Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer

Fury that anybody would say publicly what every single scientific study of the subject has shown

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times 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". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "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."

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of "scientific racism"....

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."

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6 comments:

  1. I for one wouldn't dream of saying that Dr. Watson is right or wrong...

    Yet when I read the wisdom of people like Dr. Thomas Sowell or Dr. Walter Williams, just to name a couple examples I find what Dr. Watson has to say rather hard to swallow...

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  2. Oh come on. Intelligence doesn't meaningfully work that way, and juandos gives just a couple of examples why.

    You can't get meaningful data about intelligence out of poverty destitute areas while controlling for for things like malnutrition very early in life. This, of course, is a confounding factors in state-side studies, along with different nutrition pattern s early in life.

    Even if that wasn't true, how do you get a representative sample? And even if you could, how could you know that it was genetic when we simply don't know what an "intelligence gene" might even look like.

    And even if neither of these was true, why would *this* difference between people - rather than more deep seated concerns about ideology - would be something that we'd want to care about. Life is short, political resources are finite, and we have to make choices. There's a genuine concern about this kind of rhetoric.

    You'll say "yeah but it's true". I don't think it is, but if it was it wouldn't justify approaching the problem *this way*. It's the same indict we make of W&M's Israel Lobby argument - you can't say *that* in *that* way because it works by appealing to tropes and prejudices that are quite unseemly.

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  3. i have no problem accepting the fact that we should each be taken as equals before the law even though none of us are the same.

    likewise i have no problem with the generalization that one family or race or tribe or species have in general certain traits.

    what i do have a probelm with is discriminating for or against individuals because they can be said to belong on one family or tribe or race.

    this is what affirmative action does. it is racist.

    we should all be judged as individuals.

    race is one of many factors.

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  4. "this is what affirmative action does. it is racist"...

    Cha! Ching!

    No argument from me on that well turned comment...

    So back to Watson's claim, I wonder what happens to the following discovery and how it will be explained?

    Twelve years ago scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded from DNA studies that "Eve," an ancestor common to all modern humans, was an African. Now scientists in South Africa have tracked "Eve" to the Khoisan peoples, who are the oldest indigenous group in southern Africa

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  5. eve was a dumb broad!

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  6. You should read the link given to the summary of research in the area

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