DNA Scientist's Race Comments Draw Outrage

Nobel Prize-Winner James Watson Says Africans Less Intelligent; Museum Cancels Lecture

(CBS/AP)  One of the best-known scientists of modern times has lit the fuse under an old scientific time bomb - an always-explosive mix of genetics, race and intelligence.

In London to promote a new book, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson provoked widespread outrage after the co-discoverer of DNA's structure told a newspaper that Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence.

He is credited with helping to unlock the key to modern genetics, as part of the team that discovered the double helix of DNA. But Watson has courted trouble in the past whenever he's strayed from pure science into social conjecture.

This week’s Sunday Times quoted the 79-year-old American as saying 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 told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: “People who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

In the book, titled “Avoid Boring People,” he says, “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.”

The comments drew condemnation from British lawmakers, scientists and civil rights campaigners. On Wednesday The Independent newspaper put Watson on its front page, against the words: “Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer.”

“I think these remarks are extremely dangerous and extremely offensive to make,” Steven Rose, a neuroscientist and a co-founder of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, told CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. “They distress black people; I think quite rightly, too. And they do no good either scientifically or to the fight against racism, in Britain or the United States.”

Watson was to deliver a sold-out lecture at the Science Museum, but on Wednesday night the institution said Watson's comments had gone too far and the event had been canceled. The organizers said his comments went beyond the point of acceptable debate.

Calls to Watson's book publisher and his office in New York were not immediately returned.

This is not the first time Watson's speaking engagements have caused a stir.

The Independent catalogued a series of controversial statements from Watson, including one in which he reportedly suggested women should have the right to have abortions if tests could determine their children would be homosexual.

In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced a theory about a link between skin color and sex drive.

His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin - which give skin its color - had been found to boost subjects' sex drive.

“That's why you have Latin lovers,” he said, according to people who attended the lecture. “You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”

Telephone and e-mail messages left with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (where Watson serves as chancellor) were not immediately returned.

[howie2021]

I think in a lot of ways Africa is way more developed than we are.
Here are the facts. We will work all our lives but still 97% of us will be broke at retirement as we turn 65. Our kids will shamelessly put us in nursing homes in the last years of our lives. This is unheard of in most of Africa.
We have higher cancer rates compared to Africa.
We have higher incidents of heart disease and heart attacks.
Height is the best measurement of good diet. Africans are taller than we are.
But oh yeah..we''ve got Paris Hilton, dvds, big building and send crafts to the moon so we''re supposedly more developed.
What a joke.

[howie2021]

Population of all of Asia close to 3 billion. Population of the entire Africa continent is less the 700 million.
Among humans one or two in every one million live births is gifted and has exceptional brains. So obviously given the population numbers we will have more of these gifted people in Asia.
Also i doubt that Africans are very much interested in finding their most gifted kids to attend math comps.
I''d imagine they have bigger fish to fry.

[freeurmind1]

And there was absolutely nothing good about the slave trade.

[freeurmind1]

Kitefrog, if God didn''t create man then what did?

[freeurmind1]

Search a little deeper than what you see on the surface from your window and what''s reported on the 10 o''clock news. You risk being subject to the same misperception as a lauded Nobel Prize winner that spent his life studying everything there is about DNA and yet evaluates a people from mere surface level observation. Free your mind!

[freeurmind1]

bennyblack1, I note the passion and frustration in your comments. It is shared by many. But you should be careful of your monolithic perspective of the black community and the global dynamics that create the state of it. You talk to suggest that these things don''t happen in white communities. Many of your observations are true. But they are void of history and economics, void of the perspective of unequal institutions, and void of the fact that there are many that work hard to keep things that way. Where blacks err is looking outside of us to be validated. We''re climbing out of the pit that slavery created for us. Reaching our hand up from the pit hoping and expecting that %u201Cnon-racists%u201D with your mindset would pull us up while you%u2019re looking down in the pit in disgust. When blacks look to each other in the pit and help ourselves up we win. But then you''re there to call those that are rising up from the pit; that aren''t looking to you any longer, and outwardly exposing the thoughts of those like you to others radical, racists, now terrorists and subsequently work hard to push them back in the pit %u201Cwhere they deserve to be.%u201D That''s a view from within the community a married with two children, homeowner, executive, pay my bills and taxes, non criminal, educated, proud to be black man that sees a lot of what you see! Be frustrated slow to judge.

[bennyblack1]

Furthermore, it would seem to me that black people would be going back to Africa with their education and technology to save the culture, instead of just letting those people believe in voodoo, and raise chickens. To Darfur, to educate, build, and teach those people, women and children to defend themselves. I don''t think the intent of the then African race was to go through all that mistreatment, survive until freedom, and then just sit around on welfare complaining, stealing from the government, and committing crimes. My opinion is, that if black people care SO much about being Africans (as opposed to being Americans), then take the technology and education to Africa. Usually, when a race or culture is separated from its environment, it is for a reason. Usually, that reason is to go back to that environment and save it. I think black people missed the point

[bennyblack1]

Then Adolf Hitler comes along and deems an entire culture unfit for existence because he made up a story from one man''s research questions, which were not designed to prove evolution, but to provide a basis for answering the questions concerning the origin of our existence. Darwin was a Christian, and died a Christian. He died believing in God, the creation of God, and in the saving grace of Jesus Christ. While evolution may not be entirely wrong, it is as a result of Intelligent Design.

[bennyblack1]

kitefrog
Boy, you really do believe in fantasies. You just don''t get it, do you?
God creates, and it seems to be mankind''s job to screw it up, like he knows better than the creator.
What if you tried to hook up the battery cables to a car backwards (which I have done)? Either the car won''t start, or you''ll blow a fuse. If the fuse doesn''t stop the reverse charge, then it will cause enough electrical damage to the car to damage the car irreversibly. That is why the manufacturer provides a manual.
That is why God provided the Bible for mankind. Not just white folk. But for everyone.

[kitefrog]

Take the results of the IMO 2006 (Math comp). China won which is predicted by the IQ results, no surprice. There are only two African teams in the IMO 2006. Nigeria''s best score was 3/49 and a total score of 11/252. South Africa has no black people and their best score was 11/49. In countries like USA, Canada and the UK where the black genome has existed for 100''s of years, There are NO Black people.

However 6/15 on USA is Asian, 5/8 Canadian Asians, 3/12 Austrailian Asians. Surprisinglt, Brazil has no Black peope on their team. NL has 3/9 Asians.

The Asian Genome is an advantage in math competition.
Evolution has shaped the human race to have very different brains. I don''t think having a higher IQ makes one race better than the other, they are just different.

Watson was right, but we''d rather put our head in the sand for what we did to the blacks. Sure the slave trade was a bad thing at the time, but it was good becasue it spread the black genome around the world.

At that time Africans didn''t have the resources or ambitions to travel so far and wide. It changed the shape of the world.