I remember Jim Watson back when he was cool.

[count_01]

But this cat is right. After making those remarks about how black folks is lazy and stupid? what was he, watching Birth of a Nation?

Not cool.

Comments

[unwoman]

I've met people from every racial group who span from idiotic to brilliant. Aside from the injuries to intelligence caused by poverty, which we all know does discriminate, I firmly believe every racial group has equal capacity for both brilliance and idiocy. The range between the dumbest person of any group and the smartest of that same group is so huge that it makes no sense whatsoever to average it and compare it against other groups. How about we make sure all children get a great education and encouragement to succeed before we even think about comparing their IQ (which is an outdated standard), or intelligence genes (when we don't even know what those really are)? Also, I like the author's suggestion that Watson enjoys making controversial statements. That's pretty much all he's good for these days, it seems...

[count_01]

Oh, sure, bring reason into it. I was just going to appeal to people's base desire to take revenge on a pop icon who thinks unpopular thoughts while no one's looking, in a demagogic knee-jerk autoerotic frenzy of self-righteous frothtastic oversimplicity.

[unwoman]

:)

[xerhino]

I'm probably going to be sorry, but I feel like I have to defend Watson. He said, in the article, that he never wanted someone to be judged based on their color, but on their individual traits. His point seems to have been that geographically separated humans would develop strengths and weaknesses independent of other groups and that, therefore, we would see "racial differences". A pretty touchy subject, to be sure, and I'm trying to put the most positive spin on it I can in the face of racist jerkdom. Maybe I idealize the guy too, but I don't think he ever meant to say that blacks are stupid and lazy. And if he did, what a jerkhole.

[count_01]

It seems like what he was trying to say is, it really isn't their fault that some black folks are lazy and stupid, that they evolved that way just the same as some white folks did....which still isn't a very cool thing to say, even though it's highly likely to be true.

As an anthrogeek, I have to weigh in

[hermine_93]

It's not at all likely to be true, and I have some stuff you can use to refute it.

Anthropologists have been pointing out since the 19th century that the genetic diversity between populations is not correlated with any differences in behavior and the data continue to support that thesis.

As does the way evolution works. Populations of humans were _relatively_ separate for about enough time for people in the general vicinity of a region to develop a tendency to be more or less in a particular range of colors, but something as complex as brain evolution takes a whole lot longer than that.

And because it's all tendencies and vicinities, race isn't even a biological category. There's no meaningful way to draw lines between categories.

If you want to see how human genetic diversity turned out to be distributed after scientists mapped the human genome, see http://www.understandingrace.org/, which was produced by the American Anthropological Association.

Re: As an anthrogeek, I have to weigh in

[count_01]

Wasn't actually what I meant: I didn't mean (nor do I take Dr. Watson to mean) that whole populations of any particular color wound up lazy and stupid, but individuals certainly have. In every color. And isolated populations tend to have more undesirable traits (like laziness and stupidity) than large, diverse populations, so it seems entirely plausible to me as a nonprofessional anthro, but partially-trained biologist, that undesirable traits might well have wound up selected in pockets of the world. And, well, too bad for 'em; they should have gotten out more.