Top scientist claims black people 'stupid'

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Top scientist claims black people 'stupid'

Helen Nugent

One of the world's most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.

More fierce criticism of the eminent scientist is expected as he embarks on a number of engagements to promote a new book 'Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science'. Among his first commitments is a speech to a London audience at the Science Museum on Friday. The event is sold out.

Dr Watson, who 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 says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because 'there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level'. 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 claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission is studying Dr Watson's remarks 'in full'.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said today: '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.

Page 1 of 3 - Next Page

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2677098.ece

This piece of news proves that some white people (James Watson) are also stupid. Opps, i think Bush had already proved this long ago.

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Watson? These "prominent scientists" are often quacks nobody's heard of -- this is an actual giant.

Bleh.

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This is the same debate stirred up the "The Bell Curve" several years ago where a couple of statisticians tried to show that intelligence has a genetic component to it. If you can show that, then you open the door to all sorts of arguments like this.

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they also used to think women weren't as smart as men because they have smaller skull cavities- except that brain size matters less to intelligence than density, as scientists later found out.

this is particularly interesting in light of the charges that some of watson (yes, this watson) and crick's research was stolen from rosalind franklin, a woman that researched dna, viruses, and the molecular structure of coal.

watson may end up in a hospital getting heart surgery pioneered by a black doctor, under lights that wouldn't necessarily be there if a black lab worker hadn't discovered the filament that is still burning to this day in the edison museum, but what we should really hope is that an african american will discover some treatment for mr. watson's senility.

but is it senility? i don't know, that's just my "theory." stupid old racist bastard. actually, i bet he only mentioned it to get "favors" from ann coulter while she goes on her new campaign for the master race. lonely old white supremacists need love, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

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tinygiraffe wrote:

they also used to think women weren't as smart as men because they have smaller skull cavities- except that brain size matters less to intelligence than density, as scientists later found out.

this is particularly interesting in light of the charges that some of watson (yes, this watson) and crick's research was stolen from rosalind franklin, a woman that researched dna, viruses, and the molecular structure of coal.

watson may end up in a hospital getting heart surgery pioneered by a black doctor, under lights that wouldn't necessarily be there if a black lab worker hadn't discovered the filament that is still burning to this day in the edison museum, but what we should really hope is that an african american will discover some treatment for mr. watson's senility.

but is it senility? i don't know, that's just my "theory." stupid old racist bastard. actually, i bet he only mentioned it to get "favors" from ann coulter while she goes on her new campaign for the master race. lonely old white supremacists need love, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Well said!

Two black folks should visit him (one gangsta and one doctor), one should kick the sh!t out of him and the other should save his life.

(note: the title of this article/thread has now been changed by the UK paper, timeonline - i didn't make it up)

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Zippo wrote:

Two black folks should visit him (one gangsta and one doctor), one should kick the sh!t out of him and the other should save his life.

bad idea, because the news will only report the first story. the other might be aired at 11, but not before faux brings in a panel of "experts" to say "the great irony is that this only proves what dr. watson was saying just a week ago..."

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tinygiraffe wrote:

Zippo wrote:
Two black folks should visit him (one gangsta and one doctor), one should kick the sh!t out of him and the other should save his life.

bad idea, because the news will only report the first story. the other might be aired at 11, but not before faux brings in a panel of "experts" to say "the great irony is that this only proves what dr. watson was saying just a week ago..."

Quite right, very bad idea. Crying or Very sad

I have a feeling some black scientist will provide irrefutable proof that brain cells start to detererate as people get older. (hint hint) ==> "The 79-year-old geneticist" :wink:

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Watson has been known as quacky before, but I forget the reasons why.

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Isn't intelligence inherited? It isn't all social, right?

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squinney wrote:

Isn't intelligence inherited? It isn't all social, right?

It isn't all social. According to the textbook Psychology by David G. Myers, it's uncontroversial among researchers that intelligence is partly inherited. Myers cites five pieces of evidence:

Intelligence tests of identical twins differ about as much as idential people taking the same test twice. By contrast, tests of fraternal twins diverge much more.
Identical twins raised apart also have similar test scores.
Brain scans show that the brains of identical twins are physiologically much more similar than brains of fraternal twins. They are virtually identical in the regions associated with verbal and spatial intelligence.
Specific genes have been identified to be carried much more frequently by extremely intelligent people than by people with average scores.
By inserting an extra gene into fertilized mouse eggs, researchers were able to produce smarter mice, as measured by some sort of "cheese in the labyrinth" kind of test.

It is also uncontroversial that Blacks tend to score worse than whites in intelligence tests -- the average white person scores an IQ of about 100, the average black person an IQ of about 85. The controversy is about how to interterpret this correlation between race and intelligence. Possible explanations are:

blacks tend to receive inferior schooling due to lower income.
Blacks are more likely than Whites to live in a subculture hostile to intelligence, learning, and achievement.
The IQ tests themselves reflect the cultural biases of the people who wrote them, and who tend to be White.
There are genuine genetics differences between Blacks and Whites that contribute to the statistical discrepancy.

Needless to say, all the above explanations are mutually compatible. I don't think it's been settled which theory explains the data best, and I doubt it will be settled anytime soon. Race is such a hot button issue that I expect political pressure to doom dispassionate research in the matter.

None of this, of course, excuses Watson's remarks. His conclusions were overbroad, and he appears to have presented them in throwaway remarks where careful reasoning was needed. That was stupid.

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more about watson:

But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script."

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."

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece

and more...

he shocked a scientific audience at the University of California at Berkeley by making unsupported assertions about the supposed biochemical links between sex and skin color, fat and ambition.

Watson's thesis is that a chemical called pom-C breaks down into derivative enzymes that influence a series of behaviors.

One of the pom-C derivatives is melanin, which darkens the skin. Watson described an experiment in which melanin was found to have a Viagralike effect.

He contrasted slides of bikini-clad women with veiled Muslim women to suggest that sunlight stimulated sexual desire. At another point, he described how another pom-C derivative influenced the fat cycle, and suggested that heavier people have less ambition than thin people.

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad because you know you're not going to hire them," Watson said during a seminar on the UC Berkeley campus in October.

from:
http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Watson-OpinionsDefended.htm

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ossobuco wrote:

Watson has been known as quacky before, but I forget the reasons why.

Some of them are on page 2 of the article:

Quote:

Dr Watson is no stranger to controversy. He has been reported in the past saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.

In addition, 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."

Hmmm. I think I gave him too much benefit of the doubt in my last post. Personally I would let pass point 3 as a potentially useful provocation, but points 1 and 2 are nothing but crank sociology.

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I think Crick had trouble with him too, that is, on other than matters about the double helix. Again, I forget why. You see, I'm not a pretty woman and a tad overweight... thus have poor memory.

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dear oh dear next geneticists will be saying black people have inherently darker skin. Racist! Kick the **** out of him! Outrageous.

Why is it that blacks run faster? Because of social deprivation? No because they have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre. Thats genetic.

What motivates Watson to say what he does is not white racist supremacist views nor hatred of black people but simple observation of how nature is and not necessarily how armies of social scientists think it should be.

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Steve wrote-

Quote:

Why is it that blacks run faster? Because of social deprivation? No because they have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre.

And they have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre because those people from that area of the world who didn't have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre couldn't run fast enough to escape from lions and tigers and thus were selected out by evolutionary processes and the ones with a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre were the only ones left to breed and hence the whole race eventually became faster runners than people from areas of the world where there were no lions and tigers.

But it is only over short distances that this applies because lions and tigers are non-stayers.

The long distance runners have evolved at altitude and thus running at low levels is, to them, like running on oxygen rich air.

I think.

If we didn't get to breed because we had missed a bus we would evolve to have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre too I presume.

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Read a book back in college detailing the fact that the third member of the 'watson and crick' team, whose work was essential in discovering DNA - wasn't acknowledged in any way, shape or fashion, due to her status as a female.

Cycloptichorn

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That rings a bell, cyclo. Did she do some crystallography?

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X-ray photography. Here ya go

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

Cycloptichorn

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spendius wrote:

Steve wrote-

Quote:
Why is it that blacks run faster? Because of social deprivation? No because they have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre.

And they have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre because those people from that area of the world who didn't have a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre couldn't run fast enough to escape from lions and tigers and thus were selected out by evolutionary processes and the ones with a higher density of fast twitch muscle fibre were the only ones left to breed and hence the whole race eventually became faster runners than people from areas of the world where there were no lions and tigers.

But it is only over short distances that this applies because lions and tigers are non-stayers.

Thats ridiculous. Lions and tigers dont have dark skin.

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Oh I get it Spendy, you dont believe in evolution. So God made us all different 6000 years ago. He made west african blacks sprint for gold medals. He made ethiopians run for ever on nothing. And he made Yorkshiremen, for some reason that escapes me.

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Top scientist claims black people 'stupid'

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