Professor predicts genetic decline and fall of man

A PROFESSOR has provoked outrage with a book claiming society is being threatened by a degenerate underclass which is breeding faster than the most intelligent.

Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, argues that improvements in healthcare and an increasingly immoral society are leading to less intelligent people having more children at an earlier age.

In his book, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration of Modern Populations, to be published next week, he says this is contributing to a fall in overall intelligence and a decline in the quality of civilised life. He argues that it will be necessary to discourage certain people from having children.

"Obviously, it is a very serious matter that our genetic quality is deteriorating. Such decline is really affecting the quality of our civilisation, which depends on the more intelligent members of society. Obviously some measures need to be taken," Lynn said.

His thesis, which echoes the controversial book, The Bell Curve, co-authored by Charles Murray, the American academic, will re-open the debate about whether there is any link between genes, social class and intelligence. Geneticists argue the link has never been proved and point out that overall IQ has risen in the past 50 years.

Lynn, who is no stranger to controversy, has the support of a number of psychology academics including Hans Eysenck of London University, who has also achieved notoriety for his views on genes, social class and IQ. Lynn says that since the middle of the last century, human evolution has been "retrogressive" with improvements in medicine and living conditions preventing natural selection against the weaker, less intelligent members of the population.

"The survival of the fittest keeps the population genetically sound by weeding out genetically defective individuals, rather like a gardener removing weeds," he said. "It was as if the gardener had quit and the garden was going to seed."

High child mortality before the advent of modern medicine and the welfare state ensured that more intelligent people produced relatively high numbers of children compared with the less intelligent, he said.

"In previous centuries, when there was high child mortality, the children who died would have tended to be the less intelligent. This was partly because the unintelligent were not so good at looking after themselves," Lynn said.

He argues that people of weak "moral character" are having more children than those with strong morals, self-discipline, and a willingness to work and abide by the law. Men with criminal records, he said, have 70% more children than those who have not been involved in crime.

Such views, however, are challenged by Professor Walter Bodmer, a leading expert on human genetics with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at Oxford University.

"The relationship between intelligence, however measured, and fertility has been much commented on and never substantiated. I am continually puzzled by the emphasis on the moral decline of our society. Were the Victorians, who hanged young people for stealing a handkerchief, morally more upstanding than we are now?" Bodmer said.

Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London and an award-winning author, said Lynn's book misunderstood modern ideas of genetics. A flaw in his argument of genetic deterioration in intelligence, Jones said, was the widely accepted fact that intelligence as measured by IQ tests has actually increased over the past 50 years.

"His problem is that his facts are wrong," said Jones. "This could have been written in 1910, because he misses out huge areas of modern genetics."