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10/21/2007: "Respect scientist points out racial differences, provokes furor"

The Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson has been suspended by his research institution in the US.

"Skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social concept not a scientific one," Dr Venter said. "There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive of intelligence."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7052416.stm

[ Venter sidesteps the issue. Skin color isn't race, nor did Watson claim it was. He did claim that African races were not as smart as Europeans. ]

Meanwhile, in an article for The Independent newspaper, Watson writes: "We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things. The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.

"It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/19/watson_suspended/

[ He is correct: science has no taboos. But our science is politicized, so we are prohibited from exploring certain things that may be true. Truth is not the goal of modern science. ]

Comedy aside, a comment by Oxford University's Dr Jan Schnupp concisely sums up the facts: "Watson's comments make it very clear that he is an expert on genetics, NOT on intelligence". IQ tests, as a rule, don't just measure a person's innate intelligence; indeed, intelligence researchers don't have a clear idea what that means. Rather, the tests are skewed by a person's socio-economic status, whether they were malnourished as a child, the quality of their education, whether they perceive the test as a threat, and how much experience they have of similar tests.

Black people, even in western countries, tend to be less well-off than white people. It's therefore not surprising that, as a group, they do worse on these tests. If you take these confounding factors into account, the differences in IQ shrink to insignificance.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2007/10/james-watson-master-of-scientific-gaffe.html

[ These new scientist answers aren't very scientific. First, they sidestep the issue - "IQ tests, as a rule, don't just measure a person's innate intelligence; indeed, intelligence researchers don't have a clear idea what that means." - if researchers don't know what intelligence is, they also cannot say that IQ tests do not measure it. They have opted out of a politically-sensitive subject. No one has yet come forward to claim that people who score 105 on an IQ test are routinely smarter than those who score 120 on the same test, nor have they shown us what "bias" is inherent in the test other than lack of knowledge of some common words. The IQ test samples response time, memory, and spatial logic, and the only time socioeconomic factors come into play is in reading the instructions. Those who have trouble with that are unable to read a newspaper, which with the free public education in this country, just about anyone can. ]