The Undoing of James Watson

It is difficult to say what James Watson, the co-discoverer along with Francis Crick (and some would say, Bonnie Franklin) of the structure of DNA, was thinking when he recently remarked that he felt that people of African descent were less intelligent than the rest of humanity. This resulted in the cancellation of a book tour and then his retirement, at age 79, from the Cold Harbor laboratory he had been associated with since the 1960s. A similar reception greeted the authors of a book called "The Bell Curve", which similarly made an argument for racially-based differences in intelligence.

Such assertions, whether or not they have any merit whatsoever, are absolutely irresponsible in the way that lighting a match in a theater filled with people and gasoline fumes is irresponsible: There is no way that the outcome can be beneficial to anyone, which, as is true in a few cases such as this, moots the truth or falseness of the assertion. As real human beings are put at risk when such statements are made, their welfare trumps whatever brownie points are piled up somewhere by "furthering human knowledge", if this is what is purported to be the point of morally questionable science.

That said, it still is worth considering the issue as a metaphysical question: Not to assert something about the intelligence of different groups of people, but to consider what moral or practical imperatives MIGHT pertain IF such a determination were made sometime in the unspecified future. In fact, findings of differences in intelligence could as well have nothing to do with "race" or place of origin, but might be tied to medical conditions or specific genetic differences (such as Downes). In short: What then?

The larger issue here is whether "science" is competent to or should be allowed to make life-altering pronouncements based on presumably "objective" criteria that is asserted to have some role in predicting, say, whether some people are more likely to graduate from hight school or college than other people.

Whether or not you support such efforts to predict human outcomes, scientific or otherwise, such "objectification" of the decisions of admission officers at schools or recruiters for corporations or the military has been of course a fact of life for practically a century in the US and most likely many other countries as well.

A crucial part of this process of sorting wheat from chaff has been the widespread acceptance of the concept of intelligence as an objective (i.e. measurable) trait that has broad predictive value. Now, this may resonate with commonly-accepted notions of being "bright" or "dull", but the full-fledged operational definition of an IQ or "Intelligence Quotient" hardly came about by accident. No, it was developed as a concept by the military and large corporations as a way for justifying selectively investing resources (e.g. training dollars) in some people and not others. No mind that the concept might itself be flawed, as forcefully asserted by Stephen Jay Gould in his well-known book on the matter, "The Mis-measure of Man"; the truth of such objections mattered little compared to the utility of being able to (arbitrarily) assert, beforehand, that some people were more likely to succeed than others, so OF COURSE it made economic and moral sense to give those lucky people the means to succeed while turning away the losers.

So, anybody who makes assertions about "intelligence" as if it were an objective trait of humans, a number that can be easily obtained by administering one or another series of questions, has, at the very least, bought into a very dubious set of ideas with very large moral and practical consequences, and so is quite likely to suffer from many other illusions as well. The undeniable fact that people who support the idea of "intelligence" and IQ testing have, at some point in their careers, doubtless benefited from IQ tests (because, after all, they went to exclusive colleges, which have given them the platform from which to make such pronouncements "with authority") should tell you something about the circular nature of the intelligence game.

Far better, from both a moral and practical point of view, is to stop viewing opportunities as scarce resources that should be handed out parsimoniously but rather lavish opportunities over the whole spectrum of the population, giving all the chance to make the most of education and career opportunities. Not only does this approach square with our true knowledge of future performance, it is the only way to prevent being blind-sided by bias and bad judgment and wasting a large proportion of the promise inherent in any population.