Go to Part 1.

Lynn took his final examinations in the summer of 1953, trying to conceal his antipathy for the department: “Apparently, I succeeded as I was awarded the Passingham Prize, which is given annually for the best psychology student of the year. On the basis of this I was awarded a three-year research studentship to work for a Ph.D.” That Autumn, Lynn decided to work on the relation between anxiety, intelligence and educational attainment in school children:

I began my research in a primary school in the January of 1954. I could not find any tests of anxiety for children so I constructed my own and gave these together with tests of intelligence, reading and arithmetic. I completed the work I was doing for my Ph.D. in the early autumn of 1955. The results showed a positively skewed curvilinear relation between anxiety and attainment in reading and arithmetic, which was more pronounced for reading than for arithmetic.

In the course of 1955, Lynn became engaged to Susan Maher, whom he had met during his first year at King’s College. When his fiancée broke the news to her mother, the poor woman wept for three days:

Susan’s parents hoped that she would find an old Etonian or at least a public school product, and she had come up with a former grammar school lad of obscure parentage from the provinces. Despite their disapproval, we had it our own way, as young people generally do. Our wedding took place at St Stephen’s church in London on the first of January, 1956.

In the spring of 1956, Lynn completed his PhD thesis and submitted it for examination. His external examiner was Cyril Burt, whose book The Subnormal Mind Lynn had recently trashed in a review for the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It was only his second professional publication. “I have since learned,” writes Lynn, “that few academics can forgive a negative review and eventually will take their revenge when an opportunity occurs.” However, whether due to exceptional magnanimity or (more likely) a failure to notice the review, Burt was pleased with Lynn’s thesis and voted to award him the PhD.

Lynn applied for and won an appointment as assistant lecturer at the University of Exeter where psychology was a subdepartment attached to the education department, and Lynn was one of only three lecturers on the subject. He remained at Exeter for eleven years, during which time he and Susan would have three children.

To supplement his modest salary, Lynn served for a time as warden of one of the University’s residence halls. This enabled him to purchase his first car, a 1936 model with no lock on the door, as none was considered necessary in pre-War Britain: “Cars could be left on the streets without any danger that anyone would steal them or their contents.”

Among Lynn’s duties as warden was to make sure none of the students brought girlfriends over to spend the night. Being poorly cut out for the role of moral censor, he once let drop that he considered his duty to be the suppression of scandal rather than vice. A young man soon after called upon him to ask about his views in greater detail. Lynn responded that “the students were adults and not committing any criminal offence by using the condoms that had clogged the drains of the sewage system.” The fellow turned out to be a journalist, and the next day Lynn found his picture splashed across the front page of several national newspapers along with the headline “Girls in rooms, I don’t mind says blind eyed don.” He was relieved of his wardenship.

Lynn’s father advised him that “the trick for a successful academic career was to find your gold mine as early as possible, sit on it, and make your reputation developing it,” as he had done with the genetics of cotton. But Lynn was slow to discover a rewarding program of research: “I did not do anything of significance for the next twelve years or so.”

Lynn’s father also introduced him to the geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates. Upon hearing that Lynn was a psychologist, Gates asked him what he thought about race differences in intelligence.

I told him that when I was at Cambridge we had been informed that blacks have a lower average IQ than whites and that this is caused by discrimination. Ruggles Gates told me he thought this was incorrect and that it is a genetic difference. This was the first time I had heard this view and as Ruggles Gates was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a distinguished geneticist I took it seriously. Gates also asked me my opinion about eugenics and I told him I had read the studies by Burt and Cattell showing that intelligence was declining and I agreed with Cattell that eugenic measures were needed to correct this. He told me that he took the same view.

In the 1959 UK general election Lynn voted Conservative for the first time because he approved of Harold Macmillen’s decision to end conscription and his promise to restrict immigration from the Britain’s former colonies:

I thought this was sensible because I believed it could be anticipated that there would be tension and conflict between the immigrants and the indigenous population. Some conflicts had broken out in the previous year when white youths in Nottingham and London attacked blacks, threw petrol bombs into their houses and smashed their windows.

Lynn understood that in-group preference is a human universal, and not a moral pathology from which Europeans uniquely suffer.

In December 1959 Lynn met Hans Eysenck: “I found talking with Hans was a real meeting of minds and unlike anything I had experienced before. I told him how uncongenial I had found psychology at Cambridge, and how poor the teaching was. He said this confirmed his own experience.” Eysenck had once had a Cambridge graduate as an assistant and had found her unable to calculate a correlation coefficient.

Eysenck invited Lynn to collaborate in testing certain hypotheses he was developing at the time, but their work failed to confirm Eysenck’s ideas: “I concluded that a beautiful theory had been destroyed by an ugly fact, as Thomas Huxley once put it.”

The quality of psychological research in England at this period seems to have left something to be desired. Lynn recalls:

One day in 1962, when I was reading The Times, my daughter Sophy, aged two and a half, came and sat on my knee and I pointed to the letter T and said “this is a T.” I then pointed to the letter S and said “this is an S.”  Then I turned over a page, pointed to a letter T and asked “What is this?” She answered “a T.” Then I pointed to a letter S and asked “What is this”? She answered “S.” All this may seem unremarkable, but at the time the discovery that a two-and-a-half-year-old could identify letters was revolutionary. The prevailing theory was known as “reading readiness” and was set out by Magdalene Vernon, considered the foremost expert on perception in Britain, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Reading. The theory was that young children’s perceptual abilities are not sufficiently developed to identify letters until they are at least four and typically five years old, and hence it is impossible to teach children to read before this age. Now I had found that in a couple of minutes that a two-and-a-half-year-old could identify letters perfectly easily. It was obvious that Maggie Vernon could never have tried testing whether two-year-olds had the perceptual abilities to identify letters. I wrote a paper on this that was published in 1963 as Reading readiness and the perceptual abilities of young children. This caused a minor sensation in the worlds of education and psychology. I had a number of calls from journalists asking me to expand my revolutionary discovery and its implications, and it had quite a lot of coverage in the press. 

In 1965 the Chairman of Lynn’s department hosted B. F. Skinner during a visit to Exeter and invited Lynn to meet him:

I asked him whether he would not agree than there are important genetic determinants of many behaviours, such as addictions to gambling and drugs, and also some genetic fears such as those of heights, spiders and snakes. He would have none of this. I pressed him on gambling addiction and his reply was that some unfortunate people hit the jackpot early on and this reinforced them so strongly that they became hooked. It could happen to anyone. I thought this was all nonsense and that Skinner was extraordinarily myopic in his world view. Some years later in 1996 when I met Ulrich Neisser who had been a student of Skinner’s at Harvard, he told me he agreed with me.

Lynn also took note of the Hart-Cellar Act passed by the US Congress in that year:

It would inevitably entail a huge alteration in the ethnic nature of the American population. The Kennedy brothers wanted to make the United States a new society and a new people, more racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than any nation on earth. I thought there was little doubt that they would succeed in their strategy for the destruction of the American population as an ethnically homogeneous people of largely north-west European origin, and so it has proved.

Lynn takes the occasion of Winston Churchill’s death in 1965 to record his dissenting opinion of the man:

I don’t think he was very bright. He had done poorly at school and failed in his first two attempts to pass the entrance exam to Sandhurst. In 1914 he was the leading advocate in the cabinet for declaring war on Germany, which I believe we should have avoided.

In 1915 Churchill was responsible for the disastrous British invasion of Gallipoli in which nothing was achieved and about 30,000 thousand lives were lost. In 1924 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and took Britain on to the gold standard, against the advice of Maynard Keynes. This had a deflationary effect [and] contributed to the subsequent depression. In 1938–9 he was a leading advocate for declaring war on Germany. I believe this was yet another mistake and that if we had not done so, Hitler would have attacked Russia and we could have remained on the neutral sideline like Sweden and Switzerland, while Russia and Germany fought each other to a standstill. 

After losing the 1945 election, Churchill returned to power as prime minister in 1951 at the age of 77 and held the position until 1955. He could have privatised the industries that Labour had nationalised and [turned into] loss-making monopolies. He could have repealed the Commonwealth Immigration Act that gave all the one billion or so citizens of the commonwealth the right to come and live in Britain. He could have abolished conscription which served no useful purpose because we had developed nuclear weapons that deterred the Russians from attacking us. He did none of these in these wasted years. He had had a stroke that seems to have impaired him, and most of the time he was drunk and stoned by continuously smoking cigars.

In early 1967 Lynn spotted an advertisement for a professorship at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin. He applied, came for an interview, and was offered a five-year appointment. He and his family moved to Ireland that August.

The purpose ESIR was to carry out research on the economic and social problems of Ireland and find policies that would help solve them. Foremost among these was that Ireland was quite economically backward compared with Britain, and I researched the literature to see what contribution I could make. It was not long before I discovered a study by John Macnamara that reported that the IQ of Irish 12-year-olds was 90 compared with 100 in Britain.

Lynn arranged to have a sample of Dublin pupils tested, and the results confirmed Macnamara’s findings.

I knew that intelligence is a determinant of earnings among individuals and groups. I knew Cyril Burt’s book The Backward Child in which he showed that children in the boroughs of London had different IQs and that these were highly correlated across the boroughs with the earnings of adults, and that this had also been shown by Maller in the boroughs of New York city. It seemed likely that the same would hold for nations and in particular for the economic backwardness of Ireland. This was how I first came to formulate the theory that differences in intelligence are an important determinant of national per capita incomes that I was to publish later, in collaboration with Tatu Vanhanen, in IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

By this time, Lynn had become somewhat more diplomatic than he had been in his youth. He realized his hosts might not respond positively to the idea that their country’s difficulties were attributable to their lower native intelligence, especially when an Englishman was the bearer of the news. Furthermore, he had been appointed to help find solutions for the country’s problems, and in the present case this could only mean eugenic interventions such as sterilization of the mentally retarded or incentives for graduates to have more children. While such ideas were widely out of favor by this time, Catholic Ireland was one of the few countries to oppose them even during the early-twentieth-century heyday of the eugenics movement.

Lynn contented himself with publishing a monograph entitled The Irish Brain Drain:

It reported research showing that there was a high rate of emigration of graduates from Ireland, and warned that this would reduce the average IQ of the remaining population. I advocated several policies to deal with this problem.  First, the government had recently begun a programme for increasing the number of young people at universities on the grounds that this would be an investment in the economy. I argued there is no evidence that increasing university education enhances economic growth; in the case of Ireland, since so many graduates emigrated, it would be more likely to retard it. I particularly homed in on the medical schools, which produced about three times the numbers of physicians that could find employment in Ireland. The result of this was that the day after graduation the newly qualified physicians chartered a plane to take them on a one-way flight to the United States.  I proposed that the medical schools should be cut down to a third of their existing size. 

The government’s programme for the expansion of university education also recommended that this should be free. I argued that this proposal should be rejected on the grounds that as students benefited financially from a university education, they should contribute to the cost. In addition, I argued that goods and services that are provided free invariably attract a large demand that eventually becomes unsustainable. I also proposed that the government’s priority should be to reduce taxation, which was very high in Ireland and acted as an encouragement to the talented to emigrate.

The reaction to these sensible proposals was such as to suggest that Lynn might just as well have told his hosts they were congenitally stupid.

One of Lynn’s colleagues at the ESRI was John Raven, son of the inventor of the Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test.

Raven junior had a large collection of results from a number of countries but it apparently never occurred to him to calculate national IQs from these. He made these available to me and later I used many of them to calculate IQs for a number of countries and show that these are a major determinant of national differences in per capita incomes.

In 1969, Lynn contributed to a volume critical of progressive education:

I argued that educational attainment is principally determined by intelligence and secondly by the values acquired from the family, that intelligence is largely determined genetically, and that there are innate social class differences in intelligence that would ensure that children from middle class families would always tend to do better in any system. I argued that the progressive agenda would reduce the educational standards of the most able and cited the much lower standards in American comprehensives compared with the selective European secondary schools as proof of this. I also argued that the grammar schools were a valuable conduit by which able working-class children could rise in the social hierarchy.

That same year, Arthur Jensen published his famous paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in which he argued that the 15-point difference in IQ between blacks and whites in the United States was likely to have some genetic basis. Lynn read Jensen’s paper carefully and concluded that he was correct.

During his time at ESRI, Lynn discovered that the Irish tend not to suffer much from anxiety. More generally, he found that northern European nations have low anxiety, while the southern European nations and Japan had high anxiety. This suggested that there could be genetic differences in anxiety among these groups. It was Lynn’s first excursion into racial differences.

My work on national differences in anxiety was my principal achievement of my years in Dublin. I published my conclusions in National Differences in Anxiety, an ESRI monograph, and a fuller version in 1971 in my book Personality and National Character.

Sir Cyril Burt contributed an introduction to the book (“What I should like chiefly to commend are the methods he has adopted”), and Raymond Cattell wrote Lynn a letter full of praise. A number of other researchers have continued and extended Lynn’s research in this area, including Hans Eysenck and Phil Rushton.

One surprising thing Lynn discovered in the course of his study is that Ireland’s reputation as a hard-drinking nation is not born out by the data: the country actually has an unusually low rate of alcoholism. This finding should have come as good news to the Irish, but Lynn met with resistance from some who had taken a kind of pride in their country’s popular reputation, as well as with professional researchers who had made careers out of studying the largely imaginary problem.

In the Summer of 1971, Lynn traveled to Belgium to give a talk on his research:

Art Jensen was also at the conference and gave a lecture on race differences in intelligence. I had not met Jensen and I was interested to hear him and see how the audience reacted. As he began to speak, there were shouts of Sieg Heil! from the audience, but after some pleas from the chairman the shouts died down and Jensen was able to deliver his lecture. Afterwards I met up with Art and we had dinner together. He told me that he began looking at the evidence on the black-white difference on the assumption that this was solely environmentally determined, but the more he considered the data, the more evident it became that genetic factors are also involved.

Lynn had ruffled so many feathers in Dublin that he decided not to wait around to see whether his five-year contract would be renewed. When the University of Ulster advertised for a professor to set up a new psychology department, Lynn applied for and got the position. This was not an ideal time to resettle a family in Northern Ireland, since the three-decade low intensity civil war known as the Troubles had begun just a couple years earlier: “the future looked threatening and we decided it would be best if Susan and the children moved to London, where Susan soon obtained a lectureship in Russian history at the South Bank Polytechnic.” This separation would lead to the couple’s divorce in the late 1970s.

Lynn moved to Northern Ireland in April 1972, getting into a serious accident on the way:

As I came round a corner out of the small town of Tobermore I was confronted by the sight of a car totally out of control and veering from one side or the road to the other. I slammed on the breaks and went smash into the car’s passenger side. The impact put my head through the windscreen and knocked me unconscious. Luckily my car was built on a heavy chassis, almost like a tank. The car I hit was made of light steel and the whole side caved in. It was being driven by a young woman and her father was in the passenger seat. The impact killed him instantly.              

Lynn spent a week in the hospital and was left with a scar on his forehead still visible in photographs.

He bought a ruined Georgian mansion in the Ulster countryside, pulled down about half which he considered beyond repair, and spent the next quarter of a century restoring the rest: “The satisfying thing about building work is that it is always possible to find a solution, whereas in psychology some problems are intractable.”

Lynn appointed two lecturers to make up the new department, and the first thirty psychology students enrolled at the end of September.

At the end of the term I gave a party at my house for my students and lecturers. As the students left, I heard one of them say to another “He must be lonely living in that great house all by himself, poor old bugger.” He was right about this. I have never been entirely happy living on my own.

Lynn found that setting up and running a psychology department occupied a great deal of his time, and he realized that needed an assistant in order to make progress with his own research. He obtained a grant for this purpose and “appointed Susan Hampson, who was to be an invaluable assistant for a number of years.”

End of Part 2 of 3

Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist
Richard Lynn
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2020
476 pages, £25

Richard Lynn, who turned 90 earlier this year, has published an account of his life and intellectual development, including portraits of some of the outstanding men he has known and worked with.

Lynn’s father was Sydney Harland, the world’s leading expert on the genetics of cotton. His mother Marjorie was the daughter of William Freeman, Director of Agriculture at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (now University of the West Indies) in Trinidad, another early researcher on plant genetics. Harland was, alas, married when they met in Trinidad, but Marjorie followed him to New York, where she conceived. The sight of homeless men in New York convinced her that capitalism was not working, and she became a lifelong communist. Harland concocted for her an imaginative story according to which she had married a mining engineer named Richard Lynn who had been tragically killed in a mining accident shortly after the wedding. With little except this story and her new political convictions, Marjorie returned to the UK in 1930 and settled in Hampstead, a suburb of London. On February 20, 1930, she gave birth to a son whom she named “Richard Lynn” as an expression of piety toward her lamented fictitious husband.

Richard Lynn had a mostly unremarkable childhood. When the war came, his mother sent him for his own safety to acquaintances at Ambleside in the Lake District of Northern England. He enjoyed the outdoor activities the area offered, following the course of the war on the wireless. “By the end of 1943,” he writes, “I was becoming increasingly conscious that my life at the Ambleside village school was on a slow track to no-where, and that if I was to make anything of my life I needed to get a decent education at a good school.”

By this time, his mother had moved to Bristol and there was little danger from the Luftwaffe. At his own request, Lynn rejoined his mother and applied to the Bristol Grammar School, the best in the city. He found that the entrance exam included many questions his schooling in Ambleside left him unable to answer. He performed well enough to gain admission, but was mortified to be assigned to the school’s “C stream,” for the dull boys. “I never worked harder than I did in that year,” he recalls, and the following year he was promoted to the A stream: “Once I had achieved this, I was content to rest on my laurels and coast along somewhere in the middle of the A stream.”

The young Lynn was no science nerd, being initially drawn more to history, literature, and classical music; the scientists in his family tree also seem on his account to have been men of broad interests. He writes that he was always attracted to “big ideas,” which the science classes at the Bristol Grammar School neglected in favor of minutiae. In biology class, e.g., the students were taught about stamens and pistils rather than the theory of evolution.

Partly from his mother’s influence, and partly from his own attraction to big ideas, Lynn joined the Young Communist League when he was fourteen. The YCL sponsored evening social hours, weekend bicycle trips, and summer camps where Lynn could join in the singing of communist songs: “It’s the same the whole world over, It’s the poor as gets the blame, It’s the rich as gets the pleasure, Ain’t  it all a bleeding shame.” He learned how to answer objections to the faith:

For instance, when people objected that communist Russia only permitted one party, I was able to explain that capitalist countries needed two parties, one to represent the capitalists and one to represent the workers, but as communist societies have only one class, they only need one party.

Within about a year, Lynn developed doubts about what he was being taught at the YCL, though he continued with the organization for a time in order to enjoy the social benefits.

In England at this period, grammar school students were tested in nine academic subjects at the age of sixteen, an ordeal known as the School Certificate examination. Six months beforehand, they were given a practice version known as the “mocks.”

I had not done much work since I had got into the A stream and had a full social life with the Young Communists and I was not well prepared for these mocks. After they had been marked and the results put up on the board, I found that I had not done well. Our form master asked me to stay behind after school. “Now Lynn”, he said, “I don’t know what to make of you. You seem to be intelligent but your performance in the mocks has been most disappointing”. He asked me how much homework I did each night and I said about half an hour. He urged me to pull myself together and do at least three hours homework a night. He said he thought that if I applied myself I might get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, but if I continued on this rake’s progress I would end up serving behind a counter.

Once again, the prospect of failure motivated Lynn to succeed: “I left the YCL, worked hard for the School Certificate examination, and managed to do quite creditably.”

In the summer of 1946, Lynn’s grandmother revealed to him the fictional nature of his supposed mining engineer father: “She said my father was a very clever but very immoral man, which sums him up pretty accurately.” The information came just in time: shortly thereafter, Lynn received a call from his half-sister Margaret to say their father Sydney Harlan was staying with her and would like to meet him:

I went round and met my father for the first time. He asked me about my political views and I said I was a socialist. He told me that he too had been a socialist at my age but that he was now a liberal. He gave me a copy of Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and told me it was an important psychological study, and suggested I might consider studying psychology. I read this book that proposed that people have an instinct to identify with the groups and follow them, that religion plays an important part in binding groups together, and this is one of the causes of wars. I found this very interesting and began to think about studying psychology.

Lynn still had two years of school to complete. During this time, he had to prepare to take the Higher School Certificate examination (now known as the A levels) in three or four different subjects in order to go on to university. He chose to concentrate primarily on History and English:

One of the main reasons I liked History and English Literature was that we were encouraged to make up our own minds about controversial issues. For instance, our history teacher asked us to consider which side was in the right in the English and American civil wars, or in the disputes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. We were encouraged to think through these questions for ourselves. Similarly, in English literature the master would ask “Is Shakespeare any better than Pearl Buck, and if so, why?” I found all this much more interesting than science and mathematics which just entailed learning what was already well known.

In December 1947, Lynn was summoned to the headmaster’s study, where he anticipated a flogging for having violated some rule. Instead, the headmaster told him that King’s College at the University of Cambridge was offering examinations for three scholarships in English and History the following month, and encouraged Lynn to try for them.

So in January of 1948, Lynn took the train to Cambridge. He includes a little vignette of British postwar austerity:

The candidates were put up in the college and it was freezing cold. The bedrooms provided jugs of water and bowls for washing. One of the other candidates told me that in his room the water had frozen solid, but I told him that in mine the ice was only about a quarter of an inch thick and if he gave it a hard knock, he would probably strike water.

Lynn had to compete against about a hundred other boys, but was among the five invited to an oral interview. His headmaster at Bristol Grammar School had advised him, at this stage of the process, to “take an unconventional line in order to stand out from the crowd of conventional answers.” Lynn may have taken this too much to heart. Examined in recent history, he explained that Neville Chamberlain had been perfectly correct to appease Hitler at Munich, but wrong to declare war following the invasion of Poland, in view of Britain’s loss in the subsequent war. When the examiners asked him how he figured Britain had lost World War II, Lynn responded that they had fought to preserve the independence of Poland, but had ended up handing it over to Stalin along with the rest of Eastern Europe. At this point, recalls Lynn, his examiners lapsed into silence.

Although he might have been better advised to stick with what he had learned at the Young Communist League, the Dons were broadminded enough to pass the young know-it-all. Three days later he learned via telegram that he had been awarded a scholarship: “This news threw me into a state of hyper-manic euphoria whose intensity I had never experienced before or was never to experience again.”

Lynn began to consider what he would focus on at Cambridge:

I thought that history left a lot of questions unanswered such as why humans incessantly fight wars. I began to think that psychology might provide answers to some of these questions. I read a few psychology books to get a feel of the subject. One of these was William McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology which set out his theory of the instincts of aggression, home-making, social bonding and so on. I was quite favourably impressed, not realizing that all of this was passé. I began to think seriously about reading psychology when I went up to Cambridge, as my father had suggested when I met him two years earlier.

Lynn was so lacking in esprit de corps that he had found it impossible to care whether Bristol Grammar School won or lost its athletic contests against other schools. He was, therefore, an extremely poor fit for the armed services. Nevertheless, like all British 18-year-old boys at this time, he was conscripted in July 1948 and served until September of the following year. Despite his lack of enthusiasm, he was selected for officer training, where he made his first acquaintance with the Progressive Matrices intelligence test he would later use in research. Weapons training involved Boer-War-era bolt-action rifles with six bullets that had to be transferred from the magazine manually, making for a very slow rate of fire. By this time, the Red Army had Kalashnikov AK-47s which functioned like light, handheld machine guns.

We received instruction in leading an attack on an enemy position. The gist of this was that you led your men towards the enemy position while the enemy fired at you. If you were lucky, they missed and when you got near to their position you could shoot them at close range, or run at them and stick your bayonet into one of them. When I heard about this, I was not surprised about the enormous casualties in World War One.

Upon receiving his commission, Lynn was assigned to training raw recruits such as he himself had been seven months earlier. They were not an impressive lot:

The new conscripts had one session of learning to fire an air rifle. I was astonished to find that most of them found this very difficult and failed to hit the target at all. I found no difficulty in doing this because I had occasionally been to fair grounds and shot at targets. It was simply a matter of aligning the sights on the rifle against the target and pulling the trigger, and the bullet went into the bull’s eye or very close to it. I used to give them a demonstration of how it was done, and the sergeant would bring the target and show it to them with six neat little holes in the bull’s eye. The conscripts would gather round with exclamations of “Cor, blimey, look at the officer’s.”

As an officer, Lynn had a private room and leisure for reading and study. Besides tackling Dante’s Commedia in the original Italian, he made some time for psychology:

. . . including Galton’s Hereditary Genius, in which he argued that intelligence is a single entity, is largely hereditary, that high intelligence is required for civilisation and that in advanced civilisations the more intelligent individuals tend to have fewer children, with the result that the intelligence of the population declines and with it the quality of the civilisation. I found all this very interesting and it confirmed my intention to take psychology when I went up to Cambridge. 

Lynn matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge, in October 1949, where he found it was not possible to read (or, in American English: “study”) psychology until the third year. In the meantime, he continued the study of history, which involved producing a weekly essay.  Lynn found it a valuable exercise: “you had to grapple with a problem, structure an argument and write it up.”

Social life at Cambridge was centred largely on the college. After dinner several of us would usually gather in someone’s rooms (generally we had both a sitting room and a bedroom) where the host would make coffee and we would discuss the problems that young men always have and probably always will discuss – the meaning of life, politics, literature, history, war, pacifism, religion, and of course, sex and gossip.

Most of the students came from elite backgrounds and public schools like Eton, but nearly all were socialists of some sort.

A Christian fellow student attempted to convert Lynn, but he was too rationalistic to get the hang of religion:

I had read Francis Galton’s paper on the efficacy of prayer, which he tested by examining the longevity of kings and queens. He argued that many thousands of people pray for the life of kings and queens, so these should live longer than ordinary folk if prayer is effective. He found that this was not the case and concluded that prayer is ineffective.

Lynn found this demonstration dispositive.

King’s College was all male in those days, which fostered a highly competitive atmosphere:

Those who made their mark were designated “smart” and were elected to the elite societies and invited to the “smart” parties. Invitations to parties were issued by cards that students placed on their mantelshelf, where they were displayed like trophies. The number of cards you had on your mantelshelf was an index of how “smart” you were, so we were conscious of who was and who was not “smart”. The competition between the young men resembled that of young males in many animal species and primitive societies, where young males compete to be admitted to become full members of the adult group and are allowed access to women while those who fail are excluded. From the 1980s the Cambridge colleges admitted women and most of the inter-male competition has gone.

Lynn reports only meeting two girls during his entire seven years at Cambridge; one of these was Susan Maher, who would become his first wife.

I completed my history course at the end of academic year of 1951. I had enjoyed it, particularly the course on political theory where we had to master, among other writers, Plato and Adam Smith. Plato’s Republic was an introduction to the concept of a eugenic state in which people were bred for desirable qualities. I had already encountered this idea in Galton’s Hereditary Genius, which curiously makes no mention of Plato. I was intrigued with this idea and continued to think about it for many years.

Lynn found his socialist convictions no match for Adam Smith, the reading of whom “was a road to Damascus experience.”

Although I had enjoyed the history course, I was fundamentally dissatisfied with it because it was impossible to find the patterns that can be found in the sciences. History has been described as just one damn thing after another, and this did not suit my temperament. So I stuck to my resolve to take psychology for the rest of my degree.

Lynn enthusiastically began the formal study of psychology during the Autumn term of 1951: “Here, I thought, I would be on the frontier of a new and challenging science.” His early studies did not live up to these hopes. The head of the department was Sir Frederick Bartlett, a renowned and much-honored psychologist whose books Lynn found vapid and many of whose results were later found not to be replicable: “He had an impressive presence derived from a high opinion of his own self-importance. I thought his real gift was in producing an unending flow of words that sounded impressive but had virtually no content.”

Just as I realized at school that people are divided into conformists and dissidents, and that I was by nature a dissident, I soon found it was the same in the Cambridge psychology department. As usual, the conformists were the majority. These all thought Bartlett was a genius, and in their books and papers acknowledged their indebtedness to his inspiring work. [They] struck me as like one of those religious sects headed by a charismatic leader which believe that they alone have the truth and are saved, while everyone else is in ignorance and are damned. The people they hated most were those of the London school, represented at this time by Sir Cyril Burt and Hans Eysenck. They never tired of deriding this group. My father told me that Sir Cyril Burt was nominated for fellowship of the Royal Society from time to time, but Bartlett invariably blackballed him.

After many false starts, Lynn would eventually realize it was precisely with this group that he belonged. Arthur Jensen has described it in part as follows:

The London School is not really a school or even a doctrine or a theory. Rather, it is a general view of psychology as a natural science and a branch of biology. Its central concern is variability in human behavior. It is Darwinian in that it views both individual and group differences in certain classes of behavior as products of the evolutionary process. The neural basis of behavioral capacities is subject to these evolutionary mechanisms the same as other physical characteristics. It is quantitative in that it emphasizes the objective measurement and taxonomy of behavior.

In October 1951 there was a general election in Britain which the Conservatives won. Although still a Labour supporter at this point, Lynn did not think they had achieved much in six years of governing:

I did not think there was any improvement in the mines, railways and other industries that had been nationalized. There was no sign that the workers had become more satisfied now that they were no longer working for the profits of bosses and shareholders, as we had hoped, and they continued to strike for higher wages.

I was also concerned about the Commonwealth Citizens Act of 1948 which gave all Commonwealth citizens the right to come and live in Britain. As there were about a billion of these, I doubted whether this was sensible. When [it] was questioned in the House of Commons by a conservative, a Labour minister assured him that very few would actually come. A week or two after the act was passed the first immigrants from Jamaica arrived on the Empire Windrush.

By the time Lynn began his second year of study in psychology, Sir Frederick Bartlett had retired and been replaced by Oliver Zangwill. This man was the son of Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill, famous in the United States for popularizing the idea that America is, or should be, a “melting pot” in which various immigrant strains are fused into a new race. The younger Zangwill was an uncritical Freudian, dismissive of factor analysis, the concept of general intelligence, and any psychologist whose work featured them. Lynn recalls: “He once told me that whenever he was asked to referee any of Eysenck’s papers that had been submitted to a journal for publication he always recommended rejection on the grounds that Eysenck’s work was not valid psychology.”

The King’s College psychology department favored environmental explanations of both mental disorders and intelligence. The department’s intelligence expert was Alice Heim, who taught students that the low IQ of blacks in the US was attributable to discrimination. At other times she maintained that the relative contributions of genetics and environment to intelligence could not be assessed since they could not be separated. Lynn recalls: “I explained to her that Ronald Fisher, who had been the professor of genetics at Cambridge, had shown in 1918 that the genetic and environmental contributions to a trait could be quantified by analysis of variance, but I failed to get her to understand this.”

The lecturing staff in the Cambridge department struck me a pretty mediocre lot. [The lecturer on perception] was seriously addicted to both alcohol and cigarettes. He turned up at his morning lectures unshaven and reeking of alcohol, often hung over, and chain smoked throughout his delivery. He once turned up wearing two neckties. On another occasion he put a chalk between his lips, mistaking it for a cigarette, and tried to light it, slowly raising a match with his shaking hand.

Lynn’s negative view of the King’s College lecturers was not unusual:

It was generally considered at Cambridge that most lecturers were at best mediocre and that it was more effective to read books and articles than to attend lectures. I followed this consensus and read widely, and I discovered other kinds of psychology that were much more to my taste. I was attracted by the ethological work of Konrad Lorenz and Nicholas Tinbergen, which was just beginning to become known in Britain in the early 1950s. But my chief interest became the work on intelligence done at University College, London, inspired and endowed by Francis Galton and developed by Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman, Cyril Burt and Raymond Cattell, and extended to personality by Cattell and Hans Eysenck. . . . Both Burt and Raymond Cattell were concerned that the intelligence of the population was declining and proposed ways of quantifying this. I thought this was much more interesting and important than the experimental psychology that was being studied at Cambridge.

Lynn occasionally patronized a pub opposite King’s College known as The Eagle. Here he ran into Francis Crick and James Watson just as they were working on their celebrated discovery of the double helix structure of DNA:

This made immediate news as one of the greatest discoveries of the century for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize some years later. Shortly afterwards when I met Jim Watson again I asked him whether he thought one needed a very high IQ to make a discovery of such importance. He replied that he thought not, and that he believed his own IQ was not especially high, because when he was a student at the University of Chicago he was by no means the outstanding student of his year and that he found that mathematics did not come easily to him. He said he thought an obsessive interest with a problem combined with a fairly high IQ were the essential ingredients for a significant scientific discovery. I think he was right about this except perhaps for discoveries in physics for which a very high IQ is probably needed. Francis Crick was quite a party animal and on a few occasions he invited me to the parties he and his wife Odile gave at their pretty little house in Portugal Place. On one of these occasions I talked with him and James Watson about the probable decline of intelligence resulting from dysgenic fertility. They both agreed it was a serious problem. I found Francis Crick charming and amusing, and I found Jim Watson a touch hypomanic and I was not too surprised when on later occasions he made indiscreet remarks.

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