What is the row about?
James Watson, the molecular biologist who collaborated with Francis Crick in
working out the structure of DNA in 1953, made some incautious remarks about
race and intelligence in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine.
He said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all
our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the
same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said he hoped
that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with
black employees find this not true”.
What does the evidence actually show?
Dr Watson, who is 79, was probably basing the first part of his remarks on
research that is most clearly summarised in The Bell Curve, a 1994
bestseller by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. This was a
neoconservative take on data collected over many years by psychologists
measuring IQ. It claimed that the evidence showed a consistent gap of about
15 IQ points between whites and blacks, that IQ tests measure something real
that determines success in education and in life, that this factor is
strongly inherited and that it is unaffected by education.
If all these claims are true, then social mobility that rewards the highly
intelligent means there will be a growing gap between a cognitive elite –
mostly white – and a cognitive underclass – mostly black.
Were these ideas new?
No. Francis Galton, the intellectual founder of eugenics, declared in the 19th
century that ability owed more to nature than to nurture, and that there was
a huge gap in abilities between the brightest and the stupidest. The more
mobile a society became, he predicted, the more an aristocracy of birth
would be replaced by an aristocracy of talent.
Isn’t that a good thing? Surely we are all in favour of merit being
rewarded?
Yes, we are. But we also hold fast to the belief that all men are created
equal. The idea of a permanent, ineradicable distinction based on colour is
repugnant. So the claims made in The Bell Curve made most people uneasy,
and some furious. Few books have been so roundly denounced, or made their
authors subject to such relentless attack.
If they are right, what are the implications?
If all the claims they made were true, then attempts to provide equal
opportunities are doomed to fail, and educational “catchup” schemes for
black or minority ethnic children will not work either.
But does everybody accept this?
By no means. Disregarding the ad hominem attacks made on the authors, a
formidable range of arguments has been deployed to discredit their thesis.
Each element of the argument has been disputed.
For example?
Critics do not accept that IQ measurements are culture-neutral. They believe
that they favour those from a conventional white middle-class background,
and that the differences found exaggerate any that really exist.
What Herrnstein and Murray were actually measuring was a combination of
intelligence plus education – which they partly conceded by acknowledging
that scores rose with an individual’s education level. They also exaggerated
the heritability of IQ. They reckoned that between 40 and 80 per cent of an
individual’s IQ came from the genes. A more accurate figure might be 35-45
per cent, critics say.
What about the effect of the environment?
Some of the most powerful evidence against their arguments come from newer
studies of the links between nature and nurture. Herrnstein and Murray
treated the two as if neither could influence the other. But more recent
work has shown that nature and nurture are intertwined, so that the effect
of any gene can be understood only by reference to the environment in which
it is expressed.
The neatest example of this is a study of identical twins by Eric Turkheimer
of the University of Virginia. Previous studies of identical twins have
tended to show they have very similar IQ levels, reinforcing the idea that
IQ is strongly heritable. But most twins share the same environment, and
most studies have been on middle-class twins. Professor Turkheimer searched
for identical twins among poor families and found their IQs varied quite a
lot. A French study found that when identical twins were separated for
adoption, those adopted by poor families had IQs fully ten points lower than
those adopted by well-off familes.
How does this affect the argument?
It means that IQ is malleable. And that in turn means that gaps between races
– if one accepts that they exist – could be narrowed. We are not the
prisoners of our genes to the extent that The Bell Curve pretends.
Is that it?
Not quite. Critics have also questioned the strong link claimed between IQ and
success in life. If IQ is partially a measure of education as well as
intrinsic ability, then it is hardly surprising that better educated and
more successful people have higher IQs. It is not a case of IQ determining
success in life, but rather the opposite.
Who won the argument?
Neither side can claim a knock-out. The situation is more of a stand-off. Both
sides have made their case, at length, and then retired exhausted.
Psychologists really do not want to engage in the argument any more, because
it cuts so deep into the social psyche. Those who do tend to find that they
lose their jobs.
This is supposed to be a world in which anything can be discussed, but there
are still some forbidden areas.
So those who get involved tend to be outsiders: the inventor of the
transistor, William Shockley, went to his grave protesting the intellectual
superiority of the white races to a steadily diminishing audence.
James Watson risks the same obloquy.
The Bell Curve aside, is there any reason to disbelieve that racial groups
differ in particular ways?
There is not. In his new book, Avoid Boring People, James Watson puts it
this way: “A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the
intellectual abilities of people geographically separated during their
evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve
equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of mankind will not be
enough to make it so.”
He might as well have referred to athletic abilities, since recent Olympics
have shown time and time again the remarkable talents of East Africans at
middle-distance running, while sprints are dominated by men and women whose
heritage is in West Africa, by way of the slave trade to the US and the
Caribbean.
It is hard to believe that there are not some genetic differences, honed by
natural selection, that play some part in this.
However, these differences are a pretty small part of our genome. While human
beings may look different, they are close to identical under the skin.
Should Dr Watson have been silenced by the Science Museum?
No. The museum constantly claims that it wants to be seen as a happening place
where new ideas are presented. It was a feeble response, the more so as he
quickly distanced himself from his own remarks. There is no reason to label
James Watson a racialist – he is more a clumsy controversialist. Such people
are better challenged than silenced.
