All manner of idiotic scientific myths refuse to die on social media, whether it’s ‘we only use 10 per cent of our brains’ or ‘the Great Wall of China is visible from space’. Not to mention myths about science itself, from ‘science is not a belief system’ to a childishly rigid, linear description of the ‘the scientific method’.
With the recent death of James Watson, yet another social media myth was bellowed across the echo-chambers of leftist nonsense. Hyper-charged by the continuing feminist inability to admit the relative paucity of feminine genius and the relatively minor historical feminine contribution to science, the myth that ‘Rosalind Franklin was the real discoverer of the structure of DNA’ has become an even more ineradicable myth than ‘face masks stop Covid!’
Even the lefty idiot-rag the Guardian was compelled to call bullshit on this one.
One claim was that during the race to uncover the structure of DNA, Jim Watson and Francis Crick either stole Rosalind Franklin’s data, or ‘forgot’ to credit her. Neither suggestion is true.
While the laboratory work by Franklin was important to Watson and Crick’s discovery, they neither ‘stole’ it, nor did Franklin make the crucial conceptual breakthroughs. Almost certainly, had she lived, Franklin would have been included as part of the team who made the discovery, as was Maurice Wilkins (who also contributed vital experimental data, but is also rarely remembered today). But she died four years before the Nobel was awarded and prizes are not awarded posthumously. Her exclusion was not a ‘sexist plot’.
So, what drives the persistent myth? Firstly, as stated, the feminist desperation for ‘stolen valour’. Secondly, the determined attempt to blacken Watson’s name and un-person him, for the heinous crime of simply stating facts, however unpalatable to the woke inquisition.
The Nobel Prize-winning biologist was in fact one of the earliest victims of cancel culture in 2007, when, in an interview with the Times, he stated that he was ‘pessimistic’ about the future of sub-Saharan Africa because its inhabitants were genetically less intelligent than white Europeans.
Immediately, Watson was condemned to the outer darkness as an unreconstructed racist guilty of the greatest sin known to modern minds. Institutions such as Harvard University and his own Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory – where he had used his findings about DNA to further the fight against cancer – immediately cut all ties with the great man and condemned his views as unscientific and unworthy of his world-changing genetic discoveries.
But Watson stuck to his unpopular guns and even expanded on his original statement to suggest that employers of black staff soon discovered disparities in intelligence between them and their Caucasian colleagues. For good measure, he also claimed that there were fewer women than men in the top echelons of scientific achievement because the female mind was less suited to advanced scientific thought than the male – thus adding blatant sexism to racism on his charge sheet.
Except, he was almost certainly right on both counts.
The correlation of IQ and race is one of the most robust scientific facts on the planet. The only argument is, why? The common defence is that ‘IQ is rubbish’ and ‘culturally biased’. This is blatant nonsense: not only is the efficacy of IQ thoroughly demonstrated, but tests have been rigorously culturally blinded.
A second defence is that the difference is ‘purely cultural’. This at least has some merit: as Thomas Sowell points out, the Irish and Italians once scored at the bottom of US Army IQ tests (one of the longest-running continuous series of IQ data), along with blacks. Nowadays, the Irish and Italians have worked their way up the ladder. That the Japanese in America score higher than the Japanese in Japan is also suggestive.
But the fact remains that blacks in the US remain at the bottom of the IQ ladder. As for the Japanese, the difference between Japanese-Americans and Japanese is just three per cent, barely distinguishable from statistical noise. Meanwhile, identical twins raised separately show near-identical IQ scores. The average difference of eight points is less than half the average difference of randomly compared strangers (18 points).
Clearly, then, the nexus between genetics and IQ is a strong one.
Few can reasonably deny that sub-Saharan Africa is less developed and more prone to crime, violence, corruption and disorder than much of the rest of the world, but whether that is down to intellectual differences between its inhabitants and other races, or the result of such factors as climate and colonialism, is still a matter of heated debate.
Just don’t be a public figure and say so out loud.
As for the ‘sexism’, the bell curves of male and female intelligence bear that out. While both males and females show similar extremities, the female curve is sharply concentrated about the middle. What this means is that there are far more males at both extremities: that is, there are more male idiots than female, and more male geniuses than female.
I’ve yet to hear a feminist outraged about the former, but God help the scientist who mentions the latter out loud.
Watson argued that it was truly unscientific to claim that intelligence was transmitted equally through the genes of all races, and said that those who denied inequalities in intelligence were influenced by their own political prejudices rather than by objective scientific facts.
The minority of fellow scientists who dared to defend him also risked having their research defunded and their careers abruptly terminated. But writing on the ScienceDirect website in 2008, biologist Jason Malloy said that Watson had voiced ‘an inconvenient truth’ and that there was plenty of scientific data to support his claims.
But, as the ‘Listener Seven’ in New Zealand discovered, scientific data is practically irrelevant to the Woke Science that rules the roost in academia today, with as little scientific rigour, but every bit as much doctrinaire vindictiveness, as the Lysenkoists ruled Soviet biology. To its ruin.
