The latest fracas is around a statement made by Nobel Laureate James Watson, that black people have a lower level of intelligence than whites. The ensuing rumble has led to the resignation of Professor Watson — now almost 80 years old — as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution in New York which he joined in 1968. The president of the institution has issued a strong statement in disagreement saying that there is no scientific basis for Professor Watson’s remarks. Professor Watson is known for his provocative comments about women and about improving the human race through cloning. But this pronouncement was one too many and became the feather that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

But does race matter for intelligence and, in any case, what is race or even intelligence? There is a popular saying: I know what my race is by the manner in which I am treated at the corner store. An article by Armand Marie Leroi, a British scientist, in The New York Times in 2005, recently reopened the public discussion on race and genetics. In that year, the FDA approved BiDil for the treatment of heart disease in self-identified blacks.

Scientists have long been looking for a genetic marker for race, but what we know for sure is that there is no continent-wide and continent-specific genetic marker. What this means is that if one were 30 per cent African, based on Professor Watson’s reasoning, it would make a person more African, and therefore less intelligent, than someone who is 60 per cent African. What do these probabilities mean anyway?

Sir Francis Galton, a 19th century scientist, is credited with spawning the eugenics movement in Germany, Scandinavia, and the U.S. One cannot help but think of Galton’s legacy each time a proud Brahmin declares that he is “Aryan.” Skin colour is often used as a proxy for race, but there are plenty of light skinned “blacks,” so skin colour is no proof of race. People from various places, including India, have skin colour across the spectrum from light to very dark. Other proxies such as manner of speech and shape of the lips are equally flawed in defining race. Waves of human migration across the world have ensured that we are a mongrel species with very few almost completely isolated groups. Therefore, race is a sociological rather than a biological term. For instance, the term “Latino” is often used to signify a group of people who are from Latin America and share a common racial background. The designation, however, refers to groups that originate from several continents, each with a different history of colonisation and immigration, and groups of indigenous residents.

The modern IQ test is born from a test designed by Alfred Binet in 1905 to identify students who might need assistance in school. Lewis Terman, a researcher at Stanford University, later adapted Binet’s measure, revising and renaming it the “Stanford-Binet” test of intelligence. Terman believed that the dissemination of intelligence testing would bring to the attention of the government “tens of thousands of defectives” who should be kept from breeding.

Thus, modern notions of intelligence have close ties to the eugenics movement of the same period. What is interesting is that according to a report by the American Psychological Association, there is no consensus among scientists about the term intelligence or its testing. There is no conclusive evidence linking a set of genetic markers or genes to intelligence. Twin studies on the topic have been criticised for a variety of reasons including the fact that genetic and environmental factors cannot be separated and are not additive. Nutritional, environmental and socioeconomic conditions, and educational levels, have all been shown to influence the heritability of intelligence. In fact, scholars now include emotional maturity, common sense, and artistic ability under intelligence.

We always appear to seek to explain away our biases and prejudices and solidify the status quo with the aid of scientific reasoning.

Scientists, who are also human, have through the ages provided the reasoning together with the flawed scientific analysis. Therefore, attempts to link intelligence and race to social hierarchies have been made throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and will continue to be made. We need to be vigilant, challenge scientists, and point out when we disagree even if the person making the claim happens to be as grand a figure as Professor Watson, one of the founders of modern genetics.

(The writer is an independent scholar based in Chennai and is former president, Council for Responsible Genetics.)

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail