4 November 2007
editorial
Nairobi — James Watson is an eminent Biologist. In 1962, he and Francis Click shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine, for their work in the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. For 40 years he has been the Chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, Long Island, New York, and he is recognised as the father of the Human Genome Project.
In an interview with the Sunday Times recently, Dr Watson confessed to being "inherently gloomy about the prospects 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."
He said: "While there is a natural desire to believe all people are equal, people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."
It is an argument that he develops in his new book where he says: "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."
In other words, Africans are, by virtue of their genes, stupid.
Dr Watson has been widely condemned for these comments. His tour of Britain was cancelled and he has been removed from his job.
But there have been a few voices of support, such as from Pat Buchanan, commentator and former US presidential candidate, in an online comment.
Dr Watson is apparently an outspoken person and has been politically-incorrect most of his life. That he has been disgraced and destroyed for expressing his honest views is probably wrong, the right to express oneself freely should be protected whether one's views are popular or unpopular.
The best remedy for scientific racism and deterministic racist approaches is scientific and rational rebuttal. Dr Watson was expressing, unfortunately, a widely held view not just among the general public, but among Western scholars too.
Richard Lynn, a Cambridge-educated professor of psychology, is well-known about his views on race and intelligence. He has classified sub-Saharan Africans as basically a mentally-retarded race, with an average IQ of 67. A score of 70 or less is taken as a sign of serious deficiency. He attributes the differences to dietary conditions.
Pseudo-sciences have a long tradition of being trotted out to provide justification for evil. Slavery, colonialism and imperialism have at one time or another been made palatable by the explanation that Africans are really not human.
Inequalities in the world today can similarly be justified, as Prof Lynn has tried to do in his Intelligence and Wealth of Nations, in which he argues that a nation's average IQ has a relationship to its GDP, by explaining that societies are poor because their members are daft.
Racist regimes have justified deprivation of black people by arguing that they do not need a good education because they don't have the brains for it.
100,000 years ago, all human beings were African. That period, in evolutionary terms, is a very short time.
It is highly unlikely that races have evolved differences in intelligence over that period.
The IQ test, many scientists agree, is not always an infallible measure of intelligence. In any case, across a population, the average IQ score is not fixed, it has been shown to change with time. Additionally, some scientists regard intelligence as too complex a phenomenon to be captured in one test and a score might be influenced by cultural and other factors.
Many flawed pseudo-scientific works and studies abound; they are not scientific truth but expressions of personal preferences, prejudices and cultural predispositions.
The fact of the matter is this. It does not matter who is doing the testing or who is presenting a racist perspective: Africans are neither retarded nor intellectually deficient.
It is to be hoped that out of this debate Africans will begin to appreciate their standing with the rest of the world and forget their uncritical acceptable of Western thought and actions. It is not always safe, nor is it always beneficial, to treat other people like benign Father Christmases.
It is also to be hoped that Africans will feel challenged to work harder and smarter, to build more organised and efficient societies if, for no other reason, then to prove to the scientific racists of this world that they are, in fact, not inferior at all.
Finally, and most important, even as Africans defend their right to be identified as human, rather than retarded beings, they must not become so defensive as to lose sight of their own glaring errors and short-comings.
Societies - and nations - evolve. In the process of that evolution, mistakes are made. There is corruption, dictatorship and other ills. Societies do not prosper by denying these mistakes, but by acknowledging, confronting and correcting them.
As for Dr Watson and his band of merry men, they can take their bogus studies and throw them into the sea.
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