Perhaps forever. It’s not a priority for me. If I do think of something I will let you know though.
Now, what is your definition of racism?
Do you think it would take longer to figure out than, for example, the amount of time you’ve spent avoiding the question in this thread?
Exactly what question do you think I am avoiding?
What is your definition of racism?
Oh, and what is your definition of racism?
At the risk of, you know, actually moving the debate on, I’ll just say that according to tomndebb’s AP link, Watson himself seems to think his original comments, as quoted, could fairly be construed as racist. It would therefore seem, to my no doubt simple mind, that the title question has been resolved, and that we don’t really need to concern ourselves further with how one poster or another happens to define racism. I’m just sayin’.
The difference between the definition of racism for scientists etc. etc. That one.
What is your definition of racisim?
El_Kabong, you are more gracious than I. It is my sincere belief that this thread has become too stupid for words. Or, stated in GD terms:
Given: James Watson is, and has always been, an irredeemable asshole.
Given: The value of a message can be determined, in part, by the value of the messenger.
Given: All of Watson’s statements, on any topic, should be processed with that in mind.
Given: Circular debates do not reduce or increase his assholeishness, nor do they, at this point in the festivities, serve any constructive purpose.
Given: The validity of race has been talked to death on this board, and it lost.
Given: Links to those discussions–I hesitate to call them debates because of the severity of the smackdowns received by those who contend “race” exists as anything beyond a construct by those who believe that it both exists and can be used to separate people, for whatever reason–are provided above.
Therefore: This thread should die a quiet death.
My only regret is that my university, in a contest to name a drainage ditch behind its new, in 1974, Biology building, chose “Watson Crick.” Sure, the pun is wonderful, but honoring that jerk is not so much.
So, you’re saying it is not humanly possible for people to discuss a specific issue while assuming race does exist. That that is an impossibility. I’d say it’s simply comes down to a willingness to do so. You want proo.? I’m doing it right now. It’s easy. really.
Eureka! Evidently it IS possible. Wonder of wonders. Unless you mean that I, being the super human I am, am capable of such an assumption, but not other humans.
Yet, in a previous post you admitted that there was not unanimity among even population scientists.
Oh, you’re looking for prostration and fawning. That’s one aisle over in the Obsequicopia.
Oh, so it MIGHT work that way. But everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. I see.
But this doesn’t show that the more general physical classification has no value, only that it may not be the best way to group people. And do you claim that physical appearance is a not a good way to find people of close genetic make-up, even though there are better ways to ultimately group people?
He made the issue quite easy. He cited a (supposed) reason for his statement concerning intelligence. All someone has to do is ask him for the tests and evaluate them. If they don’t show what he claims then he is either mistaken or a liar an a racist. If he does not supply the data, then he can simply be discounted as someone not serious about the issue and possibly a liar and probably a racist. The whole point is whether or not merely making the statment is racist. If he can point to these tests and these test show what he claims, then what he said is not a racist comment. Part of the reason I wrote the OP was that I was surprised that fellow scientists—or anyone seriously interested in the issue—would not take that approach and instead brand him a racist right off the bat. I did say earlier that some of his other more off the cuff remarks did not bode well for his a non-racist verdict.
No it is not. And no it is not. You’ve given me reason for the former. If you hadn’t I would have felt confidence in the process and not felt the need to fend for myself.
As a Moderator, I’d say you’re right. As a poster, I disagree strongly. And I’m not asking for slack. Just fairness. But I guess extending that to me qualifies as cutting me slack in your book. Excuse me for not being surprised.
Okay, but what if someone then simply reframes the debate as: “human populations of sub-Saharan Africans (for example) are less intelligent than northern Asian (for example) populations. The evidence is X, Y and Z.”
Now that we are talking about “populations” instead of “races” is it any less palatable if X, Y and Z turn out to be demonstrably true? This whole
race" thing is a bit of a red herring, I think. Who cares if you call a certain group of 1 billion humans a race, a population, or a really big cricket team. The real bombshell is that you are calling them less intelligent.
And what if it’s true? How much of a salve will it be to assure this unfortunate (and hypothetical) set of homo sapiens: “It’s OK! Don’t fret! You’re not a rather dull race, you’re a rather dull population!”
I missed the edit window. I was certainly using the generic “you” in the above snippet.
Geez. I wish we could just go back to the medieval thee/thou or whatever it was (I can’t recall the actual damn archaic pronouns right now).
Is that the way your textbook designated the “races” – white, black and Asian? Did it list any other “races”?
I found this entire article interesting and helpful in understanding the concept of the “no race” concept. It makes sense to me:
What DNA Says About Human Ancestry and Bigotry
(Underscoring and italics added for emphasisto the above passage.)
In essence, if you group people according to the color of their skin, your will not be grouping them by the most genetically common attributes.
The concept of racial mixtures is also not a useful construct. Who defines what is racially pure? It just doesn’t work.
This is the new science.
The debate that some of you want to have is the same one that we were having before the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. It doesn’t make sense to have this argument yet again in the light of genetic research.
Actually, he cited nothing. He made a claim that runs directly counter to mainstream science, (although it has some support among some agenda-driven groups that employ less reputable science), in an interview in which he made claims about political policy without actually referring to any evidence (other than his personal anecdote that some unidentified group of people find “black employees” to be not equal).
If he is going to make unsupported claims in the popular press–claims that he has explicitly recanted–at a time when he is trying to sell a general audience book, then there is no reason for scientists to sit down and write scholarly papers seeking clarification of his words. Those groups that are working to promote science are well aware that many people in the general population will confuse the fact that Watson did good work discovering the structure of DNA with the wholly separate fact that he has no training, expertise, or authority in the arena in which he popped off. You certainly have demonstrated that attitude: he is “[o]ne of the most respected scientists in the world,” they should be debating the issue in science papers. But he was not debating the issue in science papers; he was making broad claims–that run counter to the overwhelming body of science–that could be picked up by the uninformed and used for political purposes because so much of the public simply equates “scientist” with “neutral observer of facts” while anyone inside the scientific community knows that there are personal beliefs driving a lot of scientists and that a scientist outside his own domain bears no more authority than a chef or a policeman. It behooves people who are promoting science to protect themselves in the popular arena from people who make flaky claims outside their area of expertise.
This is hardly restricted to “racial” discussions. Fleischmann and Pons, a couple of decent chemists working in nuclear physics which was outside their domain, were subjected to the same scorn for similar reasons: they also stepped outside the realm of peer-reviewed journals to publicly assert unsupported (and ultimately erroneous) claims.
There are practical reasons for condemning this sort of thing. Science is largely funded through popular sources (either governments of foundations) that are run by non-scientists. Putting something silly out in the news that is outside the scientific process can have an adverse effect on funding of legitimate science as funds are diverted to kooks or as funding is cut when some grantor or politician accepts the unsupported claims and cuts support to mainstream science.
Given Watson’s history of similar comments along with his history of less than honest dealing with facts peripheral to his research, it is neither surprising nor inappropriate for the London Museum to have withdrawn their invitation to speak (at what amounted to a promotional book tour), nor for other scientists to demonstrate how far out of the mainstream he is by condemning his unsupported claims. (Note, again, that everyone you quoted in the OP was not a scientist.)
It does though when you realize that when people talk about race in the biological sense they aren’t saying that there are four races based on skin tone, and we’ll put the dark ones over here, the light ones over here, the yellow ones over here and the red ones over here.
They are saying, we put the genetically similar people together.
And, of course there are more genetically similar races. I went to a talk a few days ago on a genome wide scan (again, using a SNP chip) for genetic links to a human disease. Basically, at the single nucleotide polymorphism level, they’re looking across the entire genome to ask is there an identifiable region of a chromosome that would give someone a higher probability to a human disease.
One of the things that was debated was why they chose to use a population of Caucasians rather than Chinese, where this particular disease was more prevalent. Turns out, that you need an inordinate number of samples to power the experiment, and they simply didn’t have enough samples of Chinese DNA, only Caucasian (we’re talking about tens to hundreds of thousands of samples).
No one, at any point, raised their hand and said, “There is no biological basis of race!” Because that is stupid in a genetics context. Of course there is! If you were to include people of all races, there would be hits all over the place because, obscuring any real polymorphism linked to the disease, because of polymorphisms that exist among the races.
James Watson, of all people, would NOT be thinking about race from some sort of ephemeral sociological view, or based on the phenotype of skin color. I think he’d be thinking of DNA.
Keep in mind that the people were grouped into these racial categories based on self reporting, rather than the results of the analysis. Indicating that a self report correlates with what genetics says your race is. People tend to know, correctly as it turns out, what their genetic race is.
Is there a term we should substitute for “genetic race” that would make discussion possible rather than bogged down in semantics? Or is this just one of those things that is not to be discussed?
Of course not, but when the sequences were placed in a nice tree, the three largest groupings just happened to correspond. There were about 50 people in lab, in case you want to chi-square that.
Which is exactly why he talked about blacks, because everyone knows that being black has nothing to do with social-based categorization or skin color, and everything to do with DNA. They are called blacks because their DNA is black, you see?
Right.