James D. Watson

Source: Public Domain

The growth of science denialism in the 21st century can be seen in the mainstream media’s gleeful reaction to the death at 97 of James D. Watson (1928–2025), codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

Supposedly, the age of cancel culture is over. But nobody in the prestige press is apologizing for getting Watson fired in 2007 from running the famous Cold Spring Harbor cancer lab he’d built back up over four decades because he was quoted as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”

Instead, the press is still gloating about his downfall.

Since Watson was publicly humiliated, eighteen years have passed. Have any new test results disproved Watson’s observation?

Three years ago in Taki’s Magazine, I pointed out that the World Bank’s Harmonized Learning Outcome database of school achievement test scores from around the world includes part of one test in which sub-Saharans scored at or above the European average: the 2013 SACMEQ math test in Kenya.

But that’s the only exam known to the World Bank in which that happened out of their 148 from sub-Saharan countries. So, Watson is currently ahead 147 to 1.

The main reason that the media treated Watson so shamefully, of course, was not because there was something factually or logically wrong about his observation, but because the implication that the great man of science drew from these facts is so obviously plausible. It might still turn out not to be true in the end, but Occam’s razor suggests that Watson’s surmise sure is the way to bet.

And for reasons that nobody can quite nail down, the liberal establishment is determined to die in the ditch of swearing, on the rare occasions when it is forced to admit that sub-Saharans perform worse on average on cognitively demanding tasks, that the IQ gap must be because white people are just plain evil, rather than admit that perhaps that’s the kind of difference you shouldn’t be surprised to see evolve in the 50,000 or so years since the Out of Africa event separated the races.

Over the past dozen years, we’ve seen countless examples of all the things that go wrong with public policy when the only allowable opinion is that the problems of blacks are due to white badness. (Realistic liberals might include Trump’s 2024 reelection in that list.) But that didn’t seem to lead anybody to reassess their grotesque treatment of the deceased.

For example, from the New York Times opinion section:

James Watson Saw the True Form of DNA. Then It Blinded Him.

Nov. 16, 2025

By Nathaniel Comfort

Dr. Comfort is a historian of genetics who is completing a biography of James Watson.

In other words, this historian has spent several years getting ready to, as they say, platform James D. Watson at length. Perhaps during the paroxysm of hate toward the 97-year-old dead man in the newspapers this month, Dr. Comfort recognized that his career could get Watsoned, like Watson’s had, unless he wrote something really stupid and hate-filled for The New York Times.

Near the end of my time at Cold Spring Harbor, I remember seeing Dr. Watson walking around the campus, brandishing a copy of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s new book ‘The Bell Curve,’ which notoriously argued that I.Q. differences between racial groups are genetic.

Or, to be more precise than the author’s misleading statement that “I.Q. differences between racial groups are genetic,” the conclusion of The Bell Curve’s notorious Chapter 13 actually reads:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

Which would seem moderate and reasonable to well-informed and open-minded people like, say, James D. Watson in 2007. Those who don’t find Herrnstein and Murray’s conclusion to be middle-of-the-road tend to be close-minded, ignorant extremists on the subject.

At the time, I don’t recall race having been something Dr. Watson talked about in public (nor had I heard him speak of it in private). That changed drastically after the turn of the century. Jim being Jim, the more the public pressed him not to say those things, the more he said them.

In the past, we might have seen the great scientist standing up to the ignorant mob like this as heroic. But in 2025:

It was perverse but predictable. Eventually, his dogged insistence on a connection between race and intelligence cost him his reputation as a scientist and his relationship with his beloved Cold Spring Harbor, one of the great loves of his life.

Of course, the fact that there is a statistical connection between self-identified race and average intelligence may well be the most well-documented finding in all the human sciences. Why this correlation exists is less certain at present—what proportion of it is due to nature and what proportion to nurture—but nobody honest who knows what he is talking about denies the factual existence of “a connection between race and intelligence.”

DNA giveth and DNA taketh away. Dr. Watson, who died on Nov. 6, had built his stratospheric career on his total commitment to DNA and molecular biology, which resulted in a Nobel Prize and leadership of the Human Genome Project. DNA made him one of the most significant scientists of the 20th century. But getting carried away with it, insisting against the science and history that it was meaningful to compare I.Q. between races, made him among the most infamous of the 21st.

Obviously, you know and I know that IQ is the single best replicated finding in all of psychological science, as Harvard’s Steven Pinker pointed out a decade ago:

Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN’T apply to IQ: huge n’s, replicable results. But people hate the message.

But, judging by the comments to this NYT op-ed, a lot of deluded folks sincerely believe that The Science has utterly disproved IQ and race, and, especially, any connection between the two. Yet nobody seems able to cite the milestone research disproving them, or at least not any studies since they read Stephen Jay Gould’s woozy The Mismeasure of Man in cultural anthropology class in the 1980s. But they are utterly confident that The Science is definitive on this question.

Not that they pay any attention to scientific research on the subject, because, they are certain, only obsessive racist Bad Guys know data about race, IQ, crime rates, etc. All they know is that all this stuff was permanently debunked by some forgotten hero. You might imagine that purveyors of orthodoxy would be avid to track down this nameless genius and shower Nobel Prizes and cash on him or her. But no…

Comfort burbles on:

Genetic determinism is one of those one-single-technofix-will-solve-everything ideas that visionaries can fall prey to, and the history of genetics is lousy with hereditarians promising to end disease, make us smarter and better our society. We’re drawn to magic bullet solutions that cannot solve complex social problems. It is all too easy for someone who makes a genuinely profound discovery to think they have found the secret of life, or the environment, or disease.

But what in the world does that have to do with Watson’s notoriously realistic admission despairing of all the fixes we’ve attempted: He was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really”?

Let’s be honest: Dr. Comfort is playing a game in which he’s trying to denounce the pessimistic race realist Watson as an optimistic fantasist, when it is NYT subscribers who tend to be true believers that we can fix our racial problems without knowing anything about them other than whom it is fashionable to hate.

Ironically, Dr. Watson’s preoccupation with genetic determinism was far from predetermined. Some of his contemporaries began entertaining eugenics ideas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and called for deeper studies into claims that I.Q. measured human intelligence and varied across different races. But Dr. Watson stayed out of this eugenics boomlet, even after becoming director of Cold Spring Harbor in 1968.

So what changed? Why did he later become receptive to ideas he had once found repugnant?

Uh, maybe Watson read The Bell Curve in 1994 and, being a good scientist, realized he couldn’t disprove it? Or, because by 2007 a full 38 years had gone by since the beginning of the affirmative action era with not much change in the white-black racial gap?

We are now 56 years out from the beginning of racial quotas, which is two full generations, and how much has changed?

You might think that a great scientist raised as a staunch Democrat in Chicago during the New Deal in “a family that believed in books, birds, and the Democratic party” (to quote Watson) coming to reject his party’s most sacred fetish would be evidence that maybe this partisan obsession isn’t true. But that couldn’t possibly be right because, uh, the aged Watson wasn’t wise, he was vile.

An obsession with the gene, of course, is not a complete explanation for why racist ideas resonated with Dr. Watson—who was bourgeois, Anglophiliac and Eurocentric, proudly elitist and rather fond of the mid-1950s patriarchy. For ‘The Bell Curve’ to strike such a chord, some part of him had to already be receptive to its arguments.

It’s as if Watson’s nature were naturally unholy.

An overweening faith that our genes make us who we are is a terrifying thing.

Nah, not really. It’s really not that scary. Man up. As David Foster Wallace pointed out, “Although of course you end up becoming yourself.”

If you think there is one single fundamental essence that makes you you more than anything else, you’re at risk.

Of what? Getting canceled?

Though genetic determinism doesn’t necessarily make you a racist, it might move you to support forced sterilization, found a Nobel Prize winner sperm bank, have 17 children or commit other eugenic acts.

And how, Mr. Biographer, is that relevant to James D. Watson? Did Watson support forced sterilization, donate to the Nobel Prize winner sperm bank (which, of course, was a great boon to lesbians by allowing them to eugenically pick their sperm donors), or have seventeen children? (He had one, who suffered from schizophrenia.)

Exactly what form it takes in any one case depends on culture, family, temperament—even, a little, your genes.

In other words, at the very last moment, the op-edster can’t force himself to wholly sign on to the extremist, lowbrow anti-nature conventional wisdom.