James Watson retires

[MadArchitect]

Most of you probably know the name as part of a pair: Watson and Crick. It was as part of that team that James Watson received his share of a Nobel Prize for being the first to describe the double helix structure of DNA. Now, at 79, he has retired from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has served for 40 years. The circumstances, however, are more than usually sad. Controversy erupted last week over racially discriminatory comments Watson made to the Times of London.

Here is the controversial passage from The Elementary DNA of James Watson, originally published in the Times:
[quote]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

[Niall001]

Watson is an idiot. He's always been an idiot, constantly getting himself into trouble. His treatment of his colleagues has been less than admirable (and probably sexist at times). He famously declared that women should be allowed to abort their kids if they it was found that they were gay - though apparently, if Dawkins is to be believed, he also thought they should be allowed to do so, if they found out the child was heterosexual. If my memory serves me correctly, he also once suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive and his comments in The God Delusion regarding theists also form part of the pattern. The truth is that the man is a giant cock with little experience outside of his own limited social circles. His world view belongs in the 19th century.

What I found interesting was the spin put on the event. I first encountered Watson's reaction to the controversy in an article by Sue Blackmore:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sue ... tists.html

Like many other people, I disagree with many of the conclusions he bases on that evidence, but he should still be free to give his opinion. If a great scientist cannot speak the truth as he sees it, based on evidence, even if that opinion is unpalatable, then something is horribly wrong, and science is under threat.

A similar tactic was adopted by Watson when writing in the Independent:

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commen ... 075642.ece

We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science.

To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers. It is very likely that at least some 10 to 15 years will pass before we get an adequate understanding for the relative importance of nature versus nurture in the achievement of important human objectives. Until then, we as scientists, wherever we wish to place ourselves in this great debate, should take care in claiming what are unarguable truths without the support of evidence.

[jales4]

I am reading "What is Your Dangerous Idea - Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable" edited by John Brockman. (Yes, I am currently reading five books - a chapter of each at a time).

Steven Pinker writes that he predicts the dangerous idea of the next decade will be: "that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperments."

He cites several recent controversies: An article in the Times about a study by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpenidng that proposed "that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a byproduct of this evolutionary history."

An article in Commentary by political scientist Charles Murray (author of Bell Curve) arguing that "average racial differences in intelligence are intractable and partly genetic."

Pinker sums up: "Advances in genetics and genomics will soon enable us to test hypotheses about group differences rigorously. Perhaps geneticists will forbear performing these tests, but we shouldn't count on it."

In the same book, J Craig Venter (former president of Celera Genomics) says "We may attribute behaviors in other mammalian species to genes and genetics, but when it comes to humans we seem to like the notion that we're all created equal, that each child is a 'blank slate'. As we obtain the sequences of more and more mammalian genomes, including more human sequences, together with basic observations and common sense, we will be forced to turn away from these politically correct interpretations, as our new genomic tool sets allow us to sort out nature and nurture."

My own thoughts on this subject (which is something I have just begun to study and think about): To say that one group of people is more intelligent than the other is incorrect. All groups have *different* intellegence based on what is needed to survive in *their* culture, society, and world.

In Canada I may be seen as having average intelligence, but put me in the Amazon rainforest, and I'd be the village idiot, as I'd have no survival skills.

IIf you compare a person who has descended the last 20 generations from urban living - dealing with commerce, communication, large society, etc., and a person who has descended the last 20 generations from a hunter/gatherer life, what differences would you find in the two brains? Would certain lobes be more and less developed in each?

What I am getting at is that we measure intelligence on factors that are important in our society.... is the way we measure intelligence flawed?

[George Ricker]

What I am getting at is that we measure intelligence on factors that are important in our society.... is the way we measure intelligence flawed?

That was one of the themes of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. One of the great dangers inherent in scientific reseach is the tendency to leap to unwarranted conclusions based on incomplete data.

Our attempts to understand intelligence and to quantify the various influences on its development are still in very early stages at this point. It's ludicrous to start assigning values or asserting that this or that group is inherently inferior in intelligence, when we really don't know what we are talking about.

George

[seeker]

Whether or not scientists eventually find some mechanism in the brain that facilitates abstract thinking and demonstrate that some individuals were more gifted than others in this area, should we not begin to disassociate the concept of this kind of "intelligence" from the concept of "superiority?" I'm not sure where such a notion came from anyway. Don't people with the most money, or the most power (or, in fact, the most ANYthing), commonly think of themselves as superior to those with less?