Those evil white Europeans and their definitions of intelligence! How dare they!
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."
His statement was not a blanket statement.
Swedes are taller than Italians but that doesn’t mean that Swedish jockeys are taller than Italian basketball players. Even if Watson is correct, and no one can even define intelligence so I don’t know how he can be, knowing someone’s ethnicity tells you very little about the individual.
LAZARUS LONG
Expert, break it down.
EX = has been
Pert sounds like spurt
Spurt = drip under pressure.
EXPERT means a has been drip under pressure.
Me
Watson and Gore - - peas in a pod.
Exactly. Knowing how someone thinks, maybe how they vote, will tell you more about their intelligence than their race.
Thomas Sowell is more intelligent than more than 99.9% of the caucasians you'll see on any given day.
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.
There's that darn prejudice of scientific fact again.
yitbos
Stupidest thing I ever read. This guy, naturally, defines “intelligence” from an entirely white Eurocentric white, and he’s apparently not smart enough to realize that different peoples develop differnt kinds of “intelligence.
Even so, there are clearly brilliant black people all over the place by those same white Eurocentric parameters.
(Try this again....)
Stupidest thing I ever read. Watson, naturally, defines “intelligence” from an entirely white Eurocentric perspective, and he’s apparently not smart enough to realize that different peoples develop differnt kinds of “intelligence”.
Even so, there are clearly brilliant black people all over the place by those same white Eurocentric parameters.
Al Gore. Global Warming.
Talk about your dumb blanket statements.........
Unless 99% of the Caucasians that you see everyday are retards.
Dr Watson arrives in Britain to promote his latest book
God enlightened me.
It’s off to diversity training for him.
I'll bet if he had said,
"inherently gloomy about the prospect of Appalachia" 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",
that you wouldn't bat an eye.
Hell, you'd probably be making jokes about it.
“He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.’”
I smell a lawsuit coming from certain employees/applicants of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
What field is AlGore an expert in?
What possible testing can he be talking about? There are too many variables involved in any comparison to draw any rational conclusion. Another buffoon with a nobel prize.
Which Black people is he talking about. Science tells us that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is in the entire remainder of the world. This article does not make much sense.
“What field is AlGore an expert in?”
Any field where you’ve spread a lot of manure.
That is as old as the hills.
No disrespect intended.
BUMP
In general, German Shepherd dogs are “more intelligent” than Welsh Springer Spaniels...
...until you ask them both to hunt. The former thinks it is a game and will have great fun chasing the game. The latter takes it as a profession and will reliably flush game for Master to shoot. And if Master is too stupid to do the job, the latter will gladly bring home a few for him.
Comparisons like “intelligence” are unhelpful because it is an unfair and incomplete measure, and is always set within a given context.
I would rather be stuck in the Outback with an illiterate Aborigine than with a Doctor of Philosophy from Finland. Something tells me I’d eat more often and stay alive longer with the former than with the latter.
I like that one!
“Hello,” lied the politician.
You posted: Even if Watson is correct, and no one can even define intelligence so I don’t know how he can be, knowing someone’s ethnicity tells you very little about the individual.
***
You have made the important point here. There are certainly enough highly intelligent blacks and stupid whites that intelligence is a matter that has to be assessed on an individual and not a racial basis.
That said, I don’t know what the science may prove, but it seems to me that in the absence of evidence on either side, we should wait for the science to determine the answer.
Finally, why should science be concerned with social perceptions? If it turns out to be true that, as a race, blacks are less intelligent, as proven by valid scientific methods, should that science be censored?
Sort of like saying that we shouldn't reject the hypothesis that perhaps men have an inherent advantage in math, physics and peeing across the room?
Group differences in pigmentation, leaping ability and susceptibility to certain diseases are widely accepted. Such differences (e.g., pigmentation) are often the defining characteristics of different groups.
Suppose (not at all counter-factually) that Blacks (with equal incomes) save less than Whites and are more likely to default on mortgages. This is a perfectly valid empirical statement. It doesn't mean that some Whites aren't deadbeat spendthrifts or that many Blacks are not frugal and responsible. Given the validity of the supposition posed, what should the public policy implications be?
Fortunately, in our personal day to day lives, we don't have to act on suppositions like this: in fact it would be unwise to do so. Rather we should treat people as individuals, rather than as the embodiment of racial, ethnic, sexual or other stereotypes. I, for one, think the government should act the same way. In a democracy, the political pressures to create favors for certain groups, however, is overwhelming.
I remember during the 1969 World Series, the JDL was picketting Shea Stadium, "demanding" that since one fifth of the population of New York City was Jewish, five of the members of the 25 man rooster of the New York Mets should be Jewish. (Oy!). They were lampooning the demand of certain media selected Black leaders, that since (whatever fraction was valid at the time) of the students in New York City schools were (select your minority) the same fraction of school teachers should be also.
Winning teams don't pick baseball players that way, and we shouldn't be picking teachers, doctors or engineers that way either.
Echos of “The Bell Curve”. Bill Cosby has been speaking out against the self imposed non-development of intelligence but it’s falling on def ears.
I find it funny that politicians who probably have at most maybe 24 credit hours of undergraduate science think they can comment on the scientific findings that Watson has access to on a groundbreaking and daily level.
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".
The interesting part here is, there is no need to actually test the population's IQ or any intelligence related "Q" of choice, you can soundly make some of these arguments simply knowing the available nutrition levels of the population as a geographic group, and the population's ancestor's access to nutrition. It's only a matter of time now before what Watson said here is confirmed in some more definitive manner, that is if the PC politicians don't shut down any facility that gets close to this issue. I doubt the PC brigades will be able to hold the line here, parents/customers of designer babies will require that in vitro IQ testing be performed, and the gene sequences will have to be studied thoroughly. The market will find the answer,the genie will be out of the bottle.
That was my point. He's not an expert in anything other than politics (and in that he's a loser). So why did he get a Nobel prize? Why should anyone listen to him?
It’s an old argument of nature or nurture. I would tend towards the nurture argument and with the black race in total collapse (from the “nurture” and societal angle) which ends up producing the kinds of societal misfits in which one sees such a significant number (i.e., “percentage”) of their males in prison, as compared to the rest of the population.
Apparently Watson thinks it’s in a gene. It appears to be (to me) in their (sub) society and its total collapse.
Regards,
Star Traveler
So, how about who functions better in today’s society as contributing and functioning human being, operating within our given societal norms. You could start by asking the large population (percentage) of blacks in prison why they got there...?? Is it “white oppression”? Is that it?
And would you be choosing people of that group, “race-wise” to use as an example of how to function well in our society?
saving for later
> So, how about who functions better in today’s society as contributing and functioning human being, operating within our given societal norms. You could start by asking the large population (percentage) of blacks in prison why they got there...?? Is it “white oppression”? Is that it?
Watson spoke about “Intelligence”, and I guess I am saying that “intelligence” wouldn’t be the right measure.
The “white” and “black” thing in the US I have never understood, and greater minds than mine have tried. I suspect the answers to that question are far more complex than what can be explained by “intelligence”.
This is not true. I do not believe this for a second.
A very nice comparative, you both made excellent points. It boils down to the metrics utilized to determine intelligence. I am not sure you could exactly identify the metrics used as “caucasian centric” because Asians score 10 points higher on average on IQ tests.
I am just going to observe, interesting discussion. My theory counters the one posted, but still it is an interesting discussion. My theory is that I would have been stupid no matter what ethnicity I was born into, heh :)
Whatever one thinks of the tests, the results are incontrovertible that the black population taken as a whole has a lower mean/median IQ than the white population. Of course, it's also true that Ashkenazi Jews, the Chinese and Japanese have higher mean/medians than 'white' people. It's not 'racist' to note those facts.
There is also apparently an interesting phenomenon involving men and women: while the average for (white) men and women is the same at 100, the women's distribution is said to cluster more closely about the mean. What that means is that there are more men and fewer women at the extremes -- more men at the genius level but also more men who are mentally retarded. This could go a long way towards explaining some of the disparity between men and women in the professions requiring brilliance or something close - the hard sciences and mathematics.
Now, none of this means that any individual man is smarter than any individual woman, or that any individual white, Jew, Chinese or Japanese person, is smarter than any individual black person. Nor does it mean that cultural phenomena are irrelevant in determining how members of any population or subpopulation develop their natural talents which affects achievement significantly (perhaps as much as raw talent).
Instead of focusing on demanding that every group be 'equal' what would make more sense is to encourage the cultural traits that enable individuals in every group to achieve at the highest level possible for that individual. Bill Cosby, an obviously intelligent black man, is right that it is up to blacks to foster a culture that encourages achievement instead of handicapping blacks out of the gate.
After reading many comments, it appears that truthism lives on both sides of the political spectrum.
TRUE STATEMENT: Men are on average taller than women.
LIBERAL RESPONSE: Oh yeah? Then why was Ingrid Bergman taller than Mickey Rooney?
He was speaking with Africa’s native population in mind. Unfortunately that continent could use a human genome boost. Look at the Middle East, stuck in the ninth century because of Islam’s brainwashing. They need a genome boost, too.
Perhaps.....but it increases your odds of making a good guess.
LIBERAL RESPONSE: Oh yeah? Then why was Ingrid Bergman taller than Mickey Rooney?
CONSERVATIVE RESPONSE: Yes, as a GENERAL STATEMENT that is true. It doesn't mean that EVERY man is taller than EVERY woman. That's why is is called a GENERAL statement.
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