Intelligence ≠ Common Sense
Dr. James Watson has stepped in it, and the Nobel prize can’t shield him. Dr. Watson is one of the people credited with the discovery that DNA is a double helix, and he has gone on to other important work, but he is having one of the worse book tours that any author can imagine, and it may have resulted in his loss of his job.
The BBC has the gory details: Lab suspends DNA pioneer Watson
In his Sunday Times interview, Dr Watson was quoted 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 was further quoted as saying that his hope was that everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.
The scientist has since said that the way the words were presented did not reflect properly his position.
“I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have,” he said.
“To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.”
“That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
I could have understood and defended Dr. Watson’s comment, “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. This is a reality for people who create tests, because most tests have an inherent societal bias, i.e. understanding the test requires “assumed knowledge”, a common folk lore, if you will, that those from other cultures do not possess. It isn’t a matter of good or bad, just different. Therefore, if you are designing a program for Africa based on the assumptions of what is important to Americans or Europeans, it may well fail, because the society may have distinctly different priorities. There are different kinds of intelligence.
But then he blows it and loses me: “his hope was that everyone was equal but that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true'”. Sorry, but I dealt with this issue for entirely too long on an “equal opportunity” board, not to know this a problem with a supervisor not the employee in almost every case.
After achieving a certain level of renown, people should stay within the confines of their own field. Brilliance in one field is no guarantee of competence in any other.
12 comments
I still have a lot of respect for Francis Crick.
I have respect for both in their field, but this isn’t their field. He has offered a layman’s opinion on a muddied topic in a separate field of study. His comments will be used to bolster the bigotry of some very nasty people.
This isn’t news for Watson. He has been making sexist and racist comments for literally decades, previously, for example, speculating on the “fact” that black men have “higher libidos”. Most folks in the field just shake their heads sadly whenever you mention Watson to them. And he didn’t even really discover the double helix. Maurice Wilkins invented the equipment used in the project and his co-worker, Rosalind Franklin, did all the legwork and discovered that it was a double helix (rather than a triple helix as had been thought at the time), and would have received the Nobel Prize along with Watson, Wilkins, and Crick if she’d been alive at the time of the award (unfortunately the Nobel is only awarded to living people). Watson is a zoologist, not a chemist, and hadn’t the foggiest notion how to sequence proteins, and has not himself done any science in the field for over forty years. He is a bureaucrat, not a scientist, nowdays, still trading on the lucky fact that he got ahold of Rosalind Franklin’s data without her permission in order to co-author that original report.
Crick has some very interesting thoughts on “directed panspermia” which would really twist the noodle of some so-called “intelligent design” theorists.
I happen to agree with Crick, too. I think life evolves consciously.
i [heart] badtux.
I personally think that it’s pretty well established that Rosalind Franklin knew it was a double helix first, but that wasn’t what she was working on, and wanted to finish her work before getting into it.
Watson has been resting on his laurels for a very long time because of the nature of the research community, but he has made some contributions in his own field. The problem is that he believes his own press clippings and thinks he has a free pass to pontificate on everything, including pseudoscientific garbage like race.
It looks like he may have become too controversial to serve as director of anything by shooting his mouth off on a book tour. He should retire and raise flowers.
How unseemly is the whole controversy over whose discovery it was. How unlike Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, in which Darwin arranged to assure Wallace got coequal credit for the theory. I’ve read before about Rosalind Franklin, but unlike Wallace, she never really entered the public consciousness in relation to the DNA discoveries. Life truly isn’t fair, and the damnable thing is that in this case the unfairness was avoidable.
As to Watson, Badtux is absolutely right: he’s been doing this for as long as I can remember. This incident just happened to be particularly egregious and embarrassing. Even brilliant people sometimes cannot overcome their pernicious cultural biases.
Aside: whig, IMHO, whatever one’s religious beliefs, the “argument from design” has some major flaws in the factual underpinnings alone. Another time, I’d be happy to discuss the matter with you. But we’d probably just come to the conclusion that we cannot agree on a definition of “consciousness,” and hence your assertion comes down to a matter of religion, not science, because it is not testable. Interesting conjecture, though.
Yes, it’s not a scientific statement I’m making, it is indeed a conjecture. It is Crick’s conjecture, however, and I happen to agree with it. It would certainly be a very different conversation than this one should become, but I assure you my position is more complex than argument from design.
Also, I understand that Crick first adduced the helical structure, not Rosalind Franklin, and perhaps the Nobel committee thought so too. He reportedly took LSD and visualized it.
Link:
FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago. . . . The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life. . . . Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle’s warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize. . . .
Watson is an asshole, I think we can all agree.
You and I are sharing consciousness right now, by the fact that you are reading my words, and I am reading your words, and if they do not happen simultaneously in clock time there is a simultaneity of consciousness that transcends time. And if you don’t agree, then that is fine too. Namasté.