The Pseudoscience of Tomorrow is Here Yesterday

If you wanted you could use "watson" as a biology-themed Cockney rhyming slang term for "prick", via "Watson and Crick". Or you could just declare them synonymous based on a fresh but apparently not unprecedented batch of racist sentiments from James Watson, as noted in William Saletan's science-n-tech blog in Slate. From the post and the Times Online article it draws on, his claims seem like a combo of bald racism (search the text for "black employees") and stale, fakey-fake, science-flavored, Bell Curve bullshit.

I think "out of his depth scientifically" about sums it up. From my seat in the laypersons' section I see two major holes in his reasoning:

1. Racially different populations did not evolve independently on an actual evolutionary scale. Cultures have but cultures move faster. I believe the most accepted theory still holds that anatomically modern humans -- and that anatomy includes our big sexy brains -- evolved in Africa and migrated outward much more recently. Even if they didn't I doubt the population distributions of pre-modern humans probably would correspond to the locations where different cultures as we know them took root.

2. Racial identity is not a particularly accurate indicator of genealogy. Rampant interbreeding between populations these days! White folks are not the exception!

It's tempting to apply the same standard to Watson as you might to an embarrassing elderly great-uncle at a friend's wedding -- "That's inappropriate, but he's old and unreformable, and he'll be probably be gone soon, bless his heart" -- but it's deeply obnoxious to hear those sorts of discredited proclamations emanating from a scientist when many people don't understand that any idea expressed by a scientist isn't by definition science, let alone that a specialist who made his reputation identifying the existence and molecular structure of DNA isn't necessarily an expert on the population-level dynamics of evolution.

I don't consistently read Saletan's sci/tech coverage in Slate because his glib capsule commentaries usually rankle me somehow -- the point that the top of his head comes to isn't as sharp as he seems to think it is -- and with his "never be afraid to consider testable claims" I think he fully misses the point. The problem is Watson is misrepresenting the views he supports as an established theory within the scientific community. As with analogous arguments against Darwinian natural selection and global climate change, these Bell Curve-type arguments are endlessly re-advanced regardless of how often they are deflated and shown to be marginal within the scientific community. The "debate" is political, not scientific, and the intention isn't to advance good science, it's to stick a foot in the door and create the impression of a wide open question. Meanwhile the zombie claims about generalized intelligence and test scores and such are nicely rebutted by (to pick a prominent example I'm familiar with) Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which has been around for something like 25 years now.