James Watson Does It Again

James Watson was one of the people (I was about to say two people, but it was at least four and really more than that) who figured out the structure of DNA. He did this as a brash young scientist, and doing Nobel-Prize-winning work when you're barely out of high school transformed him into a brash old scientist. Personally, I think his colleague, Francis Crick, handled the transition with a bit more grace, but it is both a blessing and a curse to be a famous scientist. Watson always has seemed to enjoy it, and he's always been ready with a quick, sharp quote.

Recently, Watson's been in the news more for his talk than his walk. For instance, fellow scientists chose to sequence his entire genome to demonstrate new DNA sequencing technology. That's very cool, but he didn't do much beyond the donation process. Yet he got in the news for it. Watson's never shied away from the spotlight. But today's headlines tell a story of how he went too far, gave quotes that were too quick, and too sharp, and hurt a lot of people for no reason at all.

I won't repeat them here, but the executive summary is that Watson's 1.) worried that Africa will never catch up because blacks have less inherent intelligence; 2.) says that anyone who's ever worked with a black knows they're less intelligent on the whole; 3.) implies through all this that intelligence is genetically based and that the intelligent have more value than the unintelligent.

Where do you start to respond to that? Again, I will let the others more qualified than myself deal with the scientific refutation of these arguments, while commenting on the irony that in holding himself out to be an authority on intelligence, Watson has shown very little of that same quality in his comments. Just like with the baseball pitcher John Rocker a whle ago, a love for the spotlight kept Watson thinking that the more outrageous the comments, the wider the coverage. Like Rocker, he stepped way over the line and is feeling the repercussions (he has been suspended from his leadership role at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for one).

What I think about when I hear such easily refutable and reductionistic comments is, where does this stuff come from? We seem to have created a class of scientific provocateurs who are happy to hurt entire classes of people for a quote. You start off making straw men of theists, you end up making straw men of African-Americans. I have always wondered about the neo-atheist writers, what they do with the Christian nature of African-American (and continental African) communities. Their arguments that Christians are dumb feed right into this racism, because many Christians are poor, and many Christians are black or Latino or "other." The general intellectual strategy that Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris/etc. follow is to make caricatures of Christians. This same "oh, look, how outrageous!" strategy led to Watson's comments.

Francis Collins, evangelical Christian scientist (look, I just typed those three words together!!), is a friend of Watson's and was quoted in the article I read, with him stating how Watson's comments were "hurtful" to a large group of people. At first I thought that was just too simple, but stepping back I think that's the best word to use to characterize Watson's speech and to point out a huge rhetorical flaw in the entire public face of science. It's hurtful.

Let's set some Robert Fulghrum-style ground rules here. It's not OK to hurt other people. It's not OK to suggest genetic superiority of the people who are like you. It worries me that these naturalists can't seem to stay away from an implicit social Darwinism. But then again, when you worship the intellect, you denigrate the other aspects of life, and you lose the complexity of what humans really are.

I don't know what really motivates Watson, what was a slip of the tongue and what was a deliberately outrageous comment. I do know that in the intense pressure cooker of academic science, reviewers are encouraged to be hurtful with reason, and that has a place. But it doesn't have a place outside the system of peer review, and it doesn't have a place when dealing with real people. I constantly worry about idolatry with scientists, idolatry of reason and the intellect. I don't know exactly how that applies here, but I take it as cautionary, because saying something that's not just wrong, but hurtful and wrong, is not the way to win any arguments.