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"IQ-Race Crimethink Alert! Francis Crick, James Watson's DNA partner, also guilty"

25 Comments -

1 – 25 of 25
Anonymous Evil Neocon said...

Steve -- none of this stuff exists in a vacuum. Part of the problem was that there was a long series of outright abuses that people react to emotionally and gives PC thinking it's power.

Prominent "Progressives" such as Margaret Sanger, Theodore Roosevelt, the first Chancellor of Stanford University promoted rather dubious "scientific" efforts to sterilize (against their will): Blacks, American Indians, "criminal" classes (basically lower-class whites). The Nuremberg Laws were based on California's "Progressive" era laws of forced sterilization which continued in one form or another well into the 1970's.

As a political reality, when Blacks see discussion of IQs they see a scheme to produce forced sterilization of Blacks and seethe. Understandably. The same will be true of American Indians, and lower income whites. Who were the primary victims of rather dubious "scientific" efforts to "improve the race."

Which amounts to using political power to allow children for rich, privileged whites and none for anyone else.

Forget the Nazis. This ugly history alone guarantees that any discussion of IQ and race will generate pushback and perhaps violent pushback. It's certainly understandable.

Add the Nazis to this, including "Master Race" stuff and the legacy of the holocaust and the political realities are understandable.

Any attempt to discuss race and IQ will have to as a matter of political reality address the fundamental political reality. Which in turn is the ugly legacy of "Progressive" reformers practicing eugenics. Which amounts to forced sterilization of anyone lacking political power.

1/12/08, 7:08 PM

Blogger Color of Crime said...

Maybe I missed it. I didn't see a link to the letter from Crick to Edsall.

Googling yielded this find:

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/N/M/_/scbbnm.pdf

1/12/08, 8:13 PM

Anonymous skeptical said...

From one of Crick's letters in your blog entry:

"The main difficulty is that people have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way. The Nazis gave it a bad name and I think it is time something was done to make it respectable again."

And yet, 35+ years later, the situation has remained exactly the same.

Everything associated with racialist thought (including eugenics) in pre-WWII Western Civilization remains indelibly linked with the Nazis and the American KKK in our current age.

Evidently, the leftist thought police are still running the show.

1/12/08, 9:16 PM

Anonymous David said...

Thanks Steve for making this available.

Wha? I'm shocked - shocked - to find that anyone stood up for Jensen. I guess we can throw Crick in the ashcan, too. Pseudo-scientist.

Stephen Jay Gould is emerging as the only pure and true scientist of the latter half of the 20th Century.

He didn't discover DNA or anything, but he did publish some cleverly written books. A genius!

1/12/08, 9:39 PM

Anonymous Rick said...

"Evidently, the leftist thought police are still running the show."

If they are, they couldn't have wished for easier opponents: just look at the racist and anti-Jewish commenters who frequent this site. The sort of crowd these ideas attract today makes it easy for P.C. types to draw links to racists and anti-Semites of the past and discredit the pursuit of the field itself.

1/13/08, 1:29 AM

Anonymous ben g said...

Say what you like about Steve, he's a great journalist for finding shit like this while the mainstream press sits on its ass.

1/13/08, 3:01 AM

Anonymous Tony M said...

I'm too lazy to look, but it would be interesting to know if Crick and Watson remained in contact during this period and whether Watson was aware of Crick's opinion on the matter.

As many of Watson's critics pulled the he was never a first rate scientist hat out of the bag, it would have been a nice card for him to play.

1/13/08, 3:02 AM

Anonymous dearieme said...

Two small points:
1. "Crick is usually considered the greater theoretical genius of the two" - I think I remember that Watson said that Crick was the cleverer.
2. They didn't, whatever the newspapers may say, dicover DNA. They discovered its molecular structure.

1/13/08, 4:38 AM

Blogger RobertHume said...

Crick's comment that "Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation." is especially relevant today.

Assuming that the differences in average attainment between the races and sexes has led to social and personal anger, lost opportunities for both low and high IQ individuals, and vast sums of public money wasted.

We must completely restructure our educational establishment ... and get on the molecular eugenics wagon, if we are to have a happy and peaceful society.

1/13/08, 9:16 AM

Blogger MensaRefugee said...

Canada's policy aint that great from my perspective. Sure on paper on the smarties get in, but then the massive refugee stream (very few of them are refugees anyway, and those that are are generally not smarties anyway) negates that.

But then again I dont know about the US legal immigration procedures in general.

1/13/08, 10:19 AM

Anonymous Martin said...

"David said...

Stephen Jay Gould is emerging as the only pure and true scientist of the latter half of the 20th Century.

He didn't discover DNA or anything, but he did publish some cleverly written books. A genius!"

Were they clever? I suppose they may have been. I wouldn't know, as I could never finish a book by Stephen Jay Gould. For though he may have written cleverly, he did not write well. His prose was among the most dense, rococco, and obtuse I have ever attempted to read.

"Tony M said...

As many of Watson's critics pulled the he was never a first rate scientist hat out of the bag, it would have been a nice card for him to play.

1/13/2008"

Did that in fact happen? I wasn't paying to much attention to the episode, other than what I read on this site. If so, that's truly amazing. It would take a lot of gaul for a journalist - a mere journalist - to claim that Watson really wasn't that big a deal as a scientist anyways. I mean, the Nobel Prize.....that's supposed to indicate something, isn't it?

1/13/08, 10:41 AM

Anonymous skeptical said...

rick,

You said:

"If they are, they couldn't have wished for easier opponents: just look at the racist and anti-Jewish commenters who frequent this site. The sort of crowd these ideas attract today makes it easy for P.C. types to draw links to racists and anti-Semites of the past and discredit the pursuit of the field itself."

Do you think racialist thought in Western Civilization (pre-WWII) should be indelibly linked with the Nazis and KKK?

What Steve is pointing out on his blog is that eminent scientists from a different era (like James Watson and Francis Crick) supported positions that we now almost exclusively associate with the Nazis. And is this current situation fair to researchers in the mold of Watson, Crick, Lynn, or Jensen?

Would you describe any of the preceding scientists as being unhinged and hate-filled? Because that's how the media likes to portray them...

1/13/08, 10:50 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

On the power of genetic similarity, this news just in from the beeb:

Parted-at-birth twins 'married'

1/13/08, 10:56 AM

Anonymous Svigor said...

Bit circular Rick, don't you think?

1/13/08, 11:09 AM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

The sort of crowd these ideas attract today makes it easy for P.C. types to draw links to racists and anti-Semites of the past and discredit the pursuit of the field itself.

No, the control of the apparatus of public opinion formation makes it easy for the "P.C. types" to draw links between anyone and anything for any reason or no reason at all.

1/13/08, 1:01 PM

Blogger RobertHume said...

Another quote of Crick's, presumably the kind of thing known only to insiders like Crick:

"Lewontin, in particular, is known to be strongly politically biased and himself admits to being scientifically unscrupulous on these issues. That is, he takes them as political ones and therefore feels justified in the use of biased arguments."

This shows that us on the realist side have given far too much good faith to those on the other side. Hence we must cease arguing in good face and must not hesitate to launch ad-hominem attacks on the other side, as they do to us. I don't know, however, that we will be able to make up data as they do ... just too imbued with fair play, I'm afraid.

1/13/08, 6:08 PM

Anonymous Qliphoth said...

"If they are, they couldn't have wished for easier opponents: just look at the racist and anti-Jewish commenters who frequent this site. The sort of crowd these ideas attract today makes it easy for P.C. types to draw links to racists and anti-Semites of the past and discredit the pursuit of the field itself."

Racism consists of things like equating ethnicity with nationality (something traditionally done almost everywhere), preferring one's own kind (probably a genetically hardwired behavior), and denying strident leftist claims of racial equality (an empirical matter). So why is it wrong? Because bespectacled wise men have decreed it immoral? Because it makes Jesus angry? Antisemitism is any negatively critical talk of Jews. Unless we are to assume that Jewish interests are automatically aligned with everyone else's, why is antisemitism automatically wrong?

You say (in other words) that conservatives with politically incorrect views are giving the left ammunition. Maybe so, but the notion that leftists would be more reasonable if we didn't is codswallop. Respectable conservatives already tried appeasement with the neocons, but the neocons never relented, and respectable conservativism has become a travesty of what it once was. The only reason why our thoughts serve as ammunition is because leftists control the prevailing moral oder. It is a situation akin to an unbeliever being sentenced to burn at the stake for heresy, and then being scolded by others for giving the priests ammunition with all that talk of atheism.

1/13/08, 7:09 PM

Anonymous RKU said...

Here's a question...

The Monstrously Evil KKK has got to be totally acknowledged as the second most Monstrously Evil organization in the entire history of the universe (after the More Monstrously Evil Nazis, of course).

But I've always been a little curious about how many people the Monstrously Evil KKK (and its closely related organizations) actually killed/murdered (say) during the last 100 years.

I vaguely recall there's some Civil Rights monument somewhere with the names of all the blacks killed the Glorious Struggle, and it was around 87 or something, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, by the wonders of non-Euclidean geometry, that number's obviously a much, much bigger deal than the 100M or so killed worldwide by the Communists...

1/13/08, 8:45 PM

Anonymous Evil Neocon said...

Except those eminent scientists also supported forced sterilization of anyone deemed "inferior" which essentially meant less politically powerful.

That's the ugly legacy of Race-IQ discussions dating back to the early Progressives in the 1910's.

Shrug. We ought to be able to discuss race and IQ but that's the history.

1/13/08, 8:58 PM

Anonymous skeptical said...

"Shrug. We ought to be able to discuss race and IQ but that's the history."

"History" is far more complicated than the brutalities of a few.

Racialism took a plethora of varying forms in pre-WWII Western Civilization. To construct our history over this time period by only focusing on the very worst elements is to engage in the kind of thought-control brainwashing we have today, where people pavlovianly mention "The Nazis/KKK/Hitler" anytime questions of Race & IQ come to the surface.

1/14/08, 6:17 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

evil neocon

Your just parroting the popular political interpretation of eugenics, and you’re wrong (again).

So “eminent scientists also supported forced sterilization of anyone ‘inferior’ which essentially meant less politically powerful”. Can you define who the less politically powerful were around 1910? Are you referring to the mass forced sterilization of disenfranchised women, children, many blacks in the south and non-English speaking immigrants by the American Academy of Science? Is “that the history” as you image it?

No, eugenics wasn’t an evil political tool to oppress the less politically powerful. It was primarily promoted by “eminent scientists” as a way to enhance “public hygiene” by reducing the incidence of genetically-linked illnesses like mental retardation. You just pulled that political and race card out of your ass as per your custom here.

Now if you critiqued the eugenics promoted by eminent scientists on the morality of individual rights, medical ethics and the like you wouldn’t come across as such an ill-informed PC axe grinder.

1/15/08, 1:47 PM

Anonymous rbc said...

"While any present conclusions are tentative, it seems likely that the matter could be largely resolved if further research were carried out. ... The most distressing feature of your letter is that it neither gives nor refers to any scientific arguments, but makes unsupported statements of opinion, This, I need hardly remind you, is politics, not science. The voice of established authority, unsupported by evidence or argument, should have no place in science. ---F.H. Crick"

Hallelujah! The only way to learn the truth about anything is by performing experiments. This is why Arthur Jensen is a great scientist: he constantly collects new data and reanalyzes old, and he lets the data determine his opinions, consequences be damned. His ideas on individual variation in intelligence are more likely to be right than anyone else's not because of what they are, but because the process by which he arrived at them is more scientifically rigorous than anyone else's has ever been. Jensen, Bouchard, and many other eminent scientists in the IQ field are in fact politically rather liberal, and are to some degree disturbed or even horrified by what they have learned experimentally about human nature -- but they allow their view of the the way the world really is to be determined by the data they collected, not their preference for what they would like it to have been instead.

Regardless of whether you are a liberal or a conservative, whether you are racist or not, the only sane way to construct any kind of social policy is to first find out what the world is really like, rather than simply hope it is the way you'd like it to be. Wherever you want to go, you must first discover where you are before you can determine how to get there from here. That is why, no matter how it may have been used before, increased IQ research is the only moral way forward -- any successful policy for dealing with human beings must be based on a rational, apolitical, scientific analysis of how real human beings actually think, which is precisely what population statistics of intelligence are all about.

1/28/08, 7:20 PM

Anonymous Svigor said...

If they are, they couldn't have wished for easier opponents: just look at the racist and anti-Jewish commenters who frequent this site. The sort of crowd these ideas attract today makes it easy for P.C. types to draw links to racists and anti-Semites of the past and discredit the pursuit of the field itself.

I can never tell if this "argument" is honest balderdash, or a not-so-subtle attempt at behavior modification, or neither, or what.

Ah, who cares. It's BALDERDASH. Otherwise, "anti-racism" and cosmopolitanism (and leftism in general) would have been utterly destroyed by their associations (Gulags, etc.) long ago.

WHO? WHOM? The difference is who runs the media. Period. Full stop.

When you get up to the bird's eye level, all that matters is who's controlling the levers; he's the one who gets to decide if the sheep believe in eugenics, or "anti-racism," or Martian canals.

4/25/08, 6:03 PM

Anonymous JJ said...

There may be other monuments, but this one at the SPLC lists several dozen.
http://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs

8/10/12, 8:22 PM

Anonymous James K said...

The exception to Canadian immigration policy is Quebec, whose priority is whether a potential immigrant speaks French. This criterion allows immigration by a lot of people who might otherwise be considered "detrimental" to Canada.

I wonder how many of the Canadians who have committed terror attacks entered the country this way.

12/8/14, 8:22 AM

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