Why would a higly credited man like James Watson say blacks are genetically inferior to other races?

Question

History alone proves this to be false.

It's disappointing that a man who co-discovered the structure of DNA would try to justify racism through scientific analysis.

What are your beliefs?

Do you agree with him?

Why do you think he would personally say this?

Answer 1

being a scientist and all, he probably thinks he has decent evidence enough to be able to make this claim. No one would say stuff like this with no reasonable explanation for it unless they want to get branded a racist and disgrace themselves for the rest of their lives in our politically correct world.

His research is extensive and if it supports his claim then kudos to him for standing up to the PC nature of this world.

Answer 2

Ignorance and bigotry can be found in high class intellectuals.        had genius level IQ, and look at the horrible things he believed and done. It shows that no matter how intellegent a person is, they can still be mislead and overall wrong. It all depends on how one is raised, really.        was raised a bigot by his father and a catholic priest who believed that       s were the founders of civilization. I don't think so. Most of the       s I know are so stupid. If you ask me, the founders of civilization were a people who all modern races descend from. Not of any modern ethnicity. They divided and adapted to the different enviroments, but were all descendants of Noah and his sons. The original humans were more than likely dark-skinned. I know this a sa fact. Afterall, we were made from the dust of the earth. Wouldn't Adam's skin of been a dark color, too? I think that we all look different because 1-God wanted us to be different, because it's obvious he loves variety, otherwise, there wouldn't be so many different kinds of food to eat, and 2- he wanted us to do well in these different continents, too.

Answer 3

Only one explanation: Watson was genetically predisposed to making idiotic observations.

Answer 4

No I don't agree with it. But, since having a brother who married a Jamaican woman, ad knowing her and the family I was surprised to see that she and her family have a kind of racism towards their own race. She was considered better in her family as she was whiter and she wouldn't let the children in the sun in case they turned blacker?!

So I guess it's a kind of racism towards ones own race.

Answer 5

I seem to remember him stealing someones x-ray defraction data that they used to derive the structure.  Figuring out the structure was a double helix isn't really a great intellectual accomplishment in any case.  There are only so many logical ways you can arrange the molecules.

It is asinine to say to a race is inferior to another.  He obviously has a bloated sense of his own intellect if he thinks he can look at the gene pool of the different races and pass judgment on which one of them has a better overall configuration of genes.  Nobody knows that much about genetics even if one man knew everything we know. Even if he had the combined human knowledge of genetics, it is still a subjective judgment and he is apparently too ignorant to know that.

Answer 6

he jus racist that all u need 2 know

Answer 7

To take the controversial approach. He's not wrong per se. But to call people of African descent inferior, is extreming it a bit. What's he's referencing to is the alterration and differentiations in genetic makeup. I'm a genetic major and can see where he's coming from.

     To explain it in laymen's terms. There are through selective breeding and millenia long closed gene pools certain characteristics in said ethnicities/races.

     To list a few of the more basic ones. People of North European descent have quite a few more white blood cells than you (ironic I know, at them having the most white blood cells), this is in part because of the stress on the gene pool as a result of the plagues and diseases that drudged on Europe for centuries. Meaning the people with less white blood cells more often than not didn't live long enough to reproduce, leading to more people with higher white blood cell counts reproducing, leading in turn to the majority of the population after several generations possessing this elevated count.

This is also why you may think "how can that whitie drink so d**n much," in short, specifically in European populations the enzyme responsible for breaking down alcohol in the liver is found more often and in greater quantity. Same with in European population, due to the harshness of life and lack of vitamins, they can digest milk a lot easier and faster. This is simply again because those that could for some variable digest milk faster had a higher chance of survival in the rough and unfriendly European landscape.  

Same with Asia and IQ. Since IQ is in part hereditary. The IQ differentiation is also explained in part to selective breeding. To put it blunt. Life in Africa while not paradise, was certainly prettier than life in Asia/Europe in concerns to wars. The Europe/Asia it is theorized that the constant wars, and of course who are the majority of soldiers? Poor, uneducated farmers,...in short the people more than likely to be the dumber ones. This leads to an elevated percentage of the surviving children coming from the more non-lethal professions such as the children of blacksmiths, etc...

And no your comment that history proves it to be false is not quite true. History shows that no one race is superior to other ones, but it is quite evident that there are differences. Whether one views these differences as giving one superiority/inferiority is solely a matter of opinion.

Also while I don't agree with him I can see where he's coming from. There have been several tests I had to learn about which concerned race and intelligence. It found out that there was a trend in African based intelligence, if the person in question had partial Eurasian ancestry he/she had an elevated IQ to an African student with little to no Eurasian ancestry. The test was further expanded to see the IQ of African children raised in European families, despite going through the same education and possessing the same chances as their European siblings, they on average while scoring higher than their fellow Africans raised in African families still scored lower than their European adoptive siblings. The turnbell tests I believe they're called, they're being continued as we speak. The new set of results should be published in a year or so.

Last but not least. It is not a matter of skin color but of gene pools. Take for example people from India. Specifically from southern India. The Indians from there often have skin just as dark or darker than African peoples. Yet they possess an intelligence higher than that of most European areas (exception being the Dutch/German plateau region). Meaning it is much rather a breeding and selective breeding issue than it is one with the melanin count in your skin. In short for some odd reason, be it pure coincidence or perhaps some unrecognized variable. More people of lesser intelligence mated and produced offspring in Africa than they did in many other regions of the world, leading to a disparity in intelligence range. Same in Europe more dumb people mated than in East Asia. If one were to select a master race based on intelligence, we'd have to welcome out little Chinese overlords.

Now IQ is anyway a debated issue. Since it is not so much true intelligence, smarts as it is a certain way of thinking. And apparently this conceptual way of thinking comes easier to Asians and Europeans than it does to people of African descent. That is to say however this is all averages, the person with the highest IQ in the world could be of African descent. It's just more unlikely.

As for why he would say this? Simply put he's not a sociologist. He's a scientist, he sees the data and formulates a theory about it. He, to his own loss, is either incapable of understanding or chooses not to understand the sensibilities of people on this topic.

Answer 8

There was a bible thumper working on tracing the human genome; I wonder if Watson was he.

In any case, we all came from Africa, or at least our ancestors did.

It's no longer a mystery.

I cannot believe a scientist who actually knows DNA would make such a statement; it is not logical and makes assumptions more representative of uninformed people.

Answer 9

He said this because the man is a r****d.  The only thing he proved by his poorly judged comment is that being educated DOES NOT make a person smart.  On the flip side.....what difference would it make anyway?  We are all on this planet together and need to find a way to get by whether we are "genetically inferior" or educated dumb asses.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but seriously....provide factual evidence to the claim or keep the rediculas hypothesis to oneself.

Answer 10

Nature has made us all different but we seem to overlook the fact by comparing people using the same criteria.  My son had a learning problem but I knew that he was very intelligent. He just learns in a different way than most and I had to work with this first hand. He is amazing in his insight but it was this insight that blocked his ability to learn in the traditional way. We can't all be the same because nature depends on difference for more options toward someone surviving any type of unknown problem. My son was not inferior, just different. People will understand someday.

Answer 11

Don't quote me on this, its just something I have a vague recollection of hearing- but aren't people of African descent more likely to suffer from certain diseases or illnesses than people of other races?

"Why are African American women 1.5 to 2.2 times more likely than white women to die from breast cancer, despite their lower incidence of the disease?"

(More info on that on this site)

http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroo...

Hope I could be helpful in some way.

Peace.

Answer 12

Just proves you can be a genius and an idiot at the same time.

Answer 13

He said it, probably because he actually found the opposite to be true, and he's feeling inferior, and spreading a message like that makes him feel better.

Answer 14

There are many ways to measure supremacy and inferiority. As part of my personal belief system I judge this measure by mind and soul.

But seeing it can be measured in any number of ways he might be right to say that a part of a black persons genetic structure is weaker to that of other races.

That doesn't make them inferior as a whole.

Different races have different biological strengths and weaknesses. This is common knowledge. And when looking at hard evidence not racism but the result of scientifically collected data.

The problem here is the word inferiority. Which immediately dictates supremacy. By using it in this manner he's introducing racism into the discussion. Poor choice of words. Whether or not he himself is racist I don't know. But since I don't know the whole issue I wouldn't rush to say his comment was altogether a racist one or simply a stumbling explanation.

Try to keep in mind that your potential to achieve is not dictated by your genetics but your will alone and without exception. While they can make it more difficult, they can't make it impossible.

Answer 15

A person's expertice in on area doesn't make them all-knowing about everything else.

Even the best scientists have their prejudics and other insanities.

Answer 16

You know, he didn't say they were genetically inferior, he said they have lower IQ's. Different thing. Different DNA for different circumstances.

The race IQ thing... the only debate between psychologists is WHY there's a 20 point difference between black and Asian IQ's, not if there is one. There's the whole 'Africans have a lower brain mass relative to body mass than Asians' and a big body of research that supports it being genetic. There's also a difference in pregnancy length, onset of puberty, and developmental differences between the two in infancy (black babies develop motor skills faster).

No one as yet has come up with a good reason for malnourished illierate Asians scoring better on IQ tests than well fed literate black Americans that doesn't involve genetics.

It was quite entertaining watching the media tip-toeing around the fact that the IQ gap isn't even questioned any more by psychologists who specialise in inteligence.

"History alone proves this to be false"- How, exactly?

Edit:

"It is a known fact that IQ isn't the correct tool on measuring intelligence and competence."

Where did you get that Idea from?

The vast majority of psychologists agree that it measures overall intelligence pretty well. Someone polled them once for their attitude on IQ's in the nineties. It's why the army won't take recruits with an IQ of less than 85. IQ is also a very good predictor of life outcome, regardless of your social class. Poor high IQ kids do better with their lives than middle class average  IQ kids.

"Well I'm sure all of you are aware of the pyramids. To have the engineering capabilities to create the pyramid at that time, and to leave modern man stumped on how the pyramid was created at that point and time. Then ones intelligence and competence can't be inferior. This is known to modern man. So he thought he could use his stature in the field of science to make irrational statements like these credible. Ha!"

Since all the studies of ancient Egyptians by credible anthropologists show that Dynastic Egyptians were mainly Caucasian, how  are the pyramids relevant?

Wow, you don't know that Caucasian remains have been found in Africa prior to 20k ago. 90% plus of Egyptians had Caucasian hair... geez I have so many DNA studies, cranio facial studies etc on file that I'll just embarrass you if I continue.

SO... why in there only a couple of black looking tomb portraits, but about twenty that look just like modern Arabs? Why do the teeth and skull and hair and blood types all match with modern Egyptians? Even the limb length is the same. Even the upper Nubians show at about 40% Caucasian. Some of the mummies have naturally blond hair, quite a lot have varying shades of brown, the odd redhead.

Please show me a study that says other wise.

I have a shed load blooged that say they were Caucasian with about 10% black admixture. I'd like to know what scientific evidence backs you up.

You do read some c**p!

Funny magazine cover, no science though, I see.