“Africans are less intelligent” or “What did Watson say now?”
Watson has done it again. Yep, the “Watson and Crick” Watson. He is again insinuating that those of African descent are less intelligent than Westerners, due to genetics. Bolding is mine.
James Watson [...] 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, saidit 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”.
I don’t care what Watson has done to advance science, he is an opportunist, chauvinistic prick. Or he is a drama whore looking for attention. Considering he has written another book, soon to be published, I would say this publicity prank fits both profiles. Fitting to his elitist attitude, the title of the new book is “Avoid Boring People: Lessons Learned from a Scientific Life”.
Others are already slamming Watson’s opinion and I’m sure more will follow soon. I expect the blogosphere to light up over this one.
“These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels.”
October 17th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Watson 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. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
Of course this statement is true. There is no gene in the entire genome whose variants have the same frequencies across populations - they are enormously variable. People misuse science all the time to make political points - the old “were all 99.9% identical” statement is a good example - of course we are - we all have two legs, hair, two eyes, etc etc etc, and we are all so identical that it is obvious none of us are cats or trees! But within the realm of our species, it is the 0.1% where we vary that is the essence of human variation. That is, one might remember millions of variant sites in the genome! And those are clearly clustered geographically. So, if one accepts the assumption that a given trait has some genetic component, that component must vary between any pair of populations, and accordingly the trait distribution itself would likewise differ. Height differs, blood pressure differs, vital capacity differs, weight of the liver differs, etc etc etc. Why would one expect intelligence (however one wishes to define it) not to differ as well, since clearly there is a genetic component to it - otherwise why would one imagine humans to have higher intelligence than chimpanzees, since the differences between us and them are genetically determined (and are not enormous differences at all!). It is naive and misguided to try and legislate things to be what we wish they were for social reasons - as Henry Harpending of the University of Utah Department of Anthropology said in a book chapter in the recent book “Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Practice and Applications”, “Groups, whether they be by sex or race or class, certainly do not have equal potentials in all things, yet in the United States our educational system is facing a law (the No Child Left Behind act) that mandates that they all must achieve equal performance. Something has to break soon, and with the breakage will come drastic redefinitions of our shared public notions of fairness and social justice.” (p. 464)
Dr Watson is only the most public of people making such statements, whereas in private virtually any serious physical anthropologist or human geneticist would acknowledge these statements to be most probably accurate, as there is no reason to believe there should be a lack of variation between groups in any phenotype whatsoever, irrespective of political and social utopian ideals!
October 18th, 2007 at 1:19 am
The flaw in your argument is that that intelligence is defined by a relatively small number of genes. Research, the sum of countless man hours over literally a hundred years, has been unable to find any significant location for an “intelligence gene”. Or even a complex, a cluster or group of genes that contribute to intelligence. Ruling out brain development disorders, where the brain is grossly malformed, healthy adults of varying intelligence have no discernible genetic variability that points to intelligence.
When studies have been performed on individuals that vary in intelligence, they have been completely unsuccessful at locating even on remotely possible location. This implies that intelligence is a complex phenotype derived from a huge sum of genes. Estimates have put it at over 40% of the genome being responsible, in one way or another, to the end result of intelligence.
The more genes involved in intelligence, the smaller chance that geographically isolated groups will evolve that set of genes separately. Especially when you consider that those of European descent split away from those of African descent only very recently in the timeline (relatively speaking), the probability of a huge number of genes changing is slim to none.
Humans are more intelligent than apes. But our species diverged about 5 million years ago. Put into perspective, humans probably began migrating to different regions of the globe around 50-100 thousand years ago. Thats a big difference and just doesn’t give enough time for “intelligence” to evolve independently.
And all of this, of course, leaves out the huge number of unintelligent people that are of Western descent. Stupidity is a unifying feature of humanity.
Watson is being blatant and overtly racist with no scientific proof. Just because he is famous does not give him license to be openly racist.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
There is another two factors that you both could potentially be forgetting, and they are: social dynamics and the flawed intelligence tests that we use today.
Starting with social dynamics, there is less incentive for certain groups to care about school and learning in general. This is not because lack of intelligence, but the lack of strong will to be educated - it’s not the “cool” thing to go to class. Gangs are prominent in many public schools, hampering progress, since gang members don’t care about school, and may disrupt others. What can one do about social dynamics? Good question. While the “No Child Left Behind” Act has its problems, the morals behind it are crystalline in their clarity - all people CAN learn equally if given the correct incentives.
The flawed IQ test we use today relies heavily on knowledge we learn throughout life, and not innate intelligence. While they are coming out with tests that do capture this innate intelligence far better, one of the most widely-used IQ tests, the Standord-Binet, is based on things learned. Learned in school. Schools that are not present nor required in most African countries. Nor are the tests modified extensively to use native idioms. These are severe flaws; I’d like to see scores using other IQ tests, such as Raven’s Progressive Matricies, which I believe I have mentioned before.
If these scores follow your theorem, then you can continue your line of thought, Pizzman.