Elementary Watson
Since James D. Watson was publicly humiliated, 18 years have passed. Have any new test results disproved Watson’s observation?
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
November 19, 2025
The growth of science denialism in the 21st century can be seen in the mainstream media’s gleeful reaction to the death at 97 of James D. Watson (1928–2025), co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
Supposedly, the age of cancel culture is over. But nobody in the prestige press is apologizing for getting Watson fired in 2007 from running the famous Cold Spring Harbor cancer lab he’d built back up over four decades because he was quoted as 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.”
Instead, the press is still gloating about his downfall. …
The main reason that the media treated Watson so shamefully, of course, was not because there was something factually or logically wrong about his observation, but because the implication that the great man of science drew from these facts is so obviously plausible. It might still turn out not to be true in the end, but Occam’s razor suggests that Watson’s surmise sure is the way to bet.
And for reasons that nobody can quite nail down, the liberal establishment is determined to die in the ditch of swearing, on the rare occasions when it is forced to admit that sub-Saharans perform worse on average on cognitively demanding tasks, that the IQ gap must be because white people are just plain evil, rather than admit that perhaps that’s the kind of difference you shouldn’t be surprised to see evolve in the 50,000 or so years since the Out of Africa event separated the races.
Over the past dozen years, we’ve seen countless examples of all the things that go wrong with public policy when the only allowable opinion is that the problems of blacks are due to white badness. (Realistic liberals might include Trump’s 2024 reelection in that list.) But that didn’t seem to lead anybody to reassess their grotesque treatment of the deceased.
For example, from the New York Times opinion section:
James Watson Saw the True Form of DNA. Then It Blinded Him.
Nov. 16, 2025
By Nathaniel Comfort
… Near the end of my time at Cold Spring Harbor, I remember seeing Dr. Watson walking around the campus, brandishing a copy of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s new book ‘The Bell Curve,’ which notoriously argued that I.Q. differences between racial groups are genetic.
Read the whole thing there.
Kudos to Nathaniel Comfort. It takes real skill to write something so mendacious.
RIP James Watson. A great scientist and a fearless truth teller.
And mad props to the Russian who bought his Nobel and then gave it back to him.
The NYT editors were sufficiently confident in Nathaniel Comfort's Op-Ed that they enabled reader comments. Here are my paraphrases of the top Reader Picks.
1. Dirk (983 Recommend) -- Watson took others' work without permission or attribution. Once you go rogue, it's hard to turn back and it only gets worse when the scientific community realizes it.
2. Sid and Nancy (905) -- We can’t forget that Watson was dismissive and hostile to female scientists, and sabotaged or stole their work.
3. Beth (771) -- The Op-Ed title should be, “Rosalind Franklin Saw the True Form of DNA. Then James Watson, Blinded by his mediocrity and misogyny stole it, and became famous.”
4. paul (761) -- I knew Watson. He came several times to the lab where I worked. He thought that he and Crick were the centers of the scientific universe and Rosalind Franklin didn't have any imagination. He had no respect for "organismal" biologists, including ecologists.
5. Poppy (648) -- Liberals frequently shun science when it conflicts with their beliefs. No matter how socially inconvenient, denying that genetics is a component of intelligence is a kind of ignorance. Watson was brilliant but a bit obnoxious, and he was right on this.
6. MN (629) --Dr. Watson gave a lecture at U. Iowa's Biology Department in the 1990s. He opened with a story about chasing young women around in his lab. My mentor walked out in disappointment.
7. LR (627) -- There are elements that have been largely lost to history due to the sexism of the 1950s scientific world. Watson was not truly a co-discoverer of the double helix. Rosalind Franklin performed all of the extraordinary X-ray crystallography. Wilkins and Watson helped themselves to her images and took the credit. As such, Watson didn't understand the limits of DNA or the crucial importance of environmental factors & life experience in the development of intelligence.
8. SM (541) -- Watson was a misogynist. He and Crick used a stolen X-ray diffraction image taken by Rosalind Franklin. They did not fully credit her critical contribution. The discovery of the double helix of DNA must be referred to as the “Franklin-Watson-Crick” model.
9. Hobbes (377) -- On this topic, Robert Plomin's book "Blueprint: how DNA makes us who we are" is good. The conclusions of his 25-year study of 10,000 twin pairs infuriates both the Nature and Nurture camps, because both are equally strong contributors. It takes time to embrace new ideas; 'science advances one funeral at a time.'
10. Unconventional Liberal (374) -- The demonization of Jim Watson went too far. Intelligence has a strong genetic component, and races historically differed in their genetics. Some races have been shorter, some taller, some stouter, some skinnier, some lighter, some darker. It is no great stretch of the imagination that some might have had greater intelligence. Watson was impolitic and arrogant, but he understood genetics.
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7 out of10 top comments embrace the narrative. #s 5, 9, and 10 offer dissenting perspectives.