James Watson jumps the shark.
The well-known biologist James Watson, who performed valuable services to the scientific community, jumped the shark with his recent racist remarks claiming that the reason we were not making progress in Africa was because we were proceeding on the faulty assumption that they were equals with us. But it turns out that this notion, debunked as early as the 1920's, has been debunked again just recently:
Fryer and Leavitt responded to Watson's scientifically-unfounded claims by pointing to Department of Education research that includes test data of the mental abilities of one-year-olds.
"While you might think it would be impossible to capture anything meaningful at such a young age," Leavitt writes, "it turns out that these measures of one-year-olds' intelligence are somewhat highly correlated with IQ scores at later ages, as well as with parental IQ scores."
They found "no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life ... The observed patterns are broadly consistent with large racial differences in environmental factors that grow in importance as children age."
Not only has this been debunked, there are a lot of other issues at stake here. The first is that Watson is guilty of completely unprofessional conduct. Just like you are a basketball player 24/7, you are a member of your profession 24/7 as well. The fact of the matter is that people will take what you say as gospel truth even though this is not your area of expertise just because you happen to have a PhD by your name.
And this shows a complete lack of awareness of the realities of human suffering as well as the scourge of colonialism that Africa is still reeling from the effects of. In other words, what Europe did was create what amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if you tell a kid that they are a piece of shit enough times, they will internalize it and believe it.
Obamathon
