National Science Board reported that China had overtaken the United States for the number of articles published in science and technology.

  It is likely that this lead will grow as intelligence in China continues to increase, as it has in other economically developing nations, as a result of further environmental improvements. There is also likely to be an increase of intelligence in China with a reduction in air pollution which at present is impairing intelligence in many towns and cities. Thus, as intelligence continues to increase in China and decline in Europe and the United States, China is likely to emerge as the world’s superpower in the second half of the twenty-first century

  That conversation was first published on American Renaissance, in June 2019