Elementary Watson

Since James D. Watson was publicly humiliated, 18 years have passed. Have any new test results disproved Watson’s observation?

Nov 20, 2025

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Elementary Watson
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.