It certainly makes one wonder how Watson made the discoveries he did? He raises some questions that merit true scientific study but his approach to the answers is anything but scientific. (Is it possible that Watson "borrowed" his ideas on DNA from some unknown Black-Asian-Latino-Poor White Woman?)

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Do we like many an oil company just simply 'deny science'? Would the scientists 'cook their books' like Enron? What IF what he said was true, in some fashion? What would science and society do or respond? Simply deny it? Is that proper IF it was actually proven scientifically true in some regard?

It is absurd to assume that there are NO/ZERO differences between humans, being that humans are animals and therefore subject to nature's laws. Why should humans be immune from natural selection, evolution, etc? Why couldn't humans in some areas, separated by long-distances for thousands of years, develope different traits, intelligences, skills, emotional responses, cultures, etc.? Or, are the scientists, now denying evolution like their friends in Kansas?!?

Please note: I said IF true. Also note that it could be possible, and very likely, that one's definition of "intelligence" would also vary between cultures and types since some "intelligence" might develope to deal with some conditions/culture and another culture/condition might necessitate another type of "intelligence"....

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Instead of being offended and indignant why not take a look at what the man has to offer. If indeed there is a difference find out what it is and do something about it. We pay lip service to alot of people in this country. Making someone "feel better" is not enough. Self esteem does not pay the rent. Helping people adjust to their lot in life is immoral. Until very recently men were presumed to be smarter than women. That has changed. There must be a way to at least consider this mans' findings. Thanks, ANNA

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we look past what we see as obvious racism?
Perhaps schools in Africa are overall inferior to European schools (Oprah didn't open a school in Belgium). I definately disagree that race determines intelligence BUT maybe location, school quality and test scores makes it appear that the intelligence level of Africans is inferior.

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... the point he makes in principle (regardless of his comments about blacks, etc) is still true.

A retarded or autistic child is not going to be as smart as someone who is not. IQ does correlate well with job success if you study the literature, but it is certainly not the only factor.

People here have to face that some peope are just fucking stupid or also are not well born due to damage by organisms/toxins or genetic problems in development.

I have to deal with stupid people all the time at my business and believe me, I've hired some real stupid people who I thought would improve but never did after their temp period, wanting to give people a change.

When you own a business and your success counts on the ability of your employees to get the job done in a timely manner your perspective will change.

Watson is correct that designer children will be the future if the gene manipulating technology pans out, everyone would want to save their child from the horrors in the school system of being ugly, or a tendency to be overweight. Since ugly and overweight kids attract a large majority of the bullying and social ostracism.

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It used to be that the racists turned to religion to justify the rape, murder and slaughter of indigenous peoples in colonial European empires.

Now that the new high priests are 'scientists' (many of whom have no idea of what science is, despite have flattered their way into PhDs), the racists turn to 'science' to justify their behavior (science is what the guys in the white robes say it is, isn't it?).

Racists are scared, frightened people with huge insecurity complexes who need to invent reasons to feel superior to others due to the fact that they secretly hate themselves - and that's true regardless of the nationality of the racist in question.

Intelligence does have a genetic component of course - just look at humans and chimps, but the fact is that most people don't come anywhere near realizing their own inborn physical and mental capacities - that takes a lot of work and training. Everyone knows that if you train physically, you can get stronger, faster, more flexible, and can develop greater endurance - but for some reason it never seems to occur that the same thing applies to mental abilities.

Furthermore, the notion that intelligence correlates with skin color, or eye color, or curly vs. straight hair, is just more nonsense.

Development also matters a lot. One of the main factors is apparently very early childhood education and nutrition, for example.

The wealthy parent says, "We can't solve all these problems through throwing money at educational programs."

The poor parent says, "Well, that seems to work pretty well for your kids, doesn't it?"

The racist eugenic says, "Well, the white parent is genetically superior, and that's why they're rich!"

The racist religious maniac says, "Well, the white parent is blessed by God, and that why they're rich"

Which is just a load of B.S. Children of black and Asian and Latino parents who send them to exclusive private schools tend to do pretty well, don't they?

neurolingo.gnn.tv

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The problem being, what do you do if you prove it's true?

Even if black people on average were a few points lower, there would still be many intelligent blacks due to the fact that intelligence is a distribution, not a fixed point. It would simply make it harder for these people to get a fair chance in life.

Isn't that partially what the present education system does? Sifts people according to their inclinations and level of ability, at least to some extent. I can't see any use in establishing that a group might be biased in one way or another, since individuals vary so widely.

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Did people just not read the article? The author correctly points out that Watson's "argument" is inherently flawed because race is not a biological concept. It is a sociological concept. There is no relaible physical attribute that is a marker for "race", we made it up people! As to the genetics base of what we in the USA generally refer to as race, (ie skin color) tgere is very little there there. Skin color takes up almost no room on the human genome. If you are concerned with color and its relation to other inherented traits you would do much better to look at eye color. Genetically eye color takes up about 10 times the space on the human genome that skin color would. It is therefore logical to assume that if coloration influences intelegence then eye color is ten times as important skin color in determining intelegence levels. Which is, of course, idiotic. Just like James Watson.

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Watson is, and always has been, an old-school American eugenicist (the originators of "negative eugenics", i.e., the type of eugenics we exported to Nazi Germany, which they then practiced with such zeal). I've met him, and spoken with him many times. This is not a new or developing point of view for him. He's openly stated his eugenic ideas in public fora before.

His ideas are disturbing, because they show a complete ignorance of the social and biological consequences of allowing society to follow them. Yes, people with certain physical (and maybe mental, although the link between genetics and the mind is so weak and poorly understood that any discussion of it beyond the purely academic is uninformed at best) traits will suffer more in any given society.

But most of the reason for that is the problem of society, not biology. Let's take one poster's example of "ugly" children. Who defines what is ugly? That's a subjective social judgement, not an objective standard. It is a function of fad and fashion. Do we really want the physical attributes of people determined by other people (their parents) based on the fads and fashions of an era before they're even born? How would you like to have your entire wardobe for you entire life to have been decided by your parents at the moment of your conception? Now expand that to your whole being, not just your clothes. And that doesn't even begin to address the myriad deeper ethical or evolutionary problems it causes.

Don't believe that the technology would be abused for fad and fashion instead of simply being used to prevent genetic disorders? Yeah, and surgery is only used to correct physical injuries, deformities, and treat diseases, not to give tenenagers double-D breats. Plus, it's already being done. During in-vitro fertilization parents often select which embryos to implant based not just on genetic health, but also on genetically determined physical attributes that have nothing to do with health. The industry even has held discussions on how to market this option and expand it. As we discover "obesity"genes and other such "negative" genes, parents, generally completely ignorant of what those genes are or do will obviously want their child to not have those alleles, and change their genetics accordingly if given the option. However, we very seldom, if ever, understand the way in which these genes interact with the rest of the genome, or what the consequences of altering them would be.

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Whenever one of the "acclaimed scientist" postulates these ideas, it gets extensive media coverage.

Of course the media do the politically correct thing and roundly denounce the "very idea", at the same time making sure everyone hears about it.

Meanwhile, people are thinking, Well, blacks don't do very well, do they? We gave them their civil rights, and they still can't keep up.

And Look at Africa, and the Caribbean, those people must not be intelligent, otherwise they would be prosperous like Europe, The US and Canada, Australia.

Watch out, pretty soon "acclaimed scientists" will be promoting the idea that whites who aren't competing successfully are genetically inferior.

That there is no larger agenda designed to exploit, repress, or control, for economic advantage.

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We should not be surprised at any such conduct from Watson. Recall that his work that got the Nobel prize was based on x-ray crystalography actually stolen from Rosa Franklin, by one of her assistants, with the connivance of Watson.

Not only did Watson rely heavily on this stolen work, he gave not credit to Franklin.

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Eugenics and IQ models were used as tools of social control almost from the beginning.

"While it was Goddard who introduced the Binet scale to America, it was Lewis H. Terman who, as a professor at Stanford University, packaged it in the form which we recognize today. Terman's revision of the test, dubbed the Stanford-Binet, produced a rapid and rigid assessment tool which was strongly dependent on conformity to cultural norms and allowed no leeway for innovative responses. Terman also took Goddard's system of social classification by IQ number one step further, sorting out not only the "defective" but the able.

A just society, Terman proposed, would assign professions by IQ so that high- scorers received leadership roles while those with lower scores were assigned to various types of manual labor: "substantial success" required an IQ of at least 115, while the maximum I.Q. required for a barber was set at 85 and IQ 75 was deemed an unsafe risk in a motorman or conductor. Presuming that those who had failed to survive society must be the most unfit of all, Terman even launched a study of the IQs of "hobos and the unemployed." To his utter disbelief, average hobo IQs ranked above those of motormen, firemen and policemen."
The IQ Fallacy PART 2

Next, from a famous 1965 book- update the figures:

"Indications of anti-aristocratic bias should be interpreted in the light of the manifest economic bias of “special programs for the gifted child.” As Sexton justifiably stresses, programs for gifted children overwhelmingly serve youngsters from more affluent families. In the big city, about ten times as high a proportion of children with incomes over $7000 a year (1965) as from families from below that figure were chosen. And above $7000, the rate approximately doubles with each $1000 increment. Considering that selection is made on the basis of IQ scores, this is hardly surprising in itself. But if a higher IQ, whatever it may be, is both regarded as a gift, and strongly associated with high status, how can the school be called “anti-aristocratic,” when it provides lavishly for the gifted?

The problem lies in the precise nature of the gift. IQ tests reward a cognitive style that is especially bourgeois. While they demand a verbal facility and a familiarity with abstract symbolism, and with the goods, services and proper social attitudes of the middle class that make it be difficult for lower class children to give the right answer, they also penalize any youngster who approaches the test with the stance of the amateur, however gifted. Fanciful, original, or unduly perceptive answers are wrong. As are those that ignore or reject the commonplace assumptions of middle-class daily life.

When the tests include items like “policemen are usually….” it isn’t only lower-class children who pick answers like “down on kids,” in preference to “glad to help us when we need them.” To get the right answer, you have to be not only middle-class, but square."
Edgar Z. Friedenberg,
Coming Of Age In America

"[Steven Jay] Gould's most inflammatory allegation is to blame IQ testers for increasing the toll of the Holocaust. His thesis is that early IQ testers claimed Jews as a group scored low on their tests. This finding was then allegedly used to support passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, under which Jewish refugees were denied entry in the 1930s. Gould even claims that Henry H. Goddard in 1917 and Carl C. Brigham in 1923 labeled four-fifths of Jewish immigrants as ``feeble-minded . . . morons.''
The Christian Party

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Watson has reversed himself. Time does bring maturity.

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What Watson said is not supported by genetic science.

There are many possible explanations for lower test scores for people of African descent that do not require assuming their intelligence is genetically limited to some value less than other races. Affluence and test scores are linked, for example. I think nutritional quality also plays a role. So do cultural values and language proficiencies.

So Watson climbed out on a very thin branch, in scientific terms. What he said isn't supported. But there's something disturbing about the reaction of my fellow left-wingers to the entire brouhaha.

In science, it's completely ordinary to offer competing hypotheses to explain the natural world. Watson is no doubt influenced in his choice of hypotheses by prejudice. But that's normal, too. An scientific hypothesis is not rejectable because it's based on prejudice.

Here's the deal: if we aren't allowed to formulate hypotheses and test them, we can't learn the truth.

Watson's hypothesis is that Africans are limited by genetics to an inferior intelligence. It's an abhorrent idea to me, and seems, at least anecdotally, contradicted by people I have known. But science requires fearlessness. Truth is not discovered without it.

Watson's hypothesis has not been disproven. I think it can be disproven. But we should not be afraid to ask the question.

Let's grit our teeth and suppose for a moment that Watson's hypothesis eventually turns out to be, to one degree or another, correct: among the heritable traits in Africans, there is a gene or series of genes which inhibits some types of intelligence as compared to other races. Do you understand that the discovery would be, not an end, but a beginning? We'd have unlocked a part of the mystery that is the genetic contribution to brain functioning. Insights like this could help us develop ways to boost intelligence in humans of all genetic backgrounds.

Please understand I am not asserting that people of African descent are dumber than other races. I don't believe it. I think Watson is wrong. But let's permit science to ask *any* question, pose *any* hypothesis. Let's be fearless and let science do its thing.

One final note. Many people on the left, including the author of this article, have taken it as dogma that race is entirely a social and cultural construct. True, social and cultural factors are important. But there *are* heritable differences that distinguish races. They're fuzzy as hell, but they're there. It's natural that there should be heritable differences because of population migrations, subsequent isolation, and genetic drift. Some of those heritable differences are obvious, such as skin color or epicanthic folds. Some are less obvious, such as a higher rate of sickle-cell anemia in people of African descent. By no means can we be said to have untangled all of these differences.

The science of genetics is making progress in figuring out exactly what these differences are at the genetic level. What worries me is that the dogmatic left-wing will find themselves turned into science-bashers if science hypothesizes, then validates, something that repudiates a left-wing myth.

Let's skip the dogma, folks. There's no point bashing a scientist for posing a politically or socially unpopular hypothesis. Let him pose it, and let science test the idea. There should be no such thing as the unaskable question in science. And if one of our cherished beliefs turns out to be an ox that gets gored, we'll dispense with it, and figure out how to move forward.

Our values do not allow us to treat any human with less than compassion and equal opportunity, regardless of their genes. Nothing science can discover will change that.

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