by KaiserJeep » Mon 01 Dec 2014, 17:25:12
Scientific accuracy bows to Political Correctness .... again:
James Watson selling Nobel prize ‘because no-one wants to admit I exist’
World-famous biologist James Watson said he is selling the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA because he has been ostracised and needs the money
By Keith Perry
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ames Watson, the world-famous biologist who was shunned by the scientific community after linking intelligence to race, said he is selling his Nobel Prize because he is short of money after being made a pariah.
Mr. Watson said he is auctioning the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, because "no-one really wants to admit I exist".
Auctioneer Christie’s said the gold medal, the first Nobel Prize to be sold by a living recipient, could fetch as much as $3.5m (£2.23m) when it is auctioned in New York on Thursday. The reserve price is $2.5m.
Mr. Watson told the Financial Times he had become an “unperson” after he “was outed as believing in IQ” in 2007 and said he would like to use money from the sale to buy a David Hockney painting.
Mr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people.
* * *
Mr. Watson – who insisted he was “not a racist in a conventional way” – said it had been “stupid” of him to not realise that his comments on the intelligence of African people would end up in an article.
“I apologise . . . [the journalist] somehow wrote that I worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ – and you’re not supposed to say that.”
In 2007, the Sunday Times ran an interview with Dr Watson in which he said 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”.
He told the newspaper people wanted to believe that everyone was born with equal intelligence but that those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/11261872/James-Watson-selling-Nobel-prize-because-no-one-wants-to-admit-I-exist.htmlI have two final comments about the race/IQ controversy, and afterwards I am walking away from the thread and the debate.
1) You can pretend forever that there is no linkage between genetics and IQ, and it never will become true. There doubtless is some cultural bias to all IQ tests, because we can devise tests that display modest differences based upon the native culture of the test subject. However the majority of the difference is genetic, and there are somewhere roughly around 100 genes so far identified out of 19,000 total that are linked to IQ. The random mix of those 100 genes is why for all races the IQ scores assume a bell shaped curve. (The total number of genes in the human genome has been revised downward continuously over the last decade, from 100,000+ to 19,000, which is an estimate published July 3, 2014.) Unfortunately, the center peak of that bell shaped curve is on a different number for each of the three or the twenty-three or how ever many races you choose to recognize.
2) Pretending that no differences exist is simply not good public policy and it never will be. I'm nobody in particular, a middle class working American with a BSEE degree from 1977. Read through this thread and notice how I was repeatedly attacked by those who insist that the PC policy on race is reality, seemingly by definition alone, and in total defiance of the mass of actual Scientific evidence saying it is total BS. Not to mention - if you are honest with yourself - a lifetime of actual personal experience that confirms this. Now read the totality of the article above: The genius-level mind of the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering DNA is also being attacked for the exact same reason as am I.
Reality, what a concept. You can accept it or deny it, but I would suggest to you that acceptance is better mental health than denial.