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.
A good one is the Minnesota Trans-racial Adoption Study. Bit it's not hard to find more. It was a very popular research topic a few decades ago.
> honestly, just think about it a little longer
It's arrogant of you to assume that more thinking will lead to your thinking. It's possible that I did think of your idea and dismissed it as wrong, or that you and cogman10 have different ideas without realizing it. So you should say what you mean if you want to communicate that.
I did think about it enough to realize that all non-human life collectively has more genetic diversity than humans, yet every single other species has less intelligence. So more diversity doesn't necessarily mean equal intelligence.
> 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.
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.