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Watson’s Racism A Disservice to Science
James Watson’s remarks in the October 14 edition of the Sunday Times magazine suggesting that Africans are less intelligent than other humans were not just tragic and racist, they were also an abuse of his eminent scientific stature.
As Federation of American Scientists points out in a press release today, “At a time when the scientific community is feeling threatened by political forces seeking to undermine its credibility it is tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.”
Watson is not the first scientist of stature to use his or her notoriety to advance spurious ideas that fly in the face of scientific research. But when professional science already faces so many politically-motived obstacles, it is all the more unfortunate that a Nobel laureate would parade personal prejudice as scientific fact.
Comments on this article
Marshall,
October 19th, 2007 at 4:54 amIntellectual does not equal Intelligent. Watson is saying blacks are not intelligent.
May we please have a list of Nobel Prize winners who won for political reasons, a list for reasons of brilliance, and a list for being in the right lab at the right time? And, along with the Nobel Prize, please hand out a booklet explaining, in small words, how easily stupidity falls into arrogance.
And can we please pry the sycophant groupies out from around Nobel Prize winners, celebrities, politicians, and surgeons? I know it must feel good to have people laughing at every stupid joke they tell, day after day, but the fawning adulation obviously turns their brains to mush.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:26 amI think that it was a bit ridiculous for the Science Museum to make this decision. If Watson has made claims that are spurious then it should not be hard for an intelligent person of any race to see through to his political motives.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:55 pmIt is important to know that this sort of racism is alive and kicking, not just the kind of numbskulls that we all know about, and censoring Watson simply means that fewer people know what he wanted to say, and the grounds he had for saying it.
Whilst there are plenty of views that I find offensive I want to know about them. Knowledge is power after all.
In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in higher education African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group. African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any native-born ethnic group including white Americans (Logan & Deane, 2003; Dixon, 2006; Journal of Blacks in higher education, 1999-2000; Onwudiwe, 2006; Otiso and Smith, 2005; The Economist, 1996). Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is slightly more than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans (The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 26 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 60-61).
In 1997, 19.4 percent of all adult African immigrants in the United States held a graduate degree, compared to 8.1 percent of adult whites and 3.8 percent of adult blacks in the United States, respectively (The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 26 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 60-61). This information suggests that America has an equally large achievement gap between whites and African immigrants as there is between white and black Americans.
In the UK, 1988, the Commission for Racial Equality conducted an investigation on the admissions practices of St. George’s, and other medical colleges, who set aside a certain number of places for minority students. This informal quota system reflected the percentage of minorities in the general population. However, minority students with Chinese, Indian, or black African heritage had higher academic qualifications for university admission than did whites (Blacks in Britain from the West Indies had far lower academic credentials than did whites). In fact, blacks with African origins over the age of 30 had the highest educational qualifications of any ethnic group in the British Isles. Thus, the evidence pointed to the fact that minority quotas for University admissions were actually working against students from these ethnic groups who were on average more qualified for higher education than their white peers (Cross, 1994; Also see, C, Dustmann, N, Theodoropoulos, 2006).
According to the report The State of Working Britain, published by the Centre for Economic Performance at the highly regarded London School of Economics, 21 % of adult blacks in Britain with African origins have a university degree. Only 14 percent of adult white Britons are college educated. It has also been shown that black immigrants from Africa earn more money than do native born white Britons (C, Dustmann, N, Theodoropoulos, 2006):
October 27th, 2007 at 10:26 pm“Watson is not the first scientist of stature to use his or her notoriety to advance spurious ideas that fly in the face of scientific research.” — haha, what “scientific research”? I love how these little factoids slip into the news with 0 facts and 0 references to back up the claim.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:33 amActually, those who shouted him down for expressing well documented research are a disgrace to science not Watson.
Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R. (2005). Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294.
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf
Also;
1. Genetic changes have sped up over the past 10,000 years (note that groups left Africa about 50,000 years ago).
2. Seven percent or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (”races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance).
3. A fair fraction are neurological and likely to affect behavior in some way. For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DBA1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia.
4. Populations that adopted agriculture experienced Metabolic/diet changes like lactose tolerance, many changes in genes involved with defense against infectious disease, many changes in genes that affect hearing and smell, changes in neurotransmitters and related genes that most likely influence personality, changes in genes involved with the regulation of nerve connections and brain growth.
5. Populations vary in color-blindness, in the fraction of working olfactory genes, in visual acuity, in susceptibility to myopia. They vary in brain size by more than a standard deviation (from smallest to largest). And of course psychometric scores vary by more than that.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:22 am