Nobel Prize winner Watson retires
He’s old and older folks tend to say what’s on their mind. James Watson part of the famous team of Watson and Crick who described the DNA Helix has retired as Chancellor of a Long Island Lab after his racial remarks.
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From NYT:
James D. Watson, the eminent biologist who ignited an uproar last week with remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, retired today as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island and from its board.
In a statement, he noted that, at 79, he is “overdue” to surrender leadership positions at the lab, which he joined as director in 1968 and served as president until 2003. But he said the circumstances of his resignation “are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.”
Dr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, and later headed the American government’s part in the international Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing “unreservedly” for the comments, adding “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.” (more…)
Gerson at the Washington Post places Watson’s curtain call in proper perspective. Everyone has focused on the obvious Watson is a racist meme but few have appreciated that Watson is being faithful to the intellectual slope of scientific materialism. If you are a materialist, you have to accept that we are not equal. Evolution is based on inequalities. Biologically, no animal, including man, can be presumed equal to another. I don’t think that Watson is a racist. He is a hopeless, genetic determinist and materialist. He reminds me of those early Darwinist and eugenicists of the last century.
Gerson points out this tension between egalitarianism and scientific materialism which is uncritically accepted by many liberals.
Quote from the Post:
“The left in America positions itself as both the defender of egalitarianism and of unrestricted science. In the last presidential election, Sen. John Kerry pledged to ‘tear down every wall’ that inhibited medical research. But what happens when certain scientific views lead to an erosion of the ideal of equality? Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rising academic analyst of these trends, argues: “Watson is anti-egalitarian in the extreme. Science looks at human beings in their animal aspects. As animals, we are not always equal. It is precisely in the ways we are not simply animals that we are equal. So science, left to itself, poses a serious challenge to egalitarianism.’”
‘”The left,” Levin continues, “finds itself increasingly disarmed against this challenge, as it grows increasingly uncomfortable with the necessarily transcendent basis of human equality. Part of the case for egalitarianism relies on the assertion of something beyond our animal nature crudely understood, and of a standard science alone will not provide. Defending equality requires tools the left used to possess but seems to have less and less of.”‘
Here’s the link for the full Op ed in the Post by Gerson:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/23/AR2007102301803.html
TCB -
Thanks for your comments.
Let’s see. If we are looking at genetics then what Watson is saying is that there is a genetic link between intelligence and lack of melanin. Or perhaps more specifically melanin and the suppression of intelligence. Is that what you are saying?
How would this have evolved? Dark skinned people clearly developed fire and tools in Africa. Then they migrated into the Middle East. They developed language and spread around Asia and Europe.
If you are going to follow this logic, then with humanoids in Europe for reasons that are unclear the Europeans became more intelligent than humanoids anywhere else on the planet. Horse Hockey.