James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race

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  • James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html

    It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.

    In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “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.”

    Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

    Some scientists said that Dr. Watson’s recent remarks are noteworthy less because they are his than because they signify misconceptions that may be on the rise, even among scientists, as ingrained racial biases collide with powerful advances in genetics that are enabling researchers to better explore the genetic underpinnings of behavior and cognition.

    “It’s not an old story of an old guy with old views,’’ said Andrea Morris, the director of career development at Rockefeller University, who served as a scientific consultant for the film. Dr. Morris said that, as an African-American scientist, “I would like to think that he has the minority view on who can do science and what a scientist should look like. But to me, it feels very current.’’

    David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, has argued that new techniques for studying DNA show that some human populations were geographically separated for long enough that they plausibly could have evolved average genetic differences in cognition and behavior.

    But in his recent book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,’’ he explicitly repudiates Dr. Watson’s presumption that such differences would “correspond to longstanding popular stereotypes’’ as “essentially guaranteed to be wrong.’’

    Even Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist who argues that nature decisively trumps nurture when it comes to individuals, rejects speculation about average racial differences.

    “There are powerful methods for studying the genetic and environmental origins of individual differences, but not for studying the causes of average differences between groups,” Dr. Plomin writes in an afterword to be published this spring in the paperback edition of his book, “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.”

    #Racisme #Génomique #Watson