It's always worth reading people's posted links.
Eots posted the following:
Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.[1] Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier and more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering. More controversially, some, such as the Nazi regime in Germany, used eugenics as a pretext for racial discrimination.
The promotion of the American Eugenics movement by prominent ...Interviewee: James Watson DNAi Location: Chronicle>Threat of the unfit>epilogue Progressive eugenics Many Americans accepted eugenics social policy as a ...
http://www.dnai.org/text/502_the_pro...s_james_watson...
Now, a quick reading of this post would make it seem that Watson is one of the "prominent" people promoting the American Eugenics movement. But click on the link: all you get is a short video clip of Watson
describing the attitude of prominent Americans at the beginning of the 20th Century towards people they thought of a genetically unfit.
Suppose
Eots is quoted as saying: "The Nazis believed Jews to be evil and wanted to eliminate them."
Then suppose I accuse
Eots of being a Nazi, and give a link to a page entitled "Nazi beliefs about Jews", featuring an interview with
Eots.
What would you think of that method of arguing?
Now, I am morally certain that James Watson believes, whatever his recent hasty repentance of his thoughtcrime, that the genes for intelligence are differentially distributed among the different human geographical population groups.
That is to say, I think he really believes that it is probably that a certain ethnic group is genetically, inherently superior to another in intelligence.
So, does this make it fair to award him the blanket title of "racist" with all the connotations that come with it?
Let me ask
Eots, and others who agree with him: if a scientist says that he believes that it is probable that one ethnic group is superior to another in intelligence, due to its genes, should he be shunned?
Suppose he writes that
... Europeans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.
Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in Europe than in more densely populated,... societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
Should James Watson be labelled a "racist" and anathematized for writing this?
Shouldn't we rather calmly consider it as a hypothesis, and go about testing it?
