James Watson and the Insidiousness of Scientific Racism

I guess maybe "Black scientists are in the best position to understand what is so broken about the ideas of Watson and his army." was what he was working towards, but that seems like an extraordinarily weak point to make.

His army?

Hey, while we're researching why those people are stupid, let's also research why inhabitants and descendants of Northern climes seem so predisposed to be and do evil. The race/IQ obsessives being a relatively minor example among countless others.

As a bit of background, let's look at Lysenko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko). To summarise briefly, soviet collectivist political doctrine was fundamentally opposed to Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution as concepts, as I understand primarily because individuals are not identical parts of a collective, but are genetically unique and competing and succeeding or failing upon that basis. So they adopted practices which were politically acceptable, but without a shred of scientific evidence. 30 million people starved to death as a result. And soviet science, while generally advanced, was many decades behind when it came to biological and genetic research as a consequence.

Science is fundamentally about asking questions by formulating and disproving hypotheses. Sometimes, the questions and hypotheses in question can be uncomfortable. However, just because a question is not politically correct does not mean that question isn't a valid question to ask or to obtain an answer for.

I'm not going to address whether Watson himself is simply asking controversial questions, or actually racist. I don't know, or care especially. But I'm going to pose the following:

If we take the entire human population, and consider if specific genes have a contribution to intelligence (however we might choose to quantify it), the answer is almost certainly "yes". Genes affect every part of our development, and it would be extremely unlikely for there not to be any genetic contribution for this single factor when we know it has profound effects upon everything else. The real questions are which genes, to what extent they have an effect, and the mechanisms by which they exert that effect. That shouldn't be particularly controversial.

If you take that a step further, and decide to look at not at the whole population, but the spread between and within different groups, that also shouldn't be too controversial. We already know there are significant differences between the variants of individual genes between groups. It would not be surprising or controversial if some of those genes had some effect on intelligence.

It only becomes truly controversial when you make those groups specific. For example, grouping by sex, or race, or age, or occupation, or whatever classifier you might choose. These aren't controversial scientifically, they are controversial socially and politically. And going back to the original point about Lysenko, when politics decides what is or is not acceptable to question, we stop dealing with the facts of reality, and start dealing in wishful thinking. The wishful thinking here is that we are all the same and that there are no differences between races. But it's obvious that we aren't all the same. Basic genetics and observation tells us that. But there probably are differences, even if those differences are small. Or not so small. The problem is that people are afraid they might not like the answer, so they try to suppress the question.

But, from a scientific point of view, we can't deal with the problem except from a position of knowledge. We can't tackle it without understanding and quantifying it. Suppose that there is a big difference. Maybe that would give us a basis of doing something about it, to ensure we all have equal prospects, such as changing education to help people who don't learn as fast. The alternative is to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that we are all the same, despite any inequalities that might result by that inaction.

Then comes the "Black scientists are" part. This is a ridiculous and dangerous construction. Again it fuels racism more than it fights it. What's special about black scientists? Nothing. If we don't see race. A better phrasing is to express culture/feeling/history "Black people are"