Lynn, who died in 2023, was a professor at the University of Ulster and the president of the Pioneer Fund, a nonprofit foundation created in 1937 by American Nazi sympathizers to support “race betterment” and “race realism.” It has been a primary funding source of scientific racism and, for decades, Lynn was one of the loudest proponents of the unfounded idea that Western civilization is threatened by “inferior races” that are genetically predisposed to low intelligence, violence, and criminality.
Lynn’s work has been repeatedly condemned by social scientists and biologists for using flawed methodology and deceptively collated data to support racism. In particular, he created deeply flawed datasets purporting to show differences in IQ culminating in a highly cited national IQ database. Many of Lynn’s papers appear in journals owned by the billion-dollar publishing giants Elsevier and Springer, including Personality and Individual Differences and Intelligence.