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posted by chromas on Sunday January 13 2019, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the race-to-disgrace dept.

James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race

Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence.

In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist's remarks were "unsubstantiated and reckless". Dr Watson had made similar claims in 2007 and subsequently apologised.

He shared the Nobel in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick for their 1953 discovery of the DNA's double helix structure.

Dr Watson sold his gold medal in 2014, saying he had been ostracised by the scientific community after his remarks about race. He is currently in a nursing home recovering from a car accident and is said to have "very minimal" awareness of his surroundings.

Previously: Disgraced Scientist is Selling his Nobel Prize


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @05:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 14 2019, @05:05PM (#786487)

    "But of course you want to believe that race has some sort of meaning as a genetic concept (it doesn't), and that the meaning in question is somehow tied to people's intelligence (it isn't)"

    oh yeah. a few hundred years of breeding for size/strength affects african american size/strength but thousands of years of racial separation didn't effect anything like intelligence.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday January 14 2019, @07:24PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday January 14 2019, @07:24PM (#786580)

    "Thousands of years of racial separation" definitely didn't happen, and we know this because there's tons of shades of people in between white and black, and there always have been. For example, people who live in what is now Spain have been interacting and interbreeding with people who live in what is now Morocco for the entirety of recorded history. The Moroccans, in turn, have regularly interacted and interbred with people next door in what is now Algeria. The Algerians did the same thing with the Mali Empire to their south, routinely crossing the Sahara, and the Malians were getting into territory that's generally considered "black".

    You can see the same thing going north from Spain: Spaniards have constantly crossed the Pyrenees to hang out with and interbreed with the French. The French have always been interacting with the Germans and Brits. Who in turn have pretty much always been interacting with the Irish and Norwegians. And you're now solidly in "white" territory.

    And when you start getting into later periods, you have networks of trade and communication and interaction and interbreeding going pretty much everywhere within the Eastern Hemisphere. And there's a similar network in the Americas as well. And there even appear to have been occasional once-every-few-centuries visits across both the Atlantic and Pacific between the hemispheres before 1492. The idea that cultures were completely separated from each other bears absolutely no resemblance to history or archaeology. People moved around, shared information and sold stuff to each other, and while they were moving around they banged each other regularly. There ain't no such thing as a "pure" race, and never will be because of this.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.