The past week saw the greatest controversy in a year ignited by the seemingly racist comments of the 79 year old Nobel Laureate James Watson.
Watson who shared his Nobel with Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the Double-helical structure of DNA, had always been at the helm of controversies mostly b’coz of his fascination for Eugenics.
The latest of his comments on intelligence and race came in an interview in Sunday Times on Oct 14.
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 adds that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. 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”.
Watson was quick to apologize for his biased and baseless comments once the interview became controversial and his credibility challenged not just by the general public, but the scientific community as well.
He said …”to all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
But whatever he said now, the damage has been done. Watson’s claims on “evidence” regarding intellectual levels of races have given the right wing neo-conservatives a chance to reiterate their anti-reservationist, anti-pluralistic demands toppling political balance everywhere.
Watson knows very well that there aren’t any statistically significant evidence to suggest that there are genetic differences in intelligence among human races identified in studies yet. In fact the last part of what is quoted as his statement (about the possible differences in the evolution of intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated) may be quite plausible, but reading Watson in the context that he himself has set up through his eugenic rantings in his “post Nobel” years reveals a “prejudiced” man.
The funniest part is in two simple but powerful facts of neurobiology and cognitive science:
- there are as yet no IQ tests that are perfectly culture-free and context-independent which can be administered universally to all sects of Homosapiens
- no genes identified yet have been directly linked to any kind of animal intelligence.
Without satisfying these two ideal conditions, it is scientifically impossible to extract objective evidence regarding intellectual inferiority and superiority at the genetic level.
Page 3 Tag: Watson’s own reputation had been under question for long when new revelations about the role of Ms. Rosalind Franklin in the ‘DNA helix discovery’ and how her data was used in the discovery without giving her any credits came out. Story goes that Ms. Franklin was ungratefully excluded from the Nobel winning work after Watson and team “stole” the data from Ms. Franklin. Ever since the allegations came up, Watson had been attacking Ms. Franklin (even after her death) passing comments on her being intellectual but autistic and so on.
The Sunday Times interview is here.
See also :
Intelligence – Myths and reality
Evolutionary Socialism – a cause for affirmative action.
If only this guy spent some time reading Prof. Diamond instead.
“From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle,displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.”
That is infact a glimpse of what that distinguished professor has to say. Yeah, right, one can reasonably suppose that New Guineans wouldn’t be able to read and understand ‘Of Grammatology’. Damn it.
regards..