And even scientists can, and have been known to, approach areas outside their field of expertise with much less rigor than they would something they are trained in. Which makes sense, since the stuff outside their field is basically a hobby.
You’ve got to be kidding. What “science” is behind his political statements? What publications does he cite? What were his procedures? Where are his tables of data?
“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Attributed to Richard Feynman. (Also attributed to Lee A. DuBridge. I wish someone would straighten this out for me.)
James Watson is a really good example of this.
Anyone working in the genetic field has to walk a fine line and speak carefully.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that gene pools are roughly equivalent for human neurologic or physiologic functions across populations, and not a shred of reason to believe they should be.
Evolution has no commitment to equality.
Perhaps it will turn out that all populations of humans just happened to evolve in parallel approximately similar abilities despite having been separated by tens of thousands of years and despite (in the case of many eurasians) having interbred with archaic hominid lines with introgression of those genes to a far greater frequency than sub saharan lines.
Watson is “disgraced” by those who find it disgraceful to (publicly) hold a non-egalitarian opinion around the genes of humans (and only humans; it’s apparently fine to hold population gene-difference opinions for any other species).
No matter. In the end, science almost always wins over popular sentiment. Whatever the truth is around whether or not human populations are differently enabled functionally because of genes will eventually out.
Yeah, that’s just nonsense. IME scientists are just about as prone to credulous bullshit as non-scientists. Hell, one of the stupidest fucking people I’ve ever met ( in terms of common sense ) had a graduate degree in biology. Or we have the Young Earth creationist Ph.D biology professor I once knew. Or take Linus Pauling - a brilliant chemist but his advocacy of vitamin C as a virtual cure-all so far seems to be more or less quackery.
Besides, casual racism and sexism aside Watson just seems to be an all around asshole and anybody could be considered competent to judge that :).
These days, you are a scientist if and only if you can get at least some of your empirical findings or theories through peer review, so as to be published in recognized scientific journals.
Indeed. I guess sometimes you have to state the extremely obvious.
IMO, the significance of the work should have been obvious by '55, '56 at the outside. But I’m not a geneticist.
Well, your issue is with the Nobel Committee and not Watson. You should write them and inform them of your dissatisfaction.
The have good reasons not to hurry, and they had had no particular reasons to expect that Franklin was going to die on them. The implication that they would have deliberately dawdled to give themselves an excuse for cutting her out, is absurd.
Indeed, it does not.
My problem with many non-scientists is that they pay attention to and care for science only when it happens to paint a pretty picture for them.
So, your argument is that there’s no direct evidence that the statement is incorrect, and that it should therefore be taken seriously, a la
[QUOTE=Criswell, Plan Nine From Outer Space]
Can you prove that it didn’t happen?
[/QUOTE]
Did I blame Watson anywhere for Franklin not having a Nobel?
I didn’t mean to imply what you’re inferring. I’ve never said she was deliberately cut out of the Nobel, but that seems to be what you’re reading into my posts.
Well, what is your issue about it then? Why have you repeatedly brought the matter up? So far as I can see, unless it is being used as a way of making vague, implied accusations of sexism against the scientific establishment as a whole, the issue of Franklin’s lack of a Nobel prize is of no interest whatsoever. The reason for it is well known, and entirely innocent.
I can’t figure out what point you are making, but the evidence is overwhelming that average gene pools vary by population. Where given gene variants are broadly penetrated, one has to make an assumption that the penetration into one population versus another has nothing to do with a reproductive advantage if one wants to maintain that all populations are roughly equal functionally.
That is, an egalitarian assumption needs to assume that even genes which are highly penetrated in one population and nearly absent in another cannot have been advantageous ones (evolutionarily speaking, advantageous to reproductive success); they must have become penetrated via a population bottleneck or some other type of selection process.
These are patently ridiculous assumptions, and my “not a shred of evidence” comment was a polite way to say that such assumptions are wrong even though folks such as Watson who dare to voice that opinion publicly are publicly “discredited.” In Watson’s perspective (I think) the issue for african populations is that if their average gene pool is disparate in such a way that those populations cannot expect similar successes to other populations, then the outlook for african countries is bleaker than one might assume if the gene pools are functionally identical.
That kind of statement would “disgrace” any public figure from being listened to, even if the science underlying turns out to support those fears.
Watson’s statement (below) on the face of it is basically (so far as I can tell) saying that people of African descent aren’t going to be achieving much intellectually because they simply (inherently) don’t have the brain horsepower to do so. There have been tons of threads on this board over the years that (I thought) put the notion of human intelligence being racially focused to rest. Are you saying the position that innate human intellectual capacity is not racially/genetic population group mediated is incorrect?
I believe he is making the point that intelligence is not immune to evolutionary forces, and as such, it is naive to think that gene pools from distinct geographic populations all have equivalent ranges for intelligence.
We banish such a notion outright because it offends our politically-correct sensibilities (my editorializing).
We reject the notion because there is no evidence for it, quite a bit of evidence against it, and there is no model supporting it.
There isn’t a working model of “intelligence” in the first place. Define that first, then try to measure it in large populations.
Also: this is a dumb highjack anyway.
This has been debated here and elsewhere ad nauseum. I (as one who believes that there are genetically-driven average differences–including neurologic functions–among populations of humans) tend to smile at the idea that it’s been put “to rest.” But YMMV.
I think the OP is asking if Watson is “disgraced.” And my reply to that is that he is is indeed “disgraced” among those who think such an opinion that I just laid out is “disgraceful.”
That it is disgraceful does not make it scientifically incorrect. There is not a shred of science suggesting that gene pools do not vary among population groupings, including very broad groupings such as self-identified “race.” Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that, if one uses a grouping of self-identified race, it can be shown that average gene pools not only differ; they are Darwinianly selected for. Further, paleoanthropology and population genetics are in broad accord about the general flow of human migration patterns over the last couple hundred thousand years. Functional outcome differences by population are obvious, so the debate centers around whether genes or nurture drives those differences. To date, no amount of nurturing eliminates the differences. It’s an article of faith that those residual differences cannot be due to genes.
So what Dr Watson gets “disgraced” for is worrying publicly that mother nature may have not decided that african populations and eurasian populations should get exactly the same neurophysiologic functions out of the genes which have been driven by evolution for those two populations (broadly separated at the L3/M-N split, if you use mtDNA as markers).
That he is “disgraced” has no bearing on whether or not the science turns out to be correct.
Nearly every quantifiable measure does show differences among populations. We have different average gene frequencies. We have different chemistries; bone densities; appearances. We have different gene ancestries–particularly if you include Denisovan and Neandertal introgressions.
When it comes to “intelligence” differences, I completely agree there is an enormous overlying issue of how to define that. Instead of running down that rat hole, a better question might be why “intelligence” would be exempted from mother nature’s evolutionary pressures.
Put more neutrally, it makes sense that any population has the neurophysiologic functions evolution considers most appropriate to promote reproductive success in that population.
To the extent that any given population has been isolated from any other, it’s quite an article of faith to assume evolution for neurophysiologic function has proceeded exactly in parallel while evolution for all other functions has continued to diverge based on local reproductive pressures selecting out chance mutations for success.
Why would a Khoisan population have the same neurophysiologic function as, say, a south asian population when the two are tens of thousands of years apart?