> She supposedly sat on the image for months without realizing its significance, only for Watson to understand it at a glance. That's not the lore as I learned it. The lore is that Franklin sat on the data for months before analyzing it (she wanted to collect more data). Then W+C visited her lab and saw the data, but did not instantly understand it. Instead, the lore is that they figured out the structure of the DNA…
You likely know a lot more than I do about this story, but I will note this piece also says:
Franklin had put the photograph aside to concentrate on the A form. She was preparing to transfer to Birkbeck College, also in London, and had been instructed to leave her DNA work behind.
> erasure of women Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit had the work been from a man? And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
> Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit had the work been from a man? The what-ifs of one specific notable instance doesn't really matter. This is merely being used for illustrative purposes. It is also the case that it is not just women who are denied credit, but until relatively recently it was common practice to not even think to give equal credit to women. > And a…
> No. Franklin generated the key bit of information
Power in the sense he got completely cancelled in the west for saying things that are not considered taboo in other parts of the world.
I think most people consider "truth" to require a higher threshold than "some people believe it somewhere".
The problem is that all our empirical data back up his (quite mild) point of view, whether we like it or not. I don't like it and don't think he does either.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc/10.1.1.372.6092 Meta-analysis of the results of over six million participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude that found a difference in average scores between Black and White individuals of 1.1 standard deviations. And if you are curious about the relationship between IQ and genetics this Wikipedia page has a ton of cited research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritabili…
South Korean IQs went up by an entire standard deviation for people born between 1970 and 1990. Japanese IQs went up by more than a standard deviation between 1940 and 1965. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918... If you truly believe your extraordinary claims, you must believe these countries performed large scale human genetic engineering during these periods in a conspiracy hidden from the…
South Korea and Japan had severely malnourished populations -- which was also reflected in their heights.
Are you claiming that African-Americans are similarly malnourished? Would they become giants if, somehow, they could be properly fed?
Did reality also hand these "truths" to him? Or are they, too, "just opinions"? > 2000: During a guest lecture at the University of California Berkeley, Watson shared his belief that thin people are unhappier than larger people, and therefore harder-working. He also said: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. > In t…
I think the real issue is that her boss shared her data with W&C without her permission.
That's not true. Wilkins had as much right to share that data as Franklin, and everyone seems to forget Raymond Gosling who actually generated the data.
Sure, but I guess there should have been unanimous consent.
Claiming that the skills tested by IQ tests are in part heritable—like height, strength, weight, eye color and every other physical characteristic—is not an extraordinary claim. Indeed, the opposite claim would be more extraordinary. Why should this be the exception to the rule? It would be far more beneficial to equity to push back on the purported implications of this fact than to try to fight a losing battle again…
>The value we place on the skills that IQ tests measure It's not even that. Imagine there is an isolated population on a remote island that is legitimately very low on general intelligence, "nobody can ever learn to count past ten" kinda low, yet undeniably human. What would be a reasonable policy toward such people?
To apologise for such a unidimensional interpretation of intelligence? Maybe they harness their intelligence to survival in their environment. What would the measure of such an intelligence be? What if you've never been posed a logical puzzle before, or even had a written language, just oral tradition. Are we saying that the western definition of intelligence discounts all other forms of mentation and application of that mentation to significant survival advantage? Perhaps these people score low on "curiosity" rather than intelligence per se? How do we even define intelligence in these discussions? Is Elon Musk intelligent? By some measures, clearly yes. By others, clearly not. What is the point of these discussions of not to partition the room? Personally, I'd like to see a broad-spectrum array of measures relating to different modes of mentation. Then we may be able to get somewhere. Until then, whenever I see a discussion mentioning "whites", "blacks", "Asians", "Africans" as if these are a homogenous mass (which is utterly ludicrous), then I'll continue to suspect ulterior motives.
Franklin... died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at just 37 This is news to me. I've heard before that supposedly her work was "stolen" by men in the field. I have always thought it more likely that she thought she needed more evidence or something like that. Women seem to have trouble getting good mentors and, like Vinny in My Cousin Vinny , may be weak when it comes to procedure -- aka the culture of the appropriate way…
Was she excluded from that world of informal exchanges due to pride, personality, or sexism? I can guess myself. That blurb doesn't necessarily mean that she was bad at networking.
This article explains that Watson and Crick used Franklins work and that Franklin knew about it- really science as it is supposed to work. There was no eureka moment from stealing data but instead Watson and Crick spent months modeling the structure based on knowledge from the report of Franklins group that already stated it could potentially be a helix. The article concludes:
> Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix22,23. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.