IQ papers of British 'race scientist' under review after calls for retraction

A leading academic publisher is reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late British professor Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of "race science" who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups.

- Hannah Devlin, David Pegg

Elsevier provides access to more than 100 papers by Lynn, including several iterations of his "national IQ" dataset, which purports to show wide variations in IQ between different countries but has been criticised by mainstream scientists for serious flaws in its methodology.

The database, a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that was first published in 2002, is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded "race science" activists, whose activities were uncovered in a recent investigation by the Guardian and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

Scientific racism's supporters tend to argue certain ethnic groups are genetically pre-disposed to criminality or low intelligence. Mainstream geneticists consider it a pseudo-science without credible supporting evidence.

There have been repeated calls for publishers to retract Lynn's papers or flag concerns about their reliability with warning notices. Academics who have evaluated his papers allege that Lynn, who died last year, systematically biased data to produce implausibly low IQ scores for sub-Saharan nations.

They are concerned about flawed research being used to support racist ideology, but also about the frequency with which Lynn is cited in passing by experts in other fields who may not be familiar with the controversy that surrounds his work.

Now, Elsevier has confirmed that it has ordered a review of Lynn's research published in its journals, including in Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. The most recent of these appeared in early 2023. Elsevier sells one-off access to the paper for about £22 online.

An Elsevier spokesperson said the review "began in August this year, and was prompted by a number of factors including external feedback".