James Watson controversy
The British media have given a lot of coverage over the past few days to remarks made by James Watson. The interview reads:
He [Watson] 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” […] He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
There are strong echoes of Larry Summers’s remarks of a few years ago: in both cases, it is being pointed out that some subset of our society currently performs worse than the group as a whole (in the Summers case, there’s a gender gap in the upper echelons of science; in the Watson case, Africans do worse on tests). And in both cases, the response has been an outpouring of politically-expedient self-righteousness and scientific ignorance.
Britain’s “Skills Minister” (no less) David Lammy was quickly out of the gates: Watson’s views “were deeply offensive” and would “only provide oxygen for the BNP [a far-right British political party]”. The Science Museum was next up: “We feel Dr Watson has gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are, as a result, cancelling his talk.” And, perhaps belying the the notion that the British have an understanding of irony, the Bristol Festival of Ideas cancelled his invited talk.
Watson absolutely deserves strong criticism for the remark that “all the testing says not really”—because it’s not true. (The next day, he conceded that “from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”) But none of the responses I’ve been able to find had the confidence or honesty to disagree with Watson because he’s wrong. To simply imply that any scientist is wrong for making “offensive” remarks purely because they are offensive is vacuous.
In both the Summers and Watson cases, the issues are big. We need to figure out why the gaps in achievement exist in each case. Why can’t we have an honest debate about it?
24/10 See also: Oliver Kamm.