Discoverer of the DNA Helix: Blacks Less Intelligent Than Whites

What in the world does this even mean?

 

The kinds of adaptations you are talking about take millions of years to evolve in any meaningful way. The most recent common ancestor of all people living today very likely lived only a few thousand years ago.

Basically, our current conception of race has nothing to do with genetics. When you start talking about geographic origins and stuff like that, the actual groups in question become very ambiguous. That's why using race to generalize people is dangerous--people can be grouped by any trivial commonality, and it's easy to demonize people in 'other' groups.


NewYorker-

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I strongly feel that using race as a standard for diversity (i.e. racial diversity) is particularly uninspired and possibly counter-productive for reasons I stated above. Diversity is great! Life could not exist without it, and even if it could it would be increadibly boring.

The thing about diversity is you can find it anywhere, regardless of the racial demographics. We're all different enough from each other such that if you took the time you could find unique skill sets and attributes (not to mention experiences) of every person you met. It's lazy and... well... racist to make determinations about somebody based solely on their race, when you could be finding out so many more interesting things about that person if you (I don't mean you, NewYorker, but whomever) weren't so hung up on the completely meaningless fact that his/her skin is black.

Who really is black, anyways? The conditions for 'blackhood' are so convoluted at this point that most people don't even understand the meaning of the technical term 'African American' and presume that recent immigrants from Africa fall under that category.

 

There isn't even a scientific consensus of what intelligence is. There is a legitimate debate on how many components they are (and they are adding new dimensions or forms of intelligence) and on the measurement of those components. Thus going on to say people of x group (based on sex, racial, ethnic, etc) are overall more intelligent than y group is ridiculous. Probably me saying I am more intelligent than z (other person) is pretty silly as well, anyone else will surely have some mental capacities with a higher upper range (and some lower) than myself--even if we don't have tests for it yet.

 

Interesting Link...........though you might want to read the content a bit more thoroughly.

There seems to be some argument as to which point in time the MRCA existed, and regardless as to when it existed, "each living person receives genes (in original or mutated forms) in dramatically different proportions from these ancestors."

 

October 18, 2007
Neanderthals May Have Had Gene for Speech
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/science/19speech.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.

The genes of Neanderthals seemed to have passed into oblivion when they vanished from their last refuges in Spain and Portugal some 30,000 years ago, almost certainly driven to extinction by modern humans. But recent work by Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has made it clear that some Neanderthal DNA can be extracted from fossils.

Dr. Paabo, Dr. Johannes Krause and Spanish colleagues who excavated the new bones say they have now extracted the Neanderthal version of the relevant part of the FOXP2 gene. It is the same as the human version, they report in today’s issue of Current Biology.

Because many other genes are also involved in the faculty of speech, the new finding suggests but does not prove that Neanderthals had human-like language.

“There is no reason to think Neanderthals couldn’t speak like humans with respect to FOXP2, but obviously there are many other genes involved in language and speech,” Dr. Paabo said.

The human version of the FOXP2 gene apparently swept through the human population before the Neanderthal and modern human lineages split apart some 350,000 years ago.

But until more is known about what FOXP2 does in the brain, it is hard to know what powers were conferred by the sweep, said Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University who has written about the evolution of language. “Perhaps Neanderthals had some rudiments of language, but then again, maybe not.”

A new strain of mice may have something to say about how FOXP2 affects language. Dr. Paabo has developed mice whose FOXP2 genes have been replaced with the human version. The mice have extra neuronal connections in their brains and make an unusual sound. “There seems to be a change in vocalization — they squeak in a different way,” Dr. Paabo said. “But there are no obvious differences in behavior; in most ways they are normal mice.”

The ability to fish out a specific gene of interest from the Neanderthal genome is a remarkable technical feat, if that has indeed been achieved. The results “have the potential to become a keystone in our understanding of human evolution,” wrote an anonymous referee who reviewed Dr. Paabo’s report for Current Biology.

The study of human evolution may take a giant leap forward if Dr. Paabo should recover the entire Neanderthal genome, at least in draft form, a feat he said he hopes to accomplish by next year.

But two sudden clouds have overshadowed this grand prospect. One is that the new finding about FOXP2 sharply contradicts an earlier result Dr. Paabo announced five years ago.

Surveying the human version of FOXP2 in populations around the world, Dr. Paabo found in 2002 that everyone had essentially the same version of the gene. This happens when a new version of a gene confers such a survival advantage that it sweeps through the population. This sweep had occurred sometime within the last 200,000 years, Dr. Paabo and colleagues reported in an article in Nature.

That date supported a proposal by Richard Klein of Stanford University, based on archaeological evidence, that the modern human population had undergone some neurological change around 50,000 years ago, which enabled their populations to expand and emerge from Africa. The neurological change could have been the perfection of modern language, given that few evolutionary advances could be more valuable to a social species.

But Dr. Paabo’s new report pushes back the language-related changes in FOXP2 to at least 350,000 years ago, the time that the Neanderthal and modern human lineages split, a date that no longer supports Dr. Klein’s thesis.

Pushed by the referees of his new report to say why the old one was so wrong, Dr. Paabo told the editors of Current Biology that the calculations underlying the younger date were “not flawed but rely on assumptions that are necessary but also universally known to be oversimplifications of the reality.”

While the assumptions may be well known to population geneticists, the caveats were not so clear to others. Dr. Klein said he was disappointed to have lost the genetic support from Dr. Paabo’s work but had not changed his views. “The archaeological record suggests a major change in human behavior 50,000 years ago, and I think there is overwhelming evidence for that.”

A second cloud over Dr. Paabo’s work with Neanderthal DNA is the ever-present danger of contamination with the human DNA, especially since Dr. Paabo reports finding the human version of FOXP2 in Neanderthal bones.

Most fossil bones in museum collections, and even the chemical reagents used to analyze genetic material, are contaminated with human DNA. The contaminant often overwhelms the faint residual traces of Neanderthal DNA, which is hard at best to tell apart since the sequence of units is so similar.

Dr. Paabo has struggled valiantly to cope with the contamination issue. He has recovered the DNA sequence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, a kind that is separate from the main genome in the cell’s nucleus. By measuring the ratio of Neanderthal to human mitochondrial DNA, he can assess the degree of contamination in a sample.

Last year, to lay the groundwork for his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, Dr. Paabo decoded the sequence of many DNA fragments, and sent samples to a second laboratory for independent analysis.

This seemed a considerable feat. But in an article soon to be published in the journal PLoS Genetics, Jeffrey D. Wall and Sung K. Kim, two biologists at the University of California, San Francisco, say there are serious inconsistencies between the Neanderthal sequences Dr. Paabo published last year and those of the second laboratory, the Joint Genome Center Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., headed by Edward M. Rubin.

The bottom line of their analysis is that Dr. Rubin’s results were probably correct but Dr. Paabo’s were highly contaminated with human DNA.

Dr. Paabo said he agreed in general with Drs. Wall and Kim’s criticisms but noted the DNA extracts for both studies had been made in his clean room. He had then sent the samples for his own analysis to another laboratory, where the contamination could perhaps have occurred.

Dr. Paabo has now added extra safeguards, he said, such as tagging all the Neanderthal DNA extracted in his clean room.

For the FOXP2 analysis, he and his Spanish colleagues arranged for the bones to be excavated under sterile conditions and immediately frozen. In addition he analyzed the Neanderthal Y chromosome, showing it was very different from the human Y chromosome, and so provided a second test along with mitochondrial DNA to differentiate human and Neanderthal samples.

Dr. Wall said that in the new report Dr. Paabo and his colleagues "have been much more careful than they were before to control contamination, but I think it still remains a small possibility."

Why was such a striking result not presented to a better known journal such as Nature? Dr. Paabo replied that he had done so, but that “Nature rejected it without review. I was surprised.”

FOXP2 first came to light in a large London family, half of whose members had subtle defects in their speech and understanding. Geneticists discovered that one of their two copies of FOXP2 was inactivated by a mutation.

The gene “provides an exciting molecular window into brain circuits that are important in speech,” said Simon Fisher of Oxford University, a member of the team that discovered the FOXP2 mutation. Neanderthals and mice are not the only species contributing to the discussion. Echo-locating bats have a distinctive change in their FOXP2 gene at the same location as the human changes. Bats that don’t hunt with sonar do not have these changes, a team of Chinese biologists, led by Gang Li and Shuyi Zhang of the East China Normal University in Shanghai, report in the current issue of the journal PLoS One.

This suggests FOXP2 may have evolved in bats to support the rapid motor sequencing involved in echolocation. Similar tweaking of FOXP2 could have occurred in the human lineage to support the fine motor sequencing involved in speech, Dr. Fisher said.

 

^Intelligence is arbitrarily based upon society's needs. Which makes Watson's eugenic dreams even more dangerous because he tries to hide behind the veneer of superiority as other proponents have attempted.

Any evolutionist will agree in principle that evolution is directionless with no supreme being in sight. Our attempts to eliminate one aspect of humanity (the poor or stupid) by directly engineering our foundations will only bite us in the ass in the end. We're monkeys with clubs trying to fix a jet engine.

 

Oh yeah? Better read up on the latest theories of evolution via natural selection then.

You mean few thousands as in more than 12,000 years ago right?

Link?

True, but then anything can be used. Common stereotype = blondes are dumb, nothing's wrong with that eh? I'm pretty sure the fair share of bbs'ers have had a chuckle at those jokes.

 

Um, [race x] mom + [race x] dad = [race x] baby. That is genetics pal. There may not be a race gene, but to say our conception of race has nothing to do with genetics is asinine. If you are white, and your wife is white, and when you go into the delivery room a black baby comes out, you didn't just have an equal chance of getting a black, white, Asian, Hispanic, etc. baby; your wife was cheating on you.

 

I'm black, but how is this quote not racist, homophobic and, y'know, completely inaccurate?

 

It is well known in biology circles that this explains away a lot of mysteries about me and my family.

 

Like I said I am not sure personally where I stand on the issue. Just saying that such studies aren't useless precisely for the reasons you state.

 

Ahhh... you haven't changed partner.

 

My cousin had a "Neanderthal brow." A really large head, a 150 IQ, and that jutting brow with the eyebrows all the way across. He was a freaky dude. Had a photographic memory. Red hair. Thus, my firm belief that Neanderthals were highly intelligent, had incredible memories, were freaky as hell, and had red hair.

Makes perfect sense to me. (hey, he was my cousin!)



D&D. Impeach Bush, His Mother, the Dog, and Laura.

 

Well if the data promotes racism, its useless. Look, if you agree with me that what you stated is a form of scientific racism and discrimination that would be a negative, then that's not a reason to pursue diversity genetics research. Like I said, the only justification ever produced by diversity project proponents was disease research and that was shot down when the NIH and national academy of sciences both concluded that an anonymous sampling of genetic diversity not based on race would do the same thing without all the issues of racism.

It is worthless research.

 

DNA Scientist Apologizes for Comments on Intelligence of Blacks
By VOA News
19 October 2007



A famous scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine has apologized for racially insensitive comments about the intelligence of blacks.

The Sunday Times of London printed an interview with Doctor James Watson in which he suggested blacks are not as intelligent as whites.

The prominent laboratory where he works in New York (The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) suspended Watson over the comments Thursday. And London's Science Museum canceled a sold-out lecture Friday by the doctor.

A statement from Watson's publicist says he is mortified over the quotes. Watson said he cannot understand how he could have said what he is quoted as saying, but he understands the public reaction to the comments.

The Sunday Times of London says it recorded the interview and stands by the quotes in its October 14 issue.

Scientists around the world are denouncing the comments and say there is no scientific evidence that blacks are intellectually inferior.

In a statement issued after his remarks were published, Watson also said there is no scientific proof that blacks are less intelligent than whites.

Watson won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his discoveries of the structure of DNA.

The 79-year-old scientist is known for making outspoken remarks about genes and intelligence.

Watson is in Britain promoting his new book called, Avoid Boring People.

 

and as a black man out of all the things to take issue with in this thread, you take issue with sharpton's comments.

 

LMAO. His editors probably changed it from Avoid Black People.

Funny that the dude is a total bore. Even when he's saying outlandish things he is pretty tedious.

 

Sharpton's attention whoring abilities increased