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James Watson has died

nytimes.com

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Re: James Watson has died

#71

Post by LarsDu88 »

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.

The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.

Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?

Re: James Watson has died

#72

Post by Dig1t »

metalliqaz wrote: post #19
timonoko wrote: post #13

[flagged]

What is this abomination? "Fact-checked by Grok" So... it's a rip-off of Wikipedia edited by an LLM that was specifically designed for misinformation by the world's richest troll? Do I have that right? Cancer.

Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?

It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.

Re: James Watson has died

#73

Post by cogman10 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #57
cogman10 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has" AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.

Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.

> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.

> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.

Re: James Watson has died

#74

Post by cogman10 »

catigula wrote: post #66
cogman10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity. > The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody belie…

> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics Strawman argument. I never said that. >This is widely disputed. No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.

> No, it isn’t.

Yes it is. See the linked wikipedia article to see a bunch of references to the dispute.

Re: James Watson has died

#75

Post by LarsDu88 »

gaogao wrote: post #70
saghm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your definition of "nice" is, but mine doesn't include saying most of what's here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race

> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "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". > While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black e…

In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"

This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.

Re: James Watson has died

#76

Post by droptablemain »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #55
flkiwi wrote: post #38

[flagged]

> Wow, good genes! Said with irony? I mean, the guy was into eugenics—thought some races are smarter than others.

And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?

Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.

Re: James Watson has died

#78

Post by LarsDu88 »

flkiwi wrote: post #38

[flagged]

Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.

Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.

Re: James Watson has died

#79

Post by culi »

echelon wrote: post #10
dsr_ wrote: post #5

[flagged]

That's reframing things too much. There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model. Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong. Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also…

This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work

Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures

Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.

Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.

Re: James Watson has died

#80

Post by lordnacho »

gaogao wrote: post #70
saghm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your definition of "nice" is, but mine doesn't include saying most of what's here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race

> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "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". > While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black e…

I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.

Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.

The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.

How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.

I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.

The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.

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