Elementary, My Dear Watson

Nobel Prize winner James Watson created quite the ruckus this past week thanks to his comments on race and intelligence. His basic thesis is pretty easy to distill:

The scientist, who won the Nobel prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, was quoted in an interview in The Sunday Times 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.”

Watson recently clarified his statements, probably in an attempt to address the tidal wave of criticism hurled in his direction. His new material, while sticking to his main point, sounds less inflammatory:

-"If I said what I was quoted as saying, then I can only admit that I am bewildered by it."

-"We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things."

-"This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

I'm not going to call Watson a racist or anything like that: it would be scientifically unproductive and irrelevant to do so. Instead, I'd like to address the merits of his hypotheses. Here is what I think:

1) Unless humans evolved independently in more than one location, all of us have descended from the same human line and, therefore, some specific geographic location. Obviously, as human migrated away from each other differential selection pressures helped generate different traits (like skin color, facial morphology, etc). In that sense, its not hard to imagine that different population groups might vary across a set of traits. However, it is harder to imagine that something like intelligence would be selected on differently across space: I would expect the returns to being smart to be relatively similar across different populations, especially in the days around and prior to the agricultural revolution.

You might think that this argument is as tenuous as Watson's. You are right. However, my point is to apply the "huh" test to his reasoning. When one does that, the whole thing seems somewhat shaky.

2) Here is a stronger argument: racial gaps in ability might be explained primarily by differences in childhood investments and early life environments. Indeed, there is a great deal of scientific evidence that indicates that this may be the case. I'll pick one of my favorites as an example. In an earlier post, I talked about a paper by Douglas Almond and Ken Chay, looking at the impact of Civil Rights movement induced hospital integration on the intergenerational transfer of health status among black individuals. The authors found that the children of women born just after hospital integration report higher birthweights, better apgar scores, and lower infant mortality. Here's the kicker: they also find that the black-white test score gap among this advantaged cohort is much thinner.

It's no stretch to posit that the effects of environment are large, powerful and very real. Given how salient these factors are, it makes a great deal of sense to try and understand the process of cognitive development and its relevant inputs before resorting to blanket genetic statements. Indeed, other papers suggest that the entirity of the ability gap can be explained by early-life socioeconomic factors. Check out this post by Steven Levitt for some information on his interesting work.

3) Uncovering the determinants of ability should command a great deal of research attention. All credible hypotheses should be taken seriously and addressed with the best scientific methods. On that note, I do not believe that Watson's hypotheses are very compelling, and perhaps this is not where we should be focusing our attention when it comes to future research.