Afternoon:
11°c
The great scientist, James D Watson - of Watson and Crick - has had his sell-out appearance at the Science Museum tonight cancelled. He was due to begin a tour promoting his entertaining memoir, Avoid Boring People - And Other Lessons from a Life in Science. But the museum withdrew its invitation because of remarks he had made in the book, and in an interview, about the possibility of intelligence levels varying in different races.
In a statement, the museum professed not to shy away from discussing controversial topics. "However, the Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize-winner James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate." So what did Watson actually say that was so beyond all argument?
In the book, he suggests that academia will soon, perhaps within 10 years, simply have to hand political correctness back to the politicians, because advances in DNA sequencing will allow the pinpointing of genetic factors determining, say, psychopathy, schizophrenia, autism - and differing intellectual abilities.
He puts it like this: "A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual abilities of people 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." That carefully phrased supposition can't fairly be considered racist.
But in the interview, Watson went further, saying he was "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". That's been enough to get him banned from the Science Museum where he so obviously belongs, if anyone does.
With its gratuitous presumptions of "us" and "them", it's an ugly remark, for sure. But it is not beyond all debate. It is not such a heinous thought-crime that it should make him an outcast.
But outcast Watson has been. Now, even allowing that there is a possibility that there might be genetic differences between races and sexes, in addition to environmental ones, is strictly forbidden - an immediate red card offence.
No contrary arguments or evidence need be offered, and no debate entered into (perhaps precisely because debate is feared?) There's an element of blind panic here. It just must not be so, it must be strictly unthinkable. And that's not science, it's prejudice. The disgrace here falls not on the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA but on the supposed guardians of scientific values in Exhibition Road.
