Jason Malloy at the population genetics blog Gene Expression reviews the deliberately dishonest attacks on James Watson for saying that people in sub-Saharan Africa perform worse on IQ tests than Europeans and (especially) East Asians, and provides links to dozens of studies offering evidence that Watson’s views are unremarkably mainstream.
Archive for October, 2007
More on James Watson
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007Northfield ties
Monday, October 29th, 2007Moving back to Northfield after 15 years away, I made an appointment with the same dental office I used to go to. Not the same dentist — he’s retired — but the same practice, although they have a new name, Heritage Dental Care, and a new office south on Jefferson Road.
Are you still on Plum Street? the assistant asked when I made the appointment. No, as it happens, but I was impressed just the same. And better was to come.
Dr. Michael Remes did an initial examination (it was his brother David I used to see, who, Michael said, has been retired eight years now). Michael Remes took x-rays, right there — no walk to a special chair, and no lead aprons needed, either, for the patient or for the staff. The level of radiation is so low it isn’t worth worrying about. No film needed either; the images are digital, and available immediately.
Before David Remes, I used to see Dr. Ronald Geistfeld, who left to teach in the School of Dentistry at the University of Minnesota. After 25 years, I had forgotten his name, though I remembered it began with G, but Remes knew instantly who I meant. Yes, he said, he left the practice the year I started dental school, so he was my teacher. And, Remes continued, he did several of your fillings.
“You can tell?” I said.
Yes, he said, and he brought up the x-rays again. See there? he said. There’s a little slot, he did that (to help with retention, I think he said, but I’m not sure what that means). Just for curiosity, he fetched my chart, and not only was he right that Dr. Geistfeld had done that filling, he did it June 3, 1976.
Pretty remarkable, I thought.
The disinvitations continue
Friday, October 19th, 2007Dr. James Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the structure of DNA, has fallen into a thermal pool with his comments, made in an interview with the Sunday Times of London, 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.”
The BBC reported that the Science Museum where he was to speak canceled the event. And today the BBC is reporting that he has been suspended from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.
The message is unmistakable: “You can’t say that!” And never mind whether it might be true and what such an inconvenient truth might mean for wise policy decisions.
Watson has also written, “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.”
“No firm reason” indeed, and substantial empirical evidence that it is false. And globally, the issue concerns not just Africans and “Westerners” — which means people largely of European descent, although nobody is allowed to say that, either — but Africa and Asia. The same kind of evidence suggests that East Asians on average are smarter than both the other groups (but it’s apparently all right to mention that).
The news stories, as is only to be expected, are not familiar with the science, and get it wrong. The BBC wrote, “When, some 40 years later, scientists were finally able to read all of the DNA in our cells they were able to show that there was no genetic basis for the concept of race.”
No, that’s not what they showed. On the contrary, genetic markers are very effective at identifying an individual’s geographic ancestry, and getting better all the time. That’s not identical to race, which does have social aspects in addition to biological ones, but the match is pretty close.
And the BBC continues, “People from different racial groups can be more genetically similar than individuals within the same group. Genetic studies show that there is more variability in the gene pool in Africa, than outside.”
That’s true, but it is entirely irrelevant. Men and women can be more genetically similar (differing only in the few genes on the Y-chromosome) than two males or two females, but that does not imply there is no distinction between males and females.
The evolution blog Gene Expression links to the original articles.
“Peace Prize Committee disbands”
Friday, October 19th, 2007. . . says the headline on this very pointed satire by William Smith on TCSDaily. A small sample:
Responding to overwhelming pressure from every civilized person on earth with any semblance of intelligence, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee today announced that it had voted to terminate its charter. Just prior to the unanimous vote, the Committee voted to rescind numerous past prizes – including the 2007 prize to itinerant comedian and performance artist Albert Gore of the United States – and award those prizes and all future prizes to the United States military.
With regard to the future awards, the Committee issued the following statement: “In light of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean threats, the threats of Islamic terrorists and their state-sponsors, and potential breakdown of states into warring tribal factions, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee believes that the U.S. Military will likely be the recipient of every Nobel Peace Prize for the next thirty to forty years. For that reason, the Committee has disbanded and placed its considerable financial resources into the hands of “the only institution capable of maintaining and enhancing the peace of the world.”
Read it all and enjoy.