James Watson's comments re: race and intelligence

[woot]

Originally Posted by UtahDan

Imagine that it really is true that Africa descent correlates to lower IQ. I have no reason to believe that, but assume for a moment that this is the case. Does any one really want to know that? I have a feeling that many are so ideologically committed to the idea that every is basically the same that no evidence would convince them the contrary is true.

I also think it is appropriate to ask what possible value that information could have. I can't think of any off hand.

My interest would be the implications it would have as far as the selective pressures operating on different groups of people over the last hundred thousand years or so. It should be noted that the term "race" is probably somewhat of a misnomer, due to the very close relationship between all Homo sapiens, and that any difference in intellect is unlikely to be large.

Also, even if they somehow figure out that the average black IQ is a couple points lower, there will still be a ton of black people that are smarter than the average white person, so it still wouldn't justify racism of any kind. I'm frankly more interested to know if there are significant differences in specific areas, such as spacial reasoning ability, sense of direction, communicative ability, etc., as it seems that absolute intellect would be more difficult to correlate with selective pressures.

I do agree that outside of academic interests, the average yokel learning this sort of information is probably not a good thing.