I wrote about him several times (and he is positively cited in my book about real science); but especially a defence of him (just about the only defence in the official scientific literature of that time; for which he thanked me) when he was subjected to a lying and evil-motivated Woke/ PC media firestorm as an exemplary-punishment for speaking and writing unacceptable truths.
My colleague Ed Dutton recently published an extremely interesting book about Jim Watson, and was the first to announce his death.
I read Ed's Genius under House Arrest in draft and made a few suggestions. Unfortunately the hardback is too expensive for private buyers (paperback on its way); but this is its summary:
In 2007, the Watson Affair – the worldwide character assassination and exclusion from public life of Dr. James Watson, the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning scientist co-credited with the discovery of DNA – shocked the global public in an early episode of what would come to be called "cancel culture." Watson was as an early and very public victim of incipient wokeism: a warning to others who might be tempted to dissent from favored ideologies of expression and behavior. With the Watson Affair, Western society had changed to the point of inversion; from being broadly supportive of genius, and providing protected niches for those of great accomplishment, to exactly the opposite – a censorious surveillance culture where even minor missteps could result in personal and professional ruin. Genius Under House Arrest explores how this dramatic shift occurred and argues that not only was every "controversial" remark of Watson's empirically accurate, but that geniuses – with Watson as the example – are a package deal: extreme creative ability as a consequence of sometimes difficult personalities, with effects ranging across social, ideological, and professional life. As society has begun to realize, nothing less than the West's culture of merit and achievement is at stake.
Anyway... Watson was the last of the widely-recognized massive-impact great scientists whose achievement could stand alongside those of the past; and he has died.
So now there are none left; and the West publicly, gleefully, destroyed Watson's life and livelihood 18 years ago - and has been stamping on him ever since.
I agree with Ed Dutton that this coordinated action against Watson in 2007 was an inflexion point in our civilization.
It marks the time at which totalitarian evil became dominant, indeed officially unopposed; and from then self-hating self-destruction has been a multi-national strategy - supported by the Globalist Establishment - including the "scientific" establishment.
If real science had died-out by the 1990s, then The Watson Affair was its funeral.
But if you are interested in real science, and have not yet read Watson's marvellous 1968 book about co-discovering the structure of DNA - The Double Helix - then do yourself a favour. It's something I re-read every few years, and always with delight.
**
One of my favourite photos ever; Crick demonstrates the structure of DNA for the cameraman using an improvised slide-rule as pointer - Watson on the left looks-on in awe at the beauty of their discovery.
The moment was superbly re-created near the end of the first-rate movie Life Story - with Jeff Goldblum playing Watson, and Tim Piggott-Smith as Crick.
12 comments:
I know very little about the scientific world but I thought at the time when someone of the stature of James Watson was so shamefully treated for stating an obvious truth, and one that everybody knows is true, that science as the search for truth was dead.
@William - It's good that the real issue was clear to you - because it was not clear to the editors of the Nature journal. Quoting from my article of 2008:
Perhaps the most egregious example was the article by editorialists of the premier UK scientific journal Nature – that same journal where Crick and Watson published the original paper describing structure of DNA.
Instead of publishing a clear and uncompromising defence of the freedom of untrammelled discourse in pursuit of the scientific truth; in an editorial entitled ‘Watson’s folly’ Nature instead chose to support political correctness as being more important than science.
In the context of just 500 words, the anonymous Nature authors spent most of the space attacking Watson’s interpersonal style, with a veritable diatribe of outrage. The editorial included such comments as: ‘his notorious propensity for making outrageous statements’, ‘a track record of making distasteful remarks’, ‘on many previous occasions voiced unpalatable views tinged with racism and sexism’, ‘his views have finally been deemed beyond the pale’, ‘demonstrates a sheer unacceptable offensiveness’, ‘unpleasant […] utterances’, and ‘crass comments’.
In a brief respite from attacking Watson’s personality, the Nature editorialists make two factually incorrect statements. Firstly they wrongly state that ‘Watson has apologized and retracted’ his ‘outburst’. Secondly they state that Watson ‘acknowledged that there is no evidence for what he claimed about racial differences in intelligence’. This is doubly false in that Watson never made such retractions or acknowledgments, and for the very good reason that any such retraction or acknowledgement would be untrue...
There is a very large and robust literature documenting significant racial and ethnic differences in average IQ. But the Nature editorialists did not even attempt to argue the falsity of this large evidential database – instead, they simply denied its existence.
What the Nature editorialists advocate is described in the subtitle: ‘Debate about scientific issues needs to be forthright but not crass’. It is Watson’s ‘crassness’ that Nature seems to hate more than anything else.
This is later amplified in remarks about the investigation of racial differences which is described as a ‘sensitive task’; “‘race” is an emotive and unscientific word’ – according to Nature; and so is the investigation of the ‘equally sensitive genetics of ‘desirable’ traits’.
It is clear that Nature sees the crucial issue of the Watson Affair as one of crassness versus sensitivity. It is the ‘sensitive’ people (such as the Nature editorialists – i.e., the people who have ‘deemed’ Watson’s views ‘beyond the pale’) who stand as a bulwark against a ‘crass’ individual whose ‘outbursts’ are ‘lending succour and comfort to racists around the globe’, and whose behaviour will ‘undermine our very ability to debate such issues’.
In other words, Nature states that genetic differences can only be studied and discussed within a framework of political correctness as defined by the cultural mandarins of the US and UK, or else such matters had better not be studied or discussed at all.
If scientists are now being asked to choose between being sensitive or crass – between picking sides with either the anonymous editors of Nature or the ‘crass’ genius of James D. Watson – then it should be no contest: serious scientists must take the side of Watson.
My uncle was a professor of medicine at New College, Oxford. I remember having a conversation with him in 1997 about Charles Murray's book and he told me that he and his colleagues all knew that Murray was right but even then didn't dare say so publicly. But, at least, they wouldn't have said the opposite as the Nature writers did.
@William - Interesting. Academics/ scientists/ medics etc nowadays aren't interested in what is true; for them "truth" is whatever is professionally and socially most expedient.
Back in the late ‘60’s, we were assigned to read his “Molecular Biology of the Gene” in biochemistry class. That was the early stages of the great revolution in biology, which continues today, and it was a revelation.
It's the end of an era. The only arguable scientific geniuses left standing are Roger Penrose (b. 1931) and Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). The number of great scientists born after WWII remains zero, with no sign that that will change any time soon.
@Wm - Yes, they're great -- but from my POV one is a mathematician, and the other would not count as "a scientist" in the UK - although he worked in what the Germans (with their wider definition of "science") would call a "Wissenschaftlich" subject.
Somebody ought to write a book speculating about the disappearance of scientific genius.
I agree that Chomsky's subject isn't science in the narrow sense. Penrose, though, won a Nobel Prize in Physics.
@Wm - Fair enough!
@Wm (Although I would not take real notice of Nobel Prizes as a guide to anything much, over recent decades - they have been caught up in, and indeed led, the corruption and destruction of real science. But, by by understanding, RP certainly deserves the highest esteem markers of this era - and would (like Watson) be at least a junior peer among the geniuses of the elate 19th and early 20th centuries.
Three comments:
1. In the videos of have seen of him Roger Penrose is always talking about his thinking and the underlying ideas; he is using models to understand nature rather than just manipulating models.
2. That is an interesting comment about Watson and RP being "junior peers" compared to earlier scientists. I think that people often rated the most technically sophisticated and recent achievements highest because they have built on what is before. But that does not properly acknowledge that simple things can be harder to discover than sophisticated ones, if you are not looking properly. How many people would have invented the wheel if they had no concept of a wheel?
3. The disappearance of genius shows that the paradigm of consistent improvement in all fields is mistaken. And that paradigm (in its many variations) has both implicitly and explicitly guided people's thinking and life decisions for a long time now. And not just individuals, but policies for government and other institutions.
The fact is, improvement is never guaranteed (in any domain), it always depends on the specific circumstances.
@NLR - "simple things can be harder to discover than sophisticated ones"
Completely agree; indeed this almost must be the case. When the simple discoveries (like inventing the arch) have been made, then almost everybody can use them immediately - which means that they have been "staring people in the face" for centuries, but nobody could previously see it. It takes a rare genius to see what afterwards, and almost immediately, becomes "obvious".
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