COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ZERO HEDGE
‘Discoverer Of DNA's
Double-Helix Banned From U of I For "Failing Test Of Decency" ‘
Well, this is an old controversy.
I don't know that I've ever read a genuinely racist comment
from James Watson, but he has made some extremely controversial comments,
comments which anger many people, black people especially.
But saying something which angers some groups is not the
same thing as being racist.
Racism is a kind of prejudice, and all prejudice is
ignorance and superstition, whether religious or racial or political
prejudices.
The opposite of prejudice is science, a method for
discovering facts.
James Watson is criticized for exactly the same kind of
statements made by William Shockley, another Nobel winner who helped discover
the transistor.
Yet both these men read the literature of intelligence and
its variations between groups, a literature informed by literally millions of
IQ tests over decades, and drawn their conclusions from that. You may not like
that, but it cannot accurately be called prejudice.
That literature of the distribution of intelligence is not a
gutter or scurrilous literature, although, it arouses intense angers and
controversies. It includes some pretty capable investigators and authors, such
as Arthur Jensen, and their work is there to be scrutinized and criticized. It
is not hidden away like secret nonsense or mumbo-jumbo.
I do not think that can fairly be called racist.
It could conceivably be incorrect, but it would need to be
proven incorrect, and, so far as I am aware, it has not been proved incorrect,
only discounted by social attitudes.
In general, that literature says Ashkenazi Jews and Asians
have the highest average IQs, with Caucasian-type people second, and black
people last. I stress that those data divisions are not just arbitrarily set by
prejudiced views. Quite the opposite, they literally fall out of an immense
body of data.
If we choose to ignore the data – as by saying the tests
yielding the data were invalid or inaccurate measurements in some way, quite a
common, though unproven, response by critics - we may examine instead some
genuine intellectual successes in the world and see how they compare to the
test results.
In the people who build businesses, the people who excel at
science and math, and the people who invent complex new things both in
technology and art - we do tend to see the same general groupings seen in the
test data. That is a highly suggestive fact.
I don’t know, but I do know Americans are extremely ready to
call people names like “racist,” and they do that at the drop of a hat when
they do not like someone’s views. We see the same phenomenon at work regularly
in America with other name-calling, as when people are called misogynists or
anti-Semites or any other “-ist” or “-ite” you care to mention.
The current President of the United States – whether you
like him or not, and I do not – has been at the receiving end of a storm of exactly
such abusive name-calling, none of it with any basis in fact.
It does seem to be an American tradition, part, I think, of
what critic Robert Hughes called America’s “culture of complaint.” Remember, in
his day, that now most sainted of all American presidents, Abraham Lincoln, was
often called “an obscene ape.”
When someone stops analyzing and criticizing facts and starts
calling names, you can be sure, ipso facto, that you are dealing with another
form of prejudice in the people calling the names, a genuine form of prejudice,
and the very opposite of science, having nothing to do with facts.
