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.

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 which 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 predisposed to criminality or low intelligence. Mainstream geneticists consider it a pseudoscience 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 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”.

Prof Rebecca Sear, president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association and a psychologist at Brunel University, who is among those who demanded the retraction of Lynn’s work in June, said the review was “very long overdue”.

She added: “It’s an extremely positive development that suggests a major publishing house is taking the issue very seriously.”

When a publisher retracts a paper, it usually remains online but with various warnings. At Elsevier, the online article can be preceded by a screen containing the retraction note and the pdf version is watermarked with the word “retracted”. Sear is arguing for retraction because despite Lynn’s database being “ludicrously bad science” it has “nevertheless become thoroughly embedded in the academic literature”.

‘National IQ’ dataset background

Lynn, who was one of the most significant figures in the scientific racism movement, made no secret of his beliefs. In an interview with a far-right magazine, he suggested the US should break up into racially segregated nations so that “white civilisation would survive”.

|He taught psychology at the University of Exeter and the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, and began his “national IQ” work in 1967 after happening upon a study suggesting the IQ of Irish children was 90, compared with 100 in Britain. Lynn decided “low IQ was likely a significant cause of the Irish economic backwardness” and advocated a set of eugenic policies designed to raise the Irish IQ.

His national IQ research was published as a ranked list in 2002 and was later refined and elaborated on, including in a 2010 paper in Intelligence.

Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear, Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.

The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.

Prof Jelte Wicherts, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has published several critiques of Lynn’s methodology and concluded that Lynn’s 2010 paper appeared to have systematically excluded higher IQ scores in calculations of IQ in African countries.

“The main inclusion criteria he had been using appeared to be the IQ itself, not objective measures like whether it was a normal, healthy sample,” said Wicherts. “That’s quite a lethal indicator of bias.”

Wicherts says there is evidence for genuine differences in IQ scores across nations, due to environmental factors such as nutrition and access to education. By contrast, Lynn argued innate differences in IQ explain differences in wealth and development between nations. However, Wicherts said, IQ should not be regarded as “fixed” or “innate”.

“I was motivated to counter this narrative of Lynn’s because I don’t believe it’s true,” said Wicherts. He said he wanted Elsevier, at the very least, to issue corrections to Lynn’s work or add an expression of editorial concern.

Widespread influence

In 2024, scientists including Sear called on journals to retract Lynn’s papers, warning that his database was continuing to be cited despite having been discredited.

The citations are found in endorsements and critiques of Lynn, but also in papers not directly related to intelligence. Scientists who cite Lynn’s work in passing, or use his database to interpret newly generated data, can be unaware of the controversy surrounding his work when writing in reputable journals on matters such as global health and economic development.

Lynn’s influence extends beyond academia. A writer for the American Spectator asserted last year that the IQ of Palestinians was in the mid-80s – a claim advanced by Lynn in Intelligence in 2014 – and suggested they relied upon Israel for electricity and water because they were “so indolent and primitive”.

Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist at Macalester College in Minnesota, said: “I see the main purpose of retraction [to be] scrubbing this from citable research by mainstream academics. When mainstream academics cite Lynn’s work it launders and legitimises his work.”

However, others argue that calls for retraction risk playing into claims of censorship. “Retraction is not generally the best way to correct flawed science,” said Ivan Oransky, who co-founded the Retraction Watch website and campaigns to improve research integrity. “This notion of weaponising retractions or thinking it’s somehow going to solve the underlying problem is naive.”

An Elsevier spokesperson said: “We can confirm that editorial teams of the relevant journals are already actively investigating Lynn’s published research, as well as the sources cited for his work including national IQ datasets.”

“As a publisher, we offer guidance and support to editorial teams while following the principles of editorial independence.”