James Watson, eminent scientist and co-discoverer of DNA, has been derided in the press lately for insinuating that people of African descent are inherently inferior. At least, that’s what’s been reported secondhand in the American press. Perhaps I’m not actually defending him here, but I did want to find out what his exact words were.
After some digging, the closest I’ve been able to get is the actual interview as published in the Sunday Times. Here’s the relevant paragraph:
He 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”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. 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”.
My knee-jerk reaction was the same as everyone else’s — that this was an incredibly ignorant thing to say. However, he is absolutely correct when he says that we cannot assume that geographically separated peoples have evolved the same intelligence.
The reason Watson’s words are offensive to us is that we in popular culture see intelligence as something to be quantified, to be plotted on a linear scale. More is better. My IQ is 163 and yours is 102; therefore I am a superior human being.
But this is absurd. Any intelligent person–like, say, a famous scientist–will tell you that single-dimensional measurements of intelligence like IQ are sadly lacking in completeness and relevance. It’s entirely possible for me to have different intelligence from you. I may be better at linguistic operations and you may be better at spatial operations. In some situations, I may have the advantage; in some, you may.
Let’s extend that hypothetical situation. Would it be fair to say that you and I have “different intelligence”? Absolutely. Furthermore, what if we are both hired to perform a task that requires a kind of reasoning at which you are more skilled than I? Should we be promoted at the same time?
It sure looks to me like Dr. Watson is suggesting that people of African descent are inferior. But I can’t eliminate the possibility that what he really meant was something like this:
“It’s not fair for us to assume that all people are alike, and this extends to the kind of intelligence that each of us possesses. It may be that some prediction about the nature of a person’s intelligence can be made based on that person’s heritage. Further, our ethnocentric assumptions about the character of intelligence may place those of different races at an inherent socioeconomic disadvantage.”
Then again, based on the contrite apology he was so quick to issue, my bet is still that he’s just a racist. It just annoys me to no end when people draw their opinions from a distillation of something in the mainstream press, rather than seeking out the appropriate original sources.
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