BB FANS

DNA Nobel winner triggers race row



One of the world's most eminent scientists has triggered a race row after claiming black people are less intelligent than whites.

Dr James Watson, who shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of DNA, made his comments ahead of a tour of Britain to promote his new book.

The 79-year-old claimed he was 'inherently gloomy about the 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'.

Dr Watson, who is the director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, added that while hoping everyone was equal 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true'.

The geneticist has arrived in Britain to promote his new book Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.

And his comments have been soundly condemned by politicians.

'It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baselss, unscientific and extremely offensive comments,' said Labour MP Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

'I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.

'These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exist at the highest professional levels.'
Metro

Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"


One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks " in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times 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 said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "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."

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of " scientific racism".

Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism.

Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.

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

The American scientist earned a place in the history of great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s and formed part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script."

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."

The Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks.

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: " 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 called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."
Independent

How can DNA genius James Watson believe black people are less intelligent than white? Mail

Martin Amis launches fresh attack on Muslim faith saying Islamic states are 'less evolved'


Mail

As he arrives in Britain, DNA pioneer breaks his silence on racism row


James Watson, the Nobel laureate who shocked the world with his views on race and intelligence, has defended his position in an exclusive article for The Independent today in which he seeks to justify his theory that there is a genetic basis behind differences in IQ.

Dr Watson, who helped to unravel the structure of DNA more than 50 years ago, apologises for any offence that he caused when he suggested in an interview at the weekend that black Africans were less intelligent than Westerners.

But he restates his position that studying genes may help to understand variations in intelligence. In his interview with a Sunday newspaper, Dr Watson 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 was quoted as saying his hope is that everyone is equal but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".

Dr Watson says in his article today that he has never been one to shy away from stating what he believes to be true, however unpalatable that may be.

"This has, at times, got me in hot water," he says. "Rarely more so than right now, where I find myself at the centre of a storm of criticism.

"I can understand much of this reaction. For if I said what I was quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it. To those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. This is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

However, Dr Watson goes on to suggest that genes may account for many behavioural traits, including intelligence and even criminality. "The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me," he says. "But science is not here to make us feel good."

Without referring directly to the subject of racial differences, Dr Watson once more invokes the idea that Darwinian natural selection has led to differences in behavioural ability between people from different geographical regions of the world. "We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things," he says. "The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.

"It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Dr Watson, a former president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, arrived in the UK this week as part of a book tour but his speaking engagements are in disarray after the Science Museum cancelled a lecture by him planned for today.

The controversy spread to America yesterday, as the board of trustees at Cold Spring issued a statement saying they were "bewildered and saddened" by his comments. "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr Watson," it said.

Dr Watson is due to appear at the Centre for Life in Newcastle this weekend. Organisers distanced themselves from his views but insisted that it would still go ahead. Linda Conlon, chief executive of the centre, said: "It promises to be a robust and unmissable discussion and many people have expressed interest in it."

Meanwhile, the organisers of the Festival of Ideas in Bristol, where Dr Watson is due to give a speech next week, said they were waiting for an explanation from the Nobel Prize-winner for his remarks before deciding whether to go ahead with the sell-out booking.

Andrew Kelly, co-ordinator of the festival, which is a series of discussions with leading intellectuals, said: "A review of the event is pending a statement from Dr Watson. Once he has made his statement we will decide about the event."

Dr Watson's comments provoked a furious reaction from students at Cambridge University and led to a heated row between student groups who disagree over whether he should retain his platform at the Cambridge Union on Tuesday.

"His comments are part of an overtly political campaign which tries to justify and excuse the plight of black people in the world today," said Junior Penge Juma, a Black Student Campaigns officer.

Mr Juma is planning a protest to mark Dr Watson's entry into the Union building on Tuesday. He will be joined by members of other minority student groups, including women's groups and the Jewish Society.

Meanwhile, organisers at Edinburgh University, where Dr Watson is scheduled to appear on Monday evening alongside Dr Ian Wilmut, the scientist behind Dolly the Sheep, refused yesterday to rule out cancelling his appearance. A spokesman said the organisers were "consideringthe issues raised as a result of this matter" and would make a decision in due course.

Dr Watson's remarks in The Sunday Times have also sparked a political furore. David Lammy, the Skills minister, said his comments were deeply offensive and would provide oxygen to the British National Party.
Independent

Their views may be offensive, but trying to silence Martin Amis and James Watson's religion and race comments is even more so Mail

Nobel prize-winning scientist cancels book tour after race remarks cause storm Mail

Why we should all debate racism


Newspapers thrive on controversy and particularly on eminent people making comments that give offence - or could give offence - to large numbers of their fellow citizens. Anybody in the public eye is always a few ill-chosen sentences away from media crucifixion, demands for apologies and possibly the sack. Think of Boris Johnson on Liverpudlians, Ken Livingstone on a Jewish newspaper reporter (whom he compared to a concentration camp guard), and Glenn Hoddle, then the England football manager, on the disabled. But why do some offensive comments provoke more press reaction than others?

Just from the past few weeks, you can find examples of fairly shocking remarks that passed largely without comment or opprobrium. Sir (as he now is) Ian Botham told the Guardian that he loved the monarchy so much he would like to hang republicans. I don't think he was joking. But the best known republican is probably Rupert Murdoch, so no harm done there. The Sun columnist and former editor Kelvin MacKenzie said, on BBC1's Question Time, that Scots preferred spending money to creating it. This annoyed Scots but, since most papers now have separate Scottish editions, theirs is a country of which the English know less than they do of Poland or Romania.

James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning geneticist, did eventually get the Independent's front page, after telling the Sunday Times magazine that Africans were "not really" as intelligent as "us". But the Sunday Times itself didn't find the comments sufficiently unusual to highlight them in any way. Most other papers became interested only when the Science Museum cancelled a Watson lecture. The story then became one of censorship, not racism.

Martin Amis's views (or "adumbrations" as he prefers to call them) on Muslims passed largely unnoticed for more than a year. In an interview for the Times magazine, he told Ginny Dougary that "the Muslim community", which was "gaining on us demographically at a huge rate", should "suffer until it gets its house in order". How? "Not letting them travel. Deportation . . . Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan." Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, compared this "thought experiment" (Amis's description again) to "the ramblings of a British National Party thug". He did so last month in a new edition of his book, Ideology: an Introduction. Not, you might correctly surmise, the normal bedtime reading of your average hack but, via a brief item in the monthly magazine Prospect, his comments eventually reached the news pages.

Eagleton, though a fine literary scholar, is not exactly a household name. Frederick Forsyth, in his Express column, described him as "a Leninist lecturer I have never heard of". But the commentariat swung immediately into action. In a single issue of the Telegraph, Simon Heffer and Michael Henderson denounced Eagleton under almost identical headlines: "No laughing matter for misery Marxist" and "Where's your sense of humour, comrade?" (Presumably Telegraph editors are too absorbed in the digital age to edit a mere newspaper properly.)

The Sunday Times ran a profile of Eagleton, calling him a "venerable trendy lefty", while the Observer's Jasper Gerard declared that "Eagleton, not Amis, is the problem" and asked why "we still employ academics whose main qualification is their Marxism". The Mail produced a double-page spread, describing Eagleton as "a Marxist punk with a chip on both shoulders". All this was before Amis gave the story second wind by responding in the Independent to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of the few columnists who seemed more upset by Amis's comments than by Eagleton's.

Why did this story take off and not the others? Why did it need Eagleton's intervention to make it a story and why did he mostly get it in the neck, not Amis? The obvious answer is that Eagleton personalised the issue. For the upmarket papers particularly, a quarrel involving literary folk is specially appealing because the quality of invective is so high. And since Amis has just begun a creative writing professorship at Manchester, this one is between colleagues. Moreover, Eagleton - who never appears in print without the dread prefix of "Marxist intellectual" - had broadened his attack to include Amis's late father, Kingsley, whom he described as "a racist, anti-Semitic boor". Kingsley still has the support of a powerful lobby of ex-wives, ex-publishers and ex-drinking mates. But there is, I think, something more. If you pick the right target - an unpopular minority, preferably one with little power - at the right time, you can get away with any amount of offensive drivel. It has become fashionable to elide Muslims with Islamists and to portray them as touchy if they complain about rough treatment. That is within the boundaries of acceptable discourse. It is, in Fleet Street's eyes, just the routine exercise of free speech. But when someone challenges such remarks, the press cries "foul" and portrays it as a "Leninist" attempt at censorship.

As it happens, I do not think either Amis or Eagleton should be silenced. But I wish the press would debate a little more vigorously the views (sorry, adumbrations) of those who flirt with the boundaries of racism and not simply pillory those who question them.

guardian