Another Jim Watson Obituary

From an obituary of the famous biochemist Jim Watson:

In the late 1990s, Watson gave seminars, notably at the University of California Berkeley, where he expanded on research on the hormone POMC and related peptides and made inappropriate and incorrect observations about women. In October 2007, he made racist remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, and, damagingly for his fellow employees at CSHL, stated that while he hoped that everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” The CSHL Board of Trustees dissociated the institute from Watson’s comments, and he was forced to step down from his administrative position as Chancellor. The matter resurfaced in January 2019 when Watson was asked if his views on race and intelligence had changed. His answer was unequivocal: “No, not at all.” The Laboratory’s response was immediate, relieving him of all his emeritus titles. Watson and his family, however, continued to live on the CSHL campus.

A reader comments:

But was it necessarily bigotry? Might he have seen himself as making a best-efforts and good-faith evaluation of the evidence, and following that evidence, even if it leads to an unpopular and heretical conclusion?

If the reply would be along the lines that, no, the evidence showing he was wrong is so available and clear cut that no good-faith scientist could arrive at his conclusions, so it must have been bigotry, then could someone do the world a favour and point everyone at the available and clear-cut evidence showing he was wrong? (Note that the various denunciations of him don’t actually do that, they just denounce him.)

If there were a reliable scientific study proving Watson wrong, then the reviews would cite it.

Watson could be shown wrong if intelligence is not real, or if it is not measurable, or if all groups have the same average scores. But IQ is measurable, and group averages could be significantly different.

There still could be multiple explanations for those differences. One reason for disagreement is that differences attributable to identified genes are much smaller that what is indicated by twin studies. I do not know whether Watson took a stand on this, but he was an enthusiast of genetic explanations, so he was probably inclined in that direction.

Regardless, no makes any specific criticisms of Watson. They just call him a racist.