(NAME-MCE) "James Watson, blacker than he thought"

[Michael Kim]

I read a lot of the digests to this list and I haven't contributed yet, but
it's hard not to comment when faced with this much irony.  James Watson has
a history of putting his foot in his mouth but this really takes the cake.
It's pretty hard, given what little we know about most genes, to attribute a
complex characteristic like intelligence to genetics.  In the "nature vs.
nurture" battle, most geneticists and psychologists would probably lean on
the influence of environment, or "nurture" being the primary player when it
comes to something like intelligence.  Genetically, we are all more similar,
regardless of place of origin, than we are different.

Obviously, bigotry is another factor which is based more on environment than
genetics as has been proved by Watson's African genetic heritage.  I wonder
if hubris is also an ingrained genetic trait as he keeps making comments
along these lines and keeps thinking that he will be forgiven in the public
eye.  Cold Spring Harbor did well to get him to step down as director.

We need to be very metered in our interpretation of all the new information
that we are getting from the results of the Human Genome project.  I liken
it to finding a library full of books where we can't even figure out the
language, much less discern the nuances of the literature.  Watson obviously
thinks he is still pioneering in the field of genetics, but he is probably
as illiterate as the rest of the scientific community when it comes to
reading broad generalizations about race into the text of the human genome.

While I respect the work that he and Crick completed in bring the structure
of DNA to light, even the best of us have to watch what we say.

Here's a link to the NY Times in response to the UK press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/science/12watson.html

-M.Kim