James Watson: Whites smarter than blacks

[Zadius]

Link

The Science Museum last night cancelled a talk by Nobel Prize winning scientist Dr James Watson after he was accused of making “racist” comments implying Africans were not as intelligent as whites.

DNA pioneer Dr Watson, who discovered the double helix with Briton Francis Crick, has been roundly condemned for saying 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”.

The 79-year-old American was due to talk at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre on Friday but last night a spokesman said Dr Watson’s comments had gone “beyond the point of acceptable debate”

He announced the Musuem was cancelling the sold-out talk as a result.

On Tuesday night the Dana Centre had coincidentally hosted a debate entitled “Scientific Racism: A history”.

Dr Watson, who flew into Britain to promote a new book, has also provoked uproar by saying the assumption that different racial groups shared “equal powers of reason” was backed by “no firm reason”.

His comments have been fiercely attacked by fellow scientists, anti-racism campaigners and politicians.

Neourobiologist Prof Steven Rose of the Open University, a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said such “racist” comments were also “genetic nonsense”.

“He should recognise that statements of this sort have racist functions and are to be deeply, deeply regretted,” he said.

“Making statements of that sort is certainly a great day for the British National Party but it’s a sad day for scientists and racial harmony.”

Dr Watson has courted controversy before, saying darker-skinned people have a higher sex drive and that women should hypothetically have the right to abort fetuses that “may have a tendency to become homosexual”.

He has also backed genetic screening.

Prof Stevens thought the 79-year-old American was stirring up trouble to raise publicity for his new book, entitled 'Avoid Boring People’.

He said: “He doesn’t need to do it. He had a distinguished reputation as a molecular biologist and he should keep out of areas in which he is not well qualified.”

No evidence that claimed to find people of African descent were less intelligent than Europeans or other racial groups had stood up to scientific scrutiny, he stressed.

Koku Adomdza, director of the black equality pressure group The 1990 Trust, labelled Dr Watson a “complete dinosaur” and pressed him to apologise to “Africa and all people of African origin”.

He said: “Dr Watson is really a relic of the oldest stock and deserves to be made to account for his extremely offensive and ignorant remarks.

“His very poisonously racist opinions put students and the unsuspecting public at serious risk.”

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, commented: “It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson’s personal prejudices.

“These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels.”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was considering Dr Watson’s remarks “in full”.

The comments by Dr Watson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 together with Britons Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, were first made in The Sunday Times.

Dr Watson was also quoted as saying that while he hoped all races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He wrote 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."

However, he said people should not discriminate racially, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented”.

He said he thought it would be 10 to 15 years before the genes for intelligence were identified.

Despite the fierce barracking received by those who have put forward the theory of a racial basis for intellectual difference, the idea has refused to die.

IQ testing has consistently shown that racial groups perform differently, say advocates.

In 1994 the publication of Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve, that put forward evidence for the theory, caused a huge storm.

In March last year Leeds lecturer Dr Frank Ellis caused a furore when he said he found such evidence “extremely convincing”.

He refused to withdraw his comments, prompting a wider argument over freedom of academic thought. He resigned that July.

And last November Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, published a paper claiming African states were poor because their populations were less intelligent than Europeans and Asians.

Dr Kanazawa refused to comment on Dr Watson’s thoughts yesterday.

Both sides agree there is far more variation in intelligence and genetics within racial groups than between them.

However, opponents argue IQ tests are culturally biased and say lower average scores among blacks can also be explained by social rather than genetic factors.

[Flagg]

Is there any actual evidence of this supposed disparity beyond the general lack of quality education in impoverished areas where American blacks tend to live and the general shitholishness of Africa? Or is this guy just a racist tool?

[Shinova]

I remember reading that he's always been a racist. Mysoginist too, but I'm not sure on that one.

[Shinova]

And a bit of an ass overall, I believe. Not a pleasant person.

[Darth Wong]

I heard about this controversy. As usual, a disturbingly large percentage of right-wingers are coming out of the woodwork to cry "scientific censorship", as if he's actually being censored rather than simply not being allowed to besmirch an institution's reputation by speaking at one of their functions and thereby appearing to have their endorsement.

As for the argument itself, since Africans have much greater genetic diversity than whites, it makes no sense to argue that they can collectively be said to have inferior intelligence to whites.

[Flagg]

I heard about this controversy. As usual, a disturbingly large percentage of right-wingers are coming out of the woodwork to cry "scientific censorship", as if he's actually being censored rather than simply not being allowed to besmirch an institution's reputation by speaking at one of their functions and thereby appearing to have their endorsement.

But remember, if you dare to call those jism stains on their racism then you're just "playing the race card"! Only the right wing is allowed to inject race into an issue!

[Spin Echo]

Is there any actual evidence of this supposed disparity beyond the general lack of quality education in impoverished areas where American blacks tend to live and the general shitholishness of Africa? Or is this guy just a racist tool?

IIRC, blacks do tend to have lower IQ scores than whites. This, however, reflects a social bias in the test as opposed to actual intelligence differences.

[Flagg]

Is there any actual evidence of this supposed disparity beyond the general lack of quality education in impoverished areas where American blacks tend to live and the general shitholishness of Africa? Or is this guy just a racist tool?

IIRC, blacks do tend to have lower IQ scores than whites. This, however, reflects a social bias in the test as opposed to actual intelligence differences.

Hell, don't most IQ tests also have a gender bias?

[Metatwaddle]

Is there any actual evidence of this supposed disparity beyond the general lack of quality education in impoverished areas where American blacks tend to live and the general shitholishness of Africa? Or is this guy just a racist tool?

The "evidence" is that blacks consistently score lower on IQ tests than Asians, whites and Hispanics. It's natural, then, to make the point (as you did) that the education in predominantly black areas is shitty, and that this affects the IQ scores of the test-takers.

The counterargument (made by the IQ test advocates) is that IQ doesn't actually change all that much from before to after education: when IQ tests are administered to very young children who have not really been in the school system, and then administered to those same kids later in life (I think that's how it works anyway), the scores remain largely the same. Also, even when you adjust a bit for income, there are still disparities: black kids whose parents earn $40,000-$50,000 a year (I'm just pulling the numbers out of my ass; I don't remember them) score lower than white kids whose parents make the same amount, and so on. This isn't, of course, a perfect way to adjust for income, but it's still a bit perplexing to me that the differences are still there.

The thing is, it's just biologically misinformed. Race really isn't a useful way to group humans genetically; there's more variation within them than there is between them. It would make just as much (or as little) biological sense to group humans with any arbitrary characteristic together. It's like proclaiming that men above 6' and women above 5'7" are part of a different genetic group than those at or below those heights, and then comparing their IQ scores. And IIRC, taller people do actually score higher than shorter ones. OMG, short people are genetically inferior!

And to top it all off, most of the genetic variation in the human species comes out of sub-Saharan Africa, so "black" is just about as useless a genetic grouping as you could possibly think of.

[Darth Wong]

Is there any actual evidence of this supposed disparity beyond the general lack of quality education in impoverished areas where American blacks tend to live and the general shitholishness of Africa? Or is this guy just a racist tool?

IIRC, blacks do tend to have lower IQ scores than whites. This, however, reflects a social bias in the test as opposed to actual intelligence differences.

Hell, don't most IQ tests also have a gender bias?

IQ tests are based on the cultural context in which they were composed. Mind you, I suppose one could make the argument that this should not excuse blacks kids who are raised in America and get lower test scores than white kids raised in the same country, but the tests are not completely unaffected by early childhood environment either.

In any case, unless the discrepancy is quite large, I would tend to think that it becomes insignificant in terms of generalized statements about each ethnicity, especially since the vast majority of the two populations will overlap.

[Spin Echo]

Hell, don't most IQ tests also have a gender bias?

Hmm.. donig a quick scan of the literature, it seems that males tend to score higher than females, but an insignificant amount, under two points. The males generally did better of the mathematical and spatial portions while females did better on verbal and interpersonal intelligence(whatever that is).

[Darth Wong]

People shouldn't get into the trap of assuming that the argument must be false because it is so offensive. It is always possible, although at present unsubstantiated by evidence, that there is actually an IQ gap between whites and blacks. The problem is that even if this were the case, 99% of the two ethnicities would overlap anyway, so the two races as a whole would not show significant deviation.

That's what happens if you superimpose a pair of Bell curves whose median points are slightly offset.

[Flagg]

I've taken some IQ tests and scored pretty high, but I gotta say that I don't really trust them all that much. Plus I've seen way to many internet dicksize competitions involving IQ scores.

It's interesting to me that blacks and whites seem to be exposed to much of the same media, yet still suffer a noticable cultural divide. Even when income and residential areas are equal.

[Edi]

It's also noteworthy that proper nutrition and other similar environmental factors are a massive cause in IQ and general intelligence differences, orders of magnitude greater than race. So if you grow up in a shithole and never have enough food to eat, your body and your brain will not physically develop as far as those of someone who does get enough food. When you stack education and other social issues on top of that, it's quite clear that Watson is completely full of shit.

Not coincidentally, most of Africa is a third world shithole suffering from the problems, so Africans on the whole do have lower IQ but it has nothing to do with race. Some of the smarters people I've met are Africans. They just happened to have a good education and were just like us. One of those guys knew 8 languages and I've never seen anyone who worked as hard as he did.

[Metatwaddle]

IIRC, blacks do tend to have lower IQ scores than whites. This, however, reflects a social bias in the test as opposed to actual intelligence differences.

Hell, don't most IQ tests also have a gender bias?

IQ tests are based on the cultural context in which they were composed. Mind you, I suppose one could make the argument that this should not excuse blacks kids who are raised in America and get lower test scores than white kids raised in the same country, but the tests are not completely unaffected by early childhood environment either.

In any case, unless the discrepancy is quite large, I would tend to think that it becomes insignificant in terms of generalized statements about each ethnicity, especially since the vast majority of the two populations will overlap.

On the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most common test used for adult IQ measurement, the standard deviation is 15 points. I've also read that blacks score on average 15 points lower than whites, and to have a full standard deviation of difference would be pretty big. However, more recent studies have blacks' IQ scores going up pretty sharply since 1980. I have no idea what conclusion to draw from this except that education for American blacks has improved dramatically in the last 30 years. But if half the things RedImperator tells me are true, I don't see how it could ever have been much worse than it is now.

My source for most of my info here, by the way, is this. The American Psychological Association's Board of Scientific Affairs established a task force in 1995 to make a consensus report on what IQ is and isn't, as a response to the controversy created by the book The Bell Curve. My link goes to the full text of the report - I trust the APA to know what they're doing here.

[Spin Echo]

People shouldn't get into the trap of assuming that the argument must be false because it is so offensive. It is always possible, although at present unsubstantiated by evidence, that there is actually an IQ gap between whites and blacks. The problem is that even if this were the case, 99% of the two ethnicities would overlap anyway, so the two races as a whole would not show significant deviation.

I'm pretty certain that there is an IQ gap between blacks and whites (just considering the US at the moment), but that it has mostly to do with the fact that a higher percentage of blacks live in poverty than whites. Like Edi said, poor nutrition has been shown to have a significant impact on IQ, and I can't imagine ghettos are the best place for early childhood mental stimulation.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Jews and Poles had the lowest IQ scores in the country when they were first done. Poles now score the same as any other whites, and Jews are at the extreme upper end of the white range for IQ scores.

[Lagmonster]

As an aside, I once heard that it was the policy of colonial American slave owners to only breed the largest and strongest slaves, while executing the ones which displayed signs of intelligence; one particular claim is that the benchmark for execution was literacy - a literate slave was deemed too intelligent and thus bad for the slave gene pool. In this way, goes the story, whites were attempting to literally domesticate blacks into a race of people capable of exceptional physical labour but too stupid to coordinate retaliation or escape.

[Lord of the Abyss]

However, more recent studies have blacks' IQ scores going up pretty sharply since 1980. I have no idea what conclusion to draw from this except that education for American blacks has improved dramatically in the last 30 years. But if half the things RedImperator tells me are true, I don't see how it could ever have been much worse than it is now.

IQ scores are going up worldwide.

[Gil Hamilton]

Lots of things affect IQ. They've found, for instance, that girls and boys who have minimal contact with their mothers and fathers (respectively), have a significant drop in IQ compared to children who do, without significant variation based on race, and even more when one or both is abusive in some way. It can be found that variations on IQ scores based on race turn out to not have much to do with race.

However, James Watson was always a prick. He didn't even discover the actual correct structure of DNA. He and Crick actually only sniffed out that it was a double helix on their own, but their model was inside out. A woman named Rosalind Franklin and her associate Maurice Wilkins were the ones who discovered the correct structure of DNA, with both Dr. Franklin discovering both crystallized forms, how to separate the two forms, and producing the x-ray crystallographic evidence that allowed the correct model to be made.

Watson and Crick did discover base pairs in DNA and that they could be used as the means for heredity, but what happened was the Watson and Crick got access to her results very likely without her knowledge and published them with their own conclusions and model.

Given that Dr. Franklin did virtually all the legwork in discovering DNA's structure (including the absurdly clever method of separating DNA crystals), she should have gotten the Noble prize, not the least of which on being a pioneer in work on the structure of viruses, including polio... but never did, even posthumously after her early death to cancer. What's worse (and here's what's actually dickish), Watson when writing about the discovery of DNA completely downplays Franklin's role, saying she was Witkins underling and that the men did all the work.

[Master of Ossus]

As an aside, I once heard that it was the policy of colonial American slave owners to only breed the largest and strongest slaves, while executing the ones which displayed signs of intelligence; one particular claim is that the benchmark for execution was literacy - a literate slave was deemed too intelligent and thus bad for the slave gene pool. In this way, goes the story, whites were attempting to literally domesticate blacks into a race of people capable of exceptional physical labour but too stupid to coordinate retaliation or escape.

I can believe that there's a genetic legacy of slavery on black populations in the US (IIRC, there's a theory that American blacks are more susceptible to sodium intake, for instance, because being able to store salt was so strongly correlated with survival during the "Middle Passage"). Literacy as a proxy for intelligence, though, is highly dubious. Yes, whites in many parts of the nation did their damndest to keep black slaves from learning to read, but literacy even today has a lot more to do with environment than any inherent attribute--what's the literacy rate in the US, now? 98%+ for people born and raised here? There are some people who can teach themselves to read, but even that has a lot to do with environment.

As for the original guy, I suppose there's no reason to completely dismiss his theory out of hand--an offensive argument can still be correct. Nevertheless, it seems very unlikely to me, given current trends in education, that any effect on IQ of race is particularly powerful. Black test scores have increased, and tend to be highest in integrated school districts, which indicates a much more substantial environmental component to education, but the higher levels of achievement in integrated areas also suggest that the difference in inherent intelligence, if any, is minor.

[Mayabird]

All this "genetic legacy" stuff ignores the fact that most American blacks are part white. Plantation owners thought nothing of raping their slaves, and any children were also considered to be black slaves, no matter how many white ancestors they had. That's how many "black" people can be quite light-skinned, even to the point of being lighter than me after I got a band camp tan, when in Africa everyone is very dark except for albinos. In the U.S., it's a social construct more than any actual genetic thing.

And even then, the gap is there. Interestingly, in some tests with young children, if black kids were told that they were being given an IQ test, their scores were a standard deviation lower than that of white kids. When they were told that it was a game, though, they scored higher than the white kids.

(Similar tests have been done with other groups on stereotyping and self-handicapping. For instance, testing a group of Asian women. If they are told that women do worse than men on a test, they usually do badly. If they're told that Asians do better than everyone else on the test, they perform very well, even if it's the same test administered to two identical groups. Sorry about not remembering the numbers - I don't have my books with me.)

[Spoonist]

The counterargument (made by the IQ test advocates) is that IQ doesn't actually change all that much from before to after education:

That is not true. Training on doing IQ tests will increase the score.
This means that if the education teaches similar stuff that is on the IQ test then you will increase your IQ score, problem being if everyone else is doing it as well then it will average out. However if you have one educational system that teaches similar logical problems and a different educational system that does not then there will be a difference.

[General Soontir Fel]

Hell, don't most IQ tests also have a gender bias?

I've heard that while the average IQ for men and women is the same, but the women's scores tend to cluster around that average more densely. In other words, percentwise, there are more men than women at both the upper and lower ends of the scale.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I am going to take this opportunity to say that Watson is and always has been a fucking douchebag. In fact, he has been a fucking douchebag of the highest order ever since he, crick, wilkins and Rosalind Franklin's graduate student stole Rosalind's crystallography data and used it to posit their double helix model, relegating the paper that Rosalind published in the same issue of nature coming to the same conclusions to a companion piece, robbing her of the recognition that she deserved at the time.

Then after she was dead, Watson published The Double Helix and in that book proceeded to minimize and verbally lambast the woman who literally died from X ray induced ovarian cancer to unwittingly give them their data.

So fuck him. I hardly expect better than racist misogynistic bullshit from him