James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
Come to think of it, has anyone seen James Watson and "Uncle Al" in the same place at the same time?
Really, there's not much to say about this whole sorry business. Watson's comments are deplorable, and part of a long pattern of saying asinine things about race, gender, and genetics. He's more proof, as if any were needed, that dynamite money doesn't make you a good person.
I just couldn't help noting the similarity between Watson and everybody's favorite comment troll. Though, to be fair to "Uncle Al," he generally has the decency to put a little "crypto-" with the "racist," which Watson didn't bother to do.
(Whether "Uncle Al" is doing that intentionally or not is open to debate...)
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Watson said, "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically."
You say his comments are deplorable, so what is the reason to believe that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution have evolved identically?
Though reading your comment, I notice you don't actually say he's wrong. Maybe you think he's telling the truth, but shouldn't do so publically?
Because it may be true for allopatric speciation, but that is not true for Homo sapiens. As an example, sickle cell anemia occurs in Italian and other mediterranean populations? Did it evolve independent of African populations, or due to interbreeding of the two populations?
Mike
I'm not sure what's your point, mgr, but sickle cell anemia is definitely a possible independent mutation, especially since it's a recessive base substitution.
The sentence that Francis Crunk quoted sounds fine in and of itself, but I'm not sure of its applicability to policy. Statements of fact aren't necessarily relevant to statements of morality or policy; for all we know, the genetic effect is tiny, and the plasticity of intelligence is huge.
Plus, it sounds like Watson wasn't exactly being the most tactful person in the world. I mean, if someone is an idiot, but you have to work with them, you don't call them an idiot to their face. People do have feelings...
The Bell Curve bulges with 60+ years of intelligence testing in public education, university, industrial, and military venues. Is there any empirical evidence (Head Start; Black universities; overall university diversity admissions) in rebuttal to what is universally obvious in aggregate across the entire planet?
(Clifford Johnson is no more a rebuttal than is Dennis Prager.)
http://www.insideschools.org/fs/school_profile.php?id=1024
"Bilingual classes in Haitian-Creole." Note the Official plan to fix contemporary, ah, challenges. Tilden opened in 1930, designed to hold 3800 students. When Uncle Al attended in the late 1960s it was ~5000 kids in two overlapping shifts. Average Academic track SAT score was ~1200 mostly from Jews, then Italians and Irish. Residual minorities were largely assigned by standardized test scores into Commercial and General Ed. tracks where they could be trained.
Class sizes are now halved! Small class size assures our children's success. Tilden has one of the highest rates of assault, rape, and murder of all high schools in all five boroughs. Look up the "Acorn Academy for Social Justice" at the same site. Look what compassion dumped on us.
A racist pays for personal snit from his own wallet. A
Liberal steals your tax monies and takes a cut as performance bonus.
if someone is an idiot, but you have to work with them, you don't call them an idiot to their face Bets? Ignorance can be educated, stooopidity is forever. Support evolution - shoot back.
Watson's "argument" is a non sequitur. Whether they evolved identically or not is irrelevant to his assertion that the engineers and surveyors who constructed the pyramids are dumber than people who painted themselves blue before going into battle.
There was a time when it was thought that only Jews had the genetic skills to play basketball.
Separating genes from culture genes is tricky. The interesting data points one encounters at my college are the skilled and motivated foreign students who come from the very countries that were the original home of the slave ancestors of other students at our college.
Well, speak of the devil! One easily lost point: "races" are a sloppy division of people anyway. Africans, Europeans, Asians etc. differ greatly from each other. It's funny to think of some "intraracial" prejudices in history: how stupid and morally deficient the Irish were in the eyes of the English, Japanese/Chinese rivalry, etc. East Indians: with those features and the often dark skin, "what are they"? It's pointless. Context makes such a difference too: British and Jamaican blacks do better than their American counterparts, and when I saw advanced students in physics classes at a local HBCU, they were usually the African exchange students not the locals.
BTW Al, Republicans are "stealing" more money now than Democrats ever did, and not even spending it mostly on the public good - much wasted in contracts to screw up in Iraq, etc.
"Intelligence" is also a sloppy and ill-defined concept. It's hilarious that people will claim scientific status for differences in "intelligence" levels between different "races" without clearly defining either term, and will then go on to accuse their opponents of wishful thinking and a refusal to acknowledge facts.
I just had the misfortune to skim through a thread on this topic on another blog, Pharyngula. I'd never been there before, so I don't know if this is typical, but the threads were populated by dimwits who believe themselves to be smart and kept asserting that intelligence WAS TOO racial or that Watson hadn't really said what he actually did say or other such inanities. Feh. There were a few people arguing against this, but not enough.
What if this low opinion was based on a bad personal experience? Dr. Watson sounds daft yet somehow I cannot whip up my outrage at this 79 old guy sounding off racist remarks about Africans.
I can admire the guts of a bigot who is making himself unpopular in this age of political correctness. Its the hollier-than-thou hypocrites, the newspeak wordsmiths and academia censors that drive me up the wall.
James Watson's statement can be reduced to three main hypotheses:
1) That sub-Saharan African nations have significantly lower average IQs than European nations.
2) That national differences in IQ have a significant causal relationship with differences in economic development.
3) That these differences have a substantial genetic component.
In fact, a popular and expanding research literature in peer-reviewed biology, psychology, and economics journals support all three conclusions. For example:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d15x2810855wx085/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2006.11.002
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2006.02.003
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(02)00137-X
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2005.09.006
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2006.05.005
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpsoc/bjhp/2006/00000011/00000004…
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6435.00191
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2007.0461
Watson is by no means an outlier among scientists and scholars in his belief that people of African descent average lower native intelligence.
A 1987 scientific poll published in the American Psychologist of over 1200 relevant scholars (sociologists, psychologists, and geneticists) found that 46% - a plurality of those polled - believed the evidence pointed to genetics playing a role in observed racial intelligence differences, compared to only 15% who thought genetics did not play a role.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyderman_and_Rothman_%28study%29
And this poll was conducted before the 1990s which introduced novel cross-cultural, anatomical, and transracial adoption data. A 20 year replication of this poll is slated or sometime in the next year and will likely skew even further to the genetic position.
Watson, one of the most esteemed living biologists, was taking his statements from the science journals, not just parroting empty, discredited prejudices. His treatment has been unfair and reactionary.
I can't think of a better term for the curious position of the Science Museum in London that Watson's statements are "beyond the point ofacceptable debate"
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3070583.ece
Is this primitive dogmatism truly representative of the spirit of the scientific community?
JJC
There are many Web sites tracking the ethnicities of Nobel Laureates. What fraction of Nobel Laureates are of Jewish descent? Scale that large fraction by the negligibly small fraction of world population that is Jewish. Even larger numbers would have obtained absent anti-Semitism.
Intelligence does exist, it can be measured, it does make a difference. Intelligence can be selected and bred as easily as Hapsburg lips, Bourbon noses, and English House of Windsor ears. Evolution is a bitch - unless you are one of the winners. Losers cry "diversity!" and demand compensation. Abondon them to their own unaided hands.