Thursday, October 18, 2007

More on Watson









































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Posted by SM Schwartz at 9:51 PM
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the thoughtful essay on JDW's statements. The single departure I have with your analysis is what to make of JDW's racist statement:

"He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal,” but added: “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

This lamentable quote skewers JDW for how he thinks, or doesn’t think, when venturing beyond the laboratory he hasn't seriously occupied for many years. His biased utterance really competes quite well with just about every other anti-_____ statement recorded since the printing press was invented.

Perhaps you did the right thing though in just letting the quotation speak for itself.

Amazingly, JDW’s statement mirrors a major public misconception of how genetics works, namely that skin color and other easily recognizable external-trait genes are not necessarily closely linked to any of the
thousands of kinase, phosphatase, transcription factor, and other genes that affect neuronal development and function. And, that over the
many eons of human evolution, migration, and hybridization, the variant forms of all these genes are inherited quite independently -- albeit
still being subject to evolutionary selection.

This leads to the delightful mixture of human traits and societal behaviors that still exist on mother earth, until someone expressing
JDW's "those dumb ______'s" sentiments is used to convince groups of self-serving goons to exterminate or marginalize however many millions
of those ‘second class folks’ they can get away with.

It is sad that due to JDW’s Nobel fame his thoughtless statements degrade both ethnic groups and the value of scientific investigations into areas as complex as human neuronal function.

Steve Hauschka

10:28 AM
SM Schwartz said...

I fear that the sword can cut two ways. I have listened to many liberals saying there is "no such thing" as race. That is as absurd as claiming there are no dog breeds or that wolves and hounds are noet different.

Rather, we should educate folks on the wonderful story of the human genome. The question of how the human phenotypes arose on a continental basis is extremely interesting.

OTOH, scientific bodies actually require that we categorize Americans as black vs. white. Using that social dichotomy to make biological conclusions is both racist and scientifically absurd. I have actually wondered if one way to disprove certain studies is if they claim to be able to use "race" as a biological variable.

A similar weird issue is the assertion that there is genetic isolation in Africa. At least be language group and by physical appearance the typical Ethiopian is very similar to the typical Yemeni. Yet I once heard a famous American scholar, an African American, get angry with an Ethiopian because the African blood relationship with the scholar.

In a spirit of of abandoning convention, I have suggested we replace the term "race" with "breed." The interesting thing is then we could ask whether the breeds of man arose by intelligent design as did the breeds of dog.

3:06 PM

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