PD Smith

Just stupid?

19 October 2007 | scientists, Watson | 2 comments

Fol­low­ing his embar­rass­ing state­ment that black peo­ple are less intel­li­gent than white peo­ple, per­haps the out­spo­ken co-dis­cov­er­er of the struc­ture of DNA, Dr James Wat­son, should be remind­ed of his ear­li­er – and far more astute – com­ment about the lim­i­ta­tions of sci­en­tists:

“One could not be a suc­cess­ful sci­en­tist with­out real­iz­ing that, in con­trast to the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion sup­port­ed by news­pa­pers and moth­ers of sci­en­tists, a good­ly num­ber of sci­en­tists are not only nar­row-mind­ed and dull, but also just stu­pid.”

(Pity he does­n’t read my blog!)

By the way, Dan Agin has writ­ten a very good blog on this at The Huff­in­g­ton Post.

2 comments so far:

  1. Thomas R. | 20 October 2007

    IMO this shows again the need for some research into the men­tal­i­ty of sci­en­tists, per­haps with such means?:
    http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/
    https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

  2. PD Smith | 23 October 2007

    More com­ments & dis­cus­sion on this blog at MySpace…