DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

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Watson won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in unraveling the DNA, but his latest claims definitely won’t get a Nobel Prize maybe bricks. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins for discovering the structure of DNA.

In a newspaper interview he said Western polices needs to be changed because they have the wrong assumption that black people are as clever as their white counterparts. He said testing results shows otherwise. He said people who have to deal with black employees find it is not true compared with white employees.

He further went on and claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade and will prove his theory. It immediately drew widespread condemnation from many sources.

He is currently on a speaking tour in England and promoting his book “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science”. He spoke at many venues including the Science Museum in London and relayed the same controversial message he gave to the news reporters. The speech in the museum was organized by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism. And to it he added another one.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks and will decide a course of action.

It is just not his speech; his views are also reflected in this book in which he says:

"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 was a similar controversy in the 90s by an American political scientist Charles Murray who wrote the book “The Bell Curve” and suggested that the differences in IQ are genetic in nature and discussed there is a racial divide in intelligence. Some scientists called his work as “Scientific racism”.

Keith Vaz, Labor chairman of the Home Affairs Select committee voiced his protest and said it is sad to see a distinguished scientist making a baseless and offensive claim. He said the scientific community will surely reject Dr. Watson’s prejudice.

These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels."

This is not the first controversy Dr. Watson is involved in through out his years he has made many biased comments against sexuality, race and politics. Once the respected journal Science wrote about him and said that Dr. Watson has long been a wild man to many of his peers and his colleagues tend to hold their breath whenever he makes a comment that is not relevant to his work. They would do the same with the latest comments.

Some of the controversies he was involved in are as follows:

• In 1997, he told a British newspaper that women should have the right to abort a baby if tests are available to prove that it will become a homosexual at a later stage.
• He said there is a link between skin color and sex drive, and said that black people have higher libidos.
• He argued to have genetic screening and engineering done so stupidity could be cured.
• He also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured.

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said to the newspaper:

This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Anti-racism campaigners such as 1990 Trust are planning to see how they can take action against him in the context of racial hatred laws in the country. They said they can’t imagine a man of such distinction will perpetuate racism in such a manner and he is fueling bigotry.

In his own word, Dr. Watson said he is in favor of genetic screening to cure stupidity, maybe he can volunteer first to test it and see how it works. And also check his DNA to see any racist gene is embedded in it. If everyone given the same level of education under same set of conditions will excel the same and there will be fewer differences between them and our world could have progressed many times than what we are now. Thanks to Dr. Watson and many people like him, the world is not progressing as fast as it could.