RECEIVING the Nobel prize does not necessarily stop great scientists making foolish statements. William Shockley won a Nobel for his work on transistors, but nevertheless managed to spend the latter years of his career making racist comments and even writing about the mental inferiority of black Africans.
Last week, James Watson, co-recipient of a Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, made blatantly racist comments regarding the supposed mental inferiority of black Africans. The response has been swift. His comments were widely condemned and he was suspended from his post at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Unlike Shockley, Watson later apologised for his remarks.
But what of the research in this area? Does the condemnation of Watson鈥檚 words stem from solid science or from political correctness?
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One of the key issues in this area is the nature of intelligence, a topic I have studied together with race, with psychologist Elena Grigorenko and geneticist Kenneth Kidd, both at Yale University. It is generally agreed by those who study intelligence that it comprises the set of abilities needed to learn effectively and to adapt to one鈥檚 environment. Yet the results of the rather narrowly crafted tests of vocabulary, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, spatial visualisation and the like that make up standard IQ tests are unlikely to reflect all the skills necessary for learning and environmental adaptation. Even the first scientists who attempted to devise intelligence tests recognised that they measure only a part of intelligence.
Intelligence theorists have different opinions on the range of skills that should be assessed. Most agree on the importance of analytical reasoning such as is measured by IQ tests, but other skills are also considered important. For example, the psychologist John Carroll at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, proposed that auditory and visual perception and processing speed may also be important. In my own theory, I emphasise the importance of creative and practical intelligence, and the psychologist Howard Gardner at Harvard University includes other types of intelligences, such as musical and interpersonal skills.
The tests as they stand show some differences between various groups of children. The size of the differences and what groups do best in the tests depend on what is tested. For example, with various collaborators I have found that analytical tests of the kind traditionally used to measure so-called general abilities tend to favour Americans of European and Asian origin, while tests of creative and practical thinking show quite different patterns. On a test of oral storytelling, for example, Native Americans outperform other groups.
A further hugely complicating factor is what we mean by the word 鈥渞ace鈥�. Populations in different parts of the world have clearly adapted to their environments in different ways. A trait that is beneficial in one environment may work against people in another. Obesity is a problem today because it once was beneficial to eat as much as one could while one could. Stratification 鈥� classifying people into categories of higher and lower status in a society 鈥� already occurs on the basis of weight just as it has on the basis of intelligence test scores.
But there is nothing special about skin colour that serves as a basis for differentiating humans into so-called races. Skin colour correlates only weakly with genetic differentiations. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland, and Kidd have found that the genetic differences among black Africans are often greater than those between blacks and whites. The significance of those labels stems only from the fact that society has found it convenient to label races on the basis of skin colour.
Curiously, we do not apply the concept of 鈥渞ace鈥� to colours of dogs or cats 鈥� or moths, for that matter. For some of these, colour can be important: being a black moth confers camouflage advantages in polluted environments and disadvantages in clean environments 鈥� and vice versa for white moths. Similarly, our ancestors in Africa were almost certainly dark-skinned because it provided better protection against the particular challenges of the environment, such as ultraviolet light. We could of course refer to moths as being of different 鈥渞aces鈥�. We do not, presumably because we are less interested in creating social classes for moths than for people.
The problems with our understanding of intelligence and race show that the criticism being levelled at Watson is based on science rather than political correctness. Intelligence is clearly a far more complicated issue than standard testing allows. And race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It derives from people鈥檚 desire to classify. Whether people with a genetic predisposition toward fatness will be classified as a separate race remains to be seen.
鈥淩ace derives from people鈥檚 desire to classify. The concept is socially constructed not biological鈥�
