Why the world’s most famous geneticist was cancelled for talking about…genetics

Nobody wishes to discuss possible genetic differences between ethnicities, and even attempting to do so can prove hazardous

So used are we to the concept of ‘cancel culture’, that it seems sometimes to have been with us for a lot longer than is actually the case. In fact, the first modern example of this undesirable phenomenon took place just a little over fifteen years ago, in 2007. That year, James Watson, one of the men who discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, for which achievement he was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, released a volume of autobiography. It was called Avoid Boring People. Shortly before he arrived in Britain to publicise the book and take part in various events connected with the publication, he gave an interview to a journalist from the Sunday Times. He said that he was, ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’, as who is not? It was the reason which he gave for feeling this way which caused an uproar, for he went on to say that, ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – where all the testing says not really’. This was no more than a statement of plain fact, of course. All our social policies are indeed based upon the idea that the intelligence of black and white people is identical and every time that this hypothesis is tested objectively, all the indications are that it is not so. He ended by remarking that although he would like it to be true that intelligence was equally distributed, ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true’.