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James Watson has died

nytimes.com

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Re: James Watson has died

#231

Post by ghtbircshotbe »

somenameforme wrote: post #218
morgengold wrote: post #201

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.

Re: James Watson has died

#232

Post by greazy »

aoasadflkjafl wrote: post #142
jaaustin wrote: post #102

I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement. [1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...

I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his r…

> Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine

Someone publicly known?

Re: James Watson has died

#233

Post by jadamson »

zimpenfish wrote: post #225
jadamson wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell us about how Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, how Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the moon landings, and then repeat this claim.

Sure and then you can tell me about Marion Donovan, Nettie Stevens, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Alice Ball, Margaret Knight, Elizabeth Magie, Margaret Keane, Candace Pert, and the hundreds of others. (Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)

Let's see...

Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.

I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.

Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.

Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.

I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.

Re: James Watson has died

#234

Post by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #231
somenameforme wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.

And an actual test for intelligence. Easy, right?

Re: James Watson has died

#235

Post by y0eswddl »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #216
nikanj wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results

>There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff" SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success: https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...

so is zip code...

Re: James Watson has died

#236

Post by 1000units »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #231
somenameforme wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.

[flagged]

Re: James Watson has died

#237

Post by regularization »

somenameforme wrote: post #218
morgengold wrote: post #201

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison).

It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.

Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.

Re: James Watson has died

#238

Post by nradov »

DonHopkins wrote: post #214
nradov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives? I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.

Then call out the ones you know for a fact are assholes and racists, and stop adding to the problem by whitewashing and excusing and carrying their water. I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-th…

Hold on there buddy, you totally missed the point. I also know lots of brilliant people in the Bay Area tech scene who are not assholes. This thread isn't about brilliant people, it's about those who are commonly considered "great". Like, let's say, Steve Jobs.

And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.

Re: James Watson has died

#239

Post by typicalset »

somenameforme wrote: post #218
morgengold wrote: post #201

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

An intervention on the household someone is raised in is not the same as an intervention on race. This is part of what it means when people say racism is a structural problem: people are, systematically, treated differently in many different parts of their lives. The USA is a country where, within living memory, the insurrection act was invoked to allow black children to attend a school which wanted to segregate them.

Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/ [2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.... [3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228

Re: James Watson has died

#240

Post by tptacek »

somenameforme wrote: post #218
morgengold wrote: post #201

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ens…

The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls.

The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."

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