Why no one wants to hear from James Watson

I was just thinking, I’ve met another nobel laureate who had to do the resign-rather-than-get-fired thing for telling a young women (during office hours for a physics course he was teaching) that she should leave his office because women did not belong in physics, and he wasn’t going to answer her questions.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t an old, white British Racist/Eugenicist.

OTOH, he did fight for Germany in WWII…

The sheer number of Nigerian princes who don’t have the intelligence to hang on to their fortunes, and whom I always feel obligated to help as part of my “white man’s burden”, would seem to prove Watson’s point.

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During my freshman year of college I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Watson when he was the guest of honor at my university. In fact, somehow I got have a 30 minute chat with him and a handful of other students. At this time I was in total awe of being in the presence of a Nobel Prize winner and dreamed of a career as a scientist. So, I asked him for his best advice for a freshman just starting out. His response went something like this:

“Science has a lot of luck to it. But to get that luck you need to have a really intelligent idea. However, rarely, if ever, in your life will you have a truly intelligent idea. So, my piece of advice is just to find a nice girl. And when you have either a nice girl or an intelligent idea, hold tight and don’t let them go.”

There’s likely some paraphrasing there, as it’s been nearly two decades, but for me it was the first sign that Nobel winners were, indeed, human beings.

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Watson is American. Crick’s the Brit.

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As the linked story makes clear, Watson has been a jerk from the beginning.

It has always seemed to me that something as big as the discovery of the structure of DNA required the sacrifice of a virgin, and Rosalind Franklin drew the short straw. Her ovarian cancer very likely was related to her (overly careless) work in X-ray crystallography.

It’s easy to discard Watson as a racist, but his position on race and evolution is multifaceted.

In the same controversial interview, Watson also said that you should not discriminate “on the basis of color”. More importantly, he then said:

“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”

You can take this out of the black vs. white context by examining the fact that East Asian IQ test scores trend higher than whites. There could be many reasons for the disparity in test scores, and of course there’s no one reliable universal measure of intelligence, but there’s no reason not to explore the possibility that certain races, ethnicities, or geographical groupings may have superior abilities (intellectual, artistic, athletic, etc.). Part of a scientist’s job is to ignore current societal taboos. Watson may have run his mouth insensitively, but he shouldn’t be dismissed.

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The irony is strong in this one…

Yeah, except people who have wanted to prove the superiority of whites have explored this idea to death.

I mean it; work on this has actually killed the notion that there is any real evidence for such disparities. It’s killed the notion that there are lineages separate in their evolution; contrary to what you quote, humans turn out to be a single genetic cline with less diversity than some tribes of other apes. And it’s also done a good job showing that there are reasons not to keep reviving this possibility, that digging and digging in hopes of some evidence that certain races are inferior does not amount to harmless investigation.

Yes, Watson says you shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of color, but he immediately cancels it with a but: “but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lowest level”. That might be sensible advice to apply to employees in general, but he only recommends it for black ones; he doesn’t object to giving some people the benefit of the doubt, just not them, because while we might want them to be equal “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

And surprise, requiring that black people prove they have talent in contrast to everyone else is discrimination. So him saying you shouldn’t discriminate based on color is empty words. He thinks you should, because everyone just knows they are not equal; and yet as I’ve said, people who try to control for factors like poverty have found no evidence that this should be true.

Supposing differences between supposed races without evidence does not become a multifaceted position just because you throw in a nonsense evolutionary explanation without evidence. The reason it’s been easy to discard Watson as a racist here is because he is saying racist things, of the exact same sort racists have been pushing for a long time now.

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Sold!

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[quote=“JonathanR, post:15, topic:47603, full:true”]
It’s easy to discard Watson as a racist, but his position on race and evolution is multifaceted.[/quote]
Those facets in a nutshell are: being racist, and claiming not to be.

There are a lot of multifaceted racists of this sort out there.

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By whom? The Nobel committee? Or the 1950s culture in general?

I don’t know, Cynical provocateurs who are too clever by half still piss plenty of people off.

But Watson does seem to believe that many forms of behavior – such as “Jewish intelligence” (his phrase) and the basketball prowess of black men in the NBA (his example) – could, possibly, be traced to genetic differences among groups 1

Sweet! I’m off to the synagogue tomorrow morning to get me some of that “Jewish intelligence”! I wish I had known getting smarter was just a matter of converting to a different religion.

And herein lies the beauty of Science and the Scientific Method.

James Watson was clearly a racist jerk. He’s not alone in being unpleasant. Several advances in Science have been made by deeply unpleasant people. William Shockley, who got his Nobel for the discovery of the Transistor, was a racist and a eugenicist.Werner Heisenberg was possibly a committed Nazi (there is some uncertainty about this, ironically), and even the Internet’s favourite- Richard Feynman was an arrogant, brilliant, bongo-playing jerk to everyone around him who he felt were beneath him (which was nearly everybody, especially his poor grad students)

But from a scientific point of view, none of this matters. The mysteries of the universe are there to be uncovered by anyone, no matter what their politics, or their personality. If your hypothesis is correct, the entire universe will attest to its correctness with every experiment and every result.

On the other hand, it does not matter how prestigious you are, or how popular you are, or how saintly your views- if your ideas are flawed, then they will fail to be replicated and they will fall. This may seem unfair to people who believe in a just world, to those who want the “good people” to be right, to those who skip from “ought” to “is” with all the dexterity of an alpine chamois; but the wonderful reality of the Scientific Method is that it is wonderfully, brutally egalitarian. What is, is. And that does not change.

Even if you’re a complete fucking jerk.

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To get a complete statement, replace “several” with “many” and “Science” with anything . A large number of talented scientists, philosophers, writers, painters, musicians, etc., were not very nice people. That doesn’t diminish their contributions.

Of course, some of these talented scientists, philosophers, writers, painters, musicians, etc., used their considerable influence to directly screw over individuals or even entire groups of people (Soviet mathematician Lev Pontryagin immediately springs to my mind). It pays to remember that.

This is quite a bit less clear-cut than it seems. While the scientific method does not play favorites, it is the people who actually decide what constitutes a worthwhile or a worthless idea. It is the people who apportion the credit, who review/publish papers, and who make the hiring decisions. Ideally, one would hope that good science triumph over bad prejudice, but in reality it does not.

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I would say the difference between your views is measured in decades if not centuries, rather than degree.

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Not exactly certain what you’re driving at. We know that different races have physical differences, because we can see them. We know that different races have genetic differences, because we can examine them. And we know that different races perform differently at different tasks, for example, the extreme dominance of West African descended runners in sprinting events. It seems that you are proposing that although there are known physical and genetic differences among races, to propose that psychological or intellectual differences could exist constitutes racism?

Another way to abstract it is to avoid IQ testing as a measure of intelligence, and to instead examine races under the lens of the theory of multiple intelligences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences . Under such a model, is it fair to propose the possibility that different races might be skilled in different intellectual areas?

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What possible benefit of this “research” could you imagine that would come even close to making up for the dredging up of the brutal historical legacy, and inevitable unintended (and for many, totally intended) collateral outcomes of such work?

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Getting the existing differences properly quantified in a multidimensional way, shown to be too meaningless to base policies on, shut up those who claim the differences are big enough to matter much, and serve as a base for genetics-capabilities correlations for future improvements by genetic modifications?

Do it, and do it bloody well. The precedents gone bad had sucking methodology and distorted results.

Supposing it might have been a theoretical possibility is fair. We all know evolution wasn’t required to make everyone equal, and they probably wouldn’t be if some subspecies like neandertals or denisovans survived.

Saying it is likely the case may be racist. It definitely demonstrates an ignorance of how hard people wanted to prove it, and how completely worthless all the evidence they could find or manufacture has proved, and just how many of the supposed differences are based on momentary prejudices. Sure, people now see East Asians as possibly genetically smarter, but only a generation or two ago they thought the opposite. Somehow it always tends to come down to trying to reinforce stereotypes, and no, that’s not an activity without its harms.

And finally, saying it is assuredly the case, after all everyone who works around black people can tell they tend to be less smart, maybe that’s why Africa is such a mess now that they’re in charge, is definitely racist. In fact it’s the completely standard-issue bigotry we’ve had for centuries now, and absolutely discredited as both incorrect and morally repugnant.

That’s all stuff Watson was actually saying, you know. It’s in the same comments you quoted, only for some reason you’re not acknowledging anything more than the just asking about possible differences between racial intelligence. Well, there’s one more example of how resurrecting that dead topic serves as way to paper over all sorts of racist crap.

If you were really interested in the question of differences between the races, you would do much better starting with the actual work done on the subject - and in particular, what the problems are - than trying to excuse someone for making bigoted assumptions about it.

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