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'Black people are less intelligent than whites', claims DNA pioneer (James Watson)
Daily Mail ^ | 10/17/07

Posted on 10/17/2007 1:36:52 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster

'Black people are less intelligent than whites', claims DNA pioneer

One of the world's most eminent scientists is at the centre of a row after claiming black people are less intelligent than whites.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has drawn condemnation for comments made ahead of his arrival in Britain tomorrow for a speaking tour.

Dr Watson, who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said 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".

He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

He includes his views in a new book, published this week, in which 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," he says.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is now studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full".

Dr Watson arrives in Britain to promote his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, told the Independent: "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 exist at the highest professional levels."

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA.

He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

He has served for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics.

He has courted controversy in the past, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.

He has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos.

He also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University, told the Independent: "This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain.

"If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."


TOPICS: Extended News; News/Current Events; Technical
KEYWORDS: africa; african; africans; bellcurve; crick; dna; eugenics; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; huxley; intelligence; iq; jameswatson; junkscience; nobelprizewinner; race; racerelations; racial; racialsupremacist; racism; racist; racists; watson
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To: puroresu
Of course, egalitarians are largely responsible for the current abortion holocaust.

Keep in mind that Watson is a Democrat, and you could certainly argue that many liberals support Affirmative Action, the welfare state, and abortion because they secretly believe that blacks are too stupid to be productive citizens, and thus they must be culled or paid off by the government.

261 posted on 10/17/2007 12:44:13 PM PDT by LWalk18
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To: TigerLikesRooster

One thing for certain. Threads like show how very alive PC is in the GOP. No wonder the GOP is doomed.


262 posted on 10/17/2007 12:44:44 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
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To: cowboyway
Talk about your dumb blanket statements.........
Unless 99% of the Caucasians that you see everyday are retards.

No. A simple comparison of the intellectual prowess of Sowell vs. "x" when "x" is your average white person will reveal the same. Why is that so hard to understand?

263 posted on 10/17/2007 1:05:12 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat ((I am SO glad to no longer be associated with the party of Dependence on Government!))
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To: Recovering_Democrat
Thomas Sowell is more intelligent than more than 99.9% of the caucasians you'll see on any given day. We talking about average levels of intelligence here, not about isolated individuals.
264 posted on 10/17/2007 1:08:40 PM PDT by contra9602
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To: Jedi Master Pikachu
Slave owners were not beholden to keep families together, and many slave children were separated from their fathers early on--or if the father was European descended, their father disowned them, and even from their mothers when they were older. And that has led all the way to today, where having a single parent family is normal to many Americans of African descent.

Black single parent homes has little to do with Slavery and majority of the blame goes to Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson and Socialism. Census records as early as 1890's through the late fifties show a largely intact if poor black families.
265 posted on 10/17/2007 1:09:34 PM PDT by RedMonqey ( The truth is never PC)
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To: DieHard the Hunter
Guess agree to disagree--sort of. Agree with your basic premise, that if people have a 'stupid gene,' they could pass it down to their children.

However, would argue that such a 'stupid gene' (or 'smart gene') has only a tiny effect, and that how the children were raised, their food in utero and as younger children, and the environments in which their relatively recent ancestors grew up would have more of an effect than their DNA. Thus, a child with a pedigree of stupid people could be a prodigy if some of the environmental factors come into play in a way to foster intelligence.

266 posted on 10/17/2007 1:12:16 PM PDT by Jedi Master Pikachu ( What is your take on Acts 15:20 (abstaining from blood) about eating meat? Could you freepmail?)
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To: JimSEA
Which Black people is he talking about. Science tells us that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is in the entire remainder of the world. This article does not make much sense. Name then a single African country that reached at least half the level of the poorest European Country.
267 posted on 10/17/2007 1:14:46 PM PDT by contra9602
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To: DieHard the Hunter
I suspect it would take the university student longer than 3 days to learn how to survive in the Outback

You completely missed the point of my post. It would be far easier for an modern man to learn to live in the Outback than an Stone Age tribesman to learn to live in a modern society.
268 posted on 10/17/2007 1:16:02 PM PDT by RedMonqey ( The truth is never PC)
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To: HuntsvilleTxVeteran
He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

If they are it will never be published.

The irony is that various enthusiasts will readily believe in the heritability of all kinds of characteristics, in a vacuum of evidence, but will rear up in outrage at the idea of inherited differences in intelligence, for which a large body of evidence exists. The problem is that the evidence works for individuals but not for racial groups in countries like the US, where too much genetic mixing has taken place to test the racial hypothesis. Effective population testing for Africa has not been done and never will be for obvious political reasons. So the proposition will remain conjecture for the indefinite future and open to demagoguery from all sides.

269 posted on 10/17/2007 1:16:57 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard
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To: cowboyway
Hell, you'd probably be making jokes about it.

No doubt. To quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in re: the sterilization of a white woman, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

But we all know intelligence can't be an inherited trait. It just can't be. Why? because...because...well. It just can't. that's all.

270 posted on 10/17/2007 1:22:35 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard
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To: contra9602
In the middle ages, both Ethiopia and Mali were both comparable to European countries (and both out of the zone dominated by the The tsetse fly and malaria). The spread of Islam, chronic diseases and colonialism since haven’t helped. The scourge of drought and disease pushed people out of Africa to begin with and have hindered civilization since.
271 posted on 10/17/2007 1:34:45 PM PDT by JimSEA
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To: RedMonqey

> You completely missed the point of my post. It would be far easier for an modern man to learn to live in the Outback than an Stone Age tribesman to learn to live in a modern society.

I don’t think I missed the point of your post at all. My response is that a modern man would not have the luxury of alot of time to learn how to live in the Outback. Dropped into that environment s/he would surely die after a very short time.

So in many ways your experiment fails, based upon practical constraints. The Aborigine subsists day-to-day in a “school of hard knocks” that would preclude your university student from studying there.

As to Stone Age tribesmen, one can look to the Maori as excellent examples. It took very little time for them to adapt to Europeans and assimilate, to some degree, into modern society. There are plenty of Maori in universities, and more than plenty have degrees.


272 posted on 10/17/2007 1:44:06 PM PDT by DieHard the Hunter (Is mise an ceann-cinnidh. Cha ghéill mi do dhuine. Fàg am bealach.)
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To: contra9602
We talking about average levels of intelligence here, not about isolated individuals.

Exactly. Which is why I also said:

"...Knowing how someone thinks, maybe how they vote, will tell you more about their intelligence than their race...Al Gore & Ted Kennedy, trust fund rich white boys, are almost as smart as a bag of hammers.

So race isn't necessarily a factor, you see, in determining intelligence."

So while there may be an assertion about average levels "across the board", so to speak, that need to be tested, we still deal with each other as individuals. So I treat you as an individual person and do not see you exclusively as a member of a race.

273 posted on 10/17/2007 1:51:03 PM PDT by Recovering_Democrat ((I am SO glad to no longer be associated with the party of Dependence on Government!))
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To: TigerLikesRooster

Bump for later


274 posted on 10/17/2007 2:10:38 PM PDT by JDoutrider
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To: JimSEA

Ethiopia is considered to be the oldest nation in the world. It’s never been colonized. Yet, Ethiopia is also the poorest country in Africa.


275 posted on 10/17/2007 2:25:23 PM PDT by contra9602
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To: Recovering_Democrat

Tell that to the liberals who treat people according to their racial group. (affirmative action)


276 posted on 10/17/2007 2:29:02 PM PDT by contra9602
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To: Son House

Are you sure this isn’t a Sherlock Holmes story?


277 posted on 10/17/2007 2:33:08 PM PDT by phillyfanatic
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To: LWalk18
The idea that some people do not have the innate cognative ability to lead a productive life in modern American society is something that no one wants to accept

But no one has said that. What some have said including myself is that some groups have more innate skills to prosper in the modern world than others.

I think the proof is in the pudding.

278 posted on 10/17/2007 2:42:37 PM PDT by wardaddy (Behind the lines in Vichy Nashville)
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To: puroresu

Folks today including sadly what appears to be a majority of conservatives simply disregard or smear facts they don’t like.

Even our president does it over Islam (same God) and immigration (doesn’t matter what culture folks come from).

It is insanity that will eventually be our undoing.

We have already dumbed down quite a bit from my youth culturally. I’d say 25% at least.

just like our average height goes down each year....so does our collective IQ across the board


279 posted on 10/17/2007 2:45:57 PM PDT by wardaddy (Behind the lines in Vichy Nashville)
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To: contra9602
Ethiopia has been in a constant state of war with Islam and colonial powers with Italy pretty much laying waste to it in the last century. A country dependent upon trade as was Ethiopia is brought down when the Muslims came to dominate the African trade. Recent governments haven’t done much to help (socialism never does).
280 posted on 10/17/2007 2:48:37 PM PDT by JimSEA
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