James Watson is clearly a bright guy. He earned a share of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in the 1950s on describing the double helix structure of DNA. Unfortunately, he has spent most of his time since then doing his level best to undo his legacy by making sweeping unscientific statements about all manner of things, and generally being as politically incorrect as possible. The great biologist E.O. Wilson has called Watson "the most unpleasant human being I have ever met".
In 2014, he became the first person ever to sell a Nobel Prize medal. The medal fetched over $4 million, some of which Watson has earmarked for a David Hockey painting he has always wanted. Watson said that he needed the money, given that he has now been ostracized by most of his friends and the scientific community, and that he feels like an "unperson" and that "no-one really wants to admit that I exist". The buyer of the medal, Alisher Usmanov, then the richest man in Russia, then promptly returned it to Watson, saying that he found it unacceptable that's great scientist should have to resort to selling his Nobel Prize.
In 2014, he became the first person ever to sell a Nobel Prize medal. The medal fetched over $4 million, some of which Watson has earmarked for a David Hockey painting he has always wanted. Watson said that he needed the money, given that he has now been ostracized by most of his friends and the scientific community, and that he feels like an "unperson" and that "no-one really wants to admit that I exist". The buyer of the medal, Alisher Usmanov, then the richest man in Russia, then promptly returned it to Watson, saying that he found it unacceptable that's great scientist should have to resort to selling his Nobel Prize.
The main reason Watson is persona non grata these days is his repeated assertion that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than fairer skinned individuals. He has also proposed various other less-than-scientific hypotheses, but it is his contentious views on race that have garnered the most attention. Back in 2007, he mused that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa", and stated, "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas the testing says not really", which he followed up with the sucker punch of, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true". How scientific is that?
After he was removed from his position as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a result of these views, Watson tried to walk back his comments, and apologized unreservedly. Now, though, in another public interview with PBS, he has reinstated them in full, effectively retracting his earlier apology. This has put him right back in the spotlight, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has responded by stripping him of all titles and honours.
Watson, just for the record, contends that he is "not a racist in a conventional way", and there are some (equally controversial) claims that Watson himself is 16% black. But he has certainly been pilloried by the press for his controversial opinions, and has had lectures cancelled and honorary titles withdrawn for his stated views on race, gender, etc.
But enough about the man. Is there any truth in what he claims?
After he was removed from his position as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a result of these views, Watson tried to walk back his comments, and apologized unreservedly. Now, though, in another public interview with PBS, he has reinstated them in full, effectively retracting his earlier apology. This has put him right back in the spotlight, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has responded by stripping him of all titles and honours.
Watson, just for the record, contends that he is "not a racist in a conventional way", and there are some (equally controversial) claims that Watson himself is 16% black. But he has certainly been pilloried by the press for his controversial opinions, and has had lectures cancelled and honorary titles withdrawn for his stated views on race, gender, etc.
But enough about the man. Is there any truth in what he claims?
I have struggled to find the "testing" that Watson refers to - he did not specify - until I came across an archived BBC article, also from 2007, which talks about the IQ findings of Richard Lynn at the University of Ulster, and I can only think that this is the "testing" that Watson speaks of. Lynn found that East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) have the highest average IQ (around 105), followed by Europeans (100), Inuit (91), South East Asians (87), Native Americans (87), Pacific Islanders (85), black people in the United States (85), South Asian (84), North Africans (84), Sub-Saharan Aricans (67), Australian Aborigines (62), and, the lowest of all, the Pygmies of the Congo rainforest (54). In his 2006 book, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis, Lynn hypothesizes an evolutionary explanation for this disparity (early humans migrated out of Africa to Eurasia, where the cold and the seasonal food sources forced them to become more creative and, arguably, more intelligent).
Another possible source is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's 1994 book The Bell Curve, which looks at the IQ scores of different races within American society, and concludes that the differences are real, significant, and are probably both genetic and environmental in nature.
This research appears to bear out James Watson's claims, although of course we then get into the whole debate about IQ testing, cultural bias, and the nature of intelligence. What evidence, then, is there to the contrary? Again, I have struggled to find anything specific, although Stephen Jay Gould's earlier (1981) critique of biological determinism, The Mismeasure of Man, does a pretty good job in general terms. Much more recently, an article in The Guardian by Kevin Mitchell argues that genetic variations in intelligence are "unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next". And Ewan Birney from the European Bioinfomatics Institute has taken issue with the idea of self-identification of ethnicity (on which the results in The Bell Curve are based), arguing that African-Americans actually have a substantial amount if European genetic ancestry. But, all in all, there is a surprising dearth of evidence directly challenging these controversial findings.
So, is Watson just racist, sexist, politically incorrect and everything else that goes with it? Is he a curmudgeonly old fossil who just tells it like he sees it? He is probably both of those things, and he definitely has the look of an ancient giant tortoise in his old age (he is now 90 years old). But we should also be wary of closing off the purview of science for political or religious (or any other) reasons. It can be argued that there is nothing inherently racist or scientifically illegitimate about at least investigating links between intelligence and race, although any results do need to be interpreted very carefully.
Having said that, there is also a case against pursuing any such research, often pejoratively referred to as "race science" or" scientific racism", on the grounds that any conclusions might be used by unscrupulous politicians of the alt-right to push through unsavoury and discriminatory policies. Another article in Scientific American, asks, "Why, given all world's problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it?", and quotes from Noam Chomsky's 1987 book, Language and Problems of Knowledge: "Discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like".
I suppose that, as with anything involving race, emotions tend to run high, and a softly softly approach is called for.
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