I do not support this hostile reaction to someone just for stating what he believes in.
After all we’re supposed to be an open tolerant democratic society.

But what are we? We’re hypocrites because we don’t support the idea of free speech in actual fact.
We fire people and prevent them from speaking publically whenever they make a politically incorrect statement.
Make any kind of statement that can be represented as a hate/racist comment and you’ll
have the PC (politically correct) thought police coming down your case.

Does anyone else not see what this situation has become? It’s a situation of intolerance and lack of regard for differing opinions,especially if they are held to be politically incorrect.
Regardless of whether Mr.Watson’s comments are scientifically founded or unfounded is not the point.
Personally I don’t really know whether there really is any genetic or biological evidence for believing one race to be intellectually superior/inferior to another.
The evidence if any is probably meagre or non-existent.
But I do believe that it’s his right to believe them whether anyone else agrees with him or not.

It’s a real crime or disgrace to ruin a man’s reputation like Mr.Watson”s because the ruling (tyrannical) PC majority finds offense with his
comments.
This proves that we are not as enlightened,tolerant or open as we like to think we are.
Not if we persecute people for expressing beliefs or opinions that others don’t share.

Classism is the real dynamic of America, and NOT racism. a handful of super rich white men pits the poor whites and the poor blacks against eachother in a theater of distraction (from their evil doings) called Racism.

but anyhow, weren’t Europeans a LOT darker just merely 5000 years ago, when a mutation in skin pigment made them sickly pale?

back in 1300, Europeans were savages who peed in the bushes outside and could not take care of their sick. the wealthy in Europe sent their kids to study in a Spain ruled by Black Islamic Moors from Africa — the height of civilization: art, music, philosophy, — and had amazing schools, irrigation, running water, medical facilities, etc. the Moors were in Spain for more than 500 years.

funny how short people’s memory spans are…

They hammered that point home in my psychology class over and over again.

Besides, race is mostly a social construct anyway.

In fact, genetic studies in this area have already found that there is greater variation WITHIN a given race than there is between races.

… No.

No it is not the same thing. Race is something you are born into. Your job is not.

What race is ‘pump gas’? Although implying someone is a hillbilly troubles me.

“What a twat!”

I find it ironic how people denounce people who denounce racism that proceed to denounce someone on the basic that they ‘pump gas’ and then use a misogynist crack.

Not even close.

In a statement given to The Associated Press yesterday, Dr. Watson said, “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

Notwithstanding the childish rants of wingers, it’s extremely easy to fire an employee in the United States in private non-union employment; you find an example of misconduct and underperformance and you fire the employee, indeed, you don’t strictly need even that. Watson’s concern is that an employer would promote a presumably effective employee – i.e. not can-worthy and likely promotion worthy – in excess of that employee’s alleged intelligence, and further that the class of employees who would be so promoted would be African or African-American. Yet why such an employee would be both promotion-worthy and promotion-unworthy at the same freaking time is beyond me. (If a manager concluded that Joe/Jane was not promotion material without Watson’s management help, the discussion is moot.)

EVEN IF Watson’s alleged data were both accurately described and soundly gathered – which I profoundly doubt – it STILL would be BS to follow his irrational, counter-scientific method of thinking. Either employee X is a solid hire and promotion or he isn’t, regardless of where other people who share his so-called race and don’t work there fall on an IQ test. Watson’s walk-back – “when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level” – is a waste of breath; you don’t promote ANYBODY (unless you are married to his sister) who is a demonstrated ****-up.

Watson himself is a living example of the converse principle: sometimes a presumably competent person in one field, such as DNA molecular sequencing, cannot handle another field, such as sociology, statistics, business administration, psychology or economics.

I just hope that African-Americans and others won’t hold my intelligence in low esteem merely because I may possibly share ancestry and DNA in common with Watson, from whatever gene-pool micturating Scots Highlander who perhaps took time away from sodomizing sheep to penetrate some female ancestor of mine and his.

And, along with the Nobel Prize, let’s hand out a little booklet explaining how easily stupidity turns to arrogance.

What this means is that in the realm of jobs, education, public policy, etc. The genetic argument is simply irrelevant. Anyone who thinks otherwise and posts on blogs to that effect is either ignorant or a racist scumbag. I won’t speculate on which of those Jim is.

As for Watson, I suspect he’s just senile. Sad.

Even if this research holds out, it doesn’t at all prove that African blacks are “less intelligent” than whites. Has it been positively determined that brain size is what determines intelligence, or is it just one of those “size matters” myths?

God knows we have plenty of white people who are stupid as hell.

One can be smart and still be a racist. But the guy is also 187 years old. It could be that he WAS smart, and just isn’t any more.

He makes a number of mistakes that are common usually among the “creation science” and anti-global warming crowd. He conflates environment with intellectual capacity for starters and worse, “employee behavior” as evidence of the raw intellectual inferiority of blacks. That doesn’t even qualify as junk science. It’s just the loony ranting of some old guy on his back porch.

You’re full of shit. You don’t know one end of a pipette from another. How dare you come on this blog and post a racist comment posing as a person educated in the biosciences, capable of making judgment about the intelligence of millions of people. You work in a 7-11 in Appalachia pumping gas, you son of a racist bitch. You’re telling use that sub-Saharan Africans’ brains have stop evolving? You are a big idiot! I say your brain is both morally and intellectually defective. Ignorant, unintelligent asshole that you are.

It’s called a “straw man.” I’ve definitely seen better from the right-wing doofuses that troll this site. For example:

“If so, and if the geographical dispersion is observed as these recent studies indicate, then Watson will have been far closer to the mark than admitted by the PC Nazis who non-chalantly dismissed him and called his claims “junk science.”

Now THAT is what I call trolling.

Mekel-Bobrov N, Gilbert SL, Evans PD, Vallender EJ, Anderson JR, Hudson RR, Tishkoff SA & Lahn BT. Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in Homo sapiens. Science, 309:1720 (2005).

Evans PD, Gilbert SL, Mekel-Bobrov N, Vallender EJ, Anderson JR, Tishkoff SA, Hudson RR & Lahn BT. Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans. Science, 309:1717 (2005).

Both discuss the recent discovery of two genetic evolutions that are believed to have contributed to the expansion of the human brain several thousand years ago. The authors examined geographical evidence of the responsible gene mutations. They were dominant in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but not in the geographically isolated region of sub-saharan Africa.

Obviously these are very new discoveries, but as research continues there’s a decent chance that the genetic sources of intelligence will be pinpointed. If so, and if the geographical dispersion is observed as these recent studies indicate, then Watson will have been far closer to the mark than admitted by the PC Nazis who non-chalantly dismissed him and called his claims “junk science.”

I’d also like to point out that just because this guy is racist, doesn’t mean his research is invalid. You ask, “Can it be reproduced independently?” not, “Was the research a prick?”