I had a conversation on the phone with my father recently about Mendel (in relation to race mixing) in which I was shot down and encouraged to believe “*tut tut* no one thinks like that any more… it’s all more complicated, for example we now know about DNA evidence in the manner of Crick and Watson showing us that we’re all the same anyway…”
I appreciate his work (not that I am an expert by any stretch on genetics) and am sorry to know a great pioneer of science has died, but (and I hope this isn’t tasteless to add) part of me wishes there was not such a focus in the modern world on DNA analysis – which opens the door to archaeogenetics – at the expense of Mendelian hybridization theory and physical anthropology. It both overcomplicates what is empirically apparent anyway (phenotype encapsulates genotype) and misleads the unwary.
I think also it lends credence to the dogmatists of genetic determinism. For example, though I can’t always agree with them either, I read Gene Watch for the occasional psychiatric content (and a little on IQ – which I think is more environmentally mutable due to lingering stress than researchers usually give credit to; it thoroughly depends on the conditions under which one is tested).
Just for a thoroughly heretical addition for the day, I still wonder how much (dire) black childrearing impacts upon their offspring with regard to retarding their intelligence, as, at least to give one example, since the revelations by George Ellis and Mark Solms in Beyond Evolutionary Psychology that there are no innate language modules in the neocortex – in direct opposition to the innate language acquisition theories of Chomsky et al. – and that language is primarily passed on through infant-parent mutual relationships, via pattern-matching in a warm environment, I might at a stretch apply this reasoning to other disciplines outside language use, such as mathematics, wondering if the sheer incompetence of these brutal parents has any play on their children’s’ pronounced retardation (at least relative to Aryan standards).
In a better world, I’d see it as both, but, in the words of Jay Joseph himself – or perhaps Colin Ross also – ‘only a little bit genetic’ (something I do not apply to psychiatric research).
One reply on “James Watson”
I had a conversation on the phone with my father recently about Mendel (in relation to race mixing) in which I was shot down and encouraged to believe “*tut tut* no one thinks like that any more… it’s all more complicated, for example we now know about DNA evidence in the manner of Crick and Watson showing us that we’re all the same anyway…”
I appreciate his work (not that I am an expert by any stretch on genetics) and am sorry to know a great pioneer of science has died, but (and I hope this isn’t tasteless to add) part of me wishes there was not such a focus in the modern world on DNA analysis – which opens the door to archaeogenetics – at the expense of Mendelian hybridization theory and physical anthropology. It both overcomplicates what is empirically apparent anyway (phenotype encapsulates genotype) and misleads the unwary.
I think also it lends credence to the dogmatists of genetic determinism. For example, though I can’t always agree with them either, I read Gene Watch for the occasional psychiatric content (and a little on IQ – which I think is more environmentally mutable due to lingering stress than researchers usually give credit to; it thoroughly depends on the conditions under which one is tested).
Just for a thoroughly heretical addition for the day, I still wonder how much (dire) black childrearing impacts upon their offspring with regard to retarding their intelligence, as, at least to give one example, since the revelations by George Ellis and Mark Solms in Beyond Evolutionary Psychology that there are no innate language modules in the neocortex – in direct opposition to the innate language acquisition theories of Chomsky et al. – and that language is primarily passed on through infant-parent mutual relationships, via pattern-matching in a warm environment, I might at a stretch apply this reasoning to other disciplines outside language use, such as mathematics, wondering if the sheer incompetence of these brutal parents has any play on their children’s’ pronounced retardation (at least relative to Aryan standards).
In a better world, I’d see it as both, but, in the words of Jay Joseph himself – or perhaps Colin Ross also – ‘only a little bit genetic’ (something I do not apply to psychiatric research).
Still, it is a shame he is dead.