Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire James Watson - Co discoverer of DNA, nucelar biologist, geneticist and zoologist

now why do you care?

Because he has some views on race and genetics based on his study that is interesting and controversial

He's a Nobel Prize winner for science but he so controversial he had to sell it because he was let from a lucrative position in academics. A person bought his prize for $4.1 million and then gave it back to him.
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He has been quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, 1997, as stating: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her." The biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to The Independent claiming that Watson's position was misrepresented by The Sunday Telegraph article, and that Watson would equally consider the possibility of having a heterosexual child to be just as valid as any other reason for abortion, to emphasise that Watson is in favor of allowing choice.

Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He has also
suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.

In early October 2007, Watson was about to embark on a UK book tour to promote the memoir. He was interviewed by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe at CSHL. In 1996 she had been a student there in a program in which Watson recruited students to live at his family home and work at CSHL for a year. Hunt-Grubbe had gone on to work for the Sunday Times Magazine; she was selected for the interview as she was one of the few women to have been mentored by him.

Hunt-Grubbe broached the subject of race and intelligence. Watson did not say in his memoir that race was a factor in his hypothesis of divergence of intellect between geographically isolated populations. The following is a transcript of that part of the interview: 'He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”

Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with the clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated.


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he spoke solely as an academic with malice or prejudice, but he paid a heavy price for his findings.

As happens today with anyone whom might speak out against the science supposedly proving man is the cause of climate change.

Does anyone really believe that the ivory tower is intellectually free?

Watson says what everyone knows but is afraid to say.

he said what he though science proved

you're not allowed to do that if it doesn't fit today's agenda

What Watson is saying that in the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the various groups evolved and developed in isolation. Therefore, no exchange between them. He contends that no one can expect all groups to have come out of this as equals.

Therefore he must be a racist, all of his discoveries are false, and the Watson-Crick model of DNA was stolen from a black Grad student at Oxford. Nothing else is possible. Pig must die!

learned a long time ago... another trait of being a liberal, is to be blind to the obvious....

if it doesn't fit their ideology, then it doesn't exist in their minds...

and if you disagree with them, then you are accused of being a racist, even if race wasn't a part of the discussion...

isn't it obvious... that only really smart people come from third world countries.. and until modern times, only really really dumb people came from Europe and Asia.... that is why their nations developed and the third world didn't...

Good illustration. On a smaller level, even in America, in areas that were isolated, and successive generations of families then self isolated, you find less inclination to change. Even providing education, for improving health, does little to improve their health outcomes; this is found to be really frustrating among public health practitioners today. If not enhanced with new challenges, intellect doesn't seem to flourish among progeny. Wasted efforts to teach a population how to improve its way of life, as they don't grasp the concepts and implications. Should revise alot of social programs based on failure rates observed. but....you know THAT won't happen. That's what I can gather from it anyways. So, similar in whole cultures and civilizations thousands of years ago.