I wasn’t sure where to post this, politics (hehe just kidding), knowledge or philosophy but I think philosophy will be best.
Recently, perhaps one of the worlds best known living scientists dropped this bombshell.
Quote:
Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"
By Cahal Milmo
Published: 17 October 2007
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."
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Now we have a Nobel prize winning geneticist saying that blacks are not as smart as whites. Hes 79 years old, which leads me to three possibilities. Hes just crazy old and saying what he feels off the cuff like crazy old people do. He is looking for free publicity and man he is going to get it here, or perhaps he is old enough not to care, its not like he is in line for any grants or chairmanships which can be revoked. Copernicus didn’t release his theory that the planets revolved around the Sun until his deathbed for obvious reasons, and perhaps this is a bit of the same. His age makes him untouchable.
Regardless that doesn’t matter, none of the above makes him right or wrong.
Now being a news piece and having not read his book it contains no details here.
One quote does stand out though..
"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."
This is true. Its also a non-judgmental statement if it stands alone. All of the races have somewhat different abilities
in general . There is more than skin color that makes a race, and had we been isolated long enough I can say without a doubt we would have been different species at some point. That didn’t happen, and we ‘remixed’ soon enough to prevent that, but still we do have some differences.
There is NO reason to expect intelligence to be different in this. Yet perhaps the quickest route to hell as a scientist is to claim there is a measurable difference. When those differences are found the culprit is almost universally labeled as the test, and it was testing biased which is claimed to have caused the difference, not real intelligence. Hell we can’t even make claims of differences in males vrs females in brain function and development without catching hell and those are in fact well documented.
Added to this you have typical variation where there will always be overlap. Even if the race as a whole were less intelligent compared to another race there would be a great deal of overlap.
So the question here isn’t are blacks less intelligent than whites, none of us has fair data to make this claim, no matter what your personal thoughts are.
No my question is this. If you had an airtight test to gauge a persons intelligence, no claims of cultural bias could be made, would it be ethical to use it on a population?
Normally I am always for the truth scientifically. It doesn’t matter how inconvenient that truth is or how unpopular. In this scenario though, I have to wonder, what good it would do?
In an ideal world, the one we don’t live in, you could argue that it would be a just cause for accepting lower test scores into schools, or perhaps adjusting curriculums to fit different educational goals. Being we don’t’ live in said world, the real use of such data would be justification of racism and further segregation. Also while perhaps such data would be true for the populations it would not be true for individuals. Exceptional individuals from the intellectually inferior race may be pressured to not pursue goals which would require high intelligence. This would be grossly unfair and detrimental for society as their contributions would be lost.
So for me the question that needs to be answered isn’t are whites as a group smarter than blacks, or are Asians really the best at math, but if any benefit can come from such information.