Controversial DNA scientist retires? Racist or merely stating fact?

Question

NEW YORK - James Watson, famous for DNA research but widely condemned for recent comments about intelligence levels among blacks, retired Thursday from his post at a prestigious research institution.

Watson, 79, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced his departure a week after the lab suspended him. He was chancellor of the institution, and his retirement took effect immediately.

Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. He is one of America's most prominent scientists.

In his statement Thursday, Watson said that because of his age, his retirement was "more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071025/ap_on_sc/controversial_scientist

Answer 1

He is a great genius, and is entitled to his opinions. I suspect part of the controversy is Watson was talking to an old friend, and felt his off-the-cuff comments were off the record, and didn't intend them for publication. His apology for the remarks do seem sincere. Its hard to know now what he really believes.

Answer 2

What Watson said was irresponsible if he was speaking to us as a scientist. What he said was stupid and ignorant if it was a personal opinion; I have an opinion too!
He and Crick used X-ray crystallography to solve the structure of DNA but what evidence did he have for his claim? a good old gut feeling and a few observations that don't amount to anything.
Are you not amazed that a guy who worked with DNA all his life could not even throw out a putative 'intelligence gene sequence' to us, but instead opts for the absurd.
I don't think people deny that blacks and whites are afflicted differently but it is the claim that it can only be because of intelligence and intelligence only based on ah... nothing! A single class in sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, etc. will show you the dynamics of humanity.
I am amazed that people put so much emphasis into human races. They breed together, speak/communicate, empathize, love and laugh together, experience the same pains and fears but dang, I 've gotta dig till I pull something.
He knows he is an idiot and that's why he apologized. I am sure that now that he has come to his senses he wonders if it was worth it. Stop defending a man whom even his colleagues could not defend. What irony that we are talking about intelligence yet you are listening to very unintelligent things!

Answer 3

Probably both.
The statements that I have seen attributed to him are entirely factual. They comprise the basic tenents of Evolutionary Biology that I learned in my 101 course.
But, the context in which he presents these tenents and the way he presents them shows that he has some racial axe to grind.

What's funny is that everyone has obviously taken his comments to mean that blacks are less intelligent than whites, but if you read them carefully, the exact opposite can also be construed. See my source of info just below...
[ He says that he is “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”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
He writes that “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”.]

Evolutionary Biology teaches us that geographically isolated populations evelove differently because environmental pressures force different outcomes. Yes, it is possible that some env. pressures expereinced by other races after they separated from the populations on the African continent made them more intelligent....but the opposite could also be true. However; what is more likely the case is that the variation of intelligence within races is much greater than the variation between races. My personal, unscientific, expereince has borne that out. God forbid that it were true that the smartest black is less intelligent than the dumbest white...because I have run across plenty of 'dumb honkeys'

What is sad is that Crick, a noble prize scientist, doesn't seem to base his statements on any objectivley collected scitentific data...he is just pontificating. What's also sad is that our petty, reactionary scocitety would probably never let a scientific study to test the relative intelligence of two separate populations even get off the ground. We are so afraid of talking about race in such stark terms (as I do in my entry and will certainly pay the price for it).
There are so many interesting questions prompted by this debate. What really constitutes intelligence? Is intelligence just a social/cultural construct? Are cultural and environmental differeces between Africa and the West (or between White America and Black America) so great that there is no way to devise an intellegence test that would put persons from the two cultures on equal footing?

What is not intelligent is the fact that we let the ramblings of some has-been scientist fan the flames of hatred between us rather than permitting us to ask more questions and get closer to the truth of things.

Answer 4

Here's a slightly changed version of my answer from another question about this -

Watson has become, apparently, a racist. It's a shame that someone who once did some REAL work and actually benefited humanity, has fallen this low.

If Watson was right, the basis of racism would not be bigoted, hate-excusing nonsense, but fact. So IF he was right, he would still be a racist.

But he's provably WRONG. And so is racism!

And he's become a poor scientist, too (the two go together). Check out his data sources, and the assumptions that he uses in interpreting it. Even if his data was legit, which it isn't (ask a teacher how accurate testing results are!), he ignores the overwhelming role that social factors play in developing intelligence.

IQ tests are not a valid measure of intelligence. Even if they WERE - would the differences be based on heredity, or education? MAYBE the differences measured are because of the quality of the education systems in those countries, and the amount of encouragement of students because of culture.

The two main problems with all of this stuff is - assuming that the quality that we call "intelligence" can be measured so simply, AND, assuming that it is entirely due to heredity and not an acquired characteristic.

Humans are SOCIAL ANIMALS - why do folks find it so hard to understand that we TEACH EACH OTHER THINGS? Why attribute everything to heredity and nothing to environment? That's as foolish as the the other way around. Heredity IS important --all the education in the world won't teach a pig to sing. But so is environment - a kid whose parents are Einsteinian supergeniuses, if raised in a locked box without human contact, will STILL be insane, illiterate and ignorant. Those who ask "nature or nurture?" are missing the point -- it's not "either/or." It's nature AND nurture! Why insist on ONLY nature? That is stacking the cards - and in a game, that's called CHEATING. In intellectual pursuits, it's called self-delusion.

And what about the questionable "science" that there even ARE human "races" in the first place? Why are all white people named after a mountain range in Eurasia ("Caucasian")? Because of ONE skull found there in the 1800s and judged by a bigoted commentator on its "beauty"! And how come the darkest people on the planet (Australian aborigines) are called "Caucasian"? Why do most Africans have more in common genetically with Europeans than they do with some other groups of Africans?

The whole "race" thing is garbage. There is NO scientific evidence that there is any such thing as "subspecies" of homo sapiens-sapiens. If you MUST believe in such foolishness as "race," how about explaining why the divisions shouldn't be based on things like genetic markers for malaria resistance, or dendrites, or mitochondrial factors?

Today's ideas about "race" are social constructs, not biological. Do we identify a dog as a German shepherd rather than as a Great Dane because of the color of their pelt?

We've been down this road before. "The Bell Curve," William Shockley popping off into test tubes to give women his "superior" sperm, the anti-black "would you let one marry your daughter" crowd, zionists claiming non-Jews are bigoted by nature and that non-zionist Jews are "dead branches" of the family who deserve to die, the "master race" idiots who followed Hitler, the fake "sciences" of phrenology and eugenics...

Every third-rate ignorant fool has "science" to back up his fairy tales, usually some story about how HIS group is better. And now we have the unpleasant spectacle of a formerly-first-rate mind joining the fools. Well, he's pretty old... maybe Watson is senile.

Answer 5

Watson's a very bright guy, but simply because he's a bright guy and a famous scientist doesn't make his opinions any more accurate than "Bob-next-door"'s. In this case, he was clearly stating his opinion, since there are no provable facts to back him up. Every 'fact' that can or has been used to support his assertion can have multiple possible explanations beyond simply 'race', and therefore no scientist worth his salt would have made such a dumb comment as a scientist. He was speaking as "James Watson, private person", not "James Watson, brilliant scientist". Unfortunately, the perils of celebrity hit the Watsons as much as the Hiltons.

Answer 6

I've studied the difference between IQ's of different races a bit. In general it is found the members of races that have complex written languages have average IQ's that are a bit higher then those with more primitive written languages. I believe that this has more to do with flaws in IQ tests than it does with any one race being more intelligent than another.

Intelligence is not strictly a function of measured IQ. Intelligence is the ability to survive and adapt. Many Africans were forcibly removed from their homeland. They adapted and flourished all over the world. This is intelligence. Anecdotally, I must mention that one of the most brilliant scientists I've ever known is an African from Kenya. He is about as black as a person can get. He grew up in a third world country with very little. I grew up in a first world country with much more than he had. Yet he is more adroit than me.

The idea that things have to be dumbed down for Africa is ridiculous. Watson was out of line. He should know this. I've heard him say that his own IQ is below average. Clearly he is not stupid.

Answer 7

Racist. Because one of the example's he gives of Black people having less intelligence, is the state of many third wold countries in Africa. But then look at all the countries where there are no Black people, and they still aren't doing so well? Not to mention the fact that there are MANY successful Black people around the world. I think what it all boils down to is that Black people have been put Back a long way by thing such as segregation, and racism..these kinds of setbacks will last for many generations. Example if your mother was poor, you are unlikely to go to the best school, and therefore have a poor education, and a dead-end job. When your children are born they will be part of the same cycle. And so too will the generations that follow.

Answer 8

I don't promote racism or racists nor do i agree with his comment, but its a shame that everyone always goes off of the Recency Effect. Basically, and opinion about a person is based on whatever the most recent interaction you had with them. A brilliant science mind who has contributed more to the progression of science than a good portion of the world put together will be forever brandished as a racist because of one off-handed comment at the end of his career. In encyclopedias and wikipedias, he'll forever had an astriks next to his name reminding everyone of what he said.
However, if it had been the other way around, where he had made or acted on such a comment and later made amazing scientific discoveries, no one would think twice about his aforementioned comment. its all about whatever happened recently.

Answer 9

Athletes of amazing prowess have come from African descent, suggesting that racial differences are more than skin deep. Given such differences, we might also suspect that there will be differences in the genes related to brain development and formation too.

Here's the problem: our very intelligence makes it impossible to say which observed differences are due to heredity and which are due to culture / care. That is, we can't tell if one race is inherently less intelligent than another, or whether a perceived difference in intelligence is due to people of those races attending schools that suck and having parents who don't care that the schools suck.

No good way to tell.

Looking forward, it should be the goal of all to improve schools, and to influence the popular culture that learning and education are good things. We can't all play pro basketball, you know.

Answer 10

Racist? Probably not. He may be wrong in his opinion, but only through a misinterpretation of facts.

It may be decades before it's known whether there's any systematic difference in intelligence between different ethnic groups. Indeed, it may NEVER be known, as such differences might be too small to be reliably measured. It's a pity, though, that Watson's been pushed into retirement, merely for speaking his mind.

Who's more "vicious", Watson or the people who attacked him?