Ryan ChartrandLet me introduce you to a controversy that you may not have heard of. On Oct. 14 of this year, eminent biologist Dr. James Watson, the co-founder of the DNA double helix, was quoted in The Sunday Times magazine discussing the effects of race and genetics on IQ. He said he was “inherently gloomy about the state of Africa” because recent testing has showed that people of African descent have consistently lower IQs than people of other races. Naturally, there was a liberal outcry, and Watson was forced to resign from his laboratory.
But does he have a point? And if he does, does it matter? According to a piece by William Saletan on Slate.com, the average IQ of African-Americans is 85, Hispanics 89, caucasians 103, East Asians 106 and Jews 113. This difference persists even when the scores are normalized for environmental factors such as education or economic status.
But this doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t mean we should just hand our government and businesses over to Jews, nor that we should shove all the African-Americans back into slavery. It doesn’t change the fact that Richard Dean Parson (African-American) was able to brilliantly turn around Time Warner, nor that William P. Perez (Hispanic) currently runs Nike, nor that Kenneth Lay (caucasian) ran Enron into the ground. These IQ scores are averages, and like any average, there are those who will excel above the averages, and those who will dive far below. I’m sure everyone can name a dumb Jew or Asian, and they can also name a smart African-American or Hispanic.
So why the outcry? Over the past few centuries, we’ve had multiple “scientific” disciplines that purport to support institutionalized racism. Phrenology, for example, claimed to be able to tell intelligence and even traits like “kindness” or “honesty” by measuring bumps on the head. The theory was that these bumps correlated to areas of the brain underneath that were associated with these traits. Naturally enough, the bumps were mapped on whites, and blacks and others without the same bumps were demonized by this pseudo-science. And I agree that it is important today to prevent a recurrence of this, and I think it would be ridiculous to use these new results to justify any form of racism.
But it is science. The proper reaction is not indignation or anger, but research. Yelling at scientists does not change science. Either these results will be disproven by new research, or we will have to learn to adapt to them. As I said, they change nothing except our perceptions.
A hundred years ago, at the Scopes trial, liberals supported John Scopes and his insistence on teaching evolution. Will they still support science today, even if it disagrees with them? Or was their previous support simply a matter of convenience?
Troy Kuersten is an aerospace engineering/physics senior and a guest columnist for the Mustang Daily.