Kontraverzni stavovi nobelovca Watson-a

LONDON — A Nobel prize-winning scientist who reportedly claimed Africans and Europeans
had different levels of intelligence is no longer welcome to deliver a lecture at London's Science Museum,
the museum said Wednesday.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering DNA, drew widespread outrage when he told
The Sunday Times that Africans and Europeans did not share the same brain power.

The newspaper quoted the 79-year-old American geneticist as saying 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 paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: "people who have to deal with black employees
find this not true."

The comments drew condemnation from British lawmakers, scientists, and equality campaigners.
On Wednesday The Independent newspaper put Watson on its front page, against the words: "Africans are
less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer."

The Independent catalogued what it said were a series of controversial statements from Watson, including one
in which he reportedly suggested women should have the right to abort their unborn children if tests could determine
they would grow into homosexuals.

Watson, who serves as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, was due to speak Friday at a
sold-out event at the Science Museum, but on Wednesday night the institution said Watson's comments had gone
too far and the lecture had been canceled.

This is not the first time Watson's speaking engagements have caused a stir.

In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced his theory about
a link between skin color and sex drive.

His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin — which give skin its color —
had been found to boost subjects' sex drive.

"That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard
of an English lover. Only an English patient."

Telephone and e-mail messages left with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after business hours Wednesday were
not immediately returned.

One of the world's most eminent scientists has created a racial firestorm in Britain.

James D. Watson, 79, co-discoverer of the DNA helix and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in
medicine, told the Sunday Times of London that 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 recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that "people
who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

Acknowledging that the issue was a "hot potato," the lifelong Democrat and avowed secular
humanist nonetheless said his beliefs were not an excuse to discriminate against blacks.

"There are many people of color who are very talented," said Watson, "but don't promote them
when they haven't succeeded at the lower level."

He told the interviewer, a former student of his, that he had recently inaugurated a DNA learning
center near Harlem, and would like to have more black researchers at his lab, "but there's no one to
recruit."

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University in Britain, was quick to dismiss
Watson's comments.

"This is Watson at his most scandalous, " Rose told the Times of London. "If he knew the literature in
the subject, he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."

Watson is the former director and current chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory biological-research
institution on New York's Long Island, and both admired and infamous for bluntly speaking his mind.

In a British television documentary in 2003, Watson advised eliminating low intelligence through gene therapy.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," said Watson, according to New Scientist magazine.
"The lower 10 percent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it?

"A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't," he added. "So I'd like to
get rid of that, to help the lower 10 percent."

He also touched upon sexual attraction in the same TV program.

"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty," Watson said. "I think it would be great."

In 2000, he told a lecture audience at U.C. Berkeley that there was a correlation between a population's
exposure to sunlight and its sex drive.

"That's why you have Latin lovers," Watson said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. "You've never
heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."

The notion that intelligence tests and other scientific evidence shows that racial groups differ in intelligence,
at least statistically, is not a new one.

It last gained popular attention in 1994 with "The Bell Curve," a best-selling book written by Harvard psychologist
Richard J. Herrnstein (who died before publication) and political scientist Charles Murray, which argued that intelligence
was more important than socio-economic background or education in achieving success in American life.

The book does not explicitly ascribe a genetic, racial connection to intelligence, but Murray in his publicity tour
to promote the book cited studies that human intelligence could be ranked by ancestry, with East Asians and
European Jews leading the way.

That view was more clearly stated in 1995 by British-Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, whose "Race,
Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective" quantified dozens of differences between blacks, whites and Asians.

In the 1970s, electronics pioneer William Shockley, who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, said that the human
race would suffer as less intelligent people outbred more intelligent ones, with the greatest damage to occur in the
black American population.

Most sociologists, geneticists and psychologists reject the notion of racial differences in intelligence, pointing out
that economic and social factors clearly influence IQ test scores.

The issue of race itself is scientifically controversial, with some arguing that it is a meaningless term and others
saying that consistent traits occur among individuals of shared ancestry.

Watson is currently in Britain promoting his just-published new volume of memoirs, "Avoid Boring People: Lessons
From a Life in Science."

"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their
evolution should prove to have evolved identically," he writes. "Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as
some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

A Nobel prize-winning scientist who reportedly claimed Africans and Europeans had
different levels of intelligence is no longer welcome to deliver a lecture at London's Science Museum,
the museum said Wednesday

ventura
Tako da smatram da te priče o razlikama u inteligenciji uopšte nisu neutemeljene, naravno ne smatram sada da je to neka drastična razlika tipa belci IQ 150, crnci IQ 50, ali da postoje neke statistički primetne razlike (10,20,30%) u to verujem...

Slobodan Miskovic
Ako je tako nije mi jasno i logicno zasto spominju Nobelovu nagradu:

Beograd -- Skupština Srbije juče završila raspravu o Predlogu deklaracije o neophodnosti okončanja sankcija i izolacije Kube.

ventura: Ne čudi me da uopšte u tome ima istine,i kad se malo dublje analizira cela stvar, mislim da je i sasvim logična. Nisam rasista, i stvarno nemam ništa protiv crnaca...

Sama istorijska činjenica da su belci porobili crnce, i da su pri tom belci imali svemirski brod naspram crnaca nešto govori...

Okruženje u kome su prvobitno živeli crnci (Afrika), je takvo da uopšte ne zahteva neku preteranu upotrebu mozga da bi se preživelo... Šetaš go, za lov ti treba najprimitivnije oružje jer hrane ima u izobilju (i dan danas je tako), plodova voća takođe, ne treba ti sklonište jer je klima veoma povoljna i to je to...

Generalno u poređenju sa crncem, belac je itekako morao da koristi mozak da bi dostigli isti cilj - preživljavanje. Tako da smatram da te priče o razlikama u inteligenciji uopšte nisu neutemeljene

braker: 
Okosnica dubokoumne analize mozhe se sazheti u dve tachke:

Prosto ne mogu da verujem da neko mozhe na ovaj nachin obrazlagati utemeljenost rasizma - na "zanemarljivu" fizichku referencu nadovezuju se diskriminacija odabrane vrste - shto svakako ne ublazhava rasistichki idiotluk.

Richard Lynn, "Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis" 2006 Table 16.2 (indigenous populations) Estimated average IQ
Arctic Peoples 91
East Asians 105
Europeans 100
Native Americans (north & south) 86
Southern Asian & Northern Africans 84
Bushmen (southern Africa) 54
Africans (subsaharan) 67
Australians (aboriginals) 62
Southeast Asians 88
Pacific Islanders 85

Vinko Buj, Personal. & Individual Differences, Vol. 2, 1981 , pp. 168 to 169 (variances modern Europe) Average IQ
Dutch (Amsterdam) 109.4
Germans (Hamburg) 109.3
Swedes (Stockholm) 105.8
Italians (Rome) 103.8
Austrians (Vienna) 103.5
Norwegians (Oslo) 101.8
Danes (Copenhagen) 100.7
Bulgarians (Sophia) 96.3
Poland (Warsaw) 108.3
Yugoslavia (Zagreb) 105.7
Switzerland (Zurich) 102.8
Portugal (Lisbon) 102.6
Great Britain (London) 102
Hungary (Budapest) 100.5
Czechoslovakia (Bratislava) 100.4
Spain (Madrid) 100.3
Belgium (Brussels) 99.7
Greece (Athens) 99.4
Ireland (Dublin) 99.2
Finland (Helsinki) 98.1
France (Paris) 96.1

Linda S. Gottfredson, School of Education, University of Delaware“Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability”, 2004 page 24 Average IQ
US Whites 100
US Blacks 85
US Native Americans 90
US immigrants from nearby Hispanic regions 90
Richard Lynn, Business Today, January 2005 Average IQ
Indians in UK (Northern Indo Aryans and Southern Dravidians) 96
James R. Flynn [citation needed] Average IQ
Asians in America (Korean-, Japanese- and Chinese ancestry) 104
Whites in Minnesota (mainly German and Norwegian ancestry) 105
Whites in USA 100.5

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, "The Bell Curve", Free Press, September 1994 Average IQ
Ashkenazi Jews in USA and UK 107-115
Chinese in USA 97-98
Japanese in USA

Prosto ne mogu da verujem da je toliko teško da se prihvati da nismo svi jednaki?

braker:
Socioekonomski faktor se ne dovodi u pitanje, ali je tvrdnja da su razlike genetske prirode i diskriminacija + generalizacija po tom osnovu, neshto sasvim drugo.

Ivan Dimkovic: Eto, npr. u pravom okruzenju imas jednu Kondolizu Rajs ili Baraka Obamu - dok u Africi imas jednog Mugabe-a - ne sumnjam da su inteligentni svi ovi koje sam nabrojao, samo tu svoju inteligenciju primenjuju na razlicite nacine.

ventura: Aha, a inače je socioekonomski faktor uzrok toga što je nekome koža crna ili bela, a ne genetski...

Znači kad se radi o boji kože, dužini polnog organa i sl. onda je to genetski faktor, a kada se radi o da kažemo inteligenciji onda je to socioekonomski faktor... Kako da ne...