"A Nobel prize-winning scientist who reportedly claimed Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence is no longer welcome to deliver a lecture at London's Science Museum, the museum said Wednesday.Cautionary note: People have a tendency to see statements about groups as applying to all members of that group. That is rarely so and is certainly not true in this instance.
James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering DNA, drew widespread outrage when he told The Sunday Times that Africans and Europeans did not share the same brain power.
The newspaper quoted the 79-year-old American geneticist as saying 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."
The comments drew condemnation from British lawmakers, scientists, and equality campaigners.
Watson, who serves as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, was due to speak Friday at a sold-out event at the Science Museum, but on Wednesday night the institution said Watson's comments had gone too far and the lecture had been canceled
Source
There is no inconsistency in saying that blacks as a whole are less intelligent while also acknowledging that some individual blacks are very intelligent. What is true of most need not be true of all.
Scientists have spent decades looking for holes in the evidence Watson was referring to but all the proposed "holes" have been shown not to be so. There is NO argument against his conclusions that has not been meticulously examined by skeptics already. And all objections have been shown not to hold up. There is an introduction to the studies concerned here
Some commentators have mentioned that old Marxist propagandist, Stephen Jay Gould, as refuting what Watson said. Here is just one comment pointing out what a klutz Gould was. And for an exhaustive scientific refutation of Gould by an expert in the field, see here. Gould's distortions of the facts really are quite breathtaking.
Watson got such a lot of abuse over his comments that he has now denied that he made them. The newspaper that originally reported the comments stands by its story, however.
(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
18 comments:
if evolution can effect height and dentition then it can effect intelligence.
smaller gene pools which have been cohesive for tens of thousands of years are going to exhibit many similarities and commonalities.
but we must always remember that a just society judges people on the basis of their individual talents..
and we must remember that IQ is not the sum total value of a human.
there are many high IQ white people on the left who are morons.
also: while these facts certainly argue against affirmative action they in no way argue for discrimination of an individual based o his membership in a group.
leftists want things given to people based on their membership in groups or classes - this is what collectivism IS.
we on the right want people to earn what they can based on who they are as individuals with NO REGARD to race or gender or anything else.
MERIT not class/group/race membership.
By saying what he said, Dr.Watson was politically incorrect but factually absolutely correct.After all he is that old time Brit who were men of substance and did not mince words to call a spade a spade. After earning such a great great glory as he earned it is his bad luck to be living even now among the present decadent Brits who just dont match in qualities with the erst while Brits who were people of leadership and courage.
Britain declined because it chose the path of political correctness deviating from its original foundation of pioneership through truthfulness and fairness.
The blacks in Africa were certainly better off under colonial rule. Can any one name one black country which is well managed and better now than it was under colonial rule. There is SA but it is wealthy bcze it was the last to get independence and also that a sizeable number of Asians & whites still manage that country.Very few Blacks are qualified to manage. They will do it eventually but not now.
Even Social processes evolve over time. Europe did not become what it is today in a day. By extending the same social systems which suit the more enlightened societies to the less evolved all one will get is degradation, decadence and indiscipline.Its like giving total freedom to manage himself to your 8 year old kid. Wont he flunder?
The Indian Labour laws- borrowed from west- are example how they have spoiled the native work force ( organised sector) through rules that envisage excess freedom and too much democracy with out matching accountability.
Getting work from a factory worker is no easy task in India unlike in Europe where a worker most often does his job sincerely.
In the same tone if you see you will agree with what Dr Watson has said. Lets not condemn that graet man. He only spoke the truth.
Marxists repudiate nature’s principle of the survival of the fittest and substitute it with eternal privilege for the numerical mass. But their dead weight leaves them floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery which is what brought the communism down under in the erst while soviet empire.
I do fully endorse your view friend that merit alone shall count regardless of race, gender etc. That alone brings the results and peace.
How do you feel about the fact that if you believe these studies, you also have to believe that Asians are more intelligent than caucasians?
nunya - these are all generalities.
and only somewhat useful at all.
the generality that we are all the same is of the same usefulness that some are different.
as i said: society should judge us individually.
but no one should be forced to deny the truth because it is not pc.
the usefulness of this generality is that we should not presume all races have the same distribution of any particular trait.
Yes, it's nice to see how far we've come...
Saying that 'blacks are on the whole less intelligent, but there are highly intelligent blacks' is nonsense. All Watson or anyone else whose skimmed 'The Bell Curve' can say is that of people who did poorly on IQ *tests*, blacks outnumber whites. Inferring genetic predisposition is outside the scope of what is being tested.
For instance, it's also true that working-class children do worse on IQ tests (in school overall, actually) than the affluent. If you look at the data, poor Caucasian children do worse than affluent African Americans, while Asian and Polynesian children blow both out of the water completely. Girls beat boys consistently. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that 'Poor children do worse than those who are rich, children of high-school dropouts do worse than children of college graduates, and girls do better than boys' etc etc.
Caucasian children who speak English but did not grow up in an English-speaking household also perform in the exact range as Hispanic children. Speaking Spanish at home puts you at the same disadvantage as speaking German. Also, children in the Southeast do worse than children in the Northeast. Are we to conclude there's something in Southern drinking water that makes the children stupid?
Of course not.
None of these are causes. They are correlations. In statistics, this makes all the difference in the world. Having a child who is Caucasian is correlated with certain IQ test scores. Being from the South is correlated with lower test scores. None of these are proximate causes. Their white skin isn't making them any smarter than their Carolina accent. They're datums which likely correlate with proximate causes (i.e., a parent who is a high-school dropout is likely to be poor, and due to the work schedule they would have to maintain to get by couldn't provide the same attention as a rich college graduate. The percentage of working class people to middle/upper class is higher in the South than in the Northeast, and so on and so on...)
Rather than look for any pseudoscientific excuse to say what you are clearly ashamed to believe in, it would be better if you took a refresher course in the scientific method and statistical data.
You may also be interested in recent work by economist Steven Levitt (author of Freakonomics), which demonstrates that at a young age there is no racial discrepancy on IQ test performance.
Thomas Sowell has ably addressed the topic of race, genes, & IQ a number of times.
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/2003_archives/000792.html
The sordid history of "scientific" racialist thought should be of particular concern for Jews.
Harry Laughlin, first president of the Pioneer Fund and director of Cold Spring Harbor's Eugenics Record Office (closed in 1940). Laughlin argued against admitting Jewish refugees from Nazi-era Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Laughlin
Richard Lynn, affiliated with the Pioneer Fund and American Renaissance, recently published an article positing that Oriental Jews are genetically stupider than Ashkenazi Jews. I wonder what Lynn thinks of Ethiopian Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
While some "race realists" are not antisemitic, there is clearly some overlap between "race realists," right wing anti-neocons, and anti-Zionists.
VDARE, one of the web's more high-profile "race realist" sites, publishes the writings of Kevin MacDonald.
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_B._MacDonald
One can dismiss criticism of "race science" and eugenics thought as Marxist political correctness, but of course Marx himself was a racist and Trotsky was a eugenicist, as were many leftists of the period.
The "race realist" community held high hopes for microcephalin and ASPM as rock-solid proof of racialist claims until that was demolished.
http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2005/09/brain_evolution.html
archie: does evolution effect everything EXCEPT IQ?
would be having any discussion if the trait involved was height or wight?
if pigmentation can be distributed in clumps why not IQ?
"we on the right want people to earn what they can based on who they are as individuals with NO REGARD to race or gender or anything else."
Can you see what a pompous ass you are? Anything else? How about the property deeds or money you inherit? The money you earn through passive investment? Your family or aquaintance connections with perspective employers? None of these has anything to do with meritorius individual contribution of course, but you are loathe to give up any advantage they afford.
In the worlds of entertainment and sports, ineptitude can't be hidden. If my dad owns the Boston Celtics and gives me a spot in the lineup when I'm not the best player, the sheer openess of the contest exposes my mediacrity quickly and I could not keep the job without the franchise suffering.
It is no coincidence that black people do so well in professional sports and entertainment at a higher percentage than their race's percentage of the overall population. They are obviously drawn to the colorblindness of the competition.
"there are many high IQ white people on the left who are morons."
Do you see the humor in this statement? The meaning of the actual word "moron" specifically brackets an IQ range.
It is therefore impossible do have both a high IQ and also be a moron.
I know sometimes we tend to demean peoples intelligence just when they disagree with our political views, taking the most contradictory elements of anothers point of view out of context and putting it fourth as evidence of their stupidity.
But in this forum where you all seem so interested in condemning a whole continent of people because of their performance IQ tests, you'd at least expect you'd use "stupid" or "misguided" or "laughably without real world reasoning skills" to debase people you disagree with.
james --
you're projecting attitudes on to me which i do not share.
(1) i'd like to eliminate legacy admissions as well as affirmative action.
private property is private property and there should be ZERO inheritance tax.
as a matter of fact, for most people this is true,
networking is human - we can't change that.
but it must have a check and balance when the public money/tax-dollars are at stake.
LIKE NO RFK AS USAG.
nepotism in private companies cannot be challenged. it can and should be at publicly held firms LIKE THE NYTIMES!
and er um: jfk/rfk and the sulzbergeres were/ARE LIBS!
anyhow, this is a separate argument.
we shall have it another time.
the POINT HERE is that admissions and hiring should NOT take skin pigmentation into account.
which means that IQ distribution between the races is irrelevant.
individuals should be hired/admitted for their INDIVIDUAL merit.
not membership in any group - not race not gender not anything.
james:
no one here is condemning anyone on any continent.
each race is different. we are each different.
iq is a complex trait.
it's usefulness is determined by the individual.
plenty of hi-iq folks are dumb.
and race itself is merely a heuristic device: there's lot's a crossover and no pure races.
african-americans are not the same as africans and tribes in africa vary as do families.
that's why we must judge each other as individuals.
Eat shit, racist piece of shit.
Reliapundit: "does evolution effect everything EXCEPT IQ?"
The question is whether there are marked differences in genetic potential for intelligence between human continental populations ("races"). That is a separate issue from whether there is a genetic component to individual differences in intelligence. The former does not necessarily follow from the latter.
Incidentally, not only have racialist hopes for microcephalin and ASPM been blown away, but so has the very notion of an unprecedented Upper Paleolithic revolution 40,000 years ago in Europe, an important part of Lahn's original model as well as some other scenarios.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=7931213
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2007/03/human-evolution-radically-reappraised.html
Richard Lynn and JP Rushton do not simply posit significant differences in frequencies between races for various alleles involved in brain function; they argue that Africans have a profoundly lower distribution of genetic potential for intelligence than do Europeans and Asians.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3LYQKAUL5NV5N/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race,_Evolution_and_Behavior
Reliapundit: "would be having any discussion if the trait involved was height or wight?"
In fact, height is a good example. Besides a few exceptional groups ("pygmies;" at least one group has been show to have growth hormone insensitivity), various populations have remarkable similarity in genetic potential for height. However, populations differ markedly in manifested height due to differential nutrition, disease, and other conditions. This phenomenon can be seen in immigrant populations in the West (Japanese American studies) and with rising socioeconomic status (Bantu in Africa). And although races have very similar genetic height potential, inter-individual differences in height have a genetic component.
Similar to the Flynn effect in IQ, there has been a secular trend in height, with groups becoming taller over time due to improved conditions.
relia pundit says:
"no one here is condemning anyone on any continent."
So I am left wondering whether he read the original post which has Mr Watson saying:
he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because of the inherent genetic propensity of Africans to score low on IQ tests.
If I was a multinational corporation's geographic planner who decided not to site a plant in Africa because of it's purported "gloomy prospects" as asserted by Mr Watson, how can you say the continent hadn't been condemned by this IQ/race generalization?
Relia pundit dishing high minded advice: "that's why we must judge each other as individuals."
Earlier: "there are many high IQ white people on the left who are morons."
I guess you just left out the opposite of that statemet which would read:
There are many high IQ white people on the right who are morons.
Which you must also believe if you only are judging others as individuals, right?
Tell me then, why did you tell us about the white morons on the left but not the right? Might it be that you actually do have a tendency to judge an individual's intelligence by a group they belong to?
BTW so far in your responses you haven't spoken to any of the criticisms of your point of view at all.
Your first point was people should be afforded opportunity strictly on individual merit. When I pointed out the many things people can have that win them opportunity but but have zero correlation to individual merit, you went out of your way to endorse those items as being inalienable measures of peoples worth, but didn't tell us why they should have impact given your stated philosophy of "NO REGARD to race or gender or anything else." Isn't your philosophy really: NO REGARD to race or gender but anything else is nobodies business?
I don't believe in collectivism or egalitarianism either by the way, but you should at least fess up to reality that this idea of us only needing to strike down government preferential treatment programs to create fairness is wildly self serving. You me and the rest of the 5 or 10 percent of the world population born into high income societies have hit the jackpot through no "meritorious" accomplishment whatsoever. Our wealth and stature continues to be fed by the underclasses that are upwardly striving to achieve what we were born into and through no effort of our own bid up the worth of our possesions and production.
Yes, this is a good thing and a healthy system, but please spare me the sanctimonious "it wouldn't be fair to give people of less privelege any special consideration" over us who have been gorged on silver spoon servings relative to the world's masses.
And in your second response when you go on about how IQ is such a complex and incosequential trait with many gray areas and nuances, and no one should judge an individual based on it, what is your point? This thread is about IQ generalization isn't it?
Are you saying that the posted IQ/race generalizations are accurate and should be duly studied and published about but no one who disagrees with the theories put fourth should care?
That then begs the question as to why the people who put fourth these opinions do it? Are they doing it to create some sort of backlash to facts? The backlash being fortifying affirmative action programs and more fervent activism for racial causes against those who would use the data to casually rank one race substandard and therefore fully expected to generally acheive a lower station in life?
You are a rather uninteresting pundit. You stand up for a guy who is generalizing about the lower IQ of a race, and you wax poetic about a "merit only" based society.
Your only comments at all about all the things completely unrelated to individual merit that afford people opportunity in private life are basically yes, they exist and should continue and should even be further unbridled.
Your comments about the very subject of the thread, IQ, are basically: IQ doesn't really matter anyway so why bother disagreeing with a guy who I loudly proclaim is right beyond question.
iq doesn't matter for everything.
and it is located at the individual, not the group.
individuals have IQ's, groups do not.
period.
the distribution/frequency of higher iq individuals doesn't have to be the same among all families/regions/races/tribes DOES IT!?!?
why would it be? how could it be!?
if you think it is then please tell me what's the evolutionary mechanism to make sure all groups have just as many high iq people as all other groups!?!?!?!?!?!
there is only ONE solitary factor in evolution within species: "the differential of reproductive success."
if higher IQ doesn't have a positive effect on the DORS for a group/gene pool then higher iq will not be present in increasingly higher numbers in that gene pool.
higher iq is generally good, but not always better.
hence the fact that it has unequal distribution.
some tribes/races/groups have no use for it. and much more use for other things.
but races are bigger things than tribes and families. and what are easily recognizable as individual and family traits have less cohesion as one goes to the tribe and race.
we are more like our brothers and sister than cousins and more like our cousins than distant relatives/tribe member and more like our tribe member than other tribes and more like our race than other races.
but at each level many of the traits become more diffuse. especially ones tied to many genes.
and we must also remember that races are not as separated as they sometimes seem. as they superficially seem.
that's why we must judge people as persons first. on their own merit.
wtson said some bad shit - but it was based on FACTS.
we should deal with the facts, not the PC rhetoric.
if evolution effects distribution of height and skin pigmentation, it effects distribution of IQ and anything else.
the way out of this is NOT to take race into account, but to judge people as individuals.
race is not a good excuse for bad behavior nor should it be a guaranteed one-way ticket to success.
Post a Comment