Intelligence is not a vaccine against racism
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/25/watson.resigns/index.html
This week a Nobel laureate in biology resigned over some of the most racist comments I’ve ever heard. James Watson, who won the highest honor in science for discovering DNA 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 also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and that while he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”
To think that one of the men responsible for discovering DNA would believe in eugenics is enormously troubling. We’d like to think that raw intelligence would help one to realize the Truth with a capital T. But it seems that’s just not the case. And, while you might chalk up the crazy ramblings of an old man to senility, I’m cynical enough to believe that senility only causes old men to say the things that young men only think. The assertion that divergent evolution might cause differences in intelligence, like it does with height and hair color, is so wrong and yet appears, chameleon-like, so logical. I have to imagine that lots and lots of people secretly harbor this belief.
Scary, scary stuff.