James Watson: Please bend over while I kick your freakin ass.
Published by Greg October 17th, 2007 in Science Essays, Genetics, CommentaryIt is now time to kick James Watson’s ass.
The man is a terrible embarrassment to us all. (“Us” being scientists and rational types.) It is said by the press that Watson “makes his colleagues cringe when he goes off script” or “is known for making controversial remarks” and so on. Fine. But these are not apt descriptors for James Watson’s most recent remarks or, for that matter, many of his earlier remarks. No, not at all. These descriptors make Watson sound like a somewhat crazy free thinking guy who doesn’t care if he pisses off a few people with what he says. But that is not what he is at all.
No. James Watson is, simply put, a moron. I want to take a moment to explain why I think that.
Here is the story, as reported in The Independent:
One of the world’s most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that “equal powers of reason” were shared across racial groups was a delusion.
James Watson, … 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.
… Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
… Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: “To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.”In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. …. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that ” stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great.”
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks.
Early scientists mucking around with large messy things like kinetic energyOK, first, the science. There has been a lot of systematic testing of people divided into “racial groups” (including “Asian,” “African,” “Hispanic,” and “White” and so on). In the US it is found that “African” or “Black” categories test, in terms of IQ, a consistent 20 points, more or less, below, “Whites” as a group. On further examination, it is found that socioeconomic status (SES) and home environment predict IQ as well. When you analyze the data, you find that the latter — SES and Home Environment — are the main predictors of IQ across a given contemporary population, not skin color. It happens that skin color and SES and skin color and Home Environment, in the US and over the last few decades, are intertwined realities. The cause of the state of the SES and Home Environment variables is not IQ … it is cultural variation and, predominantly, racism. The IQ difference we see is the end product.
It is also the case that IQ varies across time in a way that is about as astounding as variation across time in stature in some populations … a group of American “Whites” brought forward in a time machine from the 1920s would test perhaps 20 points lower than a matched comparative set of “Whites” living in the first decade of the 21st century. That is not a genetic change … it is not the case that all the stupid people died any more than it is the case that all of the short people dying off, causing the secular increase in stature over the same time period (see “Tall Gene”). Rather, it is some other kind of change that has not been satisfactorily explained, but probably relates to factors like Home Environment and the vagaries of this kind of testing.
Mr. Science, with his exploding chemistry set, was a bit of an atavism. So, there is a problem. It is a social problem, an economic problem, and a problem linked in many different, insidious, ways to racism.
I assert, here and now, that Dr. Watson’s remarks indicate that he is of substandard intelligence. I say this because he must know better … he is a scientist who has worked in ancillary areas, and there is simply no way that he is not familiar with the relevant scientific literature. Therefore, he must be stupid. At least, that is what the empirical evidence strongly suggests at this point.
It is time to stop fooling ourselves about James Watson. Anyone who has keep up with his remarks will tell you this.
It may seem odd that the guy who, with others, “discovered DNA” could be a moron, but a brief analysis suggests that this is in fact quite possible. There are at least three factors that could explain James Watson’s obvious dullness, in spite of his professed brilliance: The Nature of the Academic Free Market; the Swinging Dead Cat Phenomenon; and the Benefits of Teamwork.
Once science discovered how to reveal the mysteries of tiny but complex things, the world changed and it became fairly easy for anyone with a little training and some cool gear to discover the hidden mysteries of nature. The Nature of the Academic Free Market
Watson’s work was done in the post-war era of the mid to late 1950s and the early 1960s. Although we all know that the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 was an event that galvanized the United States into a major effort to build up academic capacity (see this for more commentary), it is also true that there was a general building of universities and scientific and technological capacities as part of a more general post WW II phenomenon. In those days, therefore, there was a shortage of trained university academics (professors, researchers) and an increasing demand for individuals to fill these positions. Those were the days when you could get a job running a physics department with a masters degree in auto mechanics, get tenure, and relax for the rest of your life. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. As we speak, myriad mediocre members of the academy from this era of high demand and undersupply have recently, are just now, or are about to retire. These gentlemen (and they were all gentlemen, or at least, men) were hired some time between about 1955 and 1967, often rising to important positions, but really, not doing much in the way of actually contributing to science. It is possible that James Watson was one of these individuals who happened to get lucky.
The scientific literature of the mid 1950s through the 1960s is full of information about tiny, complex things like DNA. Swinging a Dead Cat
The other thing that was going on during this period, in science, was a major shift in instrumentation and technology. To see this in a somewhat humorous and entertaining way, go find yourself a stack of science magazines … Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc., from Pre- World War II, and get another stack of similar magazines from the mid 1960s. Compare the contents of the two … just look at the pictures, the ads, the illustrations. You will quickly and without needing a degree in the History of Science perceive a major shift in topics of interest, the machinery that was being sold or talked about, and the kinds of phenomena that scientists were addressing. Large, bulky machines designed to move things, burn things, or that produced or detected energy of various types gave way to somewhat more graceful and delicate machines that were designed to see the invisible … to peer inside cells, or to divine the micro crystaline structure of dehydrated organic compounds, etc.
In any given subfield, this transition was pretty sudden. One day you’re wondering what those dots floating around in a cell are, the next day you are collecting data that allow you to understand the structure of proteins. Wow. This transition is what allowed any moron with a grant to look at pretty much anything and discover something never before imagined.
Watson and his colleagues could not have missed the structure of DNA if they were trying to avoid it. They were living in times when you could not swing a dead cat without discovering a fundemental property of nature.
A model of a tiny, invisible to the human eye, complex feature of a cell. Teamwork
Especially if you are working with others, or even better, Rosilind Franklin did all the work for you. OK, I admit, I am nothing like an expert on the whole Rosilind Franklin affair. Watson seems to have only bad things to say about her. It does appear to be the case that some of her work was important to Watson and Crick but was not properly cited. It also appears to be the case that Watson remains to this day a misogynist. I don’t know what to conclude from this, but it does not smell right to me. In any event, just as it is possible for Watson to have had a reasonably successful career and not been very good, and for Watson to have not been able to avoid the discovery of the structure of DNA, it is also possible that he was part of a team on which anyone could have played his role. There may be nothing special, nothing “genius,” about him. Just circumstance and linkage to a particularly important event.
…
It is possible that I’m wrong about this, and that James Watson really is, or was, some kind of genius, and without this genius, the discoveries reported by Watson and Crick would have needed to wait another decade. But, if that is true, than the prognosis is worse. If Watson is not a moron, given the science surrounding the biology of race, which I summarize very briefly above, he must be a very, very deeply commited ass.
So its like a multiple choice question:
James Watson is
- a) an ass
- b) a moron
- c) all of the above
- d) none of the above
‘c’ and ‘d’ cannot be correct answers. Its ‘a’ or ‘b.’ You pick.
Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for bringing this matter to my attention.
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I don’t see why he can’t be both a moron and an ass, or possibly a Schockley, a person who is okay in one sector but a moron and ass outside that narrow field.
Have you read E.O. Wilson’s Naturalist? I’d say the picture he paints of Watson in that book is perfectly consistent with this stuff.
Dr. Watson is not the first Nobel Prize winner to pontificate on the subject of racial differences in intelligence. Case in point, one William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner in physics and professor at Stanford, Un. I had the misfortune of reading a number of articles by Prof. Shockley on this subject and was amazed at the total incompetence of such a distinguished scientist.
“SES) and home environment predict IQ as well. When you analyze the data, you find that the latter — SES and Home Environment — are the main predictors of IQ across a given contemporary population, not skin color. It happens that skin color and SES and skin color and Home Environment, in the US and over the last few decades, are intertwined realities.”
Since IQ is heritable, there’s nothing suprising about such correlations.
“The cause of the state of the SES and Home Environment variables is not IQ”
And you know this how?
“it is cultural variation and, predominantly, racism. The IQ difference we see is the end product.”
And you know this how? You’re objections seem to be based on politics, not science.
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.” If he’s wrong, then what is the reason we should believe the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution have evolved identically? Because such an outcome is incredibly improbable.
Thanks, Greg, but if to be honest, you’re far too kind to Watson to label him a moron.
There have been many brilliant people who have been tremendously wrong about an enormous number of subjects. The reason, in my opinion, is that they are blinded by their emotions. Almost by definition, rational thinking is the ability to overcome our human tendency to relate to events in an emotional way.
I guess what I am saying is that he is guilty of willful stupidity. Believing something because he wants to. I’m not sure if that makes him a moron.
Intelligence research by Nisbett, Grigorenko, Phillips and others indicates that nutrition, educational opportunities and family environment factors account for most of the differences between American black and white children. The difference in IQ between the groups has also decreased in the past three decades, which would indicate a non-genetic change.
Also, as the textbook I currently use for teaching intelligence points out, in the early 20th century the average Italian American was considered significantly below average on IQ tests. Today? Italian Americans score above average. Less than a century to move from one side to the other of the bell curve…
That’s Mr. Wizard, not Mr. Science, right?
Your comment about the difference in IQ scores over time is called the Flynn Effect. Flynn himself has published a plausible explanation for why we score higher today in the latest Scientific American Mind. It is worth reading.
Linus Pauling and researchers in England (including Franklin) were no more than months to a year behind Watson and Crick. Somebody else would have come up with the structure quickly if Watson and Crick had not done so.
And Watson’s latest? What an embarrassment to us all.
I saw Watson speak once… something about his talk made him seem not too bright. Of course, I feel a bit odd bashing on a Nobel Laureate, but really, the proper circumstances can get you pretty far. When I heard him talk, I left with the impression that Watson is to science as Bush is to politics… but that’s perhaps a bit too harsh.
Well, after this I don’t think I’ll ever forget that the Watson strand is the antisense strand.
Watson was a brilliant scientist whose discoveries revolutionized biology, but he had the misfortune of growing up in a time when racism was still politically correct and absorbing the prejudices of the day. These remarks are tragic, but understandable considering the period he was born into. Nonetheless, I have lost a lot of respect for the man and I think this should teach us that even brilliant scientists are not infallible.
I too fail to see why “(c) all of the above” isn’t an acceptable (and likely) answer. I suspect that “arrogant” should be part of the answer too (and probably “racist”).
I’d submit that all three of the factors you cite explaining how a moron could make such a monumental discovery must have played at least some role. I’m particularly intrigued by the “Teamwork” aspect:
Has Watson done anything noteworthy on his own? Or has he just coasted on his fame from 1953?
Greg Laden: “it is cultural variation and, predominantly, racism. The IQ difference we see is the end product.”
Francis Crunk: “And you know this how? You’re objections seem to be based on politics, not science.”
I’d say that’s reading way too much into Laden.
That said, I wouldn’t mind a source for the claims, myself. I remember vaguely that the book The Bell Curve offered counterarguments to those claims, and remember even more vaguely that counter-counterarguments were offered, but I can’t quite remember where The Bell Curve was taken apart. It would be nice to have a reference on the matter.
Just a couple of quick notes in response to Mr. F. Crunk:
As I indicated as well as others making comments, and as the research shows, IQ does not show any strong evidence of having a genetic component. It is generally thought that the reasonably high “heritability” coefficients you get with IQ data are because of the early influence of H.E. and S.E.S. (most H.E., I would think).
Mr. Crunk is mired in the presumption that IQ is genetic, and thus has his causal arrow pointed firmly in a particular direction, which turns out to be the wrong direction.
Yes, Blake, I’m sure you’re right. But you know, I never did see Mr. Science and Mr. Wizard in the same place at the same time….
First of all, you can’t even spell the title of your piece.
Secondly, you can’t even spell the link to “Richard Dawkins Foundation”, left column.
Thirdly, do you have a Nobel prize to buttress your opinion?
Fourthly, intelligence, like everything, is heritable; it is also influenced by the environment. That, I believe, is Dr. Watson’s basic statement, as evidenced by your post.
How about a spelling contest, instead?
It is funny that we all write about intelligence as if it were some real thing, some known quality, when the truth is that, except in conversation, it does not seem that useful concept at all.
To suggest that this poorly described and understood thing is mainly genetic is a joke!
These remarks are tragic, but understandable considering the period he was born into.
No, I think you are wrong about that second part. These remarks would have been understandable during the period he was born into, perhaps. But the world has moved on. People have grown up. Anyone today who does not look back at that period of our history with disappointment or disgust is, well, incomprehensible to me. If it has not yet occurred to him that racism is wrong, then he is willfully ignoring several decades of our entire societies progress. Today he should know better.
Kevin: I tend to agree. Richard Lewonton is not THAT much younger than Watson!
Philos, I think Dr. Watson’s statement was “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really” (”their” meaning “of blacks”)
Philos said: “intelligence, like everything, is heritable”
Hmm. My knowledge of English is heritable, eh? Funny that my son didn’t come out with a tattoo just like mine . . . given that everything is heritable. Glad to know that his genes guarantee his ability to windsurf, his knowledge of philosophy, the ability to cook a mean gumbo . . .
C’mon Philos, try to live up to your handle.
Philos said: “do you have a Nobel prize to buttress your opinion?”
a. Greg gave pretty plausible reasons for thinking that perhaps we shouldn’t be too impressed by his Nobel prize. Your suggestion is the fallacy of an argument from authority, unless we have reason to believe that Watson’s Nobel is relevant to his current claim. I don’t see that it is, but I’m open to correction.
b. I can cite examples of Nobel prize winners who’ve clearly gone off the deep end even in their area of expertise. The nice thing about science is that all your claims require support, regardless of who you are.
I think old, foolish and cranky pretty much covers it. I’ve seen folk in their dotage wander into some pretty strange corners of thought. Watson has been the center of scientific attention and accolades for so long, I didn’t notice when he slipped over the edge. It’s sad, but inevitable for some people.
I hope his reputation isn’t totally trashed by this detour into racial politics, but he needs to do some penance.
I’m appalled, Greg. If you wanted to show that Watson’s comment was wrong, you could have done it without attacking his character or intelligence at every point along the way (and why would you have to? did anyone think Jim Watson was a pillar of tact to begin with?). Since you decided to add petty name-calling into the equation, it became impossible for neutral, undecided parties to take your counterarguments seriously, no matter how correct you might have been. What a disservice you’ve done to those who actually want to change minds like Watson’s and others rather than belittle them. You’ve made intelligent conversation impossible; you’re the one who peed in the pool.
Watson should know better than thoughtlessly to say such controversial things in public. You should be truly ashamed for turning a teachable moment into a barrage of childish insults.
Last year I had a psych 1001 here at the U. For our lecture on intelligence Thomas Bouchard came in and talked about how his twin studies showed that 90% of the variance in IQ was due to genetics. I haven’t really looked into any of the data any further. Wouldn’t these studies counter the claim that intelligence is mainly affected by socioeconomic status and home environment?
A good starting point for the science of race/ethnicity/ancestry is “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” back in the 20 Dec. 2002 issue of Science, by Noah Rosenberg et al.
Here are some highlights:
• Genetic differences between, not within, major population groups account for 3-5% of overall variation. However, the patterns within between-population variation are strong enough that ancestry can be inferred from genetic markers without information about sampling location.
• Genetic diversity of populations decreases with the distance they’ve historically traveled from humanity’s birthplace in Africa, as expected from the founder effect.
• Genetic clustering often, but not always, concurs with predefined ethnic/geographic or linguistic categories.
I suppose we should call Newton a moron as well, eh? It’s clear from history that Isaac Newton was once of the most difficult personalities ever. This does not take away from his genius. And genius is finding the simple connections (well, they look simple now, don’t they?). Can you say ‘armchair general” or “Monday morning quarterback”?
Relativity is also “simple”. In retrospect, you can’t help but trip over that one as well. But it took a genus - Einstein - to see it.
Watson should simply apologize for his totally insensitive and unfounded remark and we should all move on. However, calling him a moron is as inappropriate as his comment was.
Re Philos
Brian Josephson, a professor of physics at Cambridge Un. has a Nobel prize in physics. Prof. Josephson is convinced that cold fusion, PK and ESP are real phenomena. Just a prime example of a Nobel Prize winner being a damn fool.
You are right about Rosalind Franklin.
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-3/p42.html
He virtually stole her work by not giving her credit when he won the Nobel prize. He should offer an unconditional posthumous apology. He treated her shamefully.
I am totally amazed that Greg didn’t mention Francis Crick’s contribution to the structure of DNA. His realization that the two chains have to run in opposite directions was crucial, as was Rosalind Franklin’s discovery that DNA came in two forms. (Earlier xray work had mixed the two forms, leading to indecipherable results.)
It’s an exaggeration to say Watson stole Franklin’s work. He got a vital clue to the structure from her unpublished work, but never tried to claim her ideas as his own. In fact, Watson and Crick delayed publication in Nature so that both Franklin and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, could publish their results at the same time. Wilkins later shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. Unfortunately, it was awarded to them after Franklin’s early death.
Franklin herself did not claim that W&C stole her ideas. She eventually became a such a close friend of Crick and his wife that they nursed her in their home for several weeks during her final illness.
It’s obvious to me that Watson couldn’t have come up with the structure of DNA without Francis Crick, who had a much more distinguished career overall than Watson. And I suspect Watson’s comments on race and intelligence were based on reading The Bell Curve (which he has defended in print) and not much else on the subject. So, if not moron, at least popping off his mouth on a subject on which he hasn’t thought deeply seems to characterize him.
But please– Watson didn’t steal the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin. She wasn’t a patsy; she was a serious and respected scientist. Making her out to be some sort of victim does her no justice at all.
Of course, I feel a bit odd bashing on a Nobel Laureate….
Neel, go talk with Kary Mullis for twenty minutes and I guarantee that it will never feel odd again.
I am reminded by IQ tests of the studies, which crop up every few years, concerning the size of penises among different groups of people. It seems that the only significant difference is always a slight advantage(?) found in the home region of the scientists doing the study.
“On further examination, it is found that socioeconomic status (SES) and home environment predict IQ as well. When you analyze the data, you find that the latter — SES and Home Environment — are the main predictors of IQ across a given contemporary population, not skin color. It happens that skin color and SES and skin color and Home Environment, in the US and over the last few decades, are intertwined realities. The cause of the state of the SES and Home Environment variables is not IQ … it is cultural variation and, predominantly, racism. The IQ difference we see is the end product.”
I understand that the point I am about to bring up is rather ridiculous and awful, but to play Devil’s Advocate here, given the limited data, could one not also conclude that “lesser” races were genetically predisposed to be less intelligent, and that this lower intelligence led to lower SES? Especially in view of twin studies it would be interesting to see data that fixes the problems of discerning causation.
“As I indicated as well as others making comments, and as the research shows, IQ does not show any strong evidence of having a genetic component. It is generally thought that the reasonably high “heritability” coefficients you get with IQ data are because of the early influence of H.E. and S.E.S. (most H.E., I would think). ”
What research? Have the numerous twin studies, including recent ones, been debunked? By whom? Or are all those scientists racist, sexist morons too, and therefore should be ignored?
See:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=2218526&query_hl=3&itool=pubmed_docsum
See also
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/si.....d_RVDocSum
Philos: you put a comma in your comment : “How about a spelling contest, instead?”
and, that, comma, was super, fluous, un, necessary, and not required part, icularly when challenge, ing someone, to a spell, ing contest..
Jeff: the famous U of MN Twins Studies began with Nazi ’s in Germany, on Jewish children who were tortured to gain various information. The Nazi’s were bent on proving out a master race theory, partly based in intellectual capacity, etc.
I will make longer comments at my own blog but for now let me say that I found the comments here at Pharyngula as bad or worse than Jim Watson’s.
a few, simple facts .. relevant to EITHER side:
1. The term “Black,” as used in the US has relatively little to do with genetics. Arguing that African Americans are genetically different from any other members of the human species as silly because African Americans are NOT .. as suggested in the cite from Watson, a genetically isolated population. Shortly after being imported to the Americas, Africans were intentionally cross bred with Indigenous Americans .. in other words many of our fellow “black” Americans have a large “Asian” genome! Last time I looked, Asians did awfully well on IQ tests. Over time, there was enough good spirited hanky panky that the dusky skinned gal next to you on the bus is much more likely to be descended from Tom Jefferson than she is from Shaka Zulu.
Actually things would not be much better if JDW had referred only to “real Africans.” Africa is a very complex place. Ethiopians are linguistically, and I would bet genetically, more closely related to Semites .. Jews and Arabs included, then they are to Nigerians or Zulu people.
The American Kennel club would never except the interbred folks of Africa being one “brred” much less a “race.” … What a mess!
OK, so Jim is iggorant BUT, so are the folks here who talk about IQ. IQ is NOT an absolute value any more than decibels. The IQ is defined as a z-score .. 10 points = 1 standard deviation in the population being studied. It makes no sense to say the humans are now “20″ points smarter than we were a generation ago.
Bottom line, ad hominem attacks on Jim Watson are irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of human intelligence. The only sensible argument that the human brain is NOT genetically variable implies that human intelligence, perhaps ;ike Eve’s apple, was infused onto our ancestors by some magical being. In other is this blog becoming part of the the intelligent design agenda?
“What research? Have the numerous twin studies, including recent ones, been debunked? By whom?”
Cosmo Shalizi has a useful discussion:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Watson deserves to be attacked, mercilessly. He is making an argument that is receiving attention solely due to his position as a scientific authority (otherwise his statements would be ignored as the statements of most other racist old men are), yet it is an argument entirely without scientific merit.
The very concepts of ‘race’ and ‘intelligence’ are all but impossible to define in a universal way. Even if they weren’t, both would be very difficult to measure in an unbiased way. Studies have shown that intelligence is heritable, yes, but not that there is any reason to believe that such variation occurs at any significant level across (ill-defined) ‘races.’
Those who imply that “it’s plausible that such differences occur across races” tend, like Watson, to make the assumption that western europeans would be the ’superior’ race… but given that you’re arguing from ‘plausibility’ and with zero evidence there is NO reason to believe that that is actually true.
When a prominent scientist uses his position to advance theories that don’t even meet the barest minimum standards for being scientific, and yes, especially when those theories are in support of continuing a long history of discrimination and oppression, it is the duty of other scientists to give them an unrestrained smackdown. If he wants to say these things, fine; but he should do so with the same authority as other racists cranks - that is, none save their own vitriol.
Unfortunately, I do think he knows science from a hole in the ground, so I’m more inclined to go with ‘ass’ than with ‘moron,’ which frankly is the less generous of the two assessments.
A lot of “talk” stimulated by Dr. Watson, or is it racism that is the stimulation?
What is intelligence? What do is measured and what is tested?
What is “black”? what does it mean in the context of populations?
just how is intelligence and race relevant to anything?
is it more relevant than athletic ability or the same?
Seems to me that there have been a wide variation in the population of human beings for a very very long time so there must be many more important characteristics that are beneficial to development and survival than just intelligence and race. We can’t even agree what they mean .
All sounds like Sunday Supplement talk to me there is nothing there.
Here is an old man who once was an important scientist and now no longer works is getting interviewed by an important reporter what’s the odds he had felt he had to show off a bit and does not really care what people think of him
Thank you, Greg. So nicely done. And I say “all of the above.”
For anyone interested in exploring the Rosalind Franklin business, I recommend the Maddox biography.
hoary puccoon essentially gets Watson right and the details of the discovery. One thing to add is that Watson stopped having his name on scientific papers from his lab or group in the early sixties, although he fostered a large group of scientists at Harvard. Who knows how involved he was with their work, but they were an exceptional group with diverse interests. He also built the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory into a modern center of excellent science. Watson is a shmuck and really always has been.
I’m surprised no one has linked to Cosma Shalizi’s excellent essay debunking the more simple-minded views on the heritability of IQ, at http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
It should be obvious to any one who knows my blog that I have a certain style, and that involves the occasional use of the tirade. But I’m never sarcasic. Ever.
Which, of course, is a joke. A sarcastic joke. But I digress….
Anyway, those offended by nastiness towards Watson can kiss my ass for this reason: Watson’s remarks were truly offensive. I have lived in, worked in, and have many friends in Africa, so perhaps I took this more personally than most people reading this. But that does not mean that I took it too personally. He called my sisters and brothers subhuman. He can kiss my ass too. If you want me to remain calm under these circumstances than you have missed the seriousness of the discussion.
The present “debate” is not, by the way, a serious academic discussion. It is a small number of yahoos with a social and political agenda. You can tell which ones are the yahoos because they say things like “Greg, your efforts to affront racism are obviously political.” You can kiss my ass too.
And no, they (Watson’s remarks) were not accidental or off-the-cuff. This has been going on for some time and is part of a wider phenomenon, parts of which we see here on this site as well as at Pharyngula …
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/i_would_love_to_see_a_debate_b.php
… crawling out of the woodwork as we speak.
But yes, this argument can be made with more information and more dispassionately. I’ve expanded in this direction here:
http://gregladen.com/wordpress/?p=1536
I’d love to spend a few hours giving you all a reading list and a couple of heavily cited essays but time simply does not allow me to go in that direction at this point. I’m writing a book on this topic, and it should be done … let’s see … some time later this century. I’ll let you know!!!
I also want to say that I DO very much appreciate all the comments and the discussion.
Thanks. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for.
Every discussion of Watson’s Nobel prize and/or his work on the double helix should contain _some_ mention of the fact that he basically stole the work of Rosalind Franklin. Even Watson’s own account of the “discovery” admits this.
It is always true that people doing work in science are standing on the shoulders of giants. That’s a bit more true with Watson.
Greg is correct to kick Watson’s ass on this issue. Philos’s bithering notwithstanding, “intelligence” is neither a neatly inherited trait nor is it neatly captured by a 1-variable function. That Watson could be a 79-year old scientist and never have noticed this while working in the field of biology makes me wonder about his seriousness when it comes to any scientific subject. At this point, it should be clear that anybody who tries to link complex human behavior with something as simple as skin color is, scientifically speaking, using a horribly outdated theory.
And that is the kind way to put it. I tend to go with (c) above. I see no reason to think a person can be both stupid and an ass.
On more than one occasion in my biology education I heard that Jim Watson was most of all a lucky fellow who was in the right place at the right time. I heard from people who were grad students while Watson was an active member of Harvard’s bio dept that he was generally seen as not a good scientist and not very nice.
Epistaxis:
I think you missed the point. Watson is not being called a moron because he said something “controversial and insensitive”. He is being called a moron because he said things which are downright */stupid/*. That there is some universal “black” racial type –or genetic type– is well-known to be a fallacy, ESPECIALLY to genetecists. There ARE such things as populational haplotypes, but the variations do not map to any conceivable variation of the stereotypical “race” to which Watson seems to be referring. Also, there is no reason in the world to believe that Watson is ever going to change his mind on this, given his history, and the fact that his knee-jerk racism and sexism have been palpably and visibly getting stronger and more definite as he ages.
And yes, there are many good studies showing that IQ maps *first* to socioeconomic status, and *then* to genetic heritability. He ignores all of this, completely, for idiotic sweeping statements aboutb bosses who have had black employees knowing that they are not as bright. I hear arguments like that coming from my antiquated deep-South relatives, but for a geneticist to parrot them is ridiculous — especially a geneticist who bemoaned, in his autobiography, how awful it was that people made assumptions about the poor IQ of Irish, based on stereotypes and the handicaps of poverty and lack of opportunity.
Let me say this again: he’s not a moron because he tackled a non-PC subject. He’s a moron because he says things which are simply wrong, and he is in the perfect position to know better. The real problem isn’t that he “said such things in public”, anyway; the real problem is that he *thinks* them at all.
Crunk:
Most of the twin studies involved twins which were reared separately, but in average or above-average economic environments. This means that the effects of poverty and SES were pre-eliminated. What difference this makes is evident from studies like –
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.0956-7976.2003.psci_1475.x
and
http://www.icherney.com/Teachi.....allace.doc
@14 J.J. Ramsey: In answer to your question, the most popular demolition/Fisking of The Bell Curve is S. J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.
Luna the Cat:
Last time I saw you, you were laying on the floor of the spare bedroom with a brown substance seeping out of your mouth onto the rug. I think the stain is still there.
How are things inside the freezer?
“You are right about Rosalind Franklin.
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-3/p42.html
He virtually stole her work by not giving her credit when he won the Nobel prize. He should offer an unconditional posthumous apology. He treated her shamefully.”
In fairness to Watson he has gone on record as admitting that he did treat Franklin shamefully. I forget where I read it, but it was in one of his books.
Greg: muh? >o_O
Er, it IS quite cold, by the way.
Ever since reading “The Double Helix” twenty-odd years ago, it’s been obvious to me that Watson, the mediocre ornithologist, was (by his own admission) hanging around the lab reading textbooks on physical chemistry while Rosalind Franklin gathered the data and Francis Crick, Lawrence Bragg and Maurice Wilkins analyzed it.
I never understood what his contribution was to the elucidation of the DNA structure except as a drinking companion and have no idea why he was awarded the Nobel with Crick.
Aside from an outsatnding series of textbooks on molecular biology which bear his name, I’m at a loss to think of anything he has contributed to the pursuit of science–if indeed, he contributed anything to those.
As a result, the revelation that he is a quack with little ability to weigh evidence scientifically is unsurprising, though it is somewhat depressing.
Watson’s contribution to the double helix was figuring out the way the bases bond together. Nobody else– not Crick, Franklin, Pauling, etc., got that. The base-pair bonding turned out to be an enormously important concept in biology, but it wasn’t a particularly difficult discovery. All the other pieces were in place.
Watson’s strongest skill was the ability to come up with one off-the-wall idea after another. He hit gold with one (the base-pair bonding) but he never had any other brilliant breakthroughs, and he had a LOT of lousy ideas.
His jumping to conclusions about race and intelligence, without reading the volumes showing problem after problem with these studies is pretty much par for the course, for him.
More about Watson.
http://www.lifeinresearch.com
fun.
Greg, I’ve added you to my bloglist because of your “certain style,” and the accompanying clarity of your writing. I pretty much just went off on Honest Jim, without much clarity at all. It had been a long day and that article just capped it. Thanks to PZ’s mention on Pharyngula, I found your blog.
hoary puccoon :
“Watson’s contribution to the double helix was figuring out the way the bases bond together. Nobody else– not Crick, Franklin, Pauling, etc., got that. The base-pair bonding turned out to be an enormously important concept in biology, but it wasn’t a particularly difficult discovery. All the other pieces were in place.”
I didn’t recall that, if it is mentioned in “The Double Helix”. I’m sure how one would have deduced the purine-pyrimidine pairings that occur along the complementary strings with the data and knowledge available at the time, especially given that the possibilities in solution are more than 25. Maybe I am underestimating his contribution after all. It’s pretty clear that the Wtason-Crick group were not indispensable to the discovery of the double-helix, with Pauling’s group breathing down their necks. I don’t suppose there were many people on the planet who would have had a better intuitive grasp of the hydrogen-bond possibilities of the base pairs than Pauling.
As to the race-intelligence issue, I think it bears little comment as usually formulated , since the first concept has no plausible meaning except in a social-cultural sense. To speak of African-Americans or European-Americans as a “race” is like speaking of “sled-dogs” as a “breed” of dog. It’s like trying to creating an insect taxonomy based on “bugs I put in my left pocket” vs “bugs I put in a blue envelope”.
As to the concept of” intelligence”– intuitively and broadly-defined for the moment– Jared Diamond makes the point that our modern, urbanized societies probably select against intelligence (or at least are neutral) whereas recently hunter-gatherer-type societies probably had more severe selection pressures against low “intelligence”: “stupid” Inuit who can’t hunt, don’t reproduce.
The only rigrous definition of intelligence that I am aware of is related to scores on particular written tests –which were designed, if I recall my “Mismeasure of Man”, only as relative gauges to weed out people with serious deficits in the skills required to profit from public-school education from those deemed capable of succeeding in the system.
By this assesment, the race-intelligence hypothesis becomes “There are genetic predictors of scores achieved on tests designed by literate Euro-Americans, based on those verbal, patterning and numerical skils they have been cultturally conditioned to value”.
Good luck with that , guys.
Andy Panda– Watson putting together the base pairs was definitely in the Double Helix. A better book, if it’s still in print, is Horace Judson’s ‘The Eighth Day of Creation.’ (Horrible title. It’s nothing about creationism.)
One other advance where Watson was influential was the Human Genome Project, which he pushed for hard– and most of us would now say, rightly.
But Watson’s unguarded comments– that seems to have been his style since day one.
Also, on the topic of genetic measurements of race– I read somewhere– I can’t remember where now– about a series of studies that found patterns of genes that predicted one’s ethnic background. The thing was, though, race could only be predicted by a pattern of about a hundred genes. And for some groups– notably, African Americans– the researchers couldn’t find any combination of genes, no matter how large, that predicted ‘race’ (as defined by self-identification on the census.) So being African American may have no consistent genetic basis at all.
Hoary: The concept of “race” has been utterly rejected as scientifically useless by all the sciences that study this sort of thing (note, I said all the sciences, not scientists. there is a small amount of vocal disagreement). But it has been said that if we were to go back and force the idea of “races” on the human population, then 8 out of ten of the new races would be African.
In other words, Watson saying “Africans are not as smart as whites” is a little like saying “machines made of metal are not as red as Subaru Foresters.”
It is wrong in so many ways as to be laughable.
Winner takes it all!
Watson,the Nobel winner seeks to take it up to the hilt.
He seeks to take away the truth.
Jusus, Mohammad,Budhha were not white, they however, created philosophy which can guide the humanity.
Impact of Black singers, lyricists,Rock stars in the field of performing arts and literature will falsify Watson’s arguements on intelligence being monopoly of whites.
The info about Watson’s penchant for eugenics to provided me one more evidence to confirms my observation that Eugenics fascinates to those who have right wing thinking.
hoary puccoon: As luck would have it, I have a copy of “The Eighth Day of Creation” which has survived more than a few book culls, bought decades ago when I was too busy too read it. I’ll crack it open.
I would also like to re-read “The Double Helix” to see how Watson describes the insights that led to his insights about the base-pairing. My memories of the book are quite foggy. I do recall that the tone is candid and the book opens with mention of how Francis Crick and modesty are not well acquainted.
“it has been said that if we were to go back and force the idea of “races” on the human population, then 8 out of ten of the new races would be African.”
Yeah, but what was Africa called in that brief period between it being named “Pangea” by the Saline and Pandia, and it being named “Africa” by Mawa-Lisa? What race was reading the race fiction then, huh?
maybe Nagadya and Nagawonyi know….?
CMF: Are you channeling again?
the who was here first chant goes like this–for the uninitiated;-)
“Impuka nekati ziyawaleqana (repeat)
Zithi nyawu, nyawu, zithi nyawu, nyawu, nyawu (repeat)”
those darn Zulu’s–obviously a case for Watson’s intelligence flapping
-w-….-w-….-w-….
… “in Zulu the sound of the language is more important than the accuracy of the meaning.”
http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/africasong.html
p.s.
I was going for Zulu allitertion there….working with assonance and consonance a bit, see?
…”and Nagawonyi know…”
Does that make me less intelligent, huh, huh,huh!?
paAAawWBwaaAAApppfh-oomp!
hoary puccoon wrote on Oct 20, 2007 at 7:17 am :
“Also, on the topic of genetic measurements of race– I read somewhere– I can’t remember where now– about a series of studies that found patterns of genes that predicted one’s ethnic background. ”
I don’t believe you can make these determinations from autosomal DNA except in extraordinarily isolated populations because of the mixtures that occur in most modern human family trees.
On the other hand, Y chromosome haplogroups are distinct enough that you can trace the paternal line back to particular villages at given times in the last 60k years or so.
In fact, for $100 or so, you can have your mitochondrial DNA analyzed to trace your matrilineal ethnic history:
http://www.dnaancestryproject.com/
I’m sure that there have been very many racists,fascists,communists and other generally undesirable people with “genius” tendencies and high IQ scores.
If i remember some of my Soc/Psy classes : A lot of the IQ test revolves around fitting to a bell curve “norm” and to cut out a lot of psychobabble,the IQ test is basically a measure of how well you fit the White/Middle class model.
The man may be socially/morally bankrupt or racist,but, his scientific method may well be scrupulously exacting.
To make an analogy A racing driver may be the fastest and win the most races, but, may have no ability to manage money. Watson may be good with abstract ideas and microscopy, but, have no idea or qualification in Psychology.
He obviously does not have any idea on acceptable things to say and lacks a basic grasp of the model behind intelligence testing.
To be quite honest I find it repugnant that someone who has contributed nothing of value to society has the cheek to call someone who has a “moron” and an “ass”. The fact that you are a nobody speaks for itself regardless on if I agree with you or not.
IQ is a purely subjective form of quantifying ones intelligence and as such there is still a great deal to be learned from study of our genes.
Matt: pardin me for assing, but “repugnant that someone who has contributed nothing of value to society has the cheek to call someone who has a “moron” and an “ass”….”
did you mean that Greg HASa moron and an ass? I am sure if you peruse the glorious pages of this blog, you will find he has more than a few of those who contribute here….you are not alone;-)
Matt: You can add something else to your list. Greg claims to be part of the “graduate faculty of Quaternary Paleoecology, Anthropology, and some other departments” on his About page.
Quaternary Paleoecology faculty…
http://lrc.geo.umn.edu/qpfaculty.html
Nope not there.
Anthropology faculty…
http://anthropology.umn.edu/people/faculty.php
Nope not there either.
I fully expect a “kiss my ass” reply now.
II am indeed on the graduate faculty of the anthro department. I believe they don’t list their graduate faculty who are otherwise outside the department. I have a number of graduate students in that department, and it would be very disturbing were this not be the case!
I have no idea how QP lists their faculty. At the time I wrote my About page, I was on that grad faculty, and I have not heard that I am not. But at the moment, while I have students in that minor, they are also in Anthro, thus it is possible that my membership on that faculty has lapsed. But, they probably would have told me were that the case. I’ll let you know.
Yes, you can absolutely kiss my ass. But not because of the inconsistenciesyou point out. I appreciate that. If you had a difficulty with information provided on my site, you would be more than welcome to bring it to my attention either through an email or by a polite posting in the appropriate place. If you were to treat any commentator on my site with this level of rudeness you would be banned instantly. So don’t do that.
Indeed, it is that case that my About page is somewhat out of date. I am in a different position now than I was when I wrote that, and should update it. However, there are still other changes coming soon, so I may wait for everything to settle down then update it.
Thanks very much for your interest in the topics we cover here.
Cheers,
Greg
Of course there are political implications to this subject! We’re talking about social inequality and institutionalized racism that prevent underrepresented groups from participating in academia and facilitating scientific literacy in their communities!
Race, poverty and access to education are, as Greg pointed out, “insidiously” connected. It’s true that there are stipulations in many federal research grants that now provide greater opportunities for underrepresented groups to participate in science, but a major hurdle to minority participation is the culture of academia, which is heavily influenced by the attitudes and perceptions demonstrated by Watson’s comments. As a minority graduate student working in a prestigious research institution, I appreciate the solidarity and outrage conveyed by Greg’s comments. Perhaps it is counter-productive to changing minds already set in institutionalized racism but it is a welcome demonstration of an alternative view in academic culture.
Hey Greg: don’t waste time defending yourself to idoiots who lack substance, and naysayers who lack sound opinions based in the material you present, rather than character assaults.
Maybe you can circumvent the unnecessaryt time spent buttressing your credentials with a simple page link to a page that says “kiss my ass,” instead?
Dragging this back to the original thread, I have friends who have spoken with JW in social situations, and their reaction now is astonishment about how long it has taken for the world to wake up to what he’s really like. You only have to read his autobiography to start listing; he’s deeply misogynistic and arrogant, and he has a vindictive streak. He has been frequently quoted on the sort of fetuses that should be aborted - any with disabilities, mental or physical; homosexual; etc etc. He clearly feels anyone who is not white or who scores low on IQ tests has nothing to give to the world.
And though the findings of science are often unpalatable in a social sense, we as scientists do have a responsibility for the ramifications. Nazi scientists are rightly held responsible for their support of the eugenics of Nazism.
The fact that there could be IQ differences between races does not excuse pontificating to the media that employers find their black employees stupider than whites. That is not a scientific statement, it is opinion that will be picked up on by the far right and used as justification.
JW did not back up any of his statements with facts, he did not present his theories in a scientific paper. Let’s drop all this guff about how science has to be allowed to say these things. Science IS allowed–but that’s not what JW was doing.
Just to weigh in briefly on the Rosalind Franklin “issue.” The problem
goes beyond the fact that Watson, Crick and Wilkins did not cite
Franklin’s work. In point of fact, Wilkins had been secretly COPYING
all of Franklin’s lab work for months, and when she took a photograph
(X-ray crystallography, actually) of the clear structure of DNA — a helix
with the phosphate backbone on the *outside* — he duplicated it and
showed it to Watson. Watson himself (in his autobiography, I think)
recalled that he was shown the image, told it had been secretly copied,
and ran back to his lab to publish the implications before Franklin could
do so. Years later, he claims that *Wilkins* was wrong for showing the
photo. Hm, yes, I can see how he is a completely innocent bystander.
She received no citation, no credit, nothing. His autobiography also
goes on about how, in addition to her crime of being a female scientist,
which is unacceptable, he found quite distasteful her lack of fashion and
lipstick.
The man is an arrogant, dishonest, idiotic, sorry excuse for a person,
much less for a scientist, and the sooner his name ceases to be prefaced
with “eminent” or any such adjective, the better for our species as a whole.
Is anyone *surprised* that this piece of sludge, given all the power that
undue respect and adoration have conferred, should now broaden his
targets and proudly assert his racist and unsubstantiated delusions?
Greg:
“The concept of “race” has been utterly rejected as scientifically useless by all the sciences that study this sort of thing”
really ? The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/sumc-rgm012705.php
http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/diffdx/geneticvariance.html
(
I know it’s an AmRenlink but you have to pay to get access to that article on the Globe and Mail’s website. It won an award from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, a well known racist organisationhttp://www.sciencewriters.ca/a.....s2000.html
[N.B.: No, you are not allowed to put a link to a white supremacist site on my site. -gtl]
Greg:
“When you analyze the data, you find that the latter — SES and Home Environment — are the main predictors of IQ across a given contemporary population, not skin color. It happens that skin color and SES and skin color and Home Environment, in the US and over the last few decades, are intertwined realities.”
skin color is a strawman, race or ethnic group is the right term.
And a few references would be welcomed. Rushton and Jensen conclude that IQ is a 50/50 thing, 50% environment 50% genetic.
What’s fascinating with this whole Watson thing is just how quickly people who claim to believe in evolution (i.e. when it’s time to criticize creationism and intelligent design) turn into creationists (”we’re all born equal!”) when people like Watson take the idea of evolution to its logical conclusion (quote:“There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”).
Evolution doesn’t produce equality. You can believe in either one or the other but not in both.
Evolution or Equality. You pick.
I admit, I’m not a biologist, and *certainly* not a geneticist. But I think you are a bit off-base there, VLC. Half the point of this whole “coversation” in this blog is that genetically speaking, the human species is homogenous. NO (significant) group has been isolated enough, long enough, to produce measurable differences in the *intelligence* of the group when compared to other groups.
Furthermore, it’s been pointed out by at least one commenter that the IQ test is still heavily biased toward conformance with upper middle class american caucasians. It’s not a measure of *intelligence* but a measure of deviation from an arbitrarily chosen mean.
There is no dichotomy here. Evolution is still right and creationism is still wrong.
Nor do I escuse Watson based on his formative years. My father (who holds a PhD in Physics, so is hardly a stupid man) grew up in the deep south in the 30s and 40s. His mother - while unfailingly polite - was a died-in-the-wool racist. Dad is not. And he made darn sure none of his children are. If my father can overcome his upbringing, I fail to see why any other (reportedly) intelligent person cannot.
Loath as I am to condone public ass-ripping, I agree with Greg here (and his credentials don’t matter a whit - they never do when you are correct). Watson publicly and openly pronounced himself a moron and an ass. Greg just has the nerve to point out the true nature of the emperor’s clothes. If Watson had provided citations for his remarks, references to current work.. anything reputable at all to back up his statements, Greg would have been wrong.
As it is, Watson is as big an ass and moron as Jesse Jackson, on the same subject, and for the same reason, and Greg (or anybody else) is quite right to name him such..
Calling Watson a racist is not an ad hominem, any more than calling him a Nobel Prizewinner is. And given that he has established himself to be a racist, terms like “ass” and “moron,” while ad hominems, are not inappropriate.
Duncan: Yes. And, actually, we need not fall into the Ad Hominem Fallacy: Ad Hominem is bad, therefore, don’t to it.
The fact is that ad hominem is bad as a method of making a rational argument. If someone is an ass, that does not make their reasoning bad. Their reasoning may still be good.
But they are still an ass. Watson is an ass, and that was my point. To this I added the ironic sarcasm: I believe there is scientific evidence that he is a moron, and thus, perhaps should be sterilized (though I did not mention sterilization in my post, it is clearly an option).
NO (significant) group has been isolated enough, long enough, to produce measurable differences in the *intelligence* of the group when compared to other groups.
I was shown to this discussion by a friend after asking his opinion on this discussion. Anyone able to offer recommendations for reading? Or maybe just step into the discussion and throw some elbows?
The time variance in IQ across one population is the Flynn effect and the latest Scientific American Mind has an article by Flynn himself where he explains that (broadly) the increased emphasis on logical thinking in modern industrialised, information driven socieities has contributed to better performance across some of the components of a typical IQ test like categorisation and synthesis while others have remained fairly stable.
Further the IQ variation between societies (with for example sub-saharan coutnries scoring low and east asian one high) has a significant cultural and environmental component. In studies of specific sub-saharan populations following monitored improvements in nutrition, access to potable water and at least primary education it was found that their IQ testing scores improved compared to past performances among the same population which, by keeping the genetic variable constant indicates a strong enviromental influence on the region’s underperformance
Similar studies conducted on Americans of East Asian extraction revealed a lower mean score than their ancestral population. Again this points to an environmental-cultural component which some identify in the mental effort inherent in mastering a logographic system of writting.
Dr. Watson, while an eminent scientist in his field, has overstepped the boundaries of his expertise, which is at the best of times dangerous. It is however ironic, and indicative of a double standard the source of which I cannot explain, that while Dr. Watson’s statements are rightly crticised, similar pronouncements about the superior intellect of Jews compared to others are given space in serious publications like the Scientific American and the Economist.
Science is first and foremost the practice of rejecting one’s preconceptions and prejudices in the search for Truth for the benefit of all mankind. Races, nations, religions all things fade. Man abides.
Ms Franklin didn’t ‘do all the work’ for Watson and Crick, she did a portion which helped crack the code. By all account she was a difficult person to deal with.
As for Watson speaks a large part of the truth that many scientists will state unofficially–I know I work with many researchers. He joins others like Shockley and Murry who speak truth. Rather than try to improve the situation for blacks by using their data PC types only want to whitewash it (to coin a phrase).
Watson and Shockley have Nobel prizes, no one knows who the hell you are.
We ALL know he’s hiding something.
It’s about Franklin.
He’s in denial.
He IS A MORON- for
MARRYING THE WRONG WOMEN!
`
There’s no real excuse for Watson. Ashley Montagu’s book, “Man’s most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race” came out in 1942, followed in due course by “The Natural Superiority of Women.” The first book, at least, created enough of a stir that even James Watson should have heard of it.
this article has such a biased undertone. There have not been any real study of race and IQ cause it is 2 controversial, so anyone preaching here is just as off topic as watson, and maybe even more, as watson does some serious work with genes, and therefore could be in better position to make a statement. The comment about wilson on watson is also very very old news, as the two put their differences aside, and are very fond of each other now, as can be seen on the charlie rose interview. Watson also never claimed being genius, he actually said on numerous occasions that the thing that helped him most, was that he was never the smartest person in the room. Maybe that is more than any of the genii on this blog can say. the comments are all from 2007 so i hope i’m just very late and you guys have moved on.