One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion. James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London. The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade. The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that 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 there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he 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." The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of "scientific racism". Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism. Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "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 exists at the highest professional levels." The American scientist earned a place in the history of great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s and formed 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. 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." The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks. Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: "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." Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."
Nope. Blumenbach arrived at categorizations that were indicative of their evolutionary history. If you cherry pick locally adapted traits, obviously, you get the wrong classification. I could classify Italians with Bears by doing that. Looking at ancestry indicative traits like non-metric skull traits you get the right grouping. What traits? Looking at ancestry uninformative traits. Try using 600,000 genes. Leroi is mistaken that Blacks, East Asians and West Eurasians share ancestry? Maybe it's some kind of optical illusion. Note how Graves constantly gives second hand authority statements, which tend to be quite old, and doesn't offer the data. Because it would be transparently false. Ashley Montagu aka. Israel Ehrenberg is not a reliable source.
I guess you are glad to know that we Bible literalists understand that we are all related, of the human race, descendants of Adam and Noah. Now you can focus your faux outrage at the atheists an evolutionists. I'm in your corner if you understand this.
I would like for you to explain why you are a racist when you accept the common descent of man as told in the Bible. Are you aware that most evolutionary biologists also believe in the common ancestry of humans? Are you familiar with Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam? Christians are no less racist than Atheists. Before Charles Darwin proposed evolutionary theory many people of European descent were very racist and White Christians in the United States interpreted the Bible in ways that supported racist ideology. The Polygenicists believed that God created human races separately and that the Great Chain of Being mandated that some races rule over others because certain races were superior to others. Of course the Bible actually says that all nations are of one blood and have a common descent from Adam and Eve. I have no doubt that many Christians today who are racist accept this but still find excuses to be racist. Rushton himself believed in the common descent of humans and used the Out of Africa model to propose that human races differed in mental traits despite this common descent. Rushton was a racist psychologist. I don't know what his opinion on religion was but he doesn't represent the majority opinion of the atheist community nor evolutionists. Evolutionists don't normally give an opinion on race. The ones that do, like Joseph Graves, usually believe that there are no biological races and that human differences are superficial.
I am an amateur genealogist and have had my yDNA tested and mapped. The mtDNA testing and research confirms there are only four "mtDNA Eves" just as it should be according to the Genesis account. Before Darwin, the word 'race' meant Irish race, Italian race, Egyptian race, not skin tones. Read the full title of Darwin's book and you tell me if the title is racist.
Keep in mind, that NaturalBorn believes that not just the Earth...but the entire Universe... is only 6000 years old. So take his "geneology testing and research" with that in mind.
does this wall of text have a point beyond showing that there are racists in all walks of life and in all positions?
No, that's the point. Nobel prize winning geneticists stating their opinion are dismissed as "racists" by talentless nobodies.
It wasn't an educated opinion. Watson read a book by Richard Lynn and made conclusions based on it. He didn't do any scientific research of his own on the subject and could not articulate any points when he was interviewed.
What is your source on 4 Mitochondrial Eves? The whole point of labeling the ancestor "Eve" is to denote one individual. http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Darwin's_work_refers_to_preservation_of_favoured_races 1. "Race" to a 19th century naturalist simply meant distinct populations within a specific species, not necessarily human races. Indeed, human races, nor even human evolution are not discussed at all in Darwin's first book on evolution. And as such, given as how the "races" mentioned in Darwin's book included various pigeon and pig breeds, as well as certain mollusks, any claim that suggests that Darwin was "racist" is totally absurd. 2. Whoever makes or uses this claim has never so much as read any of Darwin's works, especially since "On the Origin of Species" never discusses human evolution in the first place. 3. "Race," ala "racial variant," is still used by modern-day biologists to refer to different populations within species, with no racist connotations, in fact. 4. "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" is the subtitle of Darwin's Origin of Species. It can be taken to mean the same thing as the later phrase "survival of the fittest" which was not coined by Darwin. The phrase illustrates a consequence of, not a basis for, evolution.
I tis obvious your source ignored the sub-title of the book for starters. Darwin was also used by Germany in the 1930-40s to justify purging the non-favored races and individuals.
Darwin demonstrated how he believed evolution shaped man in his subsequent book The Descent of Man. In it, he theorized that man, having evolved from apes, had continued evolving as various races, with some races more developed than others. Darwin classified his own white race as more advanced than those “lower organisms” such as pygmies, and he called different people groups “savage,” “low,” and “degraded.”
No, they didn't. Look at point 4. The racist theories of the Nazis were heavily influenced by American eugenicists who also based their racist theories on evolution but much racist thought was based on Pre-Darwinian thinking as I said before and many racist authors came after Darwin. Just because evolutionary theory was misused doesn't mean that it was inherently racist. Darwin believed that his people were more culturally advanced than other groups and did speak of savage races but he did not believe there were evolutionary explanations for differences in culture. This study is about the mtDNA lineages of native North Americans who do apparently have 4 lineages at their maternal root but saying this has anything to do with Noah's Ark is a stretch to say the least. Watch James Watson's interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr. Notice that he doesn't back up his belief with any scientific arguments. http://theroottv.theroot.com/video/The-Science-of-Racism-Intro The above link directs you to an intro for the interview. I can't find the full interview but I did watch it years ago.
How convenient. But unfortunately I guess we'll just have to dismiss that claim unless you can find Watson having literally no points to support his view.
View attachment watson.txt View attachment watson2.txt Where is Watson asked to support his views on R&I?
An opinion is not fact, and as such other people have every right to disagree and discredit the person who utters such things, just as your 'messiah' has been disagreed with. You do no different when people post things that go against your racism. So according to you Steven Rose is a "talentless" nobody. Steven Rose - BA 1st class, Cambridge, Natural Sciences (Biochemistry), 1959 - PhD London (Neurochemistry), 1962
It's true we don't have a mathematical proof that race differences are genetic. However, one can opine that the evidence indicates this. People who express this quite possible opinion should not be "discredited", anymore that you should be "discredited" for your ludicrous "everyone is identical" opinion. And Steven Rose is known for absurd egalitarian writings and little else as far as I'm aware. Having some letters after your name isn't really that impressive to me. Maybe it is to you.
This is an interesting coincidence. I think the most likely explanation is that it's White people's fault.
and had you deemed to actually read what I have continuously written and comprehended it, you would see that I have said numerous times that it is not pointing out the differences that is racist, it is how you use those differences, for example even your much loved Watson uses supposed differences in intelligence to promote a segregation policy between blacks and whites .. that is racism and he is a racist for doing so. Really, and would he be "known" for this primarily in right-wing circles or in other places as well .. I expect you have plenty of evidence to support your accusation, please do provide it. It is funny that you equate me posting his qualifications as me being impressed by him, that really is your own fantasy not mine .. in case you hadn't noticed you were the one who stated "Nobel prize winning geneticists stating their opinion are dismissed as "racists" by talentless nobodies" I merely asked you if someone with a BA 1st class Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) and a PhD Neurochemistry is a "talentless" nobody?
Really? A "segregation policy"? Is that a lie? Can you substantiate that? And "racism" is whatever you say it is. It's anything connected to race you don't like. Watson would be called "racist" if he didn't suggest a "segregation policy", which I'm sure he didn't anyway, for simply opining on genetic differences, which he was. So who cares if one is "racist"? Anti-racists call people "racist" for suggesting differences then claim to hold a more restricted definition. Your definition is false and not how the word is used. I trust you've read Rose's work? Do you expect me to review his books for you on demand right now? Rose is absolutely a talentless clown in my opinion, based on my reading of his work. You can attempt to prove me wrong if you wish. And yes, posting the letters after his name is kind of ridiculous.
Ok, fair enough he didn't actually use the words segregation policy, apologise for that. nope, racism is as has been posted numerous times for you already, the fact that you want to try to change that only highlights your own need to defend your own racism. Well obviously you do otherwise you wouldn't be attempting to change the definition, if you didn't care what does it matter what the definition is? So you are saying that the dictionaries are wrong, would you care to post your qualifications that deems you capable of deciding on whether a dictionary is right or wrong, or is it much more likely that you HAVE to change the definition in order to feel better about yourself. I expect you to back up your accusation with something, not just your opinion. do you hold the relevant qualifications and experience to be able to make such a statement .. if so then what are your qualifications and experience please. Sorry, don't you know you can't prove delusional people wrong .. so why would I waste my time trying. not nearly as ridiculous as calling him a "talentless" nobody.
All you seem to have is lame ad hominem and authority arguments. I have shown "racist" is commonly applied to people who posit genetic mental racial differences.
