Professor Jim Watson- Undoubtedly Highly Intelligent but Utterly Barking

Nobel Prize winning US scientist 79 year old Professor James Watson, 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. 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".

Professor Watson is not your stereo-typical numbskull racist, in fact he is a titan in his field, sadly there is little doubt that his comments will be seized upon by race-hate groups throughout the world to add a patina of respectability to their abhorrent views. I have little doubt that Professor Watson, has harboured these sort of extreme views for a long time now. He has 'form' as they say in the police, and the fact that he has a Nobel prize should not distract from the fact that he has uttered a considerable amount of complete garbage throughout his long and very successful life.Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineerinng in public lectures and interviews, arguing that "stupidity" is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3451

He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." He also suggested in one of his many interviews that an expectant mother should be able to abort her pregnancy if she was able to determine that her child would turn out to be gay, it was of course an hypothetical suggestion, but his readiness to sanction such a decision shows where he is coming from.

No group seems immune. For instance, in his 1996 annual report at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he has been based for many years, Watson seems to suggest that prospective parents should use genetic engineering to weed disabled persons out of society:
"The truly relevant question for most families is whether an obvious good to them will come from having a child with a major handicap. Is it more likely for such children to fall behind in society or will they through such affliction develop the strengths of character and fortitude that lead, like Jeffrey Tate, the noted British conductor, to the head of their packs. . . . But we perhaps most realistically should see (the handicap) as the major origin of asocial behavior that has among its many bad consequences the breeding of criminal violence." (Watson's unedited remarks can be found at http://nucleus.cshl.org/96AnReport/essay14.html.

Getting back to the latest comments by Watson about Africans, this type of Scientific racism has been around for a very long time. The last big wave began in 1969 and was tied up with people like Hans Eysenck, (remember his 'test your own IQ' bestselling paperbacks?) as well as figures such as Jensen in the States. There was a powerful campaign among biologists, psychologists, geneticists, alongside activists, which killed the issue. But with the development of the human genome programme in the last 20 years, claims are now being made that you can use genetics to map the entire genetic composition of humans - genes are seen as causing everything, from aggression to male domination, alcoholism and depression. This has given confidence to the scientific racists and came to the fore with the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 in the USA. As social order has been eroded in the cities of the Western world there has developed a quasi-scientific argument explaining this decline into gang crime, single parenthood, feckless fathers , prostitution, and drug addiction in many inner city areas. Inner-city people are characterised as being genetically stupid and genetically incapable of coping with modern society. It's a combination therefore of bad genes and bad rearing by bad mothers. That is a very attractive set of arguments for right-wing politicians and the theorists of the Adam Smith Institute. Thus the renewed frequecy by which these long exploded ideas are getting a new lick of paint and being dressed up as "new science".The biological concept of race amongst humans is meaningless. It implies that there are sharp genetic differences between populations. The concept of 'race' is essentially a political concept, and as it is applied in this context , a racist concept.The difference, and the problem with the claims that are being made about intelligence, is the question of whether IQ tests measure anything other than what IQ tests measure. It is essentially a social measure, like measuring something with a bit of elastic - it stretches the way you want it. The likes of Brand and Eysenck claim that there is one unifying thing called 'g' - crystallised intelligence, a lump of something inside the brain. But you cannot take all these complex aspects of the way in which we relate to the outside world, in terms of our linguistic skills, how we respond emotionally, or how good we are at music or chess or mathematics , and lock all of these into one single measure of general intelligence. It is an absurd idea for anyone who looks at how the brain solves puzzles; there are many routes in the brain to puzzle-solving, not just one. The psychometricians are locked into a 19th century concept of the way the brain's intelligence is organised.

This latest incident supports something which I have often observed, namely that sometimes the most intelligent of people, particularly scientists, quite often hold views which are deeply reactionary and offensive and so barking mad, that if they were being expressed by some racist moron, you would observe it to be an indicator of their stupidity. This case seems to support the possibility that it is indeed possible to demonstrate indications of crass stupidity and high intelligence simultaneously.I just hope that Professor Watson's scientific credentials do not add credibility to this nonsense he is spouting about racially determined intelligence.