James Watson is nearly 80 and looks it — his skin is dotted with liver spots, a shock of wispy white hair (half) covers his head, wrinkles surround his blue eyes, and his teeth… Well, don’t get me started on his teeth. But it’s the Chicago-born Nobel laureate’s ideas, not his physical appearance, that age him the most. Lauded almost 50 years ago for determining, with the help of an unrewarded female researcher named Rosalind Franklin and others, the structure of DNA, it seems like his mission since has been to sully his notable scientific works with off-color comments.

From CNN:

In 1997, Britain’s Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

During a lecture tour in 2000, he suggested there might be links between skin color and sexual prowess and between a person’s weight and their level of ambition.

And in a British TV documentary that aired in 2003, Watson suggested that stupidity was a genetic disease that should be treated.

Watson’s latest comments, about a link between race and intelligence, may have destroyed his reputation in the scientific community and his legacy for good. Stereohyped spoke to Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Dean of University Studies at North Carolina A&T University and the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America about James Watson, scientific racism, and the need for more scientific literacy.

In case you missed it, although I’m not sure how you could, here’s the quote from Watson that has had all sorts of negative professional implications and has a number of different communities — the scientific, white power, and black, to name a few — buzzing:

Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that 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”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

Although Graves disagrees with Watson’s entire statement, it’s the last bit, about black employees, that really takes Watson’s opinion out of the realm of science.

“That revealed the thinking behind it was bigoted,” he said. “It’s not factually true.”

The fact of the matter, which Watson admitted in the aftermath, is that there is no scientific evidence that proves there’s a genetic link between race and intelligence. However, when Watson announced that “the testing says [that blacks are] not really” as intelligent as whites, he’s not making an inaccurate statement, Graves said.

“Look at the results of the Armed Forces qualifying test or the SATs and many other standardized exams,” he said. “You will find a general pattern of persons of African descent scoring less on those exams. That is a pattern, and a pattern does not infer process.”

No scientist has successfully discovered a genetic reason for this pattern.

“Why would you expect people who were colonized and enslaved to do as well in cognitive measurements as someone who has been socially dominant?” he asked.

Despite the danger of Watson’s comments, which amount to a Nobel laureate fanning the flames of racism under the guise of science, Graves thinks its an error to censor Watson and blindly denounce him without understanding why and how he’s wrong. If the public was more scientifically literate, he said, it would be far easier for everyone to see through Watson’s claims. And much harder for racists to use his words as fuel for their cause.