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Lynn’s work is intriguing but also highly controversial, as I’m sure you know.
He was a self-avowed racialist (when the concept of biological races among Homo sapiens is nonsensical to begin with), and the editor-in-chief of a white supremacist journal (Mankind Quarterly). Of course, his scholarly work should be assessed on its own merits, but it’s hard to ignore that he came with a pretty strong agenda.
The challenges with cross-border IQ testing are cultural and methodological. It’s very hard to normalize for environmental factors, and if you don’t, what you really end up measuring are differences in education, nutrition, health, cultural values, etc.
Lynn was also a strong proponent of the dysgenic effect (the Idiocracy movie premise that dumb people breed more, and that intelligence is hereditary, and thus populations become dumber over time). Yet this also flies in the face of the observed Flynn effect (a longitudinal increase in average IQ).
Deep rabbit hole this is 1 reply
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