Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees and President Bruce Stillman, Ph.D. Regarding Dr. Watson’s Comments in The Sunday Times on October 14, 2007
Earlier this evening, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees decided to suspend the administrative responsibilities of Chancellor James D. Watson, Ph.D., pending further deliberation by the Board.
This action follows the Board’s public statement yesterday disagreeing with the comments attributed to Dr. Watson in the October 14, 2007 edition of The Sunday Times U.K.
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That's really sad. I think Western science and thought is entering a new dark age.
That's really sad. I think Western science and thought is entering a new dark age. - simon newman
No, Simon - worse: freedom and democracy are entering a dark age.
After all, how many people are in a position to stand against big government, big business, and big media all aligned? Day by day, more and more people rely on one of those to put food on the table.
If an ornery 79-year-old Nobel Prize winner can't stand against them, who can?
mark:
"No, Simon - worse: freedom and democracy are entering a dark age."
Yes, but I knew that already - I live in the UK where 10 years of totalitarian New Labour government has made that very clear. That the hard sciences are affected by an anti-Copernican revolution is another issue, though.
the natural course of events is for these persons who are devoid of ethnic identity and devoid of racial identity, or at least outwardly ashamed of racial reality [cold spring harbor laboratory board of trustees], to be swept aside by persons who know themselves, admire themselves, and are hardly ashamed of who they are.......and are not afraid of what the world is.
it is absurd to think that this group of persons [cold spring harbor laboratory board of trustees] can maintain a leadership role in any society. and so logically the universities fill up with minority and immigrant professors. notice that the newcomers don't have the same queasy feeling toward racial reality. they are ready to draw distinctions and blame a responsible party without hesitation.
de-ethnicitization and deracination are unnatural states. nature will fill the void: as the czarina once said "if my borders aren't expanding, then they are contracting".
look for this natural course of events to take place at a faster and faster pace.
Mark: If an ornery 79-year-old Nobel Prize winner can't stand against them, who can?
Well, that's just the thing. He is in a position to do just that. Last I looked James Watson wasn't some untenured assistant professor with small children to feed. Same with Summers. I'm sure he liked being president of Harvard and all, but it's not as if he were going to be sleeping on sidewalk grates if he'd told his critics to stuff it. "I'm not really a truth-dealing bad-ass, I just play one when there are no real threats to my perqs and prestige". Feh. (Though to be charitable to Watson he may just be so old and batty the right neuron doesn't know what the left neuron is up to.)
No, Simon - worse: freedom and democracy are entering a dark age.
Yeah, but people with real prestige and power who grovel at the first peep of displeasure aren't the heroes of the resistance.
The autocratic responses (suspension, book talks cancelled) show that Watson's detractors believe him to be correct. Also note that there's at least two versions of his apology, one dishonestly edited (by the NYT - no doubt it'll become the standard version) so that he appears to be retracting his statements about the science rather than apologizing to the people who were upset about their own emotional reactions.
I think part of the reason Science is so weak is that so many who practice it in the U.S. and Britain are foreign born. They weren't in a strong position as graduate students because their visas depended on keeping their sponsor happy. Now that some of them are professors, they've been conditioned into demurring to authority - to the detriment of science, which requires deep questioning for anything other than incremental work.
WHAT did I tell you?
PC can stand ONLY if it is rigidly enforced. And PC is a means of controlling thought by ordinary people by the elites.
There is more to come. Watson has to be punished with jail time or firing. Otherwise people will say what they think and we can't have that.
-- Evil Neocon.
Scientists don't behave like that: theocrats do. Science explores reality; theocracy imposes it. But this excellent comment at the Guardian cheered me up:
Steven Rose wrote:
For a clever man, James Watson is remarkably loose-tongued. He always was, and age does not wither him, nor custom stale his less than infinite variety. In the UK to publicise his new book, he has been in characteristic form. In the Sunday Times, it was that long-exploded racist claim that "Africans" are inherently less intelligent than "us".
HalOnsgard replied:
"Long-exploded" in your marxoid-Boasian dreams, Rose. You are a dinosaur from Stephen Jay Gould's corner of Jurassic Park.
The existence of average differences in IQ between mankind's major races which are substantial and predictable; the fact that IQ measures something real and important; the robustness of the methods used to assay these scores; their persistence, their incorrigibility by human post-natal interventions and social engineering; and their tremendous impact on the collective outcomes for these groups... all are so well established that it is hardly a matter of serious dispute among consenting psychometricians in private any more.
Now it's just a matter of breaking gently to ordinary people the news that the real deal is what their common sense told them all along. The bromides the PC experts kept stuffing down their throats from c. 1950 were nothing more. Race is back, and it's bigger than ever. Just rejoice at that news!
Most will shrug their shoulders and say "we knew all along-- like dog breeds, isn't it?" A few gormless liberals will have nerve storms: the Nazis are coming, we must go on lying!
But it's too late. Now medical genetics are further confirming racial variation in the genotypes of sub-species, including their brains, and enormous policy implications are opening up-- which researchers not hag-ridden by Rose's egalitarian mysticism will certainly not ignore, even if his kind keep the lid on honest debate for a few years longer in the West, censoring and sacking.
We will merely lag behind China, Japan, Russia and India: where science is unshackled by soppiness, and where the very idea of race as "only skin deep" or a "social construct", of IQ as "culturally biased" and all the other squid ink squirted by Steven, Jacqueline and their dwindling tribe of lefty Luddites is laughed to scorn every day.
Darwin wouldn't be surprised at the change in the wind that at last has arrived. He might, however, be horrified at how those who profess to teach in his name have suppressed the most important aspect of his theory, in the service of a Platonic falsehood.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/steven_rose/2007/10/the_wrong_diagnosis.html
Watson made one of the most important scientific discoveries in history. It's hard to know why he should give a damn about what anybody thinks of his remarks. I can't understand his apology, even if it was a qualified one.
I grew up in the USSR... Trust me - I've seen all this many times over. It's so sad the the story repeats itself in the "West". The only difference is the kind of taboo.
Same crap - people were losing jobs, risking their future merely for voicing their opinion on a non-PC subject. And, just like with Watson, there was never a shortage of cowards condemning their friends in the press and weak souls publicly apologizing for their thought crimes.
I believe Watson was physically threatened, or they are trying to convince him his legacy is threatened. The legacy thing, I'm sorry to say, is almost certain. The mystics would like nothing better than to put him and his name down the memory hole for all time, or reduce him to the smallest of footnotes.
There should be a protest, a major statement of scientists! Remember this one?
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