Watson’s Nobel Prize Medal for Decoding DNA Fetches $4.1M at an Auction
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Jim Watson is one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is also a peevish bigot. History will remember him for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953. This week, Watson is ensuring that history, or at least the introduction to every obituary, will also remember him for being a jerk.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
People also call him racist because of his another discovery. I mean let him do whatever he wants to do with that. Will a medal going to carry away whatever he does for the science?
> [I am] 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's flat out wrong about what "all the testing" says, btw. We're not just bashing someone for speaking a politically unpopular truth here (I cynically suspect that we would do just that were Watson's position correct, but fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case).
> Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them
> [the] historic curse of the Irish, which is not alcohol, it's not stupidity. But it's ignorance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Controversies
Also, he's selling the medal with the specific intent of thumbing his nose at the scientific community. He would draw much more sympathy if he had fallen on hard times due to misfortune, for instance.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/tenses-diffuse-tensions...
I would be grateful if you could go into some more detail about this. There have been articles on HN recently that made a strong case for the genetic basis of IQ and for its validity as a measure of intelligence. It's also easy to find data about the average measured IQ in different racial groups. But there are also a variety of arguments that weaken or strengthen the case, from the Flynn effect to studies on twins, adopted children, etc. It seems to me that the issue is muddled, at best. If there is a slam-dunk argument that can finally bury the notion of intelligence differences between races, I'd like to see it articulated.
Disclaimer: I do not belong to the race with the highest supposed IQ, and I have never taken an IQ test myself, so I really have no horse in this race. Also, even if racial differences in intelligence were real, individual differences would still be more important, and it would remain unacceptable to make assumptions about someone's intelligence based on their race.
I'm black.to suggest that my intelligence is linked to the color of my skin is ridiculous.
And never forget that a whole bunch of white-supremacists out there are using his credentials to justify whatever violent ideology they promote,and these people don't just talk,they harass,beat and kill non white people because they consider other "races" as subhumans.Words have consequences.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_of...
The interpretation of the adoption research in the article you linked is particularly infuriating as there is only one thing clearly dominating in the results, the upbringing of the child which accounts for a full 10 points, a number that would seem to point to an almost irrelevance of any genetic predisposition let alone one correlated with prehistoric ancestry, those 3 points could come from literally any uncontrolled for other environmental influence.
This is an intellectually dishonest interpretation of statistics and/or his claims. Saying "all Asians are short" is stupid, but saying "Asians are shorter than Europeans" is not; my interpretation of the statement is that Asians are in average (or even better, in median) shorter than Europeans, not that all Asians are shorter than any European (btw, I don't know if it's true, and I don't particularly care, but it very well could be, and it very well could be the reverse).
About race and intelligence, I don't think it's a controversial claim, at least in the US, that Asians are more intelligent than whites, who are in turn more intelligent than blacks. Now, the reasons for this are varied, and might nothing to do with race, but with history (e.g. Asians are descendants of immigrants who were driven to succeed, while blacks are descendants of slaves, who grew up in poor neighborhoods). Why would you object to the second claim, but not the first one?
Also, I think universities have the job to yield brilliant researchers, inventors and engineers. I don't think any racial prejudice would be a very fundamental way of working towards that goal, so I'd rather they not do it, even if it means whites would rarely be accepted.
Of course, that whole problem might be caused by their entry exams not being a very good way of selecting for their goal, but that's me as a hopeful white person :p
What does the assertion that intelligence is heritable mean to you?
It means that if I dropped a bunch of Danes into South Korea, their children would be closer in height to their cohort in Denmark than would the children of another group of Danes dropped into North Korea. The North Korean Danes would be taller than the North Koreans and the South Korean Danes would be taller than the South Koreans.
This is really terrible journalism, regardless of the truth in it.
This article seems to cast doubt on how important they were in the discovery of the structure of DNA and into inheritable capability, however it is widely known amongst scientists how large of a role they played in Watson and Crick's discovery:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkins
The real shame is that we insist on shoehorning a fundamentally collaborative endeavor into a winner-take-all social construct.
The way I see it, both the diffraction theorists and the crystallization experimentalists deserve credit. Had things happened differently the experimentalists would have gotten all the credit and that would have been just as wrong.
+1
I was about to do the same.
So much for science as a bastion of disinterested objective investigation.
When a community's greatest minds (such as Perelman, Grothendieck, etc., in math, for instance) become alienated from the larger community, when conformity and publishing quantity (over quality) is rewarded, and dissent is punished, when information, results, and access is kept from all but a few of the elect, we have a system which is not fulfilling its promise or its purpose.
I think what we're seeing here is what too often happens with celebrity scientists -- they get a big head, and think they are expert on issues that they actually know nothing about.
>I think what we're seeing here is what too often happens with celebrity scientists -- they get a big head, and think they are expert on issues that they actually know nothing about.
I agree with this point (and would go further by removing the celebrity condition), and it is probably applicable to Watson, just as it is to most who condemn him.
Are you saying that you believe it is wrong to fire or refuse to associate with someone who says racist things? (This was the reaction to his comments.) I mean, leaving aside the legal issues of having someone in a management position saying something like that. Morally, you feel that this is wrong?
No, that is an overgeneralization of a very lazy mischaracterization of what I said. Ostracizing someone for "saying racist" things would be appropriate, depending on a number of particulars, including degree (is teaching "math" instead of "anti-racist math" itself an assertion of racism?). However, in this instance, it would require a great deal of interpretation to get a legitimate expression of bigotry out of his initial remarks. He was punished not for prejudice, but for breaking a social taboo. Same analysis applies to Shirtgate and Larry Summers on sex differences.
I didn't characterize what you said, I asked whether I had understood your properly.
Now that you have clarified, I have another question. Do you actually believe that what he said was a controversial yet fundamentally scientific opinion? The man himself has acknowledged that there is not actually any genetic difference in intelligence, as far as we can tell. It might be different if the data actually backed up what he said, but as far as I can tell, it was simple racist ranting.
Nobody was punished for shirtgate. A guy apologized for doing something wrong. Everyone forgave him. The end.
well, using this quote as a source (can't find the original):
>He says that he is “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”
This is more of an off-the-cuff, vague, and poorly considered comment. So, no.
However, it has attracted a disproportionate amount of scrutiny (compared to the stupid and incorrect things said all the time by other scientists), most often from people who are equally unqualified to comment. Also notable is the assumption on the part of critics who assumed he stated the basis for the difference is genetic, which he did not in fact say.
>Nobody was punished for shirtgate
He was bullied to tears by a giant internet hate mob telling him he was a bad person on one of the most significant days in his career, all for his choice of apparel. The same people, I might add, who advocate internet censorship in order to curb "harassment".
> So much for science as a bastion of disinterested objective investigation.
Nazi scientists and race theorists also thought they were "objectively investigating". You people never learn.
>You people never learn
A telling choice of words. It goes without saying that I firmly stand against over-generalization and stereotyping. This is evidently not true of all commenters, however.
Obviously you dont,if you find anything that guys says defensible, I tell you that from scientist to scientist.
Is it only me, or is it a weird purchase?
DNA isn't decoded yet. Genes have a preamble, and postamble, and we have very little idea what they mean, we only know what compounds are "requested" by the codons in the middle of the gene. There are large "empty" parts in chromosomes (not just the telomeres), and while we know they're not optional, exactly what they're for is anyone's guess. Furthermore, genes are known to contain some sort of symbolic pointers to other genes, which we don't know the format of.
Also the way the cell nucleus decodes DNA into the chromatin network, which should be thought of as the CPU that "executes" DNA contains a lot of stuff we don't know about. For starters, there are molecules linking across DNA molecules ... what do they signify ? How do they work ? How is gene expression controlled by the DNA (presumably has to do with the pre-and-postambles of genes). How does the pointer resolution in genes work ?
What we know as the double helix, what everybody thinks of as DNA, is really a picture of sex (or "conception" if you want to get technical. That's why we have sex of course). DNA only occurs in that form during reproduction (could be cell, or organism reproduction of course, though during cell (asexual) reproduction it's only present for a few seconds at best, during sexual reproduction it exists for a few minutes)
??? What are you talking about? DNA exists in a double helical form almost always. An exception is when it is "unzipped" for transcription or duplication. (And that's only a few nucleotides at a time.)
I have no idea how you're relating sex to the double helical structure of DNA.
The double helix as analyzed only exists as part of chromosomes.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Nucleosom...
I doubt anyone has ever suggested otherwise. The fact that 27% of Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century were of Ashkenazi heritage is most likely directly related to their culture and a ton of endless hard work. We are all homo sapiens. Yes some cultures are worse off than others but I see no evidence of any genetic superiority. It's not like all these academic achievers are coyly existing on a beach in a tropical environment, barely exerting any effort, and causally changing the world of science. No, it takes a ton of effort.
(My comment is based on Watson's theory on IQ and race, and books like, The Bell Curve. And I'm not promoting religion just the critical thinking skills developed by analyzing and arguing a complicated text.)