As Eli slogged this morning, James Watson is retiring from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Why?

Dr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, and later headed the American government’s part in the international Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing “unreservedly” for the comments, adding “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

How did he make this suggestion?

The 79-year-old geneticist said 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 he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

(Emphasis added.)

Wow. As a science blog commenter noted:

This lamentable quote skewers JDW for how he thinks, or doesn’t think, when venturing beyond the laboratory he hasn’t seriously occupied for many years. His biased utterance really competes quite well with just about every other anti-_____ statement recorded since the printing press was invented…
Amazingly, JDW’s statement mirrors a major public misconception of how genetics works, namely that skin color and other easily recognizable external-trait genes are not necessarily closely linked to any of the thousands of kinase, phosphatase, transcription factor, and other genes that affect neuronal development and function. And, that over the
many eons of human evolution, migration, and hybridization, the variant forms of all these genes are inherited quite independently — albeit still being subject to evolutionary selection.

Science blogger Greg Laden wrote a delightful post titled “James Watson: Please bend over while I kick your freakin ass.”

It may seem odd that the guy who, with others, “discovered DNA” could be a moron, but a brief analysis suggests that this is in fact quite possible. There are at least three factors that could explain James Watson’s obvious dullness, in spite of his professed brilliance: The Nature of the Academic Free Market; the Swinging Dead Cat Phenomenon; and the Benefits of Teamwork.

and

When you analyze the data, you find that the latter — SES and Home Environment — are the main predictors of IQ across a given contemporary population, not skin color. It happens that skin color and SES and skin color and Home Environment, in the US and over the last few decades, are intertwined realities…. a group of American “Whites” brought forward in a time machine from the 1920s would test perhaps 20 points lower than a matched comparative set of “Whites” living in the first decade of the 21st century. That is not a genetic change … Rather, it is some other kind of change that has not been satisfactorily explained, but probably relates to factors like Home Environment and the vagaries of this kind of testing.

Read Greg’s whole post; it’s fantastic.

Intelligence is clearly, in part, a genetic trait. With socio-economic factors, the intelligence of your parents are the most important factors determining your intelligence. Claiming otherwise cedes human intelligence to the creationist crowd—such a belief assumes that the human mind could only be a divine gift rather than an evolved structure. Discovery Institute, meet a David Brin SciFi series.

Science blogger Steven Schwartz agrees:

To argue that human intelligence, assuming it is somehow definable, is NOT genetic is itself “specist.” Animals are routinely bred for intelligence or lack thereof, why would our species be different? Evolution presents huge amounts of data that our fore-brains evolved. So the only sensible argument that the human brain is NOT genetically variable implies that human intelligence is housed in the soul or some other magical entity that was infused into our species by some magical being. In other words, claiming that intelligence is not genetic is very much part of the intelligent design agenda.