Dr. James Watson of the famous Watson and Crick team credited with the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule is embroiled in controversy after stating in an interview that Blacks were not as intelligent as Whites.
Dr. Watson, now 79 and Chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa." And then continued "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."
Dr. Watson has had a somewhat controversial career from the beginning. Despite the fact that he and fellow scientist Francis Crick received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work on the structure of nucleic acids, many scientists have noted that Watson and Crick did very little research themselves on the structure of DNA. Rather, they were known for schmoozing Dr. Rosalind Franklin in the early 1950s as she laboriously and carefully collected x-ray diffraction data of crystallized DNA molecules. Watson and Crick used the x-ray data, which gave the overall structure and dimensions of DNA, and then used ball and stick models to work out the precise structure of the DNA molecule. Dr. Rosie Franklin didn't even get a T-shirt that said "I did all the hard work, but they got the Nobel".
Where Dr. Watson ran into trouble in his recent interview was with the age old canard that equates intelligence and test scores. The funny thing about testing is that it is done with tests. And where do you learn how to take tests? Usually at school. Anyone who is as intelligent as Dr. Watson should know all too well that testing shows how well you take tests, not how intelligent you are.
Overall, when ranking humans by so-called racial groups, Oriental people score highest on standard tests, Jewish people score high but slightly lower than Oriental people, Caucasians score slightly lower still, and Blacks usually score lower than Whites on average. Such test results do not indicate that Oriental people are the most intelligent, it indicates that they have been trained better to take tests. It says nothing about inherent underlying intelligence. The rank order on test scores simply shows that different groups of humans receive different amounts of test training in school. If Whites were trained to take tests as thoroughly as Oriental children they would score just as high, and it works that way across all groups.
All that such test scores show is that education is not doled out evenly among the population. It is an indictment of education systems not a measure of innate intelligence.
Dr. Watson should know better than to give himself such a serious case of foot in mouth disease.
Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website www.Factinista.org, and is a Managing Editor at OpEdNews.com.
Friends and acquaintances most familiar with his work
sound very sad, especially since this was not an isolated incident. They can no longer respect him. How could someone so brilliant have such a strong character and intellectual flaw as racism?
It is something that cannot be accepted nor excused, no matter his considerable contribution to science.
He let himself and all of us down.
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Kathlyn Stone (33 articles, 204 quicklinks, 19 diaries, 557 comments)
on Friday, October 19, 2007 at 3:47:09 PM
Did you see his pix, K? His bio may say he's 79, but like all stars, I think he lies. He looks like he's about 150, which may explain a lot, because I reacted the same way you did.
How could someone who's so smart say something so incredibly dumb? Book larnin', as we all know, does not street smarts make.
John, thank you. Yesterday I cut & pasted all the article I found on him from the London papers to do a piece, and now I don't have to.
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Sandy Sand (130 articles, 0 quicklinks, 153 diaries, 1174 comments)
on Friday, October 19, 2007 at 4:51:16 PM
Political Correctness =worst form of censorship EVER!
The PC UTOPIAN idea that all humans are equal is a really nice fantasy but it is WRONG. For example, did you know that various races have different average weights, average heights, responses to medications, incidences of illness, and average penis lengths. Even more shocking is the fact that different races actually have different color SKIN! Wow, who knew that one? So the reality is that there are probably certain brain functions which blacks perform better at than whites or asians and vice versa. Much like we know, in general, that women perform better than men in some tasks whereas men perform better than women in others. So to think there can't be racial differences in intelligence is silly and almost certainly WRONG. So I'd say it like this. Blacks are almost certainly more intelligent at some specific mental skills than whites (and/or asians) but the opposite is also true. So if the conclusion of scientific testing was that non-blacks were 'smarter' than blacks then obviously the tests were skewed towards those specific 'mental skills' that blacks aren't good at.But before you start hurling the PC UTOPIAN 'you're a racist if you dare speak about reality' bull crap please do realize that you have been brainwashed because all humans are NOT the same.
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BenMarbleMD (18 articles, 0 quicklinks, 172 diaries, 259 comments)
on Friday, October 19, 2007 at 9:26:23 PM
yeah, sure, there are multiple kinds of intelligences, as John Gardner of Harvard has written about, but Dr. Watson didn't mention them. He went to a place that is racist. Even very smart people can be assholes. Every now and then I personally demonstrate just that fact.... and, Ben, my friend, so do you. <G> Hopefully we learn from our mistakes. It doesn't look like Watson is. He's putting out a negative message.
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Rob Kall (728 articles, 3775 quicklinks, 311 diaries, 1520 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 4:01:16 AM
Your own comment is driven by generalities that distort the issue as much as Watson's comments do. Yes, there are differences between the "races" (the notion of "race" itself is a construct based on geography and a few general traits such as shape of eyes, skin color, etc.). But there is a qualitative difference between the genetic program that shapes a discrete physical trait and the immense complexity governing brain function. While neuroscience is in the midst of a golden age, it hasn't begun to explain what intelligence is, much less how it operates. It is possible that one day we'll have quantitative methods of analyzing brain function that will differentiate among individual intelligences and even types of intelligence, but till that happens, any sweeping statements about relative intelligence among human populations is absurd. As for the argument that one group may be innately more intelligent in some tasks, while another is better at others, one can far more easily argue - as some of the comments have - that one merely has to look at the relative quality of schools, or relative quality of infant nutrition, or the stress effects of poverty, or the narrow competencies testing is geared towards, to find much more compelling arguments for differences in IQ test scores than the notion that there's some innate difference in brain function. The brain is so complex and marvelous in its attributes that to limit one's assessment of its capabilities in any healthy individual or in any single human population is absurd, given that each human being has - as far as anyone has determined - basically the same brain that operates according to the same bio-chemical and physical laws as everyone else's.
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Barton Kunstler (7 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 16 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 9:34:47 AM
with an African who lived 50,000 to 200,000 years ago. We know this thanks to the discovery of DNA.
When I learned that it made me happy. We truly are one human family. The little blasts of insight and the untrained skills and unexplained 'knowing' make some sense now.
That's the approach I like to take. Look for the similarities, not the differences. :-)
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Kathlyn Stone (33 articles, 204 quicklinks, 19 diaries, 557 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 7:38:47 AM
what doesnt get looked is the concept of eugenics and its history at Cold Spring Harbor lab. watson's error is that he spilled the beans and created embarassment for the mythology that exists about unbiased research. btw, this lab is cited as the home for the development of HIV which was to be part of the eugenics movement to remove africans and other unwanteds in the world. of course, this is only one way to cull the human herd. war is a great one, especially those that support genocide of large groups of people. and poisoned food stock that kills slowly and the denial of access to natural foods and supplements and holistic healing is a quiet way of participating in this effort to milk the public while rendering them unable to live full and healthy lives. etc, etc, etc.
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tanya (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 19 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 9:14:10 AM
Tanya is on target. Cold Spring Harbor labs was at the heart of racist Eugenics in the early decades of the 20th century. Their "research" was largely responsible for the racist anti Eastern and Southern Europe immigration laws of the 1920. They were connected to Nazi racists. A bad track record.
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philip rosen (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 87 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 12:52:31 PM
True or false? If true, what is his evidence? Has he come up with something new? Ditto if false (not that we haven’t been around this block a billion or so times). We ought to be able to address true or false questions without emotion—even though I realize that the nature and substance of politics is doing just the opposite.
Anyone who’s looked into it even a little understands that intelligence can’t really be measured in any meaningful way in the first place. Read Mismeasure of Man by the late Stephen Gould if you have a doubt.
As others have suggested, if we could measure different kinds of intelligence, we’d find that different people do well in some areas but not in others.I suspect my "emotional IQ" is very low, given how I misjudge people, but my mechanical IQ is quite high, based on some eighth grade scores I once came across.The test I had to give in a pre-Cambrian grad school class, the Weschler Scale of Intelligence, made some attempt to delineate different kinds of intelligence (and I think did that fairly well, regardless of whether you accepted those particular delineations as meaningful).
Intelligence, even if we could define it in some agreed upon fashion, doesn’t particularly matter in every day life nearly as much as persistence, vision, resilience, creativity, and, of course, friends, kindness, cordiality, and social skills--severely lacking on many internet postings, I’m sad to note, not to mention largely absent in our public schools.
When you get to be Watson’s age, you won’t necessarily be as coherent or make as much sense as in your younger days.The fact that I’m even writing this means I’ve taken the guy too seriously myself.
In spite of the above, I think this is a good opportunity to beat the drums for Dr. Rosalind Franklin, as I’m glad that John Moffett did. She is the one who clearly deserved the prize in this yet-another-example of a male-dominated field, assuming anyone did.
I say "assuming anyone did," because the whole shebang was begun by Alfred Nobel, who kicked off the awards with the wealth he made from inventing dynamite, which took warfare to a whole new level. It is said that Nobel was motivated in part by his reading of premature obituary of himself, published in error by a French newspaper on the occasion of the death of his brother Ludvig, and which condemned Alfred as a "merchant of death."
(As a fellow inventor, I don’t fault Alfred anymore than I fault Einstein or the Wright Brothers, but it is ironic that Nobel Prizes, even the Nobel Peace Prize, has its origins in the choice weapon of warfare for many years—even atom bombs are measured in terms of megatonnage of dynamite).
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Daniel Geery (26 articles, 55 quicklinks, 121 diaries, 659 comments)
on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 10:23:58 AM
