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James Watson's Nobel Prize Goes On Auction This Week
HughPickens.com writes: Nicholas St. Fleur reports at The Atlantic that James Watson, the famed molecular biologist and co-discoverer of DNA, is putting his Nobel Prize up for auction on Thursday. He's the first Nobel laureate in history to do so. In 2007, Watson, best known for his work deciphering the DNA double helix alongside Francis Crick in 1953, made an incendiary remark regarding the intelligence of black people that lost him the admiration of the scientific community. It made him, in his own words, an "unperson." That year, The Sunday Times quoted Watson as saying that he felt "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." Watson has a history of making racist and sexist declarations, according to Time. At a science conference in 2012, Watson said of women in science, "I think having all these women around makes it more fun for the men but they're probably less effective." To many scientists his gravest offense was not crediting Rosalind Franklin with helping him deduce the structure of DNA.
Watson is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. The gold medal is expected to bring in between $2.5 million and $3.5 million when it goes to auction. Watson says that he will use the money to purchase art and make donations to institutions that have supported him, such as the University of Chicago. He adds that the auction will also offer him the chance to "re-enter public life." "I've had a unique life that's allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part," says Watson. "All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are."
Watson is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. The gold medal is expected to bring in between $2.5 million and $3.5 million when it goes to auction. Watson says that he will use the money to purchase art and make donations to institutions that have supported him, such as the University of Chicago. He adds that the auction will also offer him the chance to "re-enter public life." "I've had a unique life that's allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part," says Watson. "All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are."
Do you ever notice how enamored with American football the Chicago population is? How much money they dump into the Chicago Bears? Oh, how I wish that I would be wrong but often science is meant to be inflammatory. The testing simply shows that the people of Chicago are slovenly drunks who cannot help but repose in sloth upon their reclining chairs in their own pitiful squalor. How can we help the people of Chicago when all of our policies revolve around thinking of them as good decent hardworking people?
About a third of the Chicago population is German. Genetically, therefore they have instilled in them a 'Crazy Fourth Reich Fever' that millennia of conditioning by the BLACK Forest of Germany and they simply only want to fight and invade other peaceful peoples that are doing nothing but contributing to the advancement of the human race. Alas, my mind is tortured that nature could be so cruel as to instill a fine specimen like the German with such brutal and total warring instinct. But we simply cannot be able to even begin to help Chicago out of shit-hole status unless we come to terms with their genetically corrupted DNA structure. I know this may seem shocking to you lay people but I have suffered as Galileo has suffered. Science requires I tell you the truth that I seem to have no scientific basis for yet I know deep down in the pit of my Swedish-American stomach to be true.
Another third of the Chicago population is Irish. Genetically the Irish have evolved in an inherently beautiful land that has caused them to drink heavily whenever outside of this land. This is to deal with the squalid landscapes of Chicago. Blame them not, they are only following the unavoidable bonds of nature that tie into their DNA and make them wholesale worthless drunks. There is no hope for them and, verily, we cannot hope to even get them into rehab until we understand that there simply is no rehabilitation for them. Their origin country has a short pitiful record that I can't seem to find records on regarding any suppressors or instigators prior to being a poor island nation hell bent on alcoholism. Oh, if only my scientific inklings were wrong! How I wish I wasn't the one that has to break the news to you. Woe is all that I can feel for having to inform you that genetically the Irish are inferior.
The final third of the Chicago population is Polish. The Poles of Chicago are a daft and rotund people but it is not their fault. The DNA has been shaped by thousands of years of unhealthy food. The cold winters of Poland and Chicago force them indoors where they cannot possibly be industrious but have to sit at microscopes and furrow their brows in a vain attempt to understand these things that I have discovered. Even my high minded Libertarian business attitude can't provide enough jobs for these idle drones. Genetically they suffer from 'Polack Slack' and our policy towards helping them past working on the dock and losing weight will forever fail until we come to accept this. It pains me so to break this news to you but down in my genetically superior innards this idea has been borne and I know it to be true. I know it.
The tests indicate that our great nation would probably be more effective if Chicago and its descendents didn't exist at all. Genetically they will forever be poor and stupid, attached to the glass teat clamoring for more concussions while wallowing about in their fetid sties. Drunk and unable to form simple sentences, our once prosperous country will be held back from truly succeeding.
Ball's in your court, James.
My work here is dung.
What kind of person buys medals? The point of a Nobel Prize (or a military decoration, or whatever) is not the shiny thing, it's the reminder of an achievement.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Watson was "brash but charming" for his entire career, until he became and old man and his inability to observe social mores wasn't so charming anymore, in fact in became a little creepy (I remember a TV interview in which the female interviewer was clearly highly uncomfortable even talking to him, as if he'd hit on her off camera). His book "The Double Helix", the account of his discovery of the structure of DNA along with Francis Crick, in sometimes-competition sometimes-collaboration with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, and outright competition with Linus Pauling, made him and Crick famous. Watson and Crick both came across in the book as being brash as hell, bulls in the China shop of old school English academia. But hey... they discovered the structure and won the Nobel Prize!
So when Torvalds goes off calling highly proficient engineers morons on public mailing lists, he's defended as doing what's necessary to run a large project. But as he gets older he might find that at some point that behavior isn't going to be tolerated, and all of these earlier incidents are going to be recalled.
Look at Africa. Over 50 nations. Over a billion people, the majority of them black. Lots of land. Lots of natural resources. A liveable climate. The recipient of billions upon billions of dollars in foreign aid over the course of decades. Yet despite all of this, we've seen almost no development. The only development that is present is the remnants of European efforts a century ago, or more recently, Chinese efforts. The standard of living is absolutely atrocious. And there's nothing to suggest it will get better any time soon.
Then look at every other populated continent. Europe, North America and Australia offer a very high level of development, with very high standards of living. Asia is rapidly catching up. South America is getting there. Even Antarctica has a higher standard of living than Africa, and that's with almost no usable resources, and one of the most hostile environments around.
Why is it that Africa is so continually backward, despite massive amounts of help, while everyone else is so much further ahead, even when they have nowhere near the natural resources or other benefits that Africa offers? It can't be blamed on "colonization" or "guns, germs and steel". If that were the case, then North America, Australia, South America and Asia would be as bad off as Africa is today. Yet obviously that isn't the case; they're all significantly better off.
I'm not going to pretend to have all of the answers, but when I look at the facts, something sure is off when it comes to Africa, especially when it's compared to the rest of the world.
Scoring high on intelligence tests only proves you know how to answer intelligence tests. Everybody knows IQ scores are no indication of intelligence.
Also, IQ tests often favors those who have received a good education: for instance, if you ask a math question to someone who doesn't know math, they're bound to score low. Does that mean that person is stupid? No, it just means they don't have the means to answer the test.
And of course, conveniently, which section of the population chronically receives the worst levels education? People of color of course. It's a self-perpetuating myth...
But I'll grant you this: whites and blacks *are* different: the former produce less melanin than the latter. That's as much as you can say with 100% certainty about the two.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Your comment is extremely racist.
You're goddamn straight it is. The point is that any population -- no matter how high and lofty it is can be the target of stupid shit attributed to their genetic structure with "just so" fallacies. He makes inflammatory statements, doesn't even offer correlation as evidence for them and completely ignores socioeconomic conditions of even the past two hundred years.
... oh, I don't know, the slave trade ... and then just "painfully" wish you were wrong. Notice how I apologized for having to be the one to first acknowledge something I'm not proving.
How hard is it to turn James Watson's high minded lofty DNA superiority complex against his home city? Not hard at all, it turns out. Simply cherry pick from painfully recent history the horrible stereotypes and wars that their ancestors have and totally ignore any outside forces like
What blows my mind is that Africa was for tens of thousands of years in the same state that the rest of the world was in -- hell it's the birthplace of homo sapiens. And the time scale we need to talk about for DNA to change is at the very least tens of thousands of years. 25 million years of human evolution and James Watson measures 'genetic skin-color-intelligence correlation' from his apparently very short knowledge of history. Let's be generous and say he actually considered the past two thousand years which would be odd that he chose not to acknowledge that Europe's age of colonialism had something to do with Africa's current state.
Just like my post listed zero gene expressions, I'm not aware of any he's presented backing his statements. Furthermore, how would one divorce the nature versus nurture in such a test? The long history of racial discrimination the world over would need to be carefully controlled out of the experiment and the fact of the matter is that you can't. I'm not a Nobel prize winning geneticist and even I recognize this.
My work here is dung.
E. O. Wilson called Watson that when Watson took over the Biology department at Harvard. Wilson called him the most unpleasant man he ever met.
But Wilson admits that Watson did motivate him to move beyond the stamp-collecting stage into more disruptive work in evolution.
Intelligence tests aren't really accurate, so using them in this context is pointless.
Sounds like someone failed the IQ test.
There has been enough work on this to show decisively that one's racial heritage or gender has at most a tiny effect (if any) on intelligence, and one's upbringing has a far greater effect.
Nonsense. The scientific results show the exact opposite. People of African ethnicity score 15 to 18 points lower on IQ tests. Both Caucasians and blacks have improved over time (the Flynn effect) but the gap has remained. Twin studies have shown that home environment explains no more than a quarter of the variance, and most studies have found that it makes a negligible difference. It can make a transitory difference during early childhood, but the gap fades away toward adulthood.
Of course, genetics is not destiny, and there are bright people in every ethnic group. In the early 20th century, measured IQ gaps between protestant and Catholics in Northern Ireland was as large as that between whites and blacks in America today. Yet that gap has now completely disappeared. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but political correctness and fear of being ostracized inhibit research in the area. That is a real shame, since progress on increasing intelligence could have a dramatic positive effect on the world.
So how do you measure intelligence if not through IQ tests?
Realistically you don't. It is a hard enough job simply defining "intelligence" so without the parameters to define intelligence how can we objectively measure it? At best we can say that IQ is correlated with intelligence.
The article says "He said he is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. It also says that he will use the money to re-enter public life.
How odd. He still has an office at Cold Spring Harbor and he comes in to work fairly often. He still attends functions, fundraisers, and lectures there. He also has a very nice house on the lab's grounds that overlooks the Long Island sound. I can't imagine the laboratory is ungrateful with his retirement package. So he's still in public life and he's living a very nice life. I don't understand the article.
soylentnews.org
That Africans have, on average, lower IQs, is a scientific fact
Which only tells you that IQ tests do not measure intelligence. Some people have even reported average scores for sub-Saharan countries that would qualify as mentally retarded in the Western world. This clearly does not make sense as the same group of people tends to do just fine when being raised in a first world country.
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No it's isn't political correctness. The point is that IQ tests are skewed by schooling and so aren't a good underlying indicator of intelligence per se. e.g. IQ has been rising since the 30s. It can't be because we're getting smarter, so something is wrong. Watson is assuming that IQ==intelligence and therefore Africans are stupid. That's a problem. You also appear to be assuming (correct me if I'm wrong) that we have selected (i.e. evolutionarily) for higher IQs in west and other urbansised areas. I don't think there is any evidence of this.
soylentnews.org
Dr, James Watson is an arrogant (reasonably intelligent) prick who managed to be at the right place at the right time. Both of the other co discoverers of the helix (Francis Crick and Rosealind Franklin) both went on to storied careers in research, in Franklin's case despite dying of cancer at age 37). Watson went on to be a gadfly and generic asshole.
I've met both Watson and Crick. Francis Crick, aside from his drive and intelligence was incredibly polite, well mannered and fun to be with. Watson was an arrogant ass.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's as much as you can say with 100% certainty about the two.
Really? That's it? That's all you can say? Nothing at all about sickle-cell anemia, heart disease risks, athletic ability. None of that? Huh. Learn something new every day.
Well, thanks professor. I'm just assuming you're a Ph.D. geneticist as you're clearly so knowledgeable on the subject.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
To buy the medal and give it to Rosalind's heirs
This study shouldn't differentiate between races. This is a study on poverty and development. "measured IQ gaps between protestant and Catholics in Northern Ireland was as large as that between whites and blacks in America today" , I bet you can correlate that with the improved living standards in Northern Ireland. Why not say " this underdeveloped area doesn't measure up on the test my developed area created".
I lived in what is now the "Democratic Republic of the Congo" for three years, so I have at least personal anecdotal knowledge.
1) Relatively recent colonial history means that there was no native bureaucracy able to run the countries when the colonial powers left.
2) Dictators took over, and most dictators don't really want to make the country better, instead they just want power and money.
3) History of tribal politics means that when someone takes power they give rewards to their tribe at the cost of the other tribes.
4) Lack of national-level control means that it's difficult to exploit the natural resources.
5) Lack of government responsibility means that when countries do exploit the national resources very little of the money ends up in the hands of the workers (or the country).
6) Lack of government funding for educational facilities means that there is a continuing shortage of qualified local skilled labour. (It was quite common for teachers to charge students a fee to write finals, since the teachers got very little salary.)
The answers to those questions revolve around societal issues, and have a lot to do with cultural inertia, which is not an easy thing to explain in ways that are quantifiable, which is where scientific study tends to look for answers. In actuality, if you took an infant born in one of those underdeveloped countries and raised him or her in a more developed nation, it is highly unlikely you would not notice any difference.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So who moderated his speech? No one. He was allowed to speak his mind, and then other people were allowed to decide whether they wanted to continue associating with him in light of what he revealed of himself.
Now, if you want to argue that being shunned for your opinions is censorship, fine, but do understand that there are implications for other people's freedom of association.
And yet no one silenced Watson. They simply stopped listening to him.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This clearly does not make sense as the same group of people tends to do just fine when being raised in a first world country.
Not true. There is a 15 to 18 point gap in IQ test scores in America between blacks and whites. That is about one standard deviation. Similar gaps exist in other mixed race countries.
Sorry, how do you come to the conclusion that IQ tests do not measure intelligence?
Simple: IQ test scores are hard data. Any reasonable interpretation of those data raises inconvenient political issues. So therefore, they are invalid. Problem solved. So despite the fact that IQ is strongly correlated with school performance, job performance, lifetime income, criminality, etc., and despite the fact that we can actually address it in measurable ways with abatement of environmental pollutants (lead, mercury, PCBs, etc.) and better nutrition (folic acid enrichment, DHA supplements, etc.), it is much better if everyone sticks their fingers in their ears, denies the issue exists, and demonizes anyone who attempts to quantify it.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Indeed, it does not. But the GPP wasn't denying the causation. He was denying the correlation.
There are similar gaps in IQ if you consider poverty or hunger rather than race.
Indeed there is. But if researchers correct for these factors, and compare whites and blacks in similar socioeconomic circumstances, and look at black children adopted and raised by white families, there is still a variance correlated with race. Blacks are more exposed to environmental pollutants, are more likely to have deficiencies in micro-nutrients, and are less likely to breastfeed, than whites in similar socioeconomic conditions. Why do black kids have higher levels of lead in their blood compared to white kids living in the same neighborhood? Why are poor black kids deficient in folic acid, iodine, and other critical micro-nutrients, when poor white kids are not? Why are black women so reluctant to breastfeed their babies? Nobody really knows, and we won't find answers by denying there is a problem, and demonizing those asking the questions.