Bryan D. Brown

One of the nice things about being on vacation is I get to tune out from American news for a while. As well as the Iraq War, the presidential campaigns, school shootings and other typical American nonsense, I also missed the whole Ann “Perfecting the Jews” Coulter controversy, as well as the Bill O’Reilly follow up. Actually, I’m kind of sorry I was away for those last two. The fact that Coulter continues to receive mainstream press is far more interesting a story than the bigoted stuff that falls our of her mouth. But I digress.

There was a controversy that occurred that I did want to address.

Like many things, science suffers from one major problem - it requires people to make it happen. And when you have people, you inevitably have jerks. Big jerks. Huge jerks. Jerks, for example, like Noble Prize winning microbiologist James Watson. Watson, like Ann Coulter, was about to embark on a book tour - and, while talking to The Sunday Times, he made the following statements (as published in The Times Online):

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”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “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”.

Of course, Watson doesn’t elaborate on the basis for such a claim or cite one bit of credible research - nor does he address even the slightest controversies in measuring intelligence.

Unlike Coulter, Watson has canceled his book tourand issued an apology (Associated Press):

“I am mortified about what has happened,” Watson said. “More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said.

“I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

You know when you say something that sounds so stupid you can’t believe you actually said it when it is quoted back to you the exact way that you originally said it? I hate it when that happens. One might consider that apology sincere if he hadn’t, more or less, stated the same thing in the book he was scheduled to promote (Wired):

Much of the outcry over James Watson’s low estimation of black intelligence centers on remarks he made in a Times of London interview, but he was quite open about his views in his new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science. There he wrote,

… 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.

How many book reviewers actually picked up on that? To the best of my Googling, only the Associated Press. The Boston Globe, Technology Review, Decatur Daily, MSNBC, Publisher’s Weekly, San Diego Union Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Seed all missed it.

Assuming that Watson thinks of himself as one of those with an evolved “power of reason”, it does beg the question - how he could not know the results of saying such something so stupid?