 However, Urbach’s paper, which was written with Lakatos’s active collaboration and encouragement (F&amp;AM: 348–34), represents something of an “own goal” for the MSRP. Urbach argued that the environmentalist programme in IQ Studies, which tries to explain intergroup differences in tested intelligence as due to environmental causes, was a degenerating research programme. At least it was degenerating when compared to its hereditarian rival which puts these differences down to differences in hereditary endowments. The tables were dramatically turned just thirteen years later with the discovery of the Flynn effect (1987) which showed massive differences in intergroup IQs which simply could not be explained by hereditary differences. (The groups in question were genetically identical, the higher scoring groups being the children or the grandchildren of the lower scoring groups. See Flynn 1987 and 2009.) Thus the supposedly “degenerate” programme was propelled into the lead. Of course the MSRP allows for such dramatic reversals of fortune, but it is at least a bit embarrassing if a programme damned as degenerate by both the Master and one of his chief disciples is spectacularly vindicated just thirteen years later.