I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement.
I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his real brilliance was clinging to him. It's probably worth mentioning that being a 30 something doing a PhD seems to be a big advantage, though, especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.
Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.
it is also of note that Watson repeatedly made public statements, starting in 2007, asserting that he believed Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, attributing this to genetics, a claim broadly denounced by scientists and the public as racist and scientifically invalid.
> Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine
That's a pretty epic title. And the cover art reminds me fondly of those textbooks from my past that were somehow extremely dry yet captivating at the same time.
Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]
He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps.
Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice.
Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser.
It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made.
He clearly was an exceptional scientist, but also likely an a*hole. Also unfortunately when people get older, many people's negative qualities are amplified. That seem to have happened with Watson and has tarnished his legacy.
I care. His legacy is tarnished by being a bad human being, when it is pretty easy to be a decent person. It’s worth recognizing the accomplishment without lauding the person.
Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
How unpleasant, exactly? Watson was an outspoken racist whose remarks led to him losing most of his connections and opportunities, to the point where he had to auction off his Nobel prize in order to survive.
But he wasn’t a bad human being. He did things so great they completely outweigh anything you’ve ever done. At the very least, he’s a much better human than you.
If we accepted peoples’ completely biased views of what makes a human “good”, that’s how I’d respond. But we don’t, which is why that would be a ridiculous response - just as ridiculous as pretending that being a meanie-head makes you a “bad person”.
Those great things were accomplished _despite_ them being assholes and often would have been accomplished by the next person in line anyway who would have just happened not to make an ego trip out of it.
You know you're just virtue signaling that you're demonic yourself with that statement, hypocritically telling somebody not to do something that you're doing yourself.
Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole.
Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reason?
"I know you are but what am I" was funny when Pee-Wee Herman said it ironically and comedically, but not when you do.
Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal relationship?
More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not.
Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives?
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
Then call out the ones you know for a fact are assholes and racists, and stop adding to the problem by whitewashing and excusing and carrying their water.
I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are.
Hold on there buddy, you totally missed the point. I also know lots of brilliant people in the Bay Area tech scene who are not assholes. This thread isn't about brilliant people, it's about those who are commonly considered "great". Like, let's say, Steve Jobs.
And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.
may I ask which of the following situations is preferrable: an asshole who saves your life, or a non asshole who lets you die because its the right thing to do?
I have no dog in this particular fight, but it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't endanger yourself to save someone else. It usually just creates two victims without professional support/equipment.
I don't believe this to be true; is there any evidence? Outside drownings where people can't swim?
People save other people's lives all the time. We hear about it and also would hear about people dying in the attempt and yet.. Don't hear much about it.
By the time you start advocating for "collective action", you should have defined what the goal of the action is a lot more precisely than "dissuade assholes from being assholes" because a social movement with an ambiguous goal is a menace to society: there is a reason no one want another witch hunt.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.
Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically.
He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.
It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start!
The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension.
No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category.
It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control.
However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity.
Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real.
An intervention on the household someone is raised in is not the same as an intervention on race. This is part of what it means when people say racism is a structural problem: people are, systematically, treated differently in many different parts of their lives. The USA is a country where, within living memory, the insurrection act was invoked to allow black children to attend a school which wanted to segregate them.
Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.
The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls.
The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."
> "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions."
---
It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem.
The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument.
I know very little about this but just an observer your reply did little to refute any of the points made. You should loosen up a bit and keep an open mind about those points raised because it feels like you’re dismissing them.
This is one of those many issues that can be approached at a macro level. Don't think about this as an argument on the internet, but about the implications. Imagine there was compelling evidence for a environmental factor that might even possibly be controlled for. Do you realize how huge a deal this would be?
Every single parent wants the best for their kids and would do anything for this. We, socially, already spend an obscene amount of money on education and other factors meaning government support to try to turn this viability into a reality would be through the roof - including in endless support on promising research along these lines. And keep in mind this isn't only for black families - there's a significant IQ deficit between whites and East Asians as well, for instance.
But where are these exciting studies on the verge of revolutionizing society? They do not exist. It's kind of like cold fusion. The latest science and research on this topic doesn't really matter. People want to find it and have been searching for decades with promising leads that go nowhere. But if one day they do, you'll know, because it will be something that would have dramatic implications for all of humanity.
This is just handwaving. Behavioral genetics, psychometrics, and molecular genomics are thriving fields of study (often in tension with each other, so you even get fun Twitter arguments between the leading lights). It's not our fault you made the risible claim that the MTAS "once and forever put to rest any question of race and intelligence".
You brought this up 7 months ago, and when I responded that this is in fact an active field of study with new science being produced constantly, you had no response. I presumed you just conceded the point. If you missed my point last time, well, I've made it for you again: your claim that this research is suppressed is trivially falsifiable.
You have in the past stated that race and intelligence can be considered a matter of faith to you and there is no evidence that could ever sway you. So are you sincerely debating here or is this just proselytizing?
I'm having trouble even parsing what your comment is claiming that I believe, but either way, this thread is dealing in falsifiable statements, not psychoanalysis. Is this research being suppressed, so that new new science can be done it, thus justifying the claim that a study last updated over 20 years ago is dispositive of racial/genetic/intelligence causality? No, it is not.
> If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.
Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable:
> His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause.
Anyways, I am just interested if you have changed your mind, and you are now treating this as falsifiable or if it is impossible to convince you with any evidence. I think this is useful information for anyone debating you in good faith.
You just went back 10 years in my comment history to find a comment that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on a thread that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on the basis that me not believing that Black people are racially inferior to white people dictates what I think about behavioral genetics.
In addition to being rude, it isn't even logically coherent. What I do or do not thing about racial supremacy has nothing to do with the very answerable question about whether behavior and molecular genetics research regarding intelligence is being published.
You are arguing to discredit a study that contradicts your previously stated religious belief. I would be very surprised if anyone found me bringing it up off-topic. I think anyone debating you is entitled to know you think it is impossible that a study could find genetic intelligence differences between races and you wont even consider any evidence. If you have changed that belief, it’s easy to state that now.
Btw, I just remembered that comment from reading that thread recently. I obviously didnt pour through 10 years of one HN’s most prolific posters.
First, the logic you're trying to apply about my "religion" doesn't cohere for the reason I stated. It doesn't follow logically from my belief that certain races aren't superior to others that I believe any X or Y claim about behavioral genetics. Second, and again, as already stated, the arguments I'm making are positive and falsifiable. You can't just bank-shot them through what you believe my psychology to be.
Either work on behavioral genetics (including behavioral genetics through the lens of racial groups) is being produced by serious scientific groups or it isn't. It is, as you can trivially verify. Ergo, the claim I made in the post I responded to is falsified. What you think about me doesn't enter into it.
So too it goes with the things I said about the MTAS: it does in fact have a small sample, it does in fact have issues with controls (look where they got the adoptees from), it does predate a large amount of scientific work on inherited environment, gene/environment interaction, and epigenetics.
Even a hereditarian wouldn't make the claim the parent commenter made, that MTAS is the last word on this question.
In fact, given the falsity of claim the parent commenter made on this kind of work being suppressed, it would be weird if it was the last word on the question: scientists have spent 20 years drilling into this, and the result has, among other things, been the "Missing Heritability Problem". You don't even have to know anything specific about MTAS to get the problem with the claim on this thread.
You’ve refuted nothing I’ve said. You continue to attempt to discredit a study related to race and intelligence. This is a topic you have claimed a religious position on and said no one should even attempt to convince you in the opposite direction.
As long as you're going back that far in his posting history, why don't you defend some of Eric Raymond's racist quotes that he posted? I bet you really love ESR.
The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison).
It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.
Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.
He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence.
Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals.
Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland.
I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".
This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have.
I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.
thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence.
For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
"Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.
Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results
So first off, no shit the college board things the SAT measures good stuff, it's their test.
Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.
There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA.
The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom.
Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings.
I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph?
It's important to realize that "Photograph 51" wasn't "Franklin's" -- it was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student mentored by Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What happened was that Wilkins chose to share the data with Watson and Crick. Yes, he maybe should have consulted with Franklin first (and certainly with Gosling, whose opinion nobody seems to care about).
In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,
I'm not so sure about that -- Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson (who went into administration instead). He also had the mathematical skills needed for interpreting crystallography data that Watson lacked (Crick had studied physics as an undergraduate while Watson had studied zoology).
As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours.
> Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson...
But we are not talking their later work. The issue under discussion is their DNA structure work, and for that Watson wa the main one in their collaboration.
No, they didn't do a "quick analysis". They were in a race with Linus Pauling to figure out the structure. Pauling's son happened to leak the fact that Linus Pauling's lab had a triple helix, so they asked the son casually for notes. That, along with Gosling & Franklin's XRays convinced them that their own original model (and Pauling's) were flawed.
Last time I checked, this was basically folklore. There were some allusions to Francis Crick experimenting with LSD, but their DNA work predates that.
Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him.
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
Specifically The Eagle in Cambridge. Close to Kings College, and a cosy and storied pub it is. The back bar has photos and soot-signatures of air crews from all over the world, a tradition that started during WWII.
High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings
What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.
In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.
> In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
It’s fair to say Watson should have given more credit to the work of Franklin and Gosling, but to claim it’s “cheating, pure and simple” is clearly revisionist history.
Either his conduct was fair or it wasn't (misconduct). You are implying that it isn't without saying it outright, the comment you are replying is clearly calling it misconduct. I think in the spirit of debating you should be more direct and clearly state if you think he engaged in misconduct or not.
The outcome of such debate is to look at history with a more critical lens as opposed to just looking at it the way our ancestors did. It is not irrational to deem Watson a terrible human being while also acknowledging his contributions to science. This gives us the clear human perspective of how science has developed across time and the things we can do to ensure we are able to address some of the downsides of the human aspects of science (i.e. sexual harassment, misogyny, etc)
Franklin and her grad student produced key experimental data that corrected and confirmed the model that Watson and Crick were already hard at work on.
Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.
Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.
Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.
This is not an honest depiction of the full picture.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
They did collaborate with each other. The labs at King’s and Cambridge shared information at different times. Franklin invited Watson to her lecture. She and Wilkins went to see the double helix model when it was completed. You’re treating a sensationalized version of the story as fact.
> All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t completely unheard of in science, at least historically if not today. Would they not have done the same if it were a more junior man? Like sure if he walked up to them and literally gave them the idea, they may not have (in either case), but with the circumstances as I understand them to be, I think this kind of thing happens all the time?
> Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized?
When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism.
It isn’t whataboutism, I’m not deflecting. What I’m alluding to is that there is some moral crusade these days about women’s historical achievements that seems to have veered into conspiracy theorist tier paranoia lately. Men weren’t rubbing their hands and twirling their mustaches and stealing women’s inventions to keep them down, there were just more classical gender role norms back then. We can certainly tut tut at the social pressure to stay at home with children back then and how that did prevent some women from inventing things, or how men didn’t take women seriously in industry because that wasn’t their role in the classical role setup, but this notion that men are or were somehow out to get women is silly.
If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.
Tell us about how Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, how Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the moon landings, and then repeat this claim.
Sure and then you can tell me about Marion Donovan, Nettie Stevens, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Alice Ball, Margaret Knight, Elizabeth Magie, Margaret Keane, Candace Pert, and the hundreds of others.
(Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)
Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.
I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.
Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.
Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.
I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.
He didn't steal anything. Franklin's PhD student took the famous Photo 51, Franklin was credited in the paper [1], and there's much more besides [2]:
"We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London."
Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale) and then went on discussing what she wears.
I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life.
She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously.
Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world.
> If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly
Setting your bizarre ranting aside, you appear to have misread - Franklin was the supervisor. It was her PhD student Raymond Gosling who took Photo 51:
I used "supervisor" loosely here - both Watson and Crick were hierarchically above her.
As for "bizarre ranting" - I guess you have never had anything you did credited to somebody else. Good for you (seriously), but in that case please do not comment about the emotions of others.
If you did and think this is fine - well we live in different worlds then.
The only thievery here is yours. Just as we are expected to believe that Ada Lovelace invented programming, Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, and Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the Apollo missions all by her lonesome, we must believe this, too. None of it is true, and when this is pointed out, the response is frothing accusations of misogyny that you've so aptly demonstrated.
Well, froth away. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and appropriately credited Dr. R. E. Franklin (not "Rosy") in their paper.
> Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale)
I took that as an accusation of misogyny and I'm unclear how else it could be interpreted. Watson named her as Dr. R. E. Franklin, so it can't be him that was being impugned.
Please also note the frothy inability to type - have I replicated that?
> don't deem worthy
Deem worthy of what?
You are demonstrating my point perfectly. You have no interest in what these women did (or did not) do, what their achievements actually were (and they certainly had them), they're simply a totem that you elevate beyond reason as proof of what a Very Nice Guy you are.
> as if you have them written down on an enemies list
By today's standards, if I heard that some random ordinary scientist was stripped of their honors and was being widely labeled a terrible person in internet comment threads, I would seriously consider the possibility that they were the real victim in the situation.
Have you ever heard anything he said about women, gays, blacks, etc? He is the kind of guy I would not even approach, while so many people were bowing.
This is in addition to his stolen work of course.
The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name.
Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity.
Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.
The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.
Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong.
Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.
Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
How do you define socialism? I see ppl throw around this term without ever defining it. They probably mean a soviet style central government , which of course is terrible.
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
It seems clear he understood it was a tricky problem, and writing at the time many of the potential problems were not apparent:
"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"
Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.
> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits
I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.
It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.
See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.
It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.
-- Michael Palin
Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
She was credited, see the original W&C paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 at the end is an acknowledgement. She also has a related article in the same issue of Nature.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
Edit, in re-reading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 I see that she did suspect the DNA structure contained multiple chains. So my statement about about the double helix aspect was incomplete/incorrect.
This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work
Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures
Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.
Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
The work belonged to the lab (according to its director), and Franklin was in the process of moving to a different institution. Additionally, the labs at King’s and Cambridge had regularly been sharing information back and forth. Wilkins showing lab property to the Cambridge team was not unusual or because he looked down on Franklin.
The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you?
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> 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".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has"
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
> To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
Maybe they are, maybe they are not, but that was not the point of my comment.
The point of my comment was that the current Western Civilization is so afraid of this hypothesis and its possible ramifications if it turned out to be even semi-correct, that it will try to destroy anyone who even dares to say it aloud, instead of approaching it without prejudice and studying it.
That is a political taboo, on the same level as saying "Allah probably does not exist" in Iran, "Ukraine is a separate nation which deserves sovereignty and our war against them is unjust" in Russia, or "Our government is neither very benevolent nor very capable and makes stupid mistakes" in China. And this taboo is mostly caused by US history of slavery and Western European history of colonialism and/or eugenics, but also by the current structure of politics. Much like the abovementioned taboos from Iran, Russia and China, its breach would undermine some political foundations.
It also has some consequences. We invest crazy amounts of money into artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence (and stupidity) is relatively underinvested, with the most interesting results coming from studies of corvids or octopuses. IMHO this is low-hanging fruit that we choose not to pluck, thus probably shooting ourselves in the foot when developing our own human potential.
I think the reason western civilization is afraid of the idea of inherent genetic limitations to intelligence is because the logical next step would not be focusing on education, but probably restarting some form of eugenics or genetic engineering of our progeny, and the last time that happened it didn't go very well. Also, much of 'western civilization' is founded on treating people as if they are equal, so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another obviously rubs us the wrong way.
I can't even tell what your suggestion is, what is the low-hanging fruit you are talking about? If you come out and say what your stance is (maybe you think we should genetically engineer babies to score higher on IQ tests?) then we could have a debate about the merits of those ideas. As it stands I have no idea what you're suggesting, which has the side effect of making you irrefutable I guess.
Your general analysis seems way off. Secular skepticism goes back a long time in Iran (way before the European Enlightenment), and few Iranians would be shocked to hear "Allah probably does not exist".
Here are some quatrains by Omar Khayyam (1048 CE) which are well known by everyone in Iran:
They say that in paradise there will be maidens with beautiful eyes,
There will be wine, milk, and honey.
If we have chosen wine and a beloved here, what’s the harm?
Since in the end, the outcome is the same.
The secrets of eternity neither you know nor I;
The solution to the riddle neither you find nor I.
There are inscriptions on the Tablet of Fate;
But when it comes to reading them, neither you can nor I.
Same goes for Russia and China, I'm very skeptical that the general population has a taboo about those ideas. A social taboo is not <whatever the government has banned you from talking about>.
In my previous comment, I was talking quite explicitly about political taboos, not societal taboos.
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.
I don't see what your definition of 'political taboo', which seems to be related to top-down restrictions on speech or behavior, has to do James Watson's remarks.
There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was shunned by the public and lost some scientific prestige/status because he didn't provide any evidence for his huge claims.
An editorial in Nature said that his remarks were "beyond the pale" but expressed a wish that the tour had not been canceled so that Watson would have had to face his critics in person, encouraging scientific discussion on the matter.
I think there's a big taboo against making huge claims that aren't supported by anything other than your own authority (such as Linus Pauling claiming that Vitamin C can cure cancer), and an even bigger taboo when those claims are explicitly ranking groups of humans on the basis of their genetics or even vaguely defined features like intelligence.
I find it interesting that you're spending so much time talking about the presence of this taboo but no time at all analyzing or evaluating the actual claims. Because if the claims are false, who cares if they're taboo? Are all taboos bad? Is it a good outcome if we get to a point where all countries have the same taboos?
> If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
First we need to have good definitions for intelligence or stupidity. I don't particularly like IQ as a proxy for overall intelligence but if you are defining it using IQ, scores are slowly improving at the population level with hispanics and blacks gaining on whites.
Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it.
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all.
Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions.
For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents.
"analyzing or evaluating ..."
This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses".
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
That’s actually a correct belief. That’s what the testing says.
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
Well timonoko also posts Grok generated FORTH code that doesn't work, and then retroactively claims it was just a joke when called on it, so it's safe to assume he doesn't know what he's talking about, that he and Grok and grokipedia are always joking and making shit up, and not to take any of them seriously, because he believes what he wants to believe without fact checking, and he post Grok generated AI slop regularly.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with.
And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should be obvious if he even glanced at the code he was posting. I'd hate to see the kind of Grok-generated buggy crap he unwittingly checks into source code control.
It's strange that timonoko is so compelled to virtue signal so often that he shares Musk's and Grok's racist views. But at least now we know what kind of person he is.
> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper 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".
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
In a clean game-theoretic terms, without making any moral or ideological claims about “who is smarter”, we’ll treat underlying advantage as any positional asset (intelligence, wealth, charisma, skill, social capital, etc.). The question is: If a subset of players has an advantage in a repeated, large-group game, how do they best play to maximize payoff and stability?
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent.
This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
arguably I'd say wars can be generally indicative of intelligence. Higher-ability groups are more likely to choose war when their greater power raises the expected payoff of fighting.
Climate change is also related to intelligence as it can argued that the more advance societies do end up consuming/producing more and thus create more Climate related waste. The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
I'm not sure I understand your point around late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of the common...
Are you really arguing that the western world has not been more advanced?
The European/Asian wars of the 20th century (ironically started by people who thought of themselves as superior races) wiped out ten of millions of lives and an untold amount of wealth. It led to the collapse of entire empires and nations. Surely you are not claiming that the wars were a net positive, are you? One indicator of a lack of intelligence is engaging in actions that are against your own interests.
Also, with climate change, may I remind you of quote from Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy:
> I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
Industrialization followed this pattern. Shitting where you live is a textbook case of stupid.
> The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
The people dying in extreme floods and fires tell me otherwise, and it's likely only going to get worse.
Watson was the one who described Franklin as "belligerent, emotional, and unable to interpret her own data" in his book. He also repeatedly referred to her as "Rosy", a name Franklin never used.
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
One professor that I had said that she met him when he was a bit younger (when he was in his 60s), and every time he would walk into a room, he would immediately pick out the most attractive young women, and ask them to sit directly next to him.
No, they rushed to beat Pauling. In a just world Franklin would gotten a co-author credit, but I don't think anyone holds that she was going to have the breakthrough on her own.
She literally did though. Both their papers were published at the same time too. Her research was finished a little bit later but they both got published in the same issue of the same journal. Hers came later in the pages so it seemed as if her work was simply confirming the work of Watson/Crick
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.
I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
> This US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023
If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)
There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].
(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)
(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)
Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.
[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based
Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and
interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite:
warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools,
districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test
taker populations."
[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"
No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.
Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.
I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement.
[1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his real brilliance was clinging to him. It's probably worth mentioning that being a 30 something doing a PhD seems to be a big advantage, though, especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.
Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.
> especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.
Who are you referring to in this?
it is also of note that Watson repeatedly made public statements, starting in 2007, asserting that he believed Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, attributing this to genetics, a claim broadly denounced by scientists and the public as racist and scientifically invalid.
> Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine
Someone publicly known?
Amazing book. Tied with _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ as my favorite non-fiction book.
Damn.
I love Making, and I'm currently on a Nick Lane/biology bender. Eigth Day is new to me. On my way to the e-book store of my persuasion ...
This book slaps. Constructed from interviews the author had with the great biologists and chemists of the era.
That's a pretty epic title. And the cover art reminds me fondly of those textbooks from my past that were somehow extremely dry yet captivating at the same time.
Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History
He was an “interesting” chap.
He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps.
Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice.
Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser.
It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made.
> “…this opportunity to shill…”
Oh? Care to reveal your stake in the success of the book?
Whatever, you said “shill”, which means you’re usually an inside man.
Just found this app: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dileorob/content/apps/photo51.php
I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat!
He clearly was an exceptional scientist, but also likely an a*hole. Also unfortunately when people get older, many people's negative qualities are amplified. That seem to have happened with Watson and has tarnished his legacy.
I think if he had died at 50 his reputation would be much much better, although he is certainly not unique in that regard
Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes.
I care. His legacy is tarnished by being a bad human being, when it is pretty easy to be a decent person. It’s worth recognizing the accomplishment without lauding the person.
Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson.
It was Gosling's photo.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
How unpleasant, exactly? Watson was an outspoken racist whose remarks led to him losing most of his connections and opportunities, to the point where he had to auction off his Nobel prize in order to survive.
But he wasn’t a bad human being. He did things so great they completely outweigh anything you’ve ever done. At the very least, he’s a much better human than you.
If we accepted peoples’ completely biased views of what makes a human “good”, that’s how I’d respond. But we don’t, which is why that would be a ridiculous response - just as ridiculous as pretending that being a meanie-head makes you a “bad person”.
The work was given to him by Wilkins who was in his right to do it.
Those great things were accomplished _despite_ them being assholes and often would have been accomplished by the next person in line anyway who would have just happened not to make an ego trip out of it.
A lot of people care. Love his work, hate the person, feel obligated to rightfully demonize him, not his work.
demonizing anyone shouldn’t be done. it makes the demonizer demonic.
You know you're just virtue signaling that you're demonic yourself with that statement, hypocritically telling somebody not to do something that you're doing yourself.
Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole.
Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reason?
"I know you are but what am I" was funny when Pee-Wee Herman said it ironically and comedically, but not when you do.
He did that all by himself.
Perhaps I should be repentant calling Pol Pot a demonic evil? /s
Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes.
We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal relationship?
More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not.
Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives?
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
Then call out the ones you know for a fact are assholes and racists, and stop adding to the problem by whitewashing and excusing and carrying their water.
I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are.
Hold on there buddy, you totally missed the point. I also know lots of brilliant people in the Bay Area tech scene who are not assholes. This thread isn't about brilliant people, it's about those who are commonly considered "great". Like, let's say, Steve Jobs.
And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.
Charles Darwin accomplished much without being an asshole.
I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture.
may I ask which of the following situations is preferrable: an asshole who saves your life, or a non asshole who lets you die because its the right thing to do?
Why would it be the right thing to do to let me die?
I have no dog in this particular fight, but it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't endanger yourself to save someone else. It usually just creates two victims without professional support/equipment.
Just seemed like a fun thought experiment.
I don't believe this to be true; is there any evidence? Outside drownings where people can't swim?
People save other people's lives all the time. We hear about it and also would hear about people dying in the attempt and yet.. Don't hear much about it.
And we need to do this on an obituary?
why?
Collective action to dissuade assholes from being assholes is a net positive for everyone.
The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are.
By the time you start advocating for "collective action", you should have defined what the goal of the action is a lot more precisely than "dissuade assholes from being assholes" because a social movement with an ambiguous goal is a menace to society: there is a reason no one want another witch hunt.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.
There's no dissuading someone from being an asshole.
Apparently not. Which is why we should call them out instead of whitewashing them.
yup! and I love they are around and celebrated as that helps weed out people not worthy of your time better than most other things
James Watson, who helped discover Rosalind Franklin’s notes and notebooks, is dead at 97
Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?
Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically.
He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.
It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
> Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races.
That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.
There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start!
The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension.
No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category.
It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
Distributions are distributions. I have not stated anything on the race and intelligence issue. I am just calling out a statistical fallacy.
I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control.
However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity.
Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
An intervention on the household someone is raised in is not the same as an intervention on race. This is part of what it means when people say racism is a structural problem: people are, systematically, treated differently in many different parts of their lives. The USA is a country where, within living memory, the insurrection act was invoked to allow black children to attend a school which wanted to segregate them.
Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/ [2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.... [3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228
The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls.
The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."
I'll respond by quoting the authors themselves:
> "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions."
---
It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem.
The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument.
I know very little about this but just an observer your reply did little to refute any of the points made. You should loosen up a bit and keep an open mind about those points raised because it feels like you’re dismissing them.
This is one of those many issues that can be approached at a macro level. Don't think about this as an argument on the internet, but about the implications. Imagine there was compelling evidence for a environmental factor that might even possibly be controlled for. Do you realize how huge a deal this would be?
Every single parent wants the best for their kids and would do anything for this. We, socially, already spend an obscene amount of money on education and other factors meaning government support to try to turn this viability into a reality would be through the roof - including in endless support on promising research along these lines. And keep in mind this isn't only for black families - there's a significant IQ deficit between whites and East Asians as well, for instance.
But where are these exciting studies on the verge of revolutionizing society? They do not exist. It's kind of like cold fusion. The latest science and research on this topic doesn't really matter. People want to find it and have been searching for decades with promising leads that go nowhere. But if one day they do, you'll know, because it will be something that would have dramatic implications for all of humanity.
This is just handwaving. Behavioral genetics, psychometrics, and molecular genomics are thriving fields of study (often in tension with each other, so you even get fun Twitter arguments between the leading lights). It's not our fault you made the risible claim that the MTAS "once and forever put to rest any question of race and intelligence".
You brought this up 7 months ago, and when I responded that this is in fact an active field of study with new science being produced constantly, you had no response. I presumed you just conceded the point. If you missed my point last time, well, I've made it for you again: your claim that this research is suppressed is trivially falsifiable.
You have in the past stated that race and intelligence can be considered a matter of faith to you and there is no evidence that could ever sway you. So are you sincerely debating here or is this just proselytizing?
I'm having trouble even parsing what your comment is claiming that I believe, but either way, this thread is dealing in falsifiable statements, not psychoanalysis. Is this research being suppressed, so that new new science can be done it, thus justifying the claim that a study last updated over 20 years ago is dispositive of racial/genetic/intelligence causality? No, it is not.
From this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674992
Here you said:
> If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.
Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable:
> His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause.
Anyways, I am just interested if you have changed your mind, and you are now treating this as falsifiable or if it is impossible to convince you with any evidence. I think this is useful information for anyone debating you in good faith.
You just went back 10 years in my comment history to find a comment that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on a thread that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on the basis that me not believing that Black people are racially inferior to white people dictates what I think about behavioral genetics.
In addition to being rude, it isn't even logically coherent. What I do or do not thing about racial supremacy has nothing to do with the very answerable question about whether behavior and molecular genetics research regarding intelligence is being published.
You are arguing to discredit a study that contradicts your previously stated religious belief. I would be very surprised if anyone found me bringing it up off-topic. I think anyone debating you is entitled to know you think it is impossible that a study could find genetic intelligence differences between races and you wont even consider any evidence. If you have changed that belief, it’s easy to state that now.
Btw, I just remembered that comment from reading that thread recently. I obviously didnt pour through 10 years of one HN’s most prolific posters.
First, the logic you're trying to apply about my "religion" doesn't cohere for the reason I stated. It doesn't follow logically from my belief that certain races aren't superior to others that I believe any X or Y claim about behavioral genetics. Second, and again, as already stated, the arguments I'm making are positive and falsifiable. You can't just bank-shot them through what you believe my psychology to be.
Either work on behavioral genetics (including behavioral genetics through the lens of racial groups) is being produced by serious scientific groups or it isn't. It is, as you can trivially verify. Ergo, the claim I made in the post I responded to is falsified. What you think about me doesn't enter into it.
So too it goes with the things I said about the MTAS: it does in fact have a small sample, it does in fact have issues with controls (look where they got the adoptees from), it does predate a large amount of scientific work on inherited environment, gene/environment interaction, and epigenetics.
Even a hereditarian wouldn't make the claim the parent commenter made, that MTAS is the last word on this question.
In fact, given the falsity of claim the parent commenter made on this kind of work being suppressed, it would be weird if it was the last word on the question: scientists have spent 20 years drilling into this, and the result has, among other things, been the "Missing Heritability Problem". You don't even have to know anything specific about MTAS to get the problem with the claim on this thread.
You’ve refuted nothing I’ve said. You continue to attempt to discredit a study related to race and intelligence. This is a topic you have claimed a religious position on and said no one should even attempt to convince you in the opposite direction.
I'm happy with what the thread says about our respective arguments at this point.
As long as you're going back that far in his posting history, why don't you defend some of Eric Raymond's racist quotes that he posted? I bet you really love ESR.
Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.
And an actual test for intelligence. Easy, right?
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The groups have very different histories within the US, and one group can pass as the majority much easier than the other. Not comparable.
OK, and what of the other hundred countries or so? The Jews just blended in?
Minnesota is in the US
The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison).
It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.
Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.
He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence.
Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals.
Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland.
I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".
This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have.
I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.
thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence.
For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
Would you say this is a valid belief?
That's like saying:
"Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.
Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results
>There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff"
SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success:
https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...
so is zip code...
So first off, no shit the college board things the SAT measures good stuff, it's their test.
Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.
Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA.
The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom.
Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings.
I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph?
It's important to realize that "Photograph 51" wasn't "Franklin's" -- it was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student mentored by Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What happened was that Wilkins chose to share the data with Watson and Crick. Yes, he maybe should have consulted with Franklin first (and certainly with Gosling, whose opinion nobody seems to care about).
In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit
yeah, generally the grad students are the ones performing experiments and the mentors are writing grants and helping to interpret data
Watson was the main man, that's why we say "Watson and Crick" and not "Crick and Watson". Why did she not get along with Watson, I wonder?
I'm not so sure about that -- Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson (who went into administration instead). He also had the mathematical skills needed for interpreting crystallography data that Watson lacked (Crick had studied physics as an undergraduate while Watson had studied zoology).
As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours.
> Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson...
But we are not talking their later work. The issue under discussion is their DNA structure work, and for that Watson wa the main one in their collaboration.
> Watson liked to talk and joke around ...
This euphemistically dances around the issue.
No, they didn't do a "quick analysis". They were in a race with Linus Pauling to figure out the structure. Pauling's son happened to leak the fact that Linus Pauling's lab had a triple helix, so they asked the son casually for notes. That, along with Gosling & Franklin's XRays convinced them that their own original model (and Pauling's) were flawed.
Last time I checked, this was basically folklore. There were some allusions to Francis Crick experimenting with LSD, but their DNA work predates that.
Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him.
You might be thinking of Kary Mullis, who supposedly came up with PCR while riding his motorcycle on LSD.
I thought he was driving in his car up a mountain with his wife/girlfriend asleep in the passenger seat.
I need to re-read his book
Riding a motorcycle on LSD is nuts
Mullis was a nutcase. He got banned from at least one conference for including porn in his slides.
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https://maps.org/2004/08/08/nobel-prize-genius-crick-was-hig...
But also
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6835/was-franci...
You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
No, Mullis wrote the Nature paper on time reversal due to the LSD trip (https://www.nature.com/articles/218663b0)
From the Wikipedia page
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
He gave a talk at where I worked and did make reference to an LSD trip in reference to the PCR process.
Maybe thinking of August Kekulé and the carbon ring [1]? I have read elsewhere it was a "pipe dream".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé#Kekulé's_dream
I am not sure. What I do know is that they used to go to pubs, so they probably used to drink pints.
Specifically The Eagle in Cambridge. Close to Kings College, and a cosy and storied pub it is. The back bar has photos and soot-signatures of air crews from all over the world, a tradition that started during WWII.
High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings
"We definitely need a debate on men..."
What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.
In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.
> In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
It’s fair to say Watson should have given more credit to the work of Franklin and Gosling, but to claim it’s “cheating, pure and simple” is clearly revisionist history.
Either his conduct was fair or it wasn't (misconduct). You are implying that it isn't without saying it outright, the comment you are replying is clearly calling it misconduct. I think in the spirit of debating you should be more direct and clearly state if you think he engaged in misconduct or not.
The outcome of such debate is to look at history with a more critical lens as opposed to just looking at it the way our ancestors did. It is not irrational to deem Watson a terrible human being while also acknowledging his contributions to science. This gives us the clear human perspective of how science has developed across time and the things we can do to ensure we are able to address some of the downsides of the human aspects of science (i.e. sexual harassment, misogyny, etc)
You mean plagiarized it?
Franklin and her grad student produced key experimental data that corrected and confirmed the model that Watson and Crick were already hard at work on.
Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.
Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.
Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.
This is not an honest depiction of the full picture.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating...
> she didn't realize its significance or implication.
That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her
They did collaborate with each other. The labs at King’s and Cambridge shared information at different times. Franklin invited Watson to her lecture. She and Wilkins went to see the double helix model when it was completed. You’re treating a sensationalized version of the story as fact.
> All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
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Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t completely unheard of in science, at least historically if not today. Would they not have done the same if it were a more junior man? Like sure if he walked up to them and literally gave them the idea, they may not have (in either case), but with the circumstances as I understand them to be, I think this kind of thing happens all the time?
> Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized?
When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism.
It isn’t whataboutism, I’m not deflecting. What I’m alluding to is that there is some moral crusade these days about women’s historical achievements that seems to have veered into conspiracy theorist tier paranoia lately. Men weren’t rubbing their hands and twirling their mustaches and stealing women’s inventions to keep them down, there were just more classical gender role norms back then. We can certainly tut tut at the social pressure to stay at home with children back then and how that did prevent some women from inventing things, or how men didn’t take women seriously in industry because that wasn’t their role in the classical role setup, but this notion that men are or were somehow out to get women is silly.
If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.
Tell us about how Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, how Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the moon landings, and then repeat this claim.
Sure and then you can tell me about Marion Donovan, Nettie Stevens, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Alice Ball, Margaret Knight, Elizabeth Magie, Margaret Keane, Candace Pert, and the hundreds of others.
(Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)
Let's see...
Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.
I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.
Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.
Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.
I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.
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It is sad, however, that he stole the research of Franklin and by today standards should be stripped from his honors.
And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed.
A terrible person indeed.
He didn't steal anything. Franklin's PhD student took the famous Photo 51, Franklin was credited in the paper [1], and there's much more besides [2]:
"We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London."
[1] https://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Wa...
[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rosalind-franklin-dna-st...
Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale) and then went on discussing what she wears.
I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life.
She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously.
Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world.
> If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly
Setting your bizarre ranting aside, you appear to have misread - Franklin was the supervisor. It was her PhD student Raymond Gosling who took Photo 51:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51
I used "supervisor" loosely here - both Watson and Crick were hierarchically above her.
As for "bizarre ranting" - I guess you have never had anything you did credited to somebody else. Good for you (seriously), but in that case please do not comment about the emotions of others.
If you did and think this is fine - well we live in different worlds then.
The only thievery here is yours. Just as we are expected to believe that Ada Lovelace invented programming, Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, and Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the Apollo missions all by her lonesome, we must believe this, too. None of it is true, and when this is pointed out, the response is frothing accusations of misogyny that you've so aptly demonstrated.
Well, froth away. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and appropriately credited Dr. R. E. Franklin (not "Rosy") in their paper.
It is sad to see that whenever gender comes into play, emotions are high.
It does not matter that she was a woman - should they have stolen from a man (which here is also the case) they would have been thieves as well.
Do not put completely useless gender craziness in this. We are talking about one scientist using dirty methods to hide another scientist.
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> Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale)
I took that as an accusation of misogyny and I'm unclear how else it could be interpreted. Watson named her as Dr. R. E. Franklin, so it can't be him that was being impugned.
Please also note the frothy inability to type - have I replicated that?
> don't deem worthy
Deem worthy of what?
You are demonstrating my point perfectly. You have no interest in what these women did (or did not) do, what their achievements actually were (and they certainly had them), they're simply a totem that you elevate beyond reason as proof of what a Very Nice Guy you are.
> as if you have them written down on an enemies list
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4141622/
One hundred percent agree with you. This is a perfect example where what's remembered as history is largely influenced by what was told by the victor.
By today's standards, if I heard that some random ordinary scientist was stripped of their honors and was being widely labeled a terrible person in internet comment threads, I would seriously consider the possibility that they were the real victim in the situation.
Have you ever heard anything he said about women, gays, blacks, etc? He is the kind of guy I would not even approach, while so many people were bowing.
This is in addition to his stolen work of course.
The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name.
Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.
The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.
Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong.
Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.
Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs.
Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
Is not being allowed to have children with close relatives also eugenics?
They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.
>an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery
I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
I have decades of experience as an unaccomplished nobody and I concur.
Arguably it is worse.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
>Einstein
>diminished contributions in later part of his life
Whew, that's a wild one.
What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
[1] still got downvoted smh
How do you define socialism? I see ppl throw around this term without ever defining it. They probably mean a soviet style central government , which of course is terrible.
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
Yeah, I wasn't aware of that writing but I read the Wikipedia article and what it describes seems spot on to me.
The article explains what Einstein meant by socialism:
"Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with a planned economy where the means of production are owned by society itself"
It seems clear he understood it was a tricky problem, and writing at the time many of the potential problems were not apparent:
"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"
Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.
> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits
I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.
> racist things about Irish people
It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.
See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.
It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English)
How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?
It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England.
>> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people
Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?
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He will be remembered as a racist. He’ll be joining other racists.
Didn’t he steal the discovery from the woman who actually took the photo?
RIP you legend.
https://archive.today/KaTaT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
This is native English and quite colloquial. It's been used in widespread use in newspapers and in the media since forever.
From just recently:
> James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
> ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’
> Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73
> Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
> Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74
> Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101
> Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70
More famous headlines:
> Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1]
> Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2]
> Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3]
> Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
[2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f...
[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/dick-cheney-dies
[4] https://uproxx.com/indie/ozzy-osbourne-dead-76/
This is normal english.
Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful.
Plenty of non-paywall links that would be better here eg
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8xdypnz32o
97 years old... must've had good genes...
Oh eu...
Seriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity.
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That's reframing things too much.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
She was credited, see the original W&C paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 at the end is an acknowledgement. She also has a related article in the same issue of Nature.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
Edit, in re-reading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 I see that she did suspect the DNA structure contained multiple chains. So my statement about about the double helix aspect was incomplete/incorrect.
This is the first time I found out that she was credited. Thanks for that.
This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work
Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures
Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.
Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
The work belonged to the lab (according to its director), and Franklin was in the process of moving to a different institution. Additionally, the labs at King’s and Cambridge had regularly been sharing information back and forth. Wilkins showing lab property to the Cambridge team was not unusual or because he looked down on Franklin.
>Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
this is a preposterously reductive and dishonest account of what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
Yes, how she was treated by Crick and Watson was scandalous.
That's what I read on the surface. Any useful links for the context?
The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
I believe this article has some updated results: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/rosalind-franklin... and it appears there was an earlier book before Dark Lady, referenced here: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/21/archives/rosalind-frankli...
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This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
Your own editorialized summary is the problem:
> Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
This is what the diffraction pattern gets you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
Now solve for the atoms and bonds.
You're making them out to be thieves.
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
lmao that's an extremely charitable take that doesn't comport with other racist bullshit he said
have you actually been to a talk he's given or are you just aping what other people report?
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you?
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> 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".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/the-elementary-d...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4067985/
"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has"
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
"the research"
where is this research
> Why mention genetic diversity?
honestly, just think about it a little longer
> To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
Why?
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
This is widely disputed [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
> No, it isn’t.
Yes it is. See the linked wikipedia article to see a bunch of references to the dispute.
What comments did he make and what type of fact-based concerns do you have with them?
if you read the article:
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
Taboos are very culture-specific. I suspect that the above statement would cause approximately zero uproar in China, or the Arabic world.
And that means that black people are inherently less intelligent?
Maybe they are, maybe they are not, but that was not the point of my comment.
The point of my comment was that the current Western Civilization is so afraid of this hypothesis and its possible ramifications if it turned out to be even semi-correct, that it will try to destroy anyone who even dares to say it aloud, instead of approaching it without prejudice and studying it.
That is a political taboo, on the same level as saying "Allah probably does not exist" in Iran, "Ukraine is a separate nation which deserves sovereignty and our war against them is unjust" in Russia, or "Our government is neither very benevolent nor very capable and makes stupid mistakes" in China. And this taboo is mostly caused by US history of slavery and Western European history of colonialism and/or eugenics, but also by the current structure of politics. Much like the abovementioned taboos from Iran, Russia and China, its breach would undermine some political foundations.
It also has some consequences. We invest crazy amounts of money into artificial intelligence, but natural intelligence (and stupidity) is relatively underinvested, with the most interesting results coming from studies of corvids or octopuses. IMHO this is low-hanging fruit that we choose not to pluck, thus probably shooting ourselves in the foot when developing our own human potential.
I think the reason western civilization is afraid of the idea of inherent genetic limitations to intelligence is because the logical next step would not be focusing on education, but probably restarting some form of eugenics or genetic engineering of our progeny, and the last time that happened it didn't go very well. Also, much of 'western civilization' is founded on treating people as if they are equal, so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another obviously rubs us the wrong way.
I can't even tell what your suggestion is, what is the low-hanging fruit you are talking about? If you come out and say what your stance is (maybe you think we should genetically engineer babies to score higher on IQ tests?) then we could have a debate about the merits of those ideas. As it stands I have no idea what you're suggesting, which has the side effect of making you irrefutable I guess.
Your general analysis seems way off. Secular skepticism goes back a long time in Iran (way before the European Enlightenment), and few Iranians would be shocked to hear "Allah probably does not exist".
Here are some quatrains by Omar Khayyam (1048 CE) which are well known by everyone in Iran:
Same goes for Russia and China, I'm very skeptical that the general population has a taboo about those ideas. A social taboo is not <whatever the government has banned you from talking about>.In my previous comment, I was talking quite explicitly about political taboos, not societal taboos.
When I was a kid, the general population of Czechoslovakia would not be shocked by a joke about stupid drunken Soviet Communists, but if someone snitched on you, that joke would still land you in prison.
As with Iran (and I noticed your Persian handle), I absolutely understand that there is a lot of agnostic and skeptical Iranians, but saying that Allah does not exist in front of some henchmen of the Islamic Republic will likely lead to trouble, am I correct?
the logical next step
Well, would it be? We're 100 years downstream from those times. It is a bit like saying that if a modern American city wants to reintroduce streetcars, it will logically resurrect the wooden boxes of the 1920s that will shake your bones whenever they accelerate.
As of now, we know preciously little about natural intelligence, and I personally don't believe that "ignorance is strength", neither am I a fan of fear masquerading as wisdom. We have likely missed some low hanging fruit because of our deliberate ignorance.
If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
It is well possible that 100 years from now, something like "glasses for the brain" will exist, something that sharpens your thought process much like glasses sharpen your vision. Of course that the road to this will be full of potholes, but we should try anyway.
so the idea that one subgroup of humans is superior to another
Why should higher intelligence be considered a basis for "superiority"? We don't consider richer, more beautiful or more eloquent people to be "superior" to the poorer or uglier ones, and we should treat differences in intelligence the same.
I don't see what your definition of 'political taboo', which seems to be related to top-down restrictions on speech or behavior, has to do James Watson's remarks.
There are few explicit or implicit rules about making racist claims that don't incite violence/hatred in most western countries (unlike the example you gave in Iran), or if they are, Watson didn't seem to suffer much for 'breaching the taboo'. Watson was shunned by the public and lost some scientific prestige/status because he didn't provide any evidence for his huge claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Public_remarks_on...I think there's a big taboo against making huge claims that aren't supported by anything other than your own authority (such as Linus Pauling claiming that Vitamin C can cure cancer), and an even bigger taboo when those claims are explicitly ranking groups of humans on the basis of their genetics or even vaguely defined features like intelligence.
I find it interesting that you're spending so much time talking about the presence of this taboo but no time at all analyzing or evaluating the actual claims. Because if the claims are false, who cares if they're taboo? Are all taboos bad? Is it a good outcome if we get to a point where all countries have the same taboos?
> If we are slowly conquering cancer, which once seemed intractable, we could slowly conquer stupidity as well, but that requires knowing something about the subject first, instead of blindly trusting some faith.
First we need to have good definitions for intelligence or stupidity. I don't particularly like IQ as a proxy for overall intelligence but if you are defining it using IQ, scores are slowly improving at the population level with hispanics and blacks gaining on whites.
Future Cognitive Ability: US IQ Prediction until 2060 Based on NAEP https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4603674
"I find it interesting"
Certainly sounds like a personal jab, but HN is based on good-faith discussion, so I won't dig deeper into it.
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
The West is no longer a dominant civilization on this planet. The US seems to be very afraid of the possibility that Chinese AI research will overtake the American one. I find it very short-sighted that a similar concern is absolutely absent when it comes to natural intelligence research. There is a shitton of underdeveloped natural intelligence around as, and if our political adversaries manage to actually develop it first, the AI race may not matter at all.
Of course, that is a big "if", much like with railguns etc. Some technologies never bear fruit. But historically, we have seen extreme concentrations of brain power in some time-and-space limited regions (Hungarian "Martians"?), which indicates that there is a lot more underdeveloped talent than we think and that it could be, given the right methods, developed to overwhelming dimensions.
For Pete's sake, we cannot even recreate Bell Labs as they once were. No one precisely knows what was the actual magic that had them going, even though everyone has their favorite theory. It reminds me of alchemists doing experiments in the early 1600s. Aren't you a bit nervous about the fact that phenomena such as Bell Labs emerge on their own and disappear without us being able to create them on purpose? We must have wasted a lot of human potential by not knowing how to harness and develop top talents.
"analyzing or evaluating ..."
This is quite obviously a vicious circle. The topic of natural intelligence is taboo, scientists who try to attack it earnestly face a lot of hurdles in funding (see also [0], an interesting article), thus the amount of actual data is remarkably small, and, as you yourself say, even the definitions aren't really good. Which, in turn, leads a lot of people to cloak their disgust over the entire topic in a plausibly sounding word bubble like "there is not enough data, it is all so nebulous and murky, there is no sense in studying such a weird topic, don't spend any money on it and don't play with any dangerous hypotheses".
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...
If you are interested in my motivation, it is not building a ladder of world's populations according to IQ and boasting about being somewhere in the upper half. I am more concerned with the fact that such taboos are slowing down our research of natural intelligence to a crawl.
Be specific. What specific research questions are you claiming have been slowed, and in what ways?
That’s actually a correct belief. That’s what the testing says.
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
First of all, what tests?
Second, you’d need to prove it’s genetic and not due to socio-economic factors.
I’m assuming you’ve thought of this?
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is grokipedia allowed ??
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
Well timonoko also posts Grok generated FORTH code that doesn't work, and then retroactively claims it was just a joke when called on it, so it's safe to assume he doesn't know what he's talking about, that he and Grok and grokipedia are always joking and making shit up, and not to take any of them seriously, because he believes what he wants to believe without fact checking, and he post Grok generated AI slop regularly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179381
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=timonoko
timonoko:
What is this abomination?
"Fact-checked by Grok"
So... it's a rip-off of Wikipedia edited by an LLM that was specifically designed for misinformation by the world's richest troll?
Do I have that right? Cancer.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
I can't read the link, as the post has been deleted, but even when everything in a text is factually correct, it still can be misleading.
Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many. They have no responsibility, and Grok is known to have explicit biases.
>Grok is known to have explicit biases
Wikipedia is known to have explicit biases, which is the entire point of the Grokipedia project.
>Fact-checking by an LLM is however not acceptable to many.
Sort of a Luddite mentality to dismiss information without even reading it just because a technology you don't like was involved in its production.
> Grok is known to have explicit biases
And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with.
And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should be obvious if he even glanced at the code he was posting. I'd hate to see the kind of Grok-generated buggy crap he unwittingly checks into source code control.
It's strange that timonoko is so compelled to virtue signal so often that he shares Musk's and Grok's racist views. But at least now we know what kind of person he is.
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I'm not sure what your definition of "nice" is, but mine doesn't include saying most of what's here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race
> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper 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".
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
Yeah, pretty racist
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
In a clean game-theoretic terms, without making any moral or ideological claims about “who is smarter”, we’ll treat underlying advantage as any positional asset (intelligence, wealth, charisma, skill, social capital, etc.). The question is: If a subset of players has an advantage in a repeated, large-group game, how do they best play to maximize payoff and stability?
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent. This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
Hmmm, let's see.
How many people died in wars in the 20th century? How many of them did NOT originate in Europe and Asia?
How much of climate change that has fouled up the earth we depend is NOT attributable to economic activity in the west?
Is there a western/Asian country where late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of of the common has not taken hold?
I could go on...
Are these evidence of intelligence? This is not a rhetorical question.
arguably I'd say wars can be generally indicative of intelligence. Higher-ability groups are more likely to choose war when their greater power raises the expected payoff of fighting. Climate change is also related to intelligence as it can argued that the more advance societies do end up consuming/producing more and thus create more Climate related waste. The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
I'm not sure I understand your point around late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of the common...
Are you really arguing that the western world has not been more advanced?
The European/Asian wars of the 20th century (ironically started by people who thought of themselves as superior races) wiped out ten of millions of lives and an untold amount of wealth. It led to the collapse of entire empires and nations. Surely you are not claiming that the wars were a net positive, are you? One indicator of a lack of intelligence is engaging in actions that are against your own interests.
Also, with climate change, may I remind you of quote from Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy:
> I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
Industrialization followed this pattern. Shitting where you live is a textbook case of stupid.
> The end result of it might not be desirable, but probably something these advance societies can deal with.
The people dying in extreme floods and fires tell me otherwise, and it's likely only going to get worse.
> whereas all the testing says not really
This part is (still) true. Is that fact racist?
on top of that, I personally know several women scientists that had to put up with his misogyny first-hand.
There was irony involved.
Watson was the one who described Franklin as "belligerent, emotional, and unable to interpret her own data" in his book. He also repeatedly referred to her as "Rosy", a name Franklin never used.
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
One professor that I had said that she met him when he was a bit younger (when he was in his 60s), and every time he would walk into a room, he would immediately pick out the most attractive young women, and ask them to sit directly next to him.
No, they rushed to beat Pauling. In a just world Franklin would gotten a co-author credit, but I don't think anyone holds that she was going to have the breakthrough on her own.
She literally did though. Both their papers were published at the same time too. Her research was finished a little bit later but they both got published in the same issue of the same journal. Hers came later in the pages so it seemed as if her work was simply confirming the work of Watson/Crick
It wasn't Franklin's photograph.
> Wow, good genes!
Said with irony? I mean, the guy was into eugenics—thought some races are smarter than others.
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
Even if he was "into eugenics", there is strong evidence that your genetic makeup contributes significantly to your longevity.
And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.
By all means they should remain in textbooks. We have a lot of unredeemable people in history that we should not ignore.
If anything it's probably a healthy reminder that even "smart" people can have blinders on?
But isn't this true? Asians are proven to have the highest IQ
I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
No.
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
If it was a cultural thing it would be a multi modal distribution.
It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Research...
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
> This US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023
If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)
There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].
(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)
(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)
Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.
[0] https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...
[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite: warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test taker populations."
[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"
[3] Bottom of page 5: "Median Family Income"
[4] Bottom of page 8: "Degree-Level Goal"
[5] Top of page 8: "Intended College Major"
>There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic.
There isn't even any concrete evidence that it's a good thing.
Intelligence has a significant genetic component, otherwise it couldn't have evolved.
"Intelligence isn't genetic" is the left's version of creationism.
No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
I'm so tired.
> the guy was into eugenics
So are you (probably). Do you think incest should be legalized?
> thought some races are smarter than others
What other conclusion can you reasonably come to based on the available data?
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.
Race is obviously biological.. You can determine someone's ancestry and ethnicity by their DNA...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PCA-clustering-Principal...
But it is biological. You can try to obfuscate and use big words all you want, but it is, in fact, biological.
No one said it wasn't biological. Hair color is also biological.
You:
> krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
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Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.
looks like it paid off
Eat goji berries, play tennis, and eat 10x the amount of daily recommended Vitamin C. I will live to be 100
both of them were jerks.
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This feels like one of those engagement-farming bots you see on xitter. What a shame.
I am very much real, you can check my comment history. Do you have any substantive critiques of Mr. Watson and his scientific research?
There's no place for you here you lunatic
Any facts you can cite to disprove his findings?