Revealed: scientist who sparked racism row has black genes

Revealed: scientist who sparked racism row has black genes


A Nobel Prize-winning scientist who provoked a public outcry by claiming black Africans were less intelligent than whites has a DNA profile with up to 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European.
An analysis of the genome of James Watson showed that 16 per cent of his genes were likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1 per cent.


"This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African," said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. "It was very surprising to get this result for Jim."


The findings were made available after Dr Watson became only the second person to publish his fully sequenced genome online earlier this year. Dr Watson was forced to resign his post as head of a research laboratory in New York shortly after triggering an international furore by questioning the comparative intelligence of Africans. In an interview during his recent British book tour, the American scientist said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects for 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".


The Science Museum in London cancelled a lecture by him, while the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, branded his comments "racist propaganda".
Other scientists working in the field of molecular biology quickly distanced themselves from the comments, saying that it was not possible to draw such conclusions from the work that had been done on DNA.
The study of the DNA of Dr Watson – who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine – adds another twist to the controversy surrounding the American scientist's comments.


In addition to the 16 per cent of his genes which were identified as likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent, a further 9 per cent were likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent, the test indicated.


http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3239366.ece


Oh Snap!

:roflmao:

 

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Was Watson making ridiculous statements that were contradicted by scientific evidence? Or are the people who are criticizing Watson simply assuming that his views are false because they want his views to be false?

I'm reminded of poor Lawrence Summers, who was forced to resign from Harvard after he speculated that Harvard might have a disproportionate number of male faculty because the standard deviation of intelligence in men is higher than in women, so if you're picking your faculty from the upper .1% of the population you will end up with more men then women. He added "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong." Instead of attempting to prove him wrong, people simply got offended and had him ousted. For most of his opponents the fact that he was wrong was taken as a forgone conclusion, since if he were correct it would be offensive - and as everyone knows, it's impossible for something to occur in nature that some people find offensive.

I don't really know anything about this area, but what does the scientific evidence say? Surely people have done studies comparing the intelligence of various racial groups. I think it's pretty well-established that intelligence does have at least some genetic component, so it seems perfectly reasonable that average intelligence might vary from one genetic group to another.

 

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http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1599687&postcount=1

 

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The post that you linked to seems to be arguing that there isn't a valid genetic basis for distinction between races. But the article from the opening post in this thread seems to indicate otherwise - apparently there are distinct genetic differences between races, and they are understood well enough that scientists can actually quantify them from person to person.

 

What does the scientific evidence say? What does Watson say? Watson doesn't stand by his own statements, so they don't need to be disproved.

 

Not quite. The DNA profiling is not based on genetically distinguished races, but on genetically distinguished geographical areas of ancestry.

The conclusion that the genes came from a dark-skinned person is an inference - there are no light-skinned ancestors from that area, as far as we know.

Black ancestors from different areas - say from other parts of Africa, or the Andaman Islands - probably would not have supplied Watson with those alleles. They don't mark the race.

Note that the argument is statistical - it is possible, although very unlikely, that Watson got those alleles from an unusual white European ancestor.

 

I think that people simply didn't want to hear what Watson had to say.

 

So who do you believe, a journalist or a biologist?

 

er, it says likely- likely means 'that is the way I see it'. Either way Africans are just as smart. And remember we all came from Africa THEN marched across the Earth like little lemmings to settle into areas where everyone just happened to look the exact same way.

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Isn't bigotry often expressed by an exaggerated reaction to ideas that seem bigoted?

 

I should have said "appear to be tainted by bigotry." Any truth-telling that seems to support bigotry can and will be attacked by some people. Those people won't actually know the subject or have any idea what they are talking about, but they sure can hurl those accusations.

 

Racism helps no one. I have never meat a black, yellow, white or any other that showed the race to have a metal defect of any kind. It was always the person himself that determined who he was and how he acted.

Even the people one lives with your whole life, instilling a way of life can not change that the person is free to be a genius, a wonderful friend, a jerk, an idiot or a hater of other races.

There will always be mistakes you can use against a person, but it takes a special person to use that against the rest of the race. It should not be seen as coincidence that such errors on the part of people are more common around other people of this type.

 

A way of life can definitely change a person's potential. More than one religion or sect of a religion has turned a society from a progressive, technically adept, forward-looking society into a retarded backwater that is only useful for bombing practice.

 

And now he probably either
won't want to hear what he has to say
or be what he is.

He has found himself in an ironic situation.

 

I don't see the point of this thread's topic...so what if Watson had a black gene...we all do...we came from Lucy in Africa and she was black...our ancestors all came from Africa.

Watson did not refute this point, he stated that those in which this gene is expressed or black people are the ones ...

 

In this case, it means the way anyone who understands what three standard deviations from the mean means.

 

There's no contradiction here since Asians score higher than whites on IQ tests.

Hence, the Asian genes would have compensated for the deficit caused by the black genes, therefore leaving his European genes the dominant determiner in his intellectual abilities.