Friday, October 19, 2007

Except maybe the French

Watson has given an apology for his remarks about blacks:
Nobel laureate biologist Jim Watson apologized "unreservedly" Thursday for stating that black people were not as intelligent as whites, saying he was "mortified" by the comments attributed to him.

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London.

"I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have."

"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief," he said.

Well, actually, that sounds like a non-pology more than an apology. Consider that earlier he said that we assume "that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." So first he says that "all the testing" tells us that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites; and now he's "apologizing" by saying that there's no scientific basis to believe that they're genetically inferior. But there's no scientific basis for quantifying one's genes, so of course there's no scientific basis for saying that one person, or group of people, are "genetically inferior" to another.

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