Thar's racism in that DNA
Well, easy to predict this will cause all sorts of outrage.
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 problem, of course, is that what most “intelligence” tests actually measure is knowledge, not intelligence. Science has yet to come up with a quantifiable way to measure intelligence, at least last I checked. That automatically introduces biases into the tests by the selection of the knowledge being tested for. Saying that "testing" has shown anything about racial "intelligence" is just flat out wrong.
There are also any number of environmental factors that probably have far greater effects on people’s reasoning ability than any purported genetic differences could; such as the chemical soup we live with in the industrialized world and malnutrition as a child.
It’s also pretty clear from some other comments Dr. Watson has made that he’s not exactly the most fair and open-minded individual out there:
In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."
Admittedly, I kind of like that last one, at least in theory. In practice, if the modeling world is any indication, it could lead to a depressing sameness in what “pretty” means. But I digress.
The whole idea of genetic selection for intelligence, or some other trait, has always fascinated me.
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 reason its fascinating is because it is to some extent true. Anyone familiar with animal breeding can tell you that’s its more than possible to selectively breed for certain traits, and geographical isolation can bring with it changes in different populations.
Where it breaks down, (well, one of the many ways), is in the assumption that somehow living in Africa compared to living in Europe wouldn’t continue selecting for intelligent people over stupid ones.
In fact, an unbiased assessment of such an idea would have to recognize that Darwinian pressures for weeding out the less intelligent specimens of humanity would be the greatest in the areas of the planet were survival is the most difficult. People in the Western world are a bunch of fat, lazy slobs compared to most people in Africa or other parts of the developing world. If this theory is accurate, people in the developing world should be leaving us in the dust intelligence-wise.
One other thing animal breeding can teach us, is that being highly selective in your breeding regimen has the unfortunate side effect of a very limited gene pool, with all the ugliness that implies. It’s no accident that the push for “perfect” cattle or other types of livestock have left them hugely susceptible to being wiped out by a single disease or infection because of their too-close genetic similarity. Or that the healthiest type of dog or cat you can have is a mongrel.
There also isn’t any human populations so isolated that their genetic material isn’t well mixed in with the rest of humanity. To pretend otherwise is beyond foolish, and frankly, given what I said above about evolutionary pressure, I'm thinking we white folks should be grateful for that.
