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."
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.
One thing for certain. Threads like show how very alive PC is in the GOP. No wonder the GOP is doomed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Exactly. Which is why I also said:
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.
Bump for later
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.
Tell that to the liberals who treat people according to their racial group. (affirmative action)
Are you sure this isn’t a Sherlock Holmes story?
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.
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
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