I think Mr. Watson must be suffering from early stage of Alzheimer's disease or being plainly racist. Contemporary scientific facts maintain that the entire human race living today, all originates from the same ancestors--Humo sapiens-- and we all have the same DNA structure. He is dead wrong to suggest that his race is more intelligent than my race. Period.
On the other hand, isn’t time for Africa to wake up from a long and deep slumber? We have been down for far too long. It is time to rise up and take charge of our destiny. We must not only condemn Mr. Watson misguided day-dreaming, I think, we must also demonstrate through actual results that we are intelligent and equal to everyone else.
Africa is the poorest and most underdeveloped among all the continents in the world. Africa is filled with hunger, disease, malnutrition, ignorance, and many other forms of degrading living condition. War, injustice, dictatorship, disregard for human dignity and human rights, rule our town and countries with impunity. We own it to ourselves to do something about these problems.
Of course, colonialism and neocolonialism play a significant role in causing Africa’s many problems. But we have been in charge for several decades now without doing much to redress the problems. Despite being endowed with the greatest share of the world’s natural resources, we have failed to translate that competitive advantage into prosperity for Africa. I think we must blame our own action or inaction.
If we fail to take charge of our destiny, many more westerners would refer to us as unintelligent and backward. Just imagine while the Europeans have completed integrating their economies and are on the verge of creating a political union like the United States, Africans are butchering one another.
M L Touray
Haruna Darbo <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Jabou,
You have distilled what I attempted to share variously. I am pleased you
recognize the underlying difficulty in proving James and his cousins wrong.
Thanx again for sharing.
Haroun Al Khairawan. Not only aiming to be like westerners. We must not aim
to be like easterners, southerners, or northerners. Like you have declared, we
must be ourselves and learn from the mistakes of others. Al Mu'Umin. Darbo.
MQDT.
In a message dated 10/18/2007 6:56:26 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
-----Original Message-----
Check
this out!
I
think that Dr Watson's linguistic basis for his conclusions that Africans are
less intelligent than Europeans is too simplistic and, of course racist. The
fact that African are not naturally inferior intellectually has been proven
by
the large number of students from Africa who came from non-literate families
and yet earned first class degrees from major Western universities, where the
great-grandchildren of European literates had failed to make a better
performance.
These
African success stories are categorical denials of the racial inferiority
usually associated with Africa's children.
C.
Thank God we are not as "intelligent" as
"Westerners?" (Whoever that is). I must admit that many are
a bunch of smart "assholes". Anyway, until we start being
ourselves and stop trying to be them, his point may have some validity.
That is, we will never be as "white" as them (I hope).
SST
By Cahal Milmo
Published: 17 October 2007
One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in
an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less
intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of
reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.
James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who
now runs one of America's
leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for
comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain
today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science
Museum in London.
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and
science
in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African
countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as
clever
as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He
claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence
could
be found within a decade.
The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the
Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks
"in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that 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 there was a natural desire that all human beings should
be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not
true".
His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he
writes:
"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of
peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have
evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some
universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a
book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which
suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a
racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the
world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of "
scientific racism".
Dr Watson arrives in Britain
today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People:
Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to
an
audience at the Science Museum
organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the
history
of scientific racism.
Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views
across
the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the
Home
Affairs Select Committee, said: "It is sad to see a scientist of such
achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive
comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear
to
be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.
"These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still
exists at the highest professional levels."
The American scientist earned a place in the history of
great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the
University
of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s
and formed part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He shared
the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick
and
New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.
But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in
research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted
controversy
with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal
Science wrote in 1990: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has
long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their
collective breath whenever he veers from the script."
In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to
abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He
later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which
could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and
sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and
argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that
"stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could
be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if
we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be
contacted to comment on his remarks.
Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a
founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said:
" This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about
women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he
knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth
scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."
Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the
context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human
rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction
should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts
to
fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal
complaint."
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