Posted on 01/01/2019 10:25:48 AM PST by reaganaut1
It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.
In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that 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.”
Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there.
He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public.
Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’
But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It's not as if James Watson was the first scientist to say there were racial differences in IQ. Arthur Jensen, a psychology professor at Berkeley, wrote about this from the late 1960s on. If the government tries to mandate equal results by race, we need to think about whether there are racial differences that make that impossible.
Well the kick off at Daytona isn’t that far off so racing season will............... Oh. THAT race.
He may be right but this does not say the next individual you meet is more or less intelligent.
One of the foundations of science is that a hypothesis must be repeatable to be accepted as true.
Thus any of the naysayers to Watson’s assertions are free to conduct tests and publish results that contradict Dr. Watson’s assertions.
Let me know when that actually happens, and which New York Times reporter is responsible for such a peer reviewed study.
Fact after verifiable fact confirms that there are measurable differences between populations on all measurable variables, including intelligence, but it is professional suicide to point this out; it must be explained away. The only solution would be to treat each person as an individual, to be rewarded per his or her individual performance and behavior, but that, it seems, is not acceptable.
Read The Bell Curve, but don’t tell anyone you did.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The IQ tests prove this over and over and over again. Like it or don’t. Feel micro-aggressed or don’t. Assume social norms make the test unfair or don’t. It doesn’t matter.
The fact of the matter is, different races’ brains are measurably different.
You are free to think like the group or lose everything.
He’s still alive!? I figured he had untwisted his helix years ago.
LOL!!! Yeah, you can't say that at a staff meeting, unless you say it within the first five minutes.
I find it interesting that blacks deem themselves more athletically superior to whites. But if THIS is true, why might it not also be true that whites are more intelligent? Of course , there are exceptions. in each case.
http://www.aei.org/publication/bell-curve-20-years-later-qa-charles-murray/
...An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution...
If you believe in evolution, almost as a default you must believe in the likelihood of measurable and significant differences among distinct groups within species, no?
Exactly. Probably more variation among group members than difference in the means of the groups, thus more overlap than deviation.
Another case is the difference between men and women. With men, intelligence distribution is broader, so there are both more geniuses and more idiots among men than among women. While the means are very close, iirc, the bell curve is flatter for men, with more outliers on both high and low ends.
The 4 seasons of non-Equator Africa may have caused the evolution of out of Africa persons to advance. The warmth of equatorial Africa may have kept the Africans to not evolve to higher ability to adapt. However, the problem with this theory is that Africa at the equator went through 1000 year cycles of heavy rain and tropical rain forest to the other extreme of drought and desert conditions. Thus the changes in Africa occurred much more gradually and were not noticeable over the time of a single life span. Thus, it could be that the so called 4 seasons of the year (yearly climate change) are a major contributor to evolution of humans.
“If that is the case, it may not bode well for combating prejudice in biomedical research, where African-Americans represent just 1.5 percent of grant applications to the N.I.H. Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.”
Bias? Or difference? The two are very different, but it is impossible to discuss race or sexuality in modern America honestly - or you WILL be destroyed! One cannot even go, “What if?”
My thoughts exactly. We are still all individuals.
Also, nurture, education, health and attitude are very important as to how “smart” you are. Not simply genetics.
Rich coming from the newspaper that hired and defended Sarah Jeong.
I am chuckling while imagining trying to have this discussion on, say, democraticunderground.com.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.