[MCP] DNA Pioneer Claims Africans Less Intelligent than Whites

[Julianne McNalley]

While Watson's comments are inexcusable, I am even more disgusted by the number of quotes of people saying that he "isn't racist."  

"Tracey de Morsella (formerly Tracey L. Minor)" <tdlists at multiculturaladvantage.com> wrote: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=488232&in_page_id=1770
On the eve of his arrival in Britain today to publicise a new book,
Watson, who at Cambridge University in the 1950s helped identify DNA,
declared himself to be 'gloomy about the prospect of Africa . . . all
our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the
same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really'.

Watson said he hoped everyone was equal, but added: "People who have to
deal with black employees find this not true."

Human rights groups and fellow scientists immediately expressed their
anger and dismay that a respected scientist could publicly state such
dangerous, divisive and unsupported opinions.

Watson, however, argues that it is an uncomfortable scientific truth,
even if it will be proved only when the genes which determine
intelligence are identified sometime in the next decade.

Steven Rose, a brain specialist and professor of biological sciences at
the Open University, said that Watson was 'out of his depth
scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically'.

He added: "This is Watson at his most scandalous. I have heard him say
similar things about women, but I have never heard him get into this
racist terrain."

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific
breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at Cambridge in the
1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure
of DNA.

He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with
colleagues Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

He has been director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long
Island in America - a world leader in research into cancer and genetics
- for 50 years.

In that time, he has never been shy of controversy, his public
utterances leading to him being accused of sexism, racism, homophobia,
sizeism and, occasionally, of being simply mad.

He once advocated the bombing of Japan when it refused to support a gene
programme.

Even his fans have described him as 'insensitive'.

On one occasion, he was reported as saying that a woman should have the
right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be
homosexual.

But he surpassed himself during an extraordinary lecture he gave at
Berkeley university seven years ago, which caused a number of members of
the flabbergasted audience to walk out.

During his talk, Watson suggested that there was a biochemical link
between exposure to sunlight and sexual urges.

Black people had more powerful libidos, he said. This was supported by
the fact that when the skin of a number of white men had turned black as
a side-effect of a scientific test, they had immediately become sexually
aroused.

"That's why you have Latin lovers," he explained. "You've never heard of
an English lover. Only an English patient."

He went on to show a slide of a melancholy Kate Moss, saying that thin
people were unhappy and therefore more ambitious.

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad because you know you're
not going to hire them," Watson said.

Afterwards, Berkeley genetics professor Thomas Cline said Watson's
lecture had 'crossed over the line' from being provocative to being
irresponsible because the senior scientist had failed to separate fact
from conjecture.

"If he wants to give a talk like this in his living room, that's his
business, but to give it in a setting where it's supposed to be
scientific is wrong," Cline said.

Listening to Watson at the podium was 'more embarrassing than having a
creationist scientist up there', he added.

Watson's latest pronouncements, in an interview in a British Sunday
newspaper ahead of his visit, will only add to his reputation as a
controversialist.

Scientists have been considering the relationship, if any, between a
person's racial origin and their intelligence for the past 200 years.

But their motives for doing so have often been highly dubious.

Often what they have 'found' has been driven by the desire to prove the
superiority of one race over another.

Or, as in the case of slavery, to justify ill-treatment.

There are echoes of Watson's contemporary thoughts in those of the
notorious 19th-century anti-abolitionist U.S. Secretary of State John C.
Calhoun.

In 1844 he declared that a scientific study of freed black American
slaves proved that 'the African is incapable of self-care and sinks into
lunacy under the burden of freedom.

'It is a mercy to give him the guardianship and protection from mental
death.'

A direct line can be drawn between the views of people such as Calhoun
and the Nazis of the 20th century and their concept of the untermensch:
that anyone born into non-Aryan races is inferior or 'subhuman'.

The next step is to be treated as such. The Holocaust and World War II
resulted.

Since the early 20th century, IQ tests have provided a way in which a
person's intelligence can be measured against another's.

And, predictably, those from poor, socially disadvantaged backgrounds
tended to come off worse. In western society, as in Africa, this
included most blacks.

And so the battle of nature versus nurture continued.

Was intelligence due largely to how you were brought up?

Or could it be genetically based and influenced by your racial origin?

In the past 40 years a number of scientists have argued that there is a
genetic difference among races which dictates intelligence.

In 1969, American academic Arthur Jensen delivered a research paper in
which he claimed to have found that whites were innately more
intelligent than blacks.

Treating them as equals was wrong, and they should be educated differently.

He declared: "A not unreasonable-hypothesis is that genetic factors are
strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference."

Colleagues lambasted his research and its conclusions.

But some of Jensen's central findings were echoed in the hugely
controversial and successful 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which supported the theory of genetic
causes for racial intelligence differences.

The resulting Bell Curve Wars were fought between its supporters and
critics, who said - among other things - that it 'was a chilly synthesis
of the work of disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists'.

The more extreme said it promoted genocide.

Such was the alarm caused that the American Anthropological Association
released a statement in which it declared itself to be 'deeply concerned
by recent public discussions which imply that intelligence is
biologically determined by race'.

It went on: "Repeatedly challenged by scientists, nevertheless these
ideas continue to be advanced.

"Such discussions distract public and scholarly attention from, and
diminish support for, the collective challenge to ensure equal
opportunities for all people, regardless of ethnicity."

Watson is only one, if the most famous, of those scientists who continue
to plough the racial intelligence furrow.

He argues that he has a very personal example of why nature triumphs
over nurture.

At the age of 39, he married a student, Elizabeth, who was 20 years his
junior.

They had two sons, the younger of whom, Rufus, was diagnosed as
schizophrenic and still lives with them today at the age of 37.

Rufus is another argument, he says, for nature over nurture: "I've seen
the failure of the environmental approach in a very personal way.

"My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn't want to accept this
for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn't have.

"He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn't respect that. We tried
to make him independent."

Last night, a spokeswoman for Watson's publisher, the Oxford University
Press, said: "There is no racism in the book. We stand by our book."

However, in one chapter Watson 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."

His first speaking date is in London tomorrow evening, before a
400-strong sell-out audience at the Imax cinema in the Science Museum.

Doubtless, the book will be prominently displayed.

It is called Avoid Boring People - a deliberate irony perhaps, given
that being boring is about the only thing of which Watson has never been
accused.

===========
Nobelist's Race Comments Spark Outrage

By MALCOLM RITTER – 37 minutes ago

NEW YORK (AP) — James Watson, the 79-year-old scientific icon made 
famous by his work in DNA, has set off an international furor with 
comments to a London newspaper about intelligence levels among blacks.

The renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson served as 
chancellor, suspended his administrative responsibilities Thursday 
following the outcry, the laboratory said in a news release.

Watson has a history of provocative statements about social implications 
of science. But several friends said Thursday he's no racist.

And Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for co-discovering the 
structure of DNA, apologized and says he's "mortified."

A profile of Watson in the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted him as 
saying that he's "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."

While he hopes everyone is equal, "people who have to deal with black 
employees find this is not true," Watson is quoted as saying. He also 
said people should not be discriminated against on the basis of color, 
because "there are many people of color who are very talented."

The comments, reprinted Wednesday in a front-page article in another 
British newspaper, The Independent, provoked a sharp reaction.

London's Science Museum canceled a sold-out lecture he was to give there 
Friday. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said his comments 
"represent racist propaganda masquerading as scientific fact.... That a 
man of such academic distinction could make such ignorant comments, 
which are utterly offensive and incorrect and give succor to the most 
backward in our society, demonstrates why racism still has to be fought."

In the United States, the Federation of American Scientists said it was 
outraged that Watson "chose to use his unique stature to promote 
personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science."

And Watson's employer said he wasn't speaking for the Cold Spring Harbor 
research facility on Long Island, where the board and administration 
"vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and 
saddened if he indeed made such comments."

Watson is in Britain to promote his new book, "Avoid Boring People," and 
a publicist for his British publisher provided this statement Thursday 
to The Associated Press:

"I am mortified about what has happened," Watson said. "More 
importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted 
as having said.

"I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have 
reacted in the ways they have. To all those who have drawn the inference 
from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically 
inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. 
More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for 
such a belief."

Watson's publicist, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, would not address whether 
Watson was suggesting he was misquoted. "You have the statement. That's 
it, I'm afraid," she said.

A spokesman for The Sunday Times said that the interview with Watson was 
recorded and that the newspaper stood by the story.

Watson's new book also touches on possible racial differences in IQ, 
though it doesn't go as far as the newspaper interview.

In the book, Watson raises the prospect of discovering genes that 
significantly affect a person's intelligence.

"...There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual 
capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should 
prove to have evolved identically," Watson wrote. "Our wanting to 
reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity 
will not be enough to make it so."

Watson is no stranger to making waves with his scientific views. In 
2000, in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, he 
suggested that sex drive is related to skin color. "That's why you have 
Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended. "You've never 
heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."

Some years earlier he was quoted in a newspaper as saying, "If you could 
find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't 
want a homosexual child, well, let her."

"Jim has a penchant for making outrageous comments that are basically 
poking society in the eye," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the 
National Human Genome Research Institute, said Thursday.

Collins, who has known Watson for a long time, said his latest comments 
"really ... carried it this time to a much more hurtful level."

In a brief telephone interview, Collins told The AP that Watson's 
statements are "the wildest form of speculation in a field where such 
speculation ought not to be engaged in." Genetic factors for 
intelligence show no difference from one part of the world to another, 
he said.

Several longtime friends of Watson insisted he's not a racist.

"It's hard for me to buy the label `racist' for him," said Victor 
McElheny, the author of a 2003 biography of Watson, whom he's known for 
45 years. "This is someone who has encouraged so many people from so 
many backgrounds."

So why does he say things that can sound racist? "I really don't know 
the answer to that," McElheny said.

Biologist and Nobel laureate Phil Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, who's known Watson since 1971, said, "I've never 
considered Jim a racist. However, Jim likes to use statistics and 
observations to provoke people, and it is possible that he is provoking 
people by these comments."

Calling Watson "one of the great historical scientific figures of our 
time," Sharp said, "I don't understand why he takes it upon himself to 
make these statements."

Mike Botchan, co-chair of the molecular and cell biology department at 
the University of California, Berkeley, who's known Watson since 1970, 
said the Nobelist's personal beliefs are less important than the impact 
of what he says.

"Is he someone who's going to prejudge a person in front of him on the 
basis of his skin color? I would have to say, no. Is he someone, though, 
that has these beliefs? I don't know any more. And the important thing 
is I don't really care," Botchan said.

"I think Jim Watson is now essentially a disgrace to his own legacy. And 
it's very sad for me to say this, because he's one of the great figures 
of 20th century biology."

Associated Press writers Thomas Wagner in London and Seth Borenstein in 
Washington contributed to this story.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ha6Uxje06Fv054CU7LwK0-qiqNogD8SC14GO0



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