Comments on So Long Watson!

The defense exhibits: Charles Mudede

What will be the legacy of cold spring harbour, I wonder. If those walls could talk, they would reveal some pretty disturbing secrets, I imagine.

I saw a PBS special on Dr. Watson a couple of years ago, and was both surprised and appalled by how comfortable he seemed discussing the merits of the eugenics movement. So his statement in the London Times came as no surprise to me. No one ever said it was impossible to be a brilliant genetic scientist AND an ignorant asshat racist.

good riddance. the guy is a fucking nutbag! when you do something like discover DNA early on in your career you can pretty much say / do whatever the fuck you want after that without much consequence [although technically watson & crick didn't discover DNA - rosalind franklin did most of the dirty work!].

a former boss and co-worker of mine had worked at CSH, and "disturbing secrets" doesn't even scratch the surface, believe me.

Obviously, the guy said something in a racist way. That doesn't mean that there isn't some truth to what he's saying.

Nobody seems to deny that Ethiopians and Kenyans make better distance runners and People of West African descent better sprinters. If intelligence is indeed genetic (and there is no evidence it's not), then we would expect it to vary in different populations.

What people don't seem to understand is what is meant by vary. If you take two bell curves with the peaks separated by just one or two IQ points, you could say that the intelligence of one group is higher on average in one group than the other. Even with that said, because the curves are so close it makes almost no difference to the average person in each group.

I'm not ready to say that what we define as "races" can be summed up so neatly. My guess is you'd have to break down the populations much more finely to really get an accurate sense of which groups would be considered more intelligent. But if you've seen any of the research done on Ashkenazi Jews, you'd understand that certain genetic groups are more intelligent than others.

theres a laboratory at cold spring harbor? i thought it was just the name of billy joels first album.

And I thought Social Darwinism was dead. How could a serious scientist believe that stupidity is a beneficial trait in a developing continent?