Tatu Vanhanen

Tatu Vanhanen (17 April 1929 – 22 August 2015) was a controversial Finnish political scientist and sociologist. He was a professor of political science at the University of Tampere in Tampere, Finland. Vanhanen was a coauthor with Richard Lynn of IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002) and IQ and Global Inequality (2006), and author of Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism (1999).

In these pseudoscientific publications, the authors argue that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). The deeply flawed 2006 follow-up study claimed to show 'Africans' have an average IQ of 69, compared to a mean of 100 for "Western Europeans".^[1][2]

The books have drawn widespread criticism from other academics. Critiques have included questioning of the methodology used, the incompleteness of the data, and the conclusions drawn from the analysis.^[3][4]