I wouldn't be too bitter about it, though. Some don't even have the potential. 
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."
ironically one of the last and most recent studies I’ve seen on why black IQs lag and was funded by a univerisity was done by guess who?
Thomas Sowell
Yeah, but they make better barbecue sauces, and Fats Domino records!
Uhm, no, the Aborigine would eat more often. DieHard the Hunter. Mmmm, the other white meat!
Hear hear! They are pathetic, I agree. They do treat people according to their race and not the content of their character.
For instance, the Michael Vick situation: the NAALCP defended him--and no one can convince me it wasn't based on his race. The content of his character was ignored.
Some of my best friends are Revolting!
And you can prove this assertion how? Unless there is written documentation that his recitation is accurate, then you only have his word that it is valid. You may accept that as verification, but I have seen oral history in action. Watch the commercial for Oreo Cakesters as an example. If you haven't seen it, it starts with a kid a school cafeteria opening a pack of new Oreo Cakesters. The word that he has a pack begins to spread across the room in whispers. By the time the message gets to the other side of the room, the message that kid X has new Oreo Cakesters evolves to the point that the message becomes that kid X has his first chest hair. The point is no matter how much effort is involved, a message gets garbled more and more with each retelling until it no longer resembles its original form.
I'm having trouble coming up with Al Gore's one field of expertise. Tobacco farming?
I believe this is true, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve met enough Jews to think that they are, as a race more intelligent than Anglos. Same for many orientals, although they work very hard, so may make up for intelligence differences. Does that make me bad? Of course not. Intelligence is just one factor in life. There will always be someone smarter or taller or better looking than you. so what?
Are there individual blacks that are more intelligent than whites? of course. We’re talking about millions of people here. I can name some more intelligent than me. So what?
Are Anglos taller than orientals on average? Is Yao Ming taller than me? Does that mean that Anglos are not more intelligent than orientals? We’re talking averages here.
Intelligence is correlated to financial success but not a guarantee. Not sure about other scales of success.
I truly believe that most people think blacks are not as intelligent (on average) as whites, but are afraid to say it because of political correctness.
I also don’t think that just because one person is more intelligent than another that they are ‘better’. This is nonsense. Further, if you talking about success and happiness scales, it takes more than intelligence.
recitation is indicative of recitation
i used to could recite Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride word for word....all 130 odd lines
and I’m dumb as an ox....just ask anyone here who knows me
tolerance of cannibalism is not considered a benchmark in civilization-speak
though who am I to say..lol
exceptions to the mean does not discredit the mean
why do folks insist it does?
> And you can prove this assertion how? Unless there is written documentation that his recitation is accurate, then you only have his word that it is valid.
Actually that particular argument is as old as it is tired and irrelevant. You can prove their “assertion” by cross-reference — as you can expect their genealogies cross-reference and inter-twine amongst the various branches, and with very few exceptions multiple recitations of the whakapapa will agree: right down to the name of the canoe that their ancestors arrived in New Zealand in, and where that canoe landed.
Knowing who you are and where you came from is a matter of vital importance to Maori — always has been. And so they spend an inordinate amount of effort ensuring that they know.
Just because their “documentation” isn’t written doesn’t make it invalid. Even the courts in the US and Canada have recognized the validity of oral history amongst Indian tribes.
This is a concept that takes a fair bit of getting used to, to the Western mind. We are not accustomed to thinking along those lines. But that doesn’t make the concept invalid: only different.
> tolerance of cannibalism is not considered a benchmark in civilization-speak
(grin) except if your civilization is scattered across tiny fly-speck islands separated by many thousands of miles of clear-blue Pacific Ocean, and particularly if these islands do not have an abundance of Protein for your diet. True, the Pacific Ocean is chock-full of fish, but many of these peoples did not learn how to catch fish in quantities sufficient to feed their entire populations.
In that context, cannibalism is a logical, pragmatic and civilized solution to their dietary problems at hand.
True, cannibalism is very hi on our “yuck-factor” in Western Civilization: we haven’t had to cannibalize because our civilization was fortunate enough to develop in places where agriculture and hunting were possible.
Spend some time in the South Pacific and you’ll probably find that — like me — you will develop first a curiosity and then a deep appreciation for exactly how clever these civilizations actually were.
I’ve recently been looking into how it is possible for them to have navigated their way between islands — reliably — using stone-age technologies. They did not have a compass, and did not have a concept of “North” or “South” or “Lattitude” or “Longitude”, and they did not have a reliable time-piece for calculating their position. And they did not even have a way of writing down their techniques...
And yet, for generation after generation they were able to pass along this knowledge and reliably undertake these amazing expeditions over many thousands of miles of open ocean.
Speaking personally, I would think two or three times about attempting such a feat, even with a modern boat and a GPS and all the trimmings. Yet they did it with the casual attitude of taking a Sunday afternoon drive.
Sadly, over the past 100 or so years, much of this knowledge is becoming less-and-less available and is disappearing. That is a real shame.
> Uhm, no, the Aborigine would eat more often. DieHard the Hunter. Mmmm, the other white meat!
(chuckle!)
Asians and American Indians consistently score higher (on average, this says nothing about the tail of the distributions) than Europeans. Africans consistently score lower.
The American Indian scores make the cultural deprivation argument pretty weak. By most measures, American Indians are are poorer and more deprived than Blacks. But indians are primarily Asian in anscestry (land bridge and all that).
The counter example is Jews in 1900. They consistently performed worse than other Europeans on IQ. Of course, that has corrected itself over the years.
One could argue this suggests that some IQ differences are explained by cultural issues--but they go away over time while others are genetic--American Indians and Asians. Those differences, of course, persist.
It's a difficult topic because noone wants different races to be smarter or dumber than others, at least noone I know. But the evidence suggests (not overwhelmingly) that it may be true.
As to the argument that IQ means nothing, it is just silly. Look at the chart in the Wikipedia link above. That's just for non-hispanic whites. Look at the difference IQ makes on nearly every measure of life performance.
I wouldn't be too bitter about it, though. Some don't even have the potential.
> 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.
I’m not entirely sure we disagree on that point. The “Nature” vs “Nurture” debate is a long one, and an antient one, with plenty to recommend on either side of the debate.
Dogs are a good example of “Nature” being important. But without the “Nurture” the best-bred dog in the world might as well be a stupid mutt.
That said, you cannot bring out what God did not put in.
So, like I said, I am unsure whether we agree, or whether we disagree. It’s an interesting point of debate, to be sure.
Does that mean brown bears are more advanced than Pacific Islanders or Hannibal Lector?
on that note I can think of plenty of folks I'd like to eat....hmmmm...some have been particularly yummy over the years
why do folks insist it does?
I didn't.
As in a movie called Shaka Zulu or sumtin like that?.........Sorry, can't call "what they did very well"etc etc what we call civilised..Btw, my wifes nurse during her cancer was Maori....
>> what they did very, very best of all: making war on each other and on other peoples
>
> As in a movie called Shaka Zulu or sumtin like that?.........
Shaka Zulu would have been about Zulus in South Africa — next door to NZ in a way, but a very long swim from here.
> Sorry, can’t call “what they did very well”etc etc what we call civilised..
We would surely agree that one of the things that America does very, very best of all is making war on each other and on other peoples, true?
(Think it thru carefully and I’m sure you will agree: America has a superb war machine for international use. And internally, all is not sweetness-and-lite in a Smurf sense: there is plenty of urban violence, and there are well-organized methods such as the Police and the National Guard for dealing with such internal strife).
If we allow for the above, then surely your position is a dichotomy. The Maori achieved with sharpened sticks what the Americans achieve with fighter jets: it is merely a question of time and scale.
In which case, it is only fair to acknowledge that the Maori were civilized.
> Btw, my wifes nurse during her cancer was Maori....
Alot of our nurses end up overseas because they are not paid properly here in NZ. Your wife would have been in superb hands, as NZ nursing standards are amongst the best in the world. I hope she has had a full and swift recovery from cancer.
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