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Nobel laureate stripped of honours after ‘reprehensible’ statements
In 2007 James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner who co-discovered the structure of DNA, said that black people are genetically inferior. In an interview with the Sunday Times Magazine, he voiced that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" as "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really".
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He has forwarded his hypothesis, one that is debated. That’s what scholars do. Yet an award he won for his achievements is now stripped from him and he has been disassociated by his educational institute. This penalisation is political, not academic. He has stated the modern equivalent of a heresy, a deviation from orthodoxy and the social values of the contemporary age, and therefore should be punished for it. This decision has potential to send a chilling effect throughout academia – only PC socially non-offensive hypotheses will be tolerated.
In the Guardian article written by Kevin Mitchell (which is hyperlinked to in the Campus Review article above), Mitchell writes:
“To end up with systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations, the selective forces driving those differences would need to have been enormous. What’s more, those forces would have to have acted across entire continents, with wildly different environments, and have been persistent over tens of thousands of years of tremendous cultural change. Such a scenario is not just speculative – I would argue it is inherently and deeply implausible.”
I am not a disciplinary expert in human evolution (I am a philosopher of science). So, I don’t know enough about the entire set of evolutionary pressures that (disciplinary experts assume) humans have been subject to over the evolutionary history of our species. But the above claim by Mitchell firstly prompted me to think about the periods of glaciation (and interglacial periods) that constitute the Pleistocene, and secondly, led me to some questions.
Would different human populations have been subject to sufficiently different selective forces during the Pleistocene such that systematic genetic differences in intelligence would have resulted? Or would all human populations have been subject to effectively the same selective forces such that no systematic genetic differences in intelligence would have resulted?
These are important questions, but perhaps we just don’t know enough about the detail of the selective forces at work during the Pleistocene (and the relationship between genes and intelligence, for that matter) to draw any definitive conclusions.
Nathan misunderstands what scientific scholars do. A scientific hypothesis should be submitted to a refereed journal, in a paper in which all the evidence for and against is discussed. If reviewers accept this as a reasonable argument, it is published. Only then should you publicise your hypothesis in such media as a TV doumentary.
There are many papers relevant to the question of the relationship between genes and intelligence. But, by way of illustration, here is one (and I particularly like the central message of the last paragraph, reproduced below):
Rushton & Jensen (2005) ‘Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability’ Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol 11, No. 2, 235-294.
‘The major policy implication of the research reviewed here is that adopting an evolutionary–genetic outlook does not undermine our dedication to democratic ideals. As E. O. Wilson (1978) aptly noted: “We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm freedom and dignity” (p. 52). He went on to quote the sociologist Bressler (1968): “An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom. Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of ‘inconvenient’ findings that may emerge in future scientific research” (E. O. Wilson, 1978, p. 52). Denial of any genetic component in human variation, including between groups, is not only poor science, it is likely to be injurious both to unique individuals and to the complex structure of societies.’
(For the details of the further references identified in this passage itself see the 2005 paper.)