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."
Twenty students left in the outback will survive and be inventing tools in a year that the aborigines hadn’t imagined in 10,000 years.
I just thought that your suggestion that people actually (gasp!) READ THE BOOK (gasp!) deserved an acknowledgement.
It makes a good read.
I'd say treasure the adversity as the fastest, most efficient and most thorough way to squeeze out the old genetic juice.
Thought not the least painful.
Rose is the English Stephen Jay Gould (who has been very quiet the last several years).
Capt. Juan Cabrillo was commissioned by the King of Spain to explore the west coast of North America circa 1540. He went with his men to the Pacific coast of Mexico, and from raw jungle built from scratch a fleet of 100 foot galleons. Iron, sails, hulls, masts, ropes, blocks, the lot. The only items brought from Spain were the astrolobe (sextant) and a few small cannon barrels. They built every stick and stitch into ocean going vessels from NOTHING.
After ten thousand years in America, the natives had not invented so much as a sailing dingy.
Keep the Guinness flowing, and I can do that and more back to Saint Patrick in Ireland! Trust me on it......Like DHTH does.
Hey, Squantos got a new UV lamp!
Yeah, I know him.
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.
Ding, ding, ding. We have a winnah.
(Eyes tight shut, hands over ears)
NO! NO! I WON’T READ THE BELL CURVE! IT’S EVIL IDEAS WILL POISON MY BRAIN!
Don’t forget to stomp your feet.
The question is not who has a higher IQ. The Question is, why do we fear reality.
What seem to matter most are character(being good-natured), 'psychological stability', prudence, perseverence,being loving, and taking an interest in things.
I think I've been to enough Mensa meetings now to appreciate the puzzle/strategy/memory/abstruse inference community without making a false idol of it.
And while I'm opposed to the 'anti-white'discrimination that seems too common nowadays, I don't see the point in making generalizations about the comparative abilities of any general group. We're not really called upon to judge.
You are a clear thinker! (BTW Ilove your homepage)
> Keep the Guinness flowing, and I can do that and more back to Saint Patrick in Ireland! Trust me on it......Like DHTH does.
Of that I am sure: if we keep the Guinness flowing Lord Knows what a man might “remember”.
> Twenty students left in the outback will survive and be inventing tools in a year that the aborigines hadnt imagined in 10,000 years.
Problem is, of course, that a year is about 362 days more than they will be allowed by the elements and the environment — for they will surely die in the attempt. The Outback isn’t the latest in the “Survivor” series, and you don’t get “voted out.”
The Aborigines would, instead, pick over their bleached bones and discarded i-Pods at their leisure, and make rudimentary-yet-effective tools as they have done for many thousands of years, and subsist in a hostile land that not even US Navy SEALS would like to call home for any length of time.
I would venture a guess that the average university student will die long before he has learned 20% of the skills that he would need to have survived. The average Abo, on the other hand, could likely learn the necessary math and literary skills soon enough to keep from being flunked out. (just my guess, based on the university grads that I have had to train for the job after hireing them.)
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