James Watson's sensitive remarks on race and genetics opposed by many scientists including Dr. Francis Collins
Great to see Dr. Francis Collins say in this article that most experts in the field "consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences."
This is the same Dr. Collins with whom I was privileged to have a few email exchanges (short responses from him) and whose Caltech 2009 lecture about evidence for belief in God, I transcribed and published on my iami1 blog, with permission from him and the event organizers, here: https://iami1.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/francis-collins-the-language-of-god-a-scientist-presents-evidence-of-belief-transcript/ .
I view Dr. Collins as an extraordinarily good man, and I trust him on this very sensitive genetics field questions. In particular, I trust that he will have the right ethics and goodness to handle super-sensitive topics like that mentioned in the shared NYT article which, very unfortunately, some top scientists like Dr. Watson tripped up badly on, from an ethical point of view.
I am NOT saying that the data should be modified to suit a goodness and ethical framework believers in God typically have. But making astonishingly broad and offensive from a goodness and ethical viewpoint, race related statements without proper and very solid data to back them, is a terrible blunder for any scientist to make, no matter how great his (or her) scientific achievements may have been.
Shared link: James Watson Had a Chance to Salvage His Reputation on Race. He Made Things Worse., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html, 1st Jan. 2019
This is the same Dr. Collins with whom I was privileged to have a few email exchanges (short responses from him) and whose Caltech 2009 lecture about evidence for belief in God, I transcribed and published on my iami1 blog, with permission from him and the event organizers, here: https://iami1.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/francis-collins-the-language-of-god-a-scientist-presents-evidence-of-belief-transcript/ .
I view Dr. Collins as an extraordinarily good man, and I trust him on this very sensitive genetics field questions. In particular, I trust that he will have the right ethics and goodness to handle super-sensitive topics like that mentioned in the shared NYT article which, very unfortunately, some top scientists like Dr. Watson tripped up badly on, from an ethical point of view.
I am NOT saying that the data should be modified to suit a goodness and ethical framework believers in God typically have. But making astonishingly broad and offensive from a goodness and ethical viewpoint, race related statements without proper and very solid data to back them, is a terrible blunder for any scientist to make, no matter how great his (or her) scientific achievements may have been.
Shared link: James Watson Had a Chance to Salvage His Reputation on Race. He Made Things Worse., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html, 1st Jan. 2019
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