Posted by Cockney Robin | Not many scientists seem prepared to concede this point, but being a scientist, and even a genius, doesn't necessarily mean you're good at logic, and specifically at spotting the flaws in your own thinking processes. Dr James Watson, the 79 year old Nobel laureate helped unravel the double helix, and earned his place in the history of science and for that we are, and must continue to be, profoundly grateful,
But knowing all there is to know within his specialty doesn't mean he can't be as wrong-headed as the next person when he holds forth on matters outside it----though, like many scientists, he appears not to understand where his area of expertise leaves off. So now, prompted by Christ knows what conviction that he had a useful "truth" to impart, he has expressed an opinion which---though merely an elderly man's personal opinion---will or might or could easily be taken and exploited by certain ill-intentioned people as a legitimate conclusion of Capital-S Science....
According to The Independent, Watson became "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."(Independent) Or, more specifically,...
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.....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." (Independent
Oh really? Could it be possible that when these interactions go wrong from the point of view of the white bloke that the ensuing difficulties might be down to something other than a gap in "intelligence"? Is that the only factor the good doctor can think of that creates Africa's current dreadful problems? Because just off the top of my head, I can think of quite a few more and I don't have the Dr. Watson's genius, education, or scientific background.
People are upset with Dr Watson not because they don't want to hear his "truth" but because they instinctively know that this is one of the areas in which the so-called "insights" of "science", even if they can be proven, simply aren't as valuable as the insights of experience and a knowledge of history. Furthermore, they readily intuit that to the jump from imaginary or projected statistics to conclusions about the fate of an entire continent to ordinary workplace interactions is a tremendous sideways leap over everything else that affects the complex skein of human development.
To paraphrase Damozel's favourite Heller quote, you can't see the flies in your eyes when you've got flies in your eyes.
Anyhow, there's more:
His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "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."(Independent)
In the first place, "intelligence" isn't a single quality, but a short-hand phrase for referencing the presence in one individual of a constellation of particular abilities which westerners highly value. Furthermore, "intellectual capacity" and "intelligence" are also not precisely the same. Finally, if one accepts the premise that these qualities (the ability to synthesize data, memory for facts, inductive thinking, deductive thinking, and so on) are statistically distributed in unequal proportions among certain segments of the human population a quick glance at a history of the Twentieth Century would quickly demonstrate to a rational observer that neither one has much to do with the sorts of problems Dr Watson cites. We are all differently gifted, but intelligence is more than the sum of its part. If one tries to envision how an intelligent person actually behaves, self-consciousness, the ability to concentrate, curiosity, interest in new information, interest in a particular kind of information, the ability to remember and learn from mistakes, and a number of other variables which depend as much on environment and the person's physical state also factor in.
And nor does everything boil down to reason and logic. We all know from experience that the presence of "intelligence" in an individual does by no means guarantee that the individual will behave rationally or humanely or have sufficient detachment to reason correctly. Many of the cruellest ideas in history have been flawlessly reasoned. That does not make such policies intelligent ones or their perpetrators intelligent people.
Furthermore, a number of factors can suppress, undermine, or override the qualities that make up intelligence: madness, poverty, ill health, deprived circumstances, abuse, lack of education, chronic ill luck, timidity, or senility. In short, Watson's conclusions by no means follow from his premises, and those are also subject to challenge and dispute.
This will not be the first time that Dr Watson---whose his ideas must have got crystallised and fossilised somewhere around the time he and his partner revealed the mystery of DNA--- has expressed an unattractive opinion in a way that might have been understood to imply that he is in a better position than the rest of us to know anything about it.
In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great." (Independent)
Human nature generally is more complicated and perverse than
science has perhaps yet realised, and prettiness and intellligence both in practise if not in theory very much in the eye of the beholder. (Think of David Copperfield's Aunt Betsey Trotwood with her cold-eyed practical common sense and her reverence for the oracular/nonsensical utterances of mad/clever old Mr Dick.)
So why care what Dr Watson says or think on the subject? Intelligent people----those according to him who are gifted with the ability to reason---should be able to spot the flaws in the reasoning of other intelligent people and get on with their lives But of course many of these same people are very fearful of bad and wrong ideas, and on substantial grounds if one consults history. But that's part of the price of freedom: to be endlessly confronted with the same old bad and wrong ideas coming round again, often circulated by well-intentioned people who see themselves as essentially kindly (and who in their day to day lives absolutely are) without being able also to see their cruelty. I'm betting that geneticists won't find any of that mapped on anyone's genes in the near future.
Pharyngula, the science blog, has a comment on the report that is well worth your attention. Also worth a look: The Gun-Toting Liberal, who wonders whether the fact that a Nobel prize-winning elderly science can be a chump knocks yet more of the bloom off Gore's win. Bloody hell, it's getting to the point where there is going to be no credit at all in winning the world's most prestigious (surely?) prize for gifts to humanity? But of course, in reality----this is Damozel again--- all human beings are terrifyingly unintelligent when they fail to distinguish what they know from what they "know."
Check out other reactions at Memeorandum
Other BN-Politics Posts:
* Did "A Gaggle of Journalists" Misreport the "9 Errors" Case?
* Response to Critics Acid-Raining on Gore's Parade (Updated)
* New Poll: Record-Low Approval of Bush & More
* Bush & Senate Republicans Protect Telecoms....
* AG Nominee Mukasey Said Torture is Un-American
* Jim Hightower has a Way of Putting Things
* Another Questionable Campaign to Privatize Social Security
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