"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”."
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Atheists from the United StatesBiologists from the United StatesZoologists from the United StatesNobel laureates in Physiology or MedicineGeneticists
Original Language: English
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Sources
C. Hunt-Grubbe, in a summary of his statements which caused wide criticism of Watson, in "The elementary DNA of dear Dr. Watson", in Times Online (14 October 2007)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_D._Watson
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James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson (April 6, 1928 – November 6, 2025) was an American scientist, most known as one of the four discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule.
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