James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning scientist as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, recently made a statement that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners. From the article:
He has previously made statements that were anti-gay or sexist and has generally found ways to offend just about everyone.
I’m trying to figure out just how he can justify his thinking. Where do people like him or Murray or other brilliant people get the information they use to justify these theories? Can they back up what they claim with any legitimacy or do they have to twist, manipulate and handpick the information and statistics they need? When confronted with overwhelming evidence of their errors, how can they continue to expound their statements without appearing delusional (or more than they already do)?
I suppose this could be expanded to other scientists in different branches (e.g. climatologists) but I would like to stick to Watson et al. I think Watson was brilliant but is becoming a total goofball with these statements. Can anyone help me figure out how he could come to these conclusions?
I know this will devolve and probably inspire a Pit thread or two. Please let’s try to keep it civil. Asking for someone to try to rationalize an aberrant or abhorrent thought process does not necessarily mean that they agree with it.
Here’s one Wiki cite which details the results of the book mentioned in the OP’s article. Here’s another.
But I really don’t see what the problem is. Certain people are better at some things; others are better at others. Blacks, for instance, dominate many forms of athletics. And no-one’s outraged by Asians being more intelligent than whites, are they?
It’s clear that there are genetic differences between groups of people, apart from skin colour. And there may be differences in intellectual ability determined by genetics. The trouble is that social/environmental influences are so strong here that they will swamp any genetic differences. Is it clear that “Asians” are “more intelligent than whites”? If “Asians” means “East Asians” here, then it is clear that East Asian children generally do better at school in the US than white children, but:
(1) Is that because they are in recenbt immigrant families, which are self-selectected for ambition and initiative in getting ahead?
(2) Is it because of generally high emphasis in East Asian cultures on doing well at school?
I don’t think it’s at all obvious that “Asians are more intelligent.”
Hmm. you musta missed that dust-up over Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve, which claimed to find significant differences in IQ between races. It certainly WAS a big deal, because the book was used to bolster theories about crime rates and public funding. It’s been discussed several times on this Board, and there are at least two impressive books out criticizing The Bell Curve and its methodology. Having read the critics, I don’t see any reason to take The Bell Curve at all seriously. If Watson and these two books are promoting the same idea, they’d better have better arguments behind them.
It doesn’t bolster my faith that both the wiki cites Quartz gives are by the same guy, that there are only three reviews, and that he uses as questioonable and as single-valued a yardstick as IQ to make his case. It was a reliance upon that same single standard (and the incompastibility and inappropriateness of the tests used for it) that did a large part of the torpedoing of The Bell Curve.
So, yeah, it’s a big deal. Telling people that they’re not as intelligence (e ven “on average”) than others because of their race is not going to win you friends, and is going to give ammunition to racists and cause confusion folks who are trying to apportion limited public funding.
According to the Wikipedia article on The Bell Curve, its authors, like the guy whose books were cited by Quartz, were also funded by The Pioneer Fund. That makes me more than a little suspicious.
And suspicious you should be, but then for a second ask yourself this: “If I wanted to conduct a study to determine if there are scientifically measurable differences of intelligence between ethnic groups, who would I have fund it?” The way I feel I’d have to fund it myself because I can’t think of anybody parting with money on the subject without giving me a “Don’t let me down with your results” look, regardless of which way the bias leaned.
So, outside of the Pioneer Fund supported books, where else can he and others be getting their information? And don’t tell me they are getting it from Klan and White supremacist literature. I mean any “legitimate” sources (genetic studies, psychological tests, anthropological treatise, etc.). If Watson and Murray are basing their theories on “Uncle Adolph’s Guide to a Better World,” then they are more than deluded; they are pathetic. If, however, they are referring to accepted and well researched studies coming out of Harvard or Oxford, I can (almost) understand how they could interpret things in certain ways.
As for the Quartz’s statement about some people being better than others, this is the inverse to what Watson is saying. Asians are smarter implies that other races are dumber. Blacks are better in athletics implies that they are not capable of more difficult intellectual pursuits or that they were “bred” to be better athletes (that is what got Jimmy the Greek in trouble).
Certain things are genetically tied to race, particularly skin tone, epicanthic folds and hair structure as well as other things I cannot think of at the moment. Some races are more predisposed to certain diseases (sickle cell with African-Americans, for example). I have yet to see a link, however, between race and intelligence.
It’s interesting how you worded the OP " his theories"–not his “information.”
I don’t know where he’s getting his info–but I can guess where he’s getting his theories: from his own emotional prejudices.
Intelligent people usually want good information, from good sources. But intelligent people can still do extremely stupid things , even if they have good sources.
Example:
The professors at Harvard University are intelligent and know how to use the scientific method: But they fired the university president because he suggested that they use the scientific method (to study why men do better in math than women.)
The fact that you are a genius in one field doesn’t stop you from being a jackass in the rest of your life.Even smart people have prejudices.
Watson is clearly a brilliant scientist: the Nobel prize is evidence enough for that. But he’s also a human. And humans, even brilliant scientists, say, do, and think illogical things sometimes. I don’t think any more explanation than that is necessary.
Except that’s not what Summers suggested, as shown by the article you linked:
If an educator notes that there a particular gender is over-represented in a particular academic field, and suggests that the differential representation should be studied to determine why, that’s one thing. But Summers went straight to innate difference between the genders as the explanation, without anyhing other than the difference in representation as a fact. That’s not the scientific method.
Except that chappachula has a much closer approximation to what Summers actually said than you or USA Today. (And why are we looking at USA Today as a cite when the actual transcript is available?)
If you actually read the speech, as opposed to a summary written/rewritten/edited by someone who may not have even read the original speech–and who at any rate is only writing with the care expected at birdcage liners like USA Today or the NY Times, not the level expected at the SDMB–you find that Summers was in fact offering multiple hypotheses for the underrepresentation of women in science, not one single explanation: hence the use of “the reason” in the article is doubly misleading, in both number and strength. The hypothesis of sex-linked traits, in fact, only ranked second in Summers’ hypothesized order of importance.
Furthermore, Summers offered more than just “the difference in representation” as support for this hypothesis, pointing to studies showing apparent, empirical linkings of sex to several traits (in particular, to the standard deviations in these traits). Finally, there is really no way you can read Summers’ speech as stating this as “a fact”; several times throughout the speech he points out that these are his opinions, with his understandings of current research. Throughout the speech he stresses that these hypotheses are not fully resolved and asks for further research.
Since Summers clearly presents his three explanations as hypotheses and not fact, I must disagree with you: this is precisely the scientific method. From his concluding paragraph:
Sadly, sentimentality won out in most of the public debate I saw.
I find these kinds of discussions interesting as an example of how people can choose to ignore the obvious when it suits them.
Let’s take the initial question.
What evidence is there that Africans are less intelligent than Westerners?
Well, all of it. No one has ever designed a test that shows that people of African descent are even equal to other groups anything approximating what we call intellectual intelligence. Many people claim that this is because every test of this type is designed by white people for white people so all of them are inherently biased. This is horseshit. Psychometrics (which I have a decent academic background in) is a well developed science that relies on pure statistical theory and there are ways to detect and correct any racial bias. People don’t simply sit down and write intelligence test questions based on their own experiences. They require years of research and complicated statistical techniques to prove that each question is measuring what they think it does and that it shows no bias along racial lines. Matching up black and white cohorts along socioeconomic lines almost always shows stronger performance from the white students even if all of them grew up in the same affluent neighborhood.
When I was in grad school at Dartmouth, I took a class on Intelligence Theory and testing. The main focus of the class was to pick apart The Bell Curve. Some of the research in it is good and irrefutable and other parts of it is highly flawed. The professor didn’t exhibit any bias at all as we went through it week by week. At the end of the class, he asked all 6 of us what we thought about the book and its conclusions. Everyone said that the book had crap methodology in places and the theories presented had no basis. I agreed with the first part but we were still sitting there with a mountain of good evidence that blacks as a whole always score lower than other groups on any test of intelligence that anyone has ever devised. One flawed book doesn’t dismiss that premise. The professor agreed wholeheartedly.
If you open your closet and see a man hiding in it and scream for your mommy. It doesn’t matter how well-reasoned her arguments are about how that is impossible and then leaves you to go to sleep. The fact remains that there is still a man hiding in your closet.
Some intelligent and clever people claim that it is impossible that blacks aren’t as intelligent as other groups because blacks aren’t a race and there is more genetic diversity in Africa itself than between any other groups on earth. Therefore, they have little in common and don’t share any traits that could make this possible. That is absolutely true. However, you can flip the theory around. The Out of Africa Hypothesis says that a very small group of people moved out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago and populated the rest of the world. You would most certainly see a population bottleneck effect there. Perhaps the people that moved out of Africa had exceptional traits both good and bad and populated the rest of the globe. It is unlikely that their descendants would be exactly the same on any given trait as those groups that never left Africa.
Granted, none of this requires that this is a true genetic difference. It could be developmental or environmental. However, the question as stated is almost irrefutable that the current population of blacks almost always lags in any intellectual measure almost all of the time. There is a chance that this effect will disappear in the future but claiming that it doesn’t exist clearly today is very disingenuous and dishonest.
P.S. Can someone please list the things I will be banned from, fired from, or shunned for this post because I would like to see it coming?
There is a real, significant, and persistent difference in measured IQ between blacks and whites (and Asians). Herearesomecites; there are many others.
There are a number of different theories proposed to explain this difference. A major problem in examining and evaluating these theories is what Dr. Summers encountered - that a lot of people will not wait until the end of your sentence to start screaming at you.
:shrugs:
And a countdown to lockdown or moving to GD in 4,3,2…
Watson is claiming that there’s a genetic basis for the differences. As far as I can tell, this is not based on any special biological knowledge or insight. In any case, it’s reasonable to ask what that supposed knowledge or insight might be. It’s one thing to say “we don’t know that there aren’t genetic differences in intelligence among races/ethnicities/locations”; it’s another thing to assert that there are such differences, and that they have a particular direction.
Shagnasty, your reading seems very different from mine. The critiques I’ve read of The Bell Curve pointed out how Murray grabbed a great deal of test data from places where the tests were often not IQ tests, or weren’t intended to be used to measure IQ, or had to be “corrected” by application of arcane formulae in order to get it on a footing with other tests. After reading the details I would be unwilling to put any trust in the results at all. I didn’t see any good evidence left to support the hypothesis.
And Shodan – those cites aren’t academic stdies. And the last one is by — Murray and Flynn! Imagine that!
That was part of my (implied) point. Murray did have some crappy methods but if you look at any valid sets of IQ scores or anything like it, you will almost always get the same result. The fact that the Bell Curve was poorly done in places has little bearing on whether the ultimate conclusions are real or not. People complain against IQ tests and things related to them (SAT, GRE, MCAT, and LSAT scores for example) being biased but all of them point to the same thing. No one has developed any sort of test that shows blacks being superior or even equal to any traditional intelligence measures.
At this point I feel obligated to say that many blacks are smarter than I will ever be but the overwhelming evidence remains that today’s black population overall isn’t as intellectually intelligent as other groups and it is painfully easy to demonstrate and replicate anywhere in the world. It takes an extreme leap of faith and a finger to Occam’s razor to suggest that every measure has been biased against blacks and that one day a real test will come to show that blacks, whites, and Asians are really exactly equal in everything that approaches an intelligence measure like academics or jobs or standardized tests.
As detailed before, I think belief in IQ tests is evidence of low intelligence.
Crick’s ramblings remind me of Linus Pauling’s assertions about vitamin C being a cure-all. Sometimes you get these otherwise-brilliant guys who go all the way out into left field in one or two other areas.